In reply to Peter Metcalfe:
> According to the ONS, 50% of the projected rise in the UK's population to 2050 is due to "natural increase" i.e. more births than deaths. The rest is of course due to net immigration.
I'm amazed that anyone thinks that they can predict the future so far ahead - and that anyone else believes it!
In fact, what they actually say is "The UK population is projected to increase by 9.7 million over the next 25 years from an estimated 64.6 million in mid-2014 to 74.3 million in mid-2039". That is a 15% increase in 26 years!
And anyway, just who would a significant proportion of this "natural increase" be due to?
> Are you prepared to throw this country into economic, constitutional and societal chaos for a completely pointless gesture?
As I said in my initial post, I am not thinking about myself, I'm think about future generations. There's no doubt that the population of the UK will increase, but does it need to increase this rapidly? And that's presuming that the ONS are anything like accurate. That number of people would need a minimum of 2 million homes of some sort, that's before you add on all the other buildings and infrastructure needed to support and employ that many extra people, and, with all due respect to those who argue otherwise, it's just not going to squeeze into "brown field sites", at least not unless a significant number of city institutions and factories move to new buildings on green field sites to make room for them. And that’s not including all the extra homes that we are already short of.
People are not the only inhabitants of our island - we share it with a large population of plants, animals and other organisms. Every housing estate, factory, new road, new railway line, etc eats into their habitat. It's insidious but constant. And the buildings that are going up in the countryside are, far too often, as ugly as sin, with virtually no attempt made to blend in with the vernacular architecture. This is not just ruining the countryside it is also ruining the look of what countryside is left. In addition, every green field that goes under concrete, tarmac, windfarm or solar park effectively pushes the price of agricultural land up because (as people love to point out) "they don't make it any more". Farmland prices in Cumbria have almost doubled in the last 10 years, goodness only knows what they are like in Kent or Sussex. This makes it an attractive proposition for speculators as there's not much else that delivers that rate of return plus an annual cash benefit from DEFRA (the Single Farm Payment), and, if they get lucky, they might just get planning permission for a housing estate. All this is combined with a sharp fall in prices that farmers receive for produce due to price wars in supermarkets and other factors like sanctions against Russia. The long term effect of all this will be to force small farmers out of the market and deny would be small scale entrants into farming the chance to buy their own land. The survivors will be the big boys, the factory style giants of the farming world, who can keep costs down by doing everything on a large scale (thousands of acres rather than hundreds, huge machines and so on) and by removing as many inconvenient obstacles (hedgerows, trees, ponds etc) as get in the way of the said huge machines. Expect little mercy in the way of herbicides and pesticides too as to be competitive every last drop of production has to be squeezed out of every last square centimetre of soil. So not much habitat there either.
Climbers as a whole seem to me to like to think of themselves as environmentally minded but I have to say that this doesn’t come across much in the posts above. One post even seemed to imply that it is the greenbelt areas that are causing the housing shortage problem, not the increase in the population.
So, as you put it, am I “prepared to throw this country into economic, constitutional and societal chaos for a completely pointless gesture?”
I would say, the case for economic chaos is by no means proven and won’t be until after the referendum. In any case it seems to me such downturns, like the 2008 debacle, are largely the result of the financial markets getting jittery (often as a result of something they have caused themselves) rather than anything more substantial, and things tend to right themselves once people realise that the sun is still shining and stop panicking. The constitutional crisis, by which I presume you mean the SNP’s recurring threats to hold another referendum - well speaking as someone whose ancestors in the male line are mainly buried north of the border and whose mother was Scottish, I’m saddened to say that another Scottish referendum will probably happen sooner or later any way and probably carry on happening until the SNP get what they consider to be the “right” answer. Sad because, as someone whose Scottish ancestors left Scotland and ended up in England via Canada, I think that Scots have contributed hugely to the success of the UK and that Scotland and England are much stronger together (with Wales and Northern Ireland) than they would be apart. To forestall anyone pointing out that this seems totally at odds to my position on the EU, I’ll just paraphrase Bill Clinton by saying, “It’s the population, stupid!” and if it wasn’t for this idealistic free movement of people business, I’d be considering voting to remain, though there’s plenty else in the EU I have my doubts about - not least that the EU powers that be have let their ideals get so much in the way the way of pragmatism that they have in a way brought this referendum on their own heads. Not sure what you mean by societal chaos, can’t see much of that happening oop north.
As for being a “completely pointless gesture” - well not to me it isn’t, and there currently appear to be around half the population of the UK who agree.