In response to Kathy Gyngell: Why won’t politicians admit the truth about rampant immigration?, Don Benson wrote:
Yes, too high a population density is the most certain way to national poverty, and Britain exemplifies that perfectly. Despite all our historic advantages we are now hopelessly in debt, severely over-congested, productively low-achieving, stressed by any measure you care to choose, discontented, frustrated, pessimistic and utterly divided between those who recognise these things and those who describe any objective or commonsense observation of them by some pejorative word ending in ‘phobic’.
But surely the most absurd nonsense we constantly hear is that immigration gives a boost to our economic performance (and so presumably makes us all more wealthy). Well, any fool can boost GDP by filling up an island of finite space until there’s standing room only; but the hell you have created reduces your real wealth (measured by any realistic sense of what wealth means) to the subsistence level of mere survival so long as nothing goes wrong – of course eventually it is bound to go wrong.
Yet only a couple of years ago Cameron was saying ‘Come and work here, it’s a great place to live!’ and of course Theresa May was overseeing horrific levels of immigration; still today she has not the faintest understanding of what she’s done, suggesting building skywards everywhere as a remedy!
If we were to achieve a net population growth of zero permanently from now on, a few decades of careful management and positive inducements to emigration might sort out the massive problem we have brought on ourselves; we would be densely populated but possibly able to achieve acceptable living standards once again. Now who amongst our ‘elite’ is intellectually and morally capable of facing up to this challenge?
