Stopping out of control population growth that the country cannot sustain and is making the country worse.
Illegal shops like vape shops, desert shops, takeaways (and their takeaway wars), restaurants and their illegal employees, changing the face of our high streets for the worse… and the huge amount of litter seen around these high streets in these areas… is one thing, but there is far more to it than that.
More people = more electricity demand, more water demand, more housing demand, more refuse and waste, more demand on landfill, more recycling demand, more imports, more traffic, more demand on public transport, more pollution, more demand on our greenfield, more demand on our farmland… that we simply cannot keep up with.
I’ve posted this a few times times but most never take it on board, most ignore it, and the few who did respond: one told me I’ve taken it from a far-right article from decades ago (that I’d never heard of because I’m really from a left of centre/social democrat stance) and another just gave me the reply of ‘bollocks’.
I don’t want a growing population in Britain. There are already too many people living on this island. Having a larger population who can pay more tax is far outstripped by many other factors:
With the current population size, the UK barely covers electricity demand in the Winter. Plus, it’s estimated that our current water industry will not be able to cover the demand for water required by the growing population by the 2030s.
Are there any initiatives or investment planned to combat this and keep us serviceable for electricity and water with the surges in immigration and ever increasing population?
And even if there are, will these then have a knock-on effect of increasing pollution which is already a massive problem?
The UK is already struggling to cope with the amount of waste/refuse it has to process. Recycling plants can’t turn around the amount of waste it faces, which leads to much going to landfill when investment in landfill has pretty much ended because successive govts have said that we are going to recycle more. And we are running out of landfill space to the point that we may have no more land to use for waste storage within the next eight years. So where’s the waste going to go with an increased population?
Our current cities are heaving. Traffic and the amount of pollution that comes from it, is at dangerous levels. Greater Manchester has some of the most polluted air in Europe; Nitrogen Dioxide levels from motor vehicles in Greater Manchester already significantly exceed World Health Organisation guidelines. Air pollution contributes to 1,200 annual early deaths in Greater Manchester. 1 in 20 of GtrMcr adult deaths are linked to air pollution.
A growing population through immigration of non-skills-shortage-target-people, means there’s a surplus unskilled workforce. Industries like Tech in Manchester are facing huge shortages in a skilled workforce yet we have hundreds of thousands of people coming into the country who don’t meet these required skills. Too few of the right people are coming into this country. The plan around who comes in is very poor. We have a surplus population of people we don’t need. What we need more than anything is to create skills course qualifications for the current population so that employment balances out properly, not just get more and more people in with the hope that some might be able to cover the skills shortage.
Housing in existing cities is poor and insufficient. There aren’t enough homes and, where homes are vacant, the state of them can be appalling and you wouldn’t use them for keeping farm animals, never mind human families with children. There are too many rogue landlords taking advantage of tenants. There are also instances of double the amount of people living in homes than they are supposed to house in inner-city areas.
Current towns and cities, especially Manchester, feel overpopulated. There’s been a net increased population of Manchester Salford Trafford Stockport Tameside and Oldham who’ve arrived in this country in just the last two years. Yet, there are no new cities being built and existing cities are not increasing at that rate. In existing cities, everywhere is extremely busy all the time. If there were plans to develop places like Carlisle, Dundee, Ipswich, Bangor, Plymouth etc. into 2million population cities with mass house building and infrastructure programmes, fair enough. But there isn’t. The govt aim to build 300,000 new homes a year yet that will still fall short of demand for the population size there is currently, never mind a larger population. Plus, even if there were the right amount of houses being built and available for the growing population, there isn’t the infrastructure to educate, care for, keep healthy and transport all these people around.
Plus even if new cities were built or small cities became big cities, it still wouldn’t help with the need to generate the required electricity and water - and food - demand for more people because it’s not there. And, even if everything was in place for it, pollution would still be made worse so why would we want to do that anyway?
Building new cities and increasing the the size of existing cities means that we would lose green belt land, natural wild habitats, farming land (which has further knock-on effects of not producing enough food for the increasing population and increases of imports which means extra cost and even further pollution), and we would lose parts of our beautiful countryside.
Over 72% of land in England is already farmed land, less than 15% of England is natural wild habitat, with the rest being urban built on or urban parkland. Low wild habitat and low woodland coverage in Britain has lead to poor soil quality and carbon emmisions are not locked away. One-crop farming also leads to poor soil quality and a lack of biodiversity. Soil has degraded and eroded, the quality of the food that we grow and graze on farmland is decreasing and it is a contributor to poor health with lack of nutrients and even a reduction in the quality, size and diversity of the microbiome in our guts, which is one of the most important aspects of health (arguably the most important). Plus, we are taking away the small % of wild habitats we have.
None of this is a good thing and all of it gets worse with a growing population.
An increasing population puts further demand on our already struggling public services.
Crime has significantly increased. A decade ago, the Police in England and Wales recorded around 4m annual crimes committed. There’s been a steady increase in that time and in recent years it’s not been below 6.5m. Population increases will see an increase in crime. Why should people have to put up with that as a side effect of increasing the population? It’s not something people want.
Plus with this, the less likely the general population are to get required help from the Police, because they are too busy with the amount of crime being committed in general.
The UK is one of the most unhealthy countries in Europe (granted, that is mainly due to poor lifestyles and diets). The strain on the NHS is huge, to the point that the NHS cannot cope with a 69m population it has now, never mind how it would cope with an increasing population.
If the growing elderly population is a growing problem now, what will it be like when everyone of working age now gets to to retirement age? They’ll need an even bigger NHS and care service, there’ll need to be an even bigger pension pot. So what then? Just constantly flood the island with more and more people? Constantly putting more and more strain on everything? And house them where? Feed them how? Keep the taps and electricity flowing how? Reduce pollution how? Stop them from contributing to and being a victim of the growing pollution problem how?
There are also far too many issues with an ever polarised and disunited nation with increased immigration. And it seriously is not just an issue with far right bigots, even if the rise of the far-right directly naturally correlates with increased immigration. Every-day, normal, fair-minded people with no extreme views are seeing ever increasing issues with ever increasing immigration.
Many inner-city areas have just become immigrant dumping zones. This sees the existing population feel grievances with the state that these areas become. Small things like some, if not all, the pubs and social clubs shutting in these areas means that social spaces for existing populations decrease or disappear. Pubs and social clubs are often the heartbeat of communities, as places of social communion, sports teams and events. British culture suffers without them and in many places with high immigration, there are no pubs left. The types of businesses in these areas change to cater more for the immigrant population as well; from clothing to food to faith-based sector businesses and charities.
Immigrants being housed in hotels means that the existing local population lose their local place where work meetings, work training, Christmas parties, wakes, birthday parties, school proms, university balls, dance clubs, fitness clubs, wedding receptions, anniversaries, or have people who would visit friends+family for a weekend and need somewhere to stay etc. at these hotels which they were built for and were used for previously, cannot happen anymore. They’ve been taken away from existing communities and their grievances with that mostly have nothing to do with who’s there and nothing to do with being right wing, but simply that another community hub is taken away from the community.
The existing population in these areas, and not just the far-right bigots amongst them, naturally tend to end up relocating from these areas because of accumulations of things like this happening because they don’t like how their local community changes. And you never hear of people wanting to move to these areas. This then creates segregation within our towns and cities, which makes integration into British culture more difficult for concentrated immigrant areas. This is something we should be avoiding as a society but is a natural societal move with increasing immigration.
Another negative that comes from this is that right wing bigots cotton onto it and drive it through as an issue for the whole country which sees the rise in far right sentiment towards immigration. They completely miss all the pertinent negatives to it all and drive it as a cultural issue only. It is a cultural issue but not solely a cultural issue. A knock-on negative that comes from that are then the left wing idiots cotton onto the far right issue, who just do anything to argue and shout down the right wing bigots, start to defend immigration at all costs but - exactly like the far right - also completely miss the pertinent negatives to it all, even purposely ignoring them so they don’t gain any traction in discussion because they cannot have anything the far right agree with being discussed in a wider discussion.
And overall, it just adds to the ever growing polarisation of society.
But the roads are a mess, road networks in cities can’t cope with the amount of vehicles on the roads, transport is a mess, schools can’t offer places for the amount of children there are in the country (300,000 children are not on role at a school), white working class children (especially boys) are being left behind in school performance, wages are kept suppressed, poverty is high, the gap between rich and poor is at an all-time high, pollution is at dangerous levels, the environment is impacted and often cannot be reversed, food is becoming less nutritious, the job market is all over the shop, public services cannot cope, housing is in crisis, crime is ever increasing, social cohesion is collapsing and getting ever more polarised, racial segregation is becoming facet of our communities… all because of an increase in the population and immigration.
There’s no way that there are more positives than negatives to having a larger population and further immigration.
We have the infrastructure in this country for about 60m people. Yet, we’re now at 69m and by the 2040s the current rate of increase would see a 77m population. This is a massive ‘NO!’ for me. We are not ready for it, we are already not coping.
Every single negative aspect to a growing population increases with an ever growing population. Even where people draw positives from a growing population, they can only be maintained and addressed through an even higher growth in population because it’s unsustainable and with that comes all the negatives from an ever growing population.
More people = a worse country on an island like ours.
This doesn’t meant I think people should vote for right wing populist parties. But because the new left call people who think this way ‘racist’ and ‘thick’ and either shout them down or refuse to listen to them, and no left wing party apart from the small Social Democratic Party (who most people have never heard of) are offering solutions to their concerns, I can see why people have turned to right wing populism.
I didn’t vote (again!) the other day, but I can see why people are voting this way.
www.bbc.co.uk
