There is an obvious clash of which one of two objectives will, inevitably, have to give way as neither can survive side by side.
The two objectives are the continuous push for growth from both businesses and Governments and protecting the environment, only one can win. If growth wins this means populations will have to continuously rise, resulting in cities becoming ever more crowded, they will have to expand ceaselessly with the countryside and the natural environment being eroded. This also creates pressure on services, our roads, health provision, education, energy and much more. Like parasites living on a creature that breed and spread until eventually there are so many of them they kill the host and they too die without a host to feed on.
For anyone who has read any of my other contributions to this blog, will know that I am no monster raving greenie. I am opposed to the banning of petrol and diesel cars, gas boilers and despair at the actions of our so called Energy Minister, or as I call him, our no Energy Minister as he continues to wreck our energy supply by closing down our North Sea gas and oil fields, leaving us reliant on energy from far less reliable sources. However, I also know that there are limits and things we should care about. I worry about the destruction of our rainforests and loss of many species of flora and fauna, building on our countryside, the amount of plastics in our seas doing harm to many creatures and the release of sewage destroying our rivers, killing fish and natural vegetation. To me these are sensible thing to worry about.
After living on this planet for more years than I care to mention, I have seen seasons come and go and know that varied weather patterns, which have gone on all through the history of our planet, are not climate change, as constantly claimed by eco zealots who no longer live in the real world and do not consider the devastating effects on people of what they demand. None the less, I worry about the serious issue of overpopulation of our country and the world - the human race is in danger of turning into that plague of parasites feeding on the world until nothing is left.
From doing a quick Google search, the population of the UK in 1950, when I was a two year old child, was 50.4 million, today the figure stands at 68.35 million. The figure given for 1950 would have been fairly accurate, unlike the figure given for today as there have been so many people smuggled into the country illegally the real figure is anyone's guess but no doubt over 70 million. The Office for National Statistics has predicted that in 25 years time in 2050 there will be 10 million more people living in the UK taking the population up to 78 million, there is a point where the population growth becomes unsustainable.
As I get older and see the world become ever more insane with political correctness, woke issues and claims of saving the planet becoming more important than plain and simple common sense, I often wish I could return to and live back in the far more sensible 1950's. As a child growing up in those days there was space to roam, as my pals and I did during the summer months. We could walk a short distance from our house and in no time be wandering along a country track through fields having great adventures. If I tried to walk the route way today, where the track and fields were are now houses and buildings covering several miles of what was countryside. This is the result of rapid and, in my opinion, out of control population growth which has taken place during the span of my lifetime - it can't continue.
If those living today want the quality of life and welfare of our planet to be of benefit for those who will follow us, we all must seriously consider how to reduce future populations and for us here in the UK, consider, in the long term, reducing to the population of the 1950's figures - or even lower. This then creates a conflict with those pushing for growth who want to sell more products, increase and expand the size of their businesses and take on more, usually cheap, labour.
This makes me sound as if I am anti-business and against capitalism, which could not be further from the truth. For many years I worked in our small family business and after my parents retired I ran the business, which was hard going through the dreadful recession of the early 1990's, created by the madness of the UK joining the EU's Exchange Rate Mechanism. Those were hard and stressful days and I have great admiration as well as much sympathy for anyone trying to survive in business today with such an anti-business Government and economy wrecking Chancellor.
So how do we shrink the population to more sustainable levels and keep businesses afloat? In some ways we already see this happening, go to any supermarket and most of the manned tills are gone to be replaced by banks of self service checkouts with the need for fewer staff. It's the same in banks, those that are left open that is. My bank was completely revamped and now there are screens where people go to complete their own transactions, instead of several helpful bank tellers sitting behind a counter giving a personal service to customers. In factories and warehouses everything is becoming ever more automated.
Some years ago I visited a brickworks run by one of our suppliers, everything was automated. A long line of clay was being extracted from a machine, it came out with three holes through the centre and was being cut, automatically and hey presto - there were unfired bricks. These were transferred, by a robotic machine onto trollies which moved around the factory where they were dried and eventually passing through the kiln coming out as fired bricks at the end of the process. The only two humans in the whole of this works were two chaps shrink wrapping the pallets of bricks at the end of the process. More and more factories are going this way and people are needed less and less, especially with A.I. becoming more part of our lives. Humans in many ways are already becoming redundant other than the fact they are needed to purchase the products made by A.I. controlled robotic machines.
On this basis the call for cheap labour, the main reason for mass immigration into the country, will be less and less, if immigration continues all we will be doing is importing more and more unemployed. They quality of life for all but a few will continue to fall, space will become an issue and crime and strife will increase. It is becoming ever more important that global populations need to reduce.
If, instead of increasing our population over the next 25 years by 10 million, we begin a programme of reducing it instead, the quality of life for people will eventually improve. This has to be done gradually and when started has to be a long term project. The birth rate, which is, according to official statistics, is already falling, needs to be encouraged to continue on that path. Families should be encouraged to have no more than one child. All immigration has to be stopped and those who, by coming into the country illegally in small boats or hidden in lorries, by their criminal actions, need to be removed. To do this we need a strong government who will pull Britain out of the ECHR and inform the French that those coming across the Channel will be returned, no matter how many Gallic tantrums and hissy fits result from such a policy. Sadly, the substantial payments we have given them have not worked and as these illegals cross the Channel from France they are their problem, not ours, so the French can have them back.
As the population gradually begins to reduce things such as a shortage of housing will no longer be a problem, our services will once again be able to cope, our countryside and farms will be protected and we will become less reliant on imported energy and food. The irony is in the fact in order to be green by depopulating the country we will need to be less green. We can reopen the closed oil and gas fields, smash the concrete over our shale wells and begin fracking, we can even go back to digging out the hundreds of years of coal under our feet. By doing these things we can be self sustaining which will be easier for a smaller population. Many of the things we ceased to manufacture can be returned to these shores and by becoming producers we can become less reliant on foreign imports. We can even go back to making our own cars for roads that will be relatively free of traffic with a smaller population and there will be no need for rip-off ULEZ and LTN's.
In time children growing up may have the freedom to roam in nearby countryside having great adventures, as I did in my less crowded youth - as long as they can be dragged away from gawping at screens!