A while back, there was a scary lady on the news. She was the representative of something ominously called the Optimum Population Trust. Her hair rose a good six inches above her head, and she was almost certainly from Surrey.
The Optimum Population Trust’s website is nicely done out in pink. The Trust appears to be a selfless consortium of the environmentally concerned and socially responsible. Concerned about the speed of global warming? it asks, About the effects of overpopulation on a plundered planet?
Well, I, er… About the UK’s failure to stabilise its own population? Ahhhh.
Just below these probing entreaties is a world population counter that ticks away like a tolerance timebomb as you wiggle your cursor around trying to decide what to click on first. They all sound so inviting! Let’s see.
Too many people in the UK… Too many people in Europe… Too many people ON EARTH… The caps are mine. I quiver with terror as I click in. Is this in fact a direct policy tool? Will the over-curious be digitally exterminated for the good of the Race?
No, don’t be silly, Mortimer. It’s a perfectly legitimate organisation supported and led by many eminent people of all political stripes, making a good and terrifying point about the effect of a rising population on a planet whose natural resources are dwindling.
A shame therefore that it lays itself open to the charge of playing to extremist views, quoting the following as though it supported the core argument:
Those who already inhabit the UK recognise the dangers: in an Ipsos-Mori poll carried out in August 2006, 33% of respondents identified population growth as the most serious threat to the future wellbeing of Britain, second only to terrorism and ahead of climate change. Yet no political party has a policy aimed at stabilising and reducing today’s environmentally unsustainable population.
Firstly, the poll was incorrect to separate out population growth and climate change, but the results of its having done so are revealing. If all those respondents had really been as selflessly concerned with environmental impacts as the OPT chooses to believe, surely they would all have put climate change first. Moreover, many of those who inhabit the UK also “recognise” that those filthy Eastern Europeans have our benefits system in their sights, that gay people aren’t fit to adopt, and that they should be allowed to use their car as much as they want, and that includes driving their perfect children the thirty yards to school. That doesn’t mean that even a Tory government would be stupid enough to formulate policy to support them. If the Optimum Population Trust isn’t being disingenuous in this po-faced little paragraph, it is at the very least guilty of total cretinism.
However, it will come as a surprise to precisely no-one that my biggest problem with the OPT statement is that no-one has bothered to seek out Lib Dem policy on the issue (yawn). Paras 7.4.3 to 7.3.5, birth-control fans. I mean, no doubt we could make more of this than we do, but we have enough trouble getting people to take on board our tax policy…
November 27, 2007 at 8:55 am
Well, there has always been an extremist/feudal/insane fringe of the green movement that wants to cull humanity – John Aspinall was one who wanted the population of the UK reduced to about 2 million. Though a lot of it is just the usual ‘why won’t the lower orders stop breeding?’
And on a global perspective, surely all these immigrants are reducing the population of the countries they come from?
November 27, 2007 at 9:06 am
This issue scares me. Yesterday I walked past a stand of newspapers and scanned the headlines – I saw a Daily Mail headline about ‘THE POLISH BABY BOOM’. Now, I’m normally quite a detached individual who has learned to tolerate or ignore idiocy (it’s a necessary coping strategy these days) in its many forms, but this genuinely made me do a double-take. I couldn’t quite believe that newspapers (even the Mail!) would go this far. ‘Total cretinism’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.
November 27, 2007 at 9:33 am
Historically birth rates have been pretty close to death rates. Worldwide, people have always bred like rabbits and died like flies.
With industrialisation, sanitation, etc, we stopped dying like flies, and it took a few years, and a population explosion, for us to naturally stop breeding like rabbits. Family planning and the decline of religion have helped. (Poland will end up with low birth rates like Ireland and Italy.)
Now the rest of the world is doing much the same.
It is a cause for celebration that we will be able to feed, house and heal so many people. The OPT seems to be looking for a pessimistic angle.
While they will say they just want to “educate” people into (not) breeding responsibly, I would say that a) this gives “education” a bad name, and b) anything that looks like a political pressure group is likely to end up behaving like one.
November 27, 2007 at 11:02 am
It’s all about the condoms. Why do organisations like the OPT go around scarifying people about population controls in Europe which apart from being potentially illiberal and authoritarian are unlikely to get much take up (if you think getting people to take the environment seriously was tough…) and instead shout as loudly as possible about the importance of condoms?
Improve family planning worldwide and you will achieve a multiplicity of good things: people will be less susceptible to GUMs and it will help get the HIV pandemic under control; families will find it easier to live within their means which would improve economic development and reduce the tensions between international development and famine relief; Europe would have less economic immigrants who are coming here for the perfectly legitimate reason that the alternative is starvation; we’d have fewer abortions, whether illegal or not, as fewer people would be forced to use it as the contraceptive of last resort.
If we treated family planning as seriously as we considered polio or smallpox, the strain that population growth causes would decrease. We don’t need draconian population controls, just the empowerment of people to take control of their own fertility.
Until we stop countries like the US (and of course the Catholic church) from pursuing shockingly destructive abstinence-only policies, there is nothing else to discuss regarding population controls.
November 27, 2007 at 11:51 am
Nick, re the global perspective, that’s exactly what bothers me. The OPT are trying to artificially tie two strands together, the UK population which is rising as a result of immigration, not birth rate, and the global situation where the reverse is true. If they want to be taken seriously on the latter point, they need to jettison the former and stop sounding like, well, a bunch of Nazis. I mean, good god, that lady was SCARY. Rob, this is where you may find not wearing glasses or contact lenses a useful addition to your coping arsenal. I haven’t been able to read a Daily Mail sandwich board for about ten years.
Joe, what is the comeback to John Gray’s argument (from Heresies, but I don’t know where he’s taking it from; or for that matter what his politics are) that if the population expands to 8bn by the end of this century as is anticipated, science won’t be deployed in a rational, peaceful way to support them all (his point being that nuclear power hasn’t been, so there’s no reason to think any more enlightenment will prevail with the scientific capacity to increase resources) and bitter wars over resources will result? Ew, what a long horrid sentence.
I was going to say that you are slightly hard on the education aspect, but actually having looked at the site again I see what you mean. They mean “educate” as in do lots of finger-wagging and warn about the global apocalypse, not as in educate women so that they can contribute economically to society in ways other than having children. Which would be more useful, and would work, and also happens to be party policy, O jolly good!
James, I think in a way the condoms point is just another version of the illiberalism problem(not something one gets to say very often). If a huge swathe of the world’s population have been programmed via their religious culture to see condoms as the devil’s work with latex, foisting condoms onto them (again, a phrase that is not used nearly enough) is surely nearly as illiberal as preventing them from having children. Obviously not quite, because you’re not actually regulating their reproductive systems by legislation, but in both cases you are interfering with personal choice. With both birth control and population control systems, it takes an extremely broad mind to see the liberal overview – that the liberty of the many is best served by constraining the liberty of the, er, lots.
November 27, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Actually, the problem with the OPT’s idea of education is that it misses the wood for the trees. One of the best ways to bring birth rates down is to improve the level of general education (and specifically female literacy) rather than just didactically telling the masses that they shouldn’t breed. See here or Amartya Sen in more detail here.
November 27, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Alix, I’m now quite scared that you appear to know that I wear contact lenses. Does the People’s Republic have an intelligence service keeping tabs on your readers?
Also, I see that the BBC are joining in the lunacy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7115155.stm
November 27, 2007 at 1:41 pm
I just assume that all intelligent people are short-sighted. It sort of goes with the territory, and probably results from the many years squinty reading with the torch after lights out.
Is the story I have asked my People to disseminate. Ahahaha.
November 27, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Increasing population and global warming are not necessarily linked – they are only linked if the factors causing global warming are fixed per person – this is not the case. I can see CO2 emissions per person dropping globally in the near future, plus other technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and even better understanding of the climate.
Those who tie global warming and population growth inextricably together play into the hands of the population control supporters.
November 28, 2007 at 11:13 am
No-one’s foisting condoms on them and the theological objection to condoms is tenuous at best. The real issue is not health officials in the developing world “foisting” condoms on them but missionaries foisting religion on them. Countries which were starting to get control of HIV in the late 90s are seeing the situation reverse ever since the US abandoned funding for safe sex projects in favour of “abstinence only” education. Which is the lesser evil?
And what about the rights of children who end up born into a world of poverty and disease?
November 28, 2007 at 3:15 pm
It’s not me you have to convince though. The entire world would be covered in a giant condom if I had my way. The point is that people feel, however wrongly, that there *is* a theological objection. I’m not saying that a liberal argument can’t be made for over-riding that, just that we should acknowledge it. By not addressing the illiberalism trap, we fall into the same error as the OPT who absorb a right-wing ideology into what would appear to otherwise be a good point.
However it is possible – hm, likely even – that I am getting too theoretical, as what you were saying is that the OPT should be sponsoring the foisting, not any liberal agency.
Tristan, as I understand it the problem is not with CO2 emissions per head, but with agricultural, mineral resources etc being stretched to deal with the growing population, when it is already under simultaneous threat from climate change. I don’t know much about this though. Please refer me on if you do, because it’s a pretty bleak scenario!
November 30, 2007 at 9:54 am
I think you will find that in many parts of the world people are having large numbers of kids because they want to, and not because they are forced to through local bigwigs banning condoms. When we have plenty of consumer goodies to amuse ourselves, we are less likely to want kids, but people who have nothing else to do like raising kids, hard though it is for us to understand that.
To blame it all on the RC Church is typical UK anti-Catholicism. If that was the major factor, you’d find HIV rates highest in those parts of Africa where the RC Church was dominant – but you don’t find that. Also, if it REALLY was the case of people cowed by RC teaching they’d all be having sex only in marriage after marriage to a virgin. It seems to me to be insulting to Africans to suggest they are like little kids who can’t think for themselves and so are pushed around by prelates. I find it rather unlikely that someone is so scared of RC Church teaching that he won’t use a condom even when he really wants to, but has no problem using prostitutes etc.
December 16, 2007 at 2:05 am
We need to make people who have children more responsible. People on welfare, drug addicts and felons should be sterilized. Desperate times calls for desperate actions. Married people who don’t have children should be rewarded. People who have one child after another. So they won’t have to work should not be allowed. People who won’t be responsible for having children should be punished.
December 16, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Warren:
So the solution to irresponsibility is to provide rewards (money? privileges?) for people to get married and not have children? Is there not an significant risk of fraud here?
(I’m not going to bother to argue with the rest of the post)