Gadzooks

The aptly-acronymed Government Actuary's Department (GAD) is "a special unit which analyses how demographic changes could affect Government spending". It has just come up with a projection which suggests that "with high immigration and fertility rates, the population could reach 108,723,000 by 2081". On the other hand, "if the same factors were low, the population could rise by as little as four million to stand at 64 million by 2081". The projection is based on "variations in life expectancy, fertility rates and immigration"; or, as the home affairs spokesbeing for the Down with Frogs, Out with Wogs party has it, immigration, immigration and immigration. "Labour need to wake up and understand the factors driving population change as well as the solutions," fulminated David Davis. "Only the Conservatives would take steps to reduce immigration to levels that are suitable and sustainable for the UK", life expectancy and fertility rates being matters for the individual private healthcare and parenthood consumer. The idea that Britain's population might shrink - owing to such factors as increased flooding, severe heat in summer, water shortages, lack of affordable health care, excessive road traffic, terrorist activity, profitable but unsafe public transport, irradiation from nuclear leaks, exhaustion of food supplies, unanticipated temperature drops during the winter months, bad diet, power cuts, homelessness, armed police doing a difficult job, or the unauthorised usage by hostile powers of national identity data to persuade British law enforcement corporations that everyone born in a month containing the letter R is likely to grow up into a financially negligible psychopath - does not appear to have been considered. This no doubt means that GAD's figures are singularly uninformative about the ways in which Britain's population is likely to develop, but depressingly revealing about the ways in which Government spending can be affected.