Too many or too few?
From K.R. Houston
Sir: Rod Liddle’s assertion (‘Our overpopulation is a catastrophe’, 12 August) that an ever-growing population fuelled by mass immigration is seriously debilitating our quality of life was spot on. But it also highlights the question of why we ever reached this state of affairs in the first place. When my three children were born between 1977 and 1982 — a period which took in both Labour and Conservative governments — new parents were sent a missive from the local health authority stating that while family size was a matter of personal choice, Britain needed to have a population level that it could ‘sustain’. The underlying message was clear: don’t have too many children. A generation later, we are informed that the economy would collapse without a massive influx of immigrants, even though most of them do not speak English or have any capital to invest, and some of them actually wish to do us harm.
Why, then, was the indigenous population of 25/30 years ago encouraged to limit its families, when it could have made up the shortfall in the current workforce without any of the cost and social unrest that has come with mass immigration? Perhaps a politician with experience of government at the time — your new columnist Lord Hattersley, for example — might care to provide an explanation.
K.R. Houston
Edinburgh
From Dr D.R. Cooper
Sir: Of course population policy is a sensitive issue, but Rod Liddle is right to raise it. According to some studies, for long-term sustainability the UK population should be no more than 30 million — about the same as in 1880. Perhaps that is an underestimate, and something like the pre-war level — say, 45 million — could be sustained indefinitely. However, it is certain that the present population of 60 million plus is already too high.
D.R. Cooper
Maidenhead, Berkshire
From Anthony Ozimic
Sir: In labelling Britain ‘overpopulated’, Rod Liddle mistakenly bases his assessment on densely populated areas such as London and south-east England, while failing to mention basic facts such as that there are more deaths than births in less densely populated areas such as north-east England, Scotland and Wales, and that the UK’s total fertility rate (1.77 children per woman of childbearing age in 2004) has been below replacement level (2.1) since the early 1970s. Mr Liddle cites ‘bulging school rolls’, yet the class of 2006 is a third smaller than the class of 1970, however overcrowded schools or classrooms may be.
Anthony Ozimic
Society for the Protection of Unborn Children
London SW1
Defecting tenors
From Robert Triggs
Sir: ‘The incumbent male musicians of St Paul’s Cathedral (and Westminster Abbey) are not showing much sign of opening their exclusive ranks to women,’ moans Peter Phillips (Arts, 12 August). ‘Like so many reactionary scenes in the past, this one is going to have to change.’ At what cost, may I ask?
I have lately been observing this ‘reform’ in operation at my old Oxford college, Pembroke. Like the majority of Oxford colleges, Pembroke has only one weekly choral evensong during term-time. Since the admission of women students, it is consistent for them to have equal opportunities to sing in the college choir, read lessons and, in exceptional circumstances, deliver an address, and they are playing an ever more prominent role. Recently, whether by accident or design, some of the leading tenors and basses have made arrangements to offer their services to other choirs on Sunday evenings, leaving the male voice sections seriously under-represented. When the new freshmen arrive in six weeks’ time, I suspect they may peep round the doors of Pembroke College chapel, deduce that the service is an extension of the Mothers’ Union or Women’s Institute, and tiptoe off to Christ Church, New College or Magdalen to hear fine, all-male choirs.
Robert Triggs
Oxford
Resistance overruled
From Frederick Forsyth
Sir: Sir Malcolm Rifkind, like so many closet EU-enthusiasts, appears to make a robust case for British independence within the EU, and then spoils it all by a single word (‘We must reject neo-Conservatism’, 12 August). He declaims that Britain’s ‘real national interests’ must be primordial, and agreement with fresh diktats from Brussels must be regarded as being of secondary status unless these interests are met. And he adds, ‘But if these criteria are not met, harmonisation [he means integration] for ideological reasons must be politely and firmly resisted.’
‘Resisted’: what a lovely word. The word Sir Malcolm declines to use is ‘overruled’. For two decades Britain has resisted and resisted. And been overruled and overruled. (Margaret Thatcher’s ‘no, no, no’ was not to the continent of Europe but to British subordination to the EU.) We can never re-acquire the primordiality of British national interests that Sir Malcolm advocates until and unless we make clear that we will abide by only those Commission-sourced instructions that suit our interests. But at that point, as EC President Barroso has made plain, we would have to leave the Union. Clearly Sir Malcolm should de-closet and join the BOO (Better Off Out) movement.
Frederick Forsyth
Hertford
Passport controls
From Ingrid Uys
Sir: Boris Johnson writes how incensed he was on leaving for America to find that because he was born there he could not enter on a British passport (‘That’s it, Uncle Sam’, 12 August). He asks, rather indignantly, ‘What other country insists that because you can be one of its nationals, then you must be one of its nationals?’ I would like to inform him that the very same rule applies to South Africans.
Ingrid Uys
London NW6
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