In 1960, in the US journal Science, a paper by the
distinguished physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues
declared, “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be
squeezed to death.” The paper was titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD
2026. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/09/is-britain-full-home-truths-about-population-panic
Last year, London’s population reached an all-time peak of
more than 8.6 million. By 2050, it is forecast to be 11 million, and possibly
as high as 13 million. The rest of the UK’s population is growing, too. The
Office for National Statistics expects it to swell by 4.6 million during the
2010s – “the biggest growth in the last 50 years”. In 2014, the latest year for
which figures are available, the UK had almost 65 million inhabitants, its
greatest ever total. The rate of population growth doubled in the 90s and
doubled again in the 00s. It is predicted to be home to more people than France
by 2030 and more people than Germany by 2047, which would make this much
smaller land mass the most populous country in Europe. This expanding
population is almost always talked about in negative terms. In 2011, a Royal
Commission on Demographic Change and the Environment concluded: “In practice,
there is little government can do to have any real effect on the size of the
population over the next 40 years.” The boom’s causes are too interconnected
and powerful – and the British state insufficiently authoritarian – for our
population trends to be set by Whitehall. The commission recommended instead
that governments protect the UK by “improving resource use and influencing
consumption patterns”
But Jonathan Portes of the National Institute of Economic
and Social Research thinks alarm is wrong. “We find it hard to be positive
about population growth. But it has boosted economic growth. It has made
austerity less painful, by increasing total employment and tax revenues. And
congestion, pressure on services – they’re considerably easier to cope with,
from a collective point of view, than the opposite problems. We’ve forgotten
what depopulation feels like.” Between 1975 and 1978, the UK population fell.
In 1982, it dropped again. “The population of inner London fell by 20% in the
70s,” says Portes. “Many people said London was basically doomed. It was going
to go the way of Detroit. Inner London would become wasteland.” The
consequences of depopulation could be bleak: boarded-up houses; miles of urban
dereliction; dwindling investment and passenger numbers in and on public
transport. In some places, despite the recovery of the population since, this
emptied Britain still exists.
Jonathan Portes points out that much of the UK is not
crowded anyway. Liverpool and Glasgow have barely half as many inhabitants now
as they had at their peaks in the middle of the 20th century. All population
statistics are by definition slightly out of date and approximate, but while
England has roughly 410 people a sq km – the second highest in the EU – Wales
has only 150, Northern Ireland 135 and Scotland 70. Even heaving, stressful
London is much less full of people than is widely supposed. “London is the
lowest-density mega-city on the planet,” says Danny Dorling. “The densest part
of London is four times less dense than Barcelona, a normal, well-planned
European city that Britons all want to visit.”
Danny Dorling, a demographer and professor of geography at
the University of Oxford argues that the UK’s “overpopulation problem” is
really the product of poor land use and social division, of corporate wage
squeezes and cuts in state provision. “We’ve managed to organise ourselves so
that much of our daily lives is crowded. We have the smallest homes in Europe.
Meanwhile, there’s lots of wasted space.” Inner London is increasingly taken up
by the huge, little-occupied homes of the super-rich and empty investors’
properties. He thinks the population panic will pass. “I find it hard to
believe that we’ll have this gloomy discourse on population in 20 years’ time.”
Portes agrees: “You can build more schools and hospitals. Population redistribution
is hard, but not impossible. You obviously can’t plonk people in the middle of
nowhere, but we built new towns in the 50s. Why not build more within commuting
distance of, say, Manchester?” Sooner or later, Dorling points out, the current
rise will go into reverse. The British economy will enter a recession and cease
to be so attractive to immigrants. The Mediterranean economies will recover.
Even the civil wars in the Middle East and Africa, and the resulting refugee
crisis, will end. At this point, the size of the British population will depend
much more on our fertility rate, which is around 1.9 children a family – one of
the highest in Europe, but lower than the 2.1 needed to keep a population
stable.
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