One Sustainable Resource

Despite the fact that over a hundred thousand Britons per year can no longer stand living here, the Office for National Statistics finds that the population of the United Kingdom has risen above sixty million and is growing faster than at any time since the early sixties.

Two-thirds of the rise is because of migrants but, surprisingly enough, the Government figures which conjured press hysteria earlier in the week have proved misleading. The Home Office said that 427,000 East Europeans had arrived over the past two years to swamp us; the Office for National Statistics notes that this year's hundred and fifty thousand migrants from Commonwealth countries outnumber the East Europeans by a factor of two to one, and that furthermore the Home Office neglected to observe how many East Europeans went home. The concept of anyone's arriving here, seeing the quality of our Press and the tourism-friendliness of our health service, sampling the wonders of our infrastructure and signing on for our benefits, and then wishing to go back to some foreign country, was evidently beyond the imaginative powers even of the Department of Unimaginable Terror. The idea that the Home Office may have known that some of the nearly-whites went home, but deliberately failed to mention the fact in order to induce a tabloid frenzy, is of course the crudest kind of conspiracy theory and not to be entertained for a moment.

Meanwhile, despite ever more efficient methods of inducing self-destruction in our less efficient offspring, deaths continue to be outnumbered by births. The birthrate in Britain is now 1.8 squalling future debt repayment units per viable uterus. In a world where so much that's of value is running out, there is still a plentiful and growing supply of Britishness.