This blog is entirely locally sourced

"All locally sourced!" You've seen it a thousand times from little cafes, delis, restaurants and bars. It's a necessary badge along with "fair trade" and "ethical" for these businesses to enter the world of the "independent" with all its promises of hipsterish splendidness.

But what on earth does "locally sourced" mean? It's self evident that it doesn't mean that the food in that cafe is "locally grown". Unless, that is, the weather in Bradford has shifted a little - the menu will include tea and coffee, cakes with exotic ingredients like cocoa and banana, and a host of other foods that have travelled to our city from all the corners of the earth like black pepper, cinnamon and chilies.

Perhaps "locally sourced" simply means purchased locally? But then how does this differ from any other business out there? Most of them are going to the cash-and-carry for basic stuff, maybe to St James Wholesale market for veg (not much lettuce is grown in and around Bradford either and there's a paucity of apple orchards) and to a local wholesale butcher. And anyway isn't going to Morrisons "locally sourced" too - it's a Bradford-based company after all!

It's clearly not about either growing food or selling food. So "locally sourced" must mean something else. The platter of "locally sourced" Polish sausage, dill pickles and smoked cheese uses product bought off the deli in the market rather than from some anonymous wholesaler. The product's the same - may even be the same brands - but we've got it from a bloke with a stall rather than watched as an eighteen-year-old pings it across a cash-and-carry checkout. This, we're told, is somehow better.

If you want my view (and that's why you're here at my entirely locally sourced blog) then it's that "locally sourced" is a bit of a scam. After all what to we mean by local? Here's the US National Restaurants Association (not to be confused with another organisation sharing the acronym):

The definition of local food for restaurants is a little stickier, considering it is not something that is regulated. Local can mean the food comes from around the corner or across the state.

“Every company that you’re going to run into is going to have a different definition for local,” says Jamie Moore, director of sourcing and sustainability for Eat’n Park, a Pittsburgh-based concept with more than 75 locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Moore and others agree that the rule of thumb adopted for local ingredients is that they come from within a 150-mile radius.

But is that really what we mean? It's pretty clear from our cafe example that the coffee, tea and cake ingredients aren't coming from within a 150 mile radius of Bradford. So we're still none the wiser as a consumer - it's not about growing locally not is it about buying locally. It seems to be about buying from other "independent" providers rather than from those dark and evil dens of capitalist sin that supply establishments selling stuff that's not "locally sourced".

It's pretty clear that "locally sourced" (at least in the context of shouting "All Locally Sourced!" on your website) is an almost entirely meaningless term given it doesn't mean either grown or bought locally but rather some more nuanced idea relating to these terms. I can understand locally sourced when my local butcher put up the name of the farms where he got his beef and pork. I can understand locally sourced when the bar says all its bread comes from the Ukrainian bakery a mile away. But saying "all locally sourced" is both meaningless and misleading. Little more that signalling the righteous virtue of the establishment and requiring very little of a different approach to any other similar place not claiming to be "all locally sourced".

We should challenge the ethics of these statements in the same way as, for example, people have questioned supermarkets using "farm" in brands of mass produced cheese or soup. By all means say "we buy locally grown food where we can and use small, quality local suppliers for as much as possible" - it's a bit rah but I get the sentiment. But taking the step from here to "all locally sourced" is to move for a description that can be evidenced to one that can't.

In the end our obsession with short supply chains (the locavore obsession with food miles and a misunderstanding of resilience) plus a sort of "aren't we good" brand positioning is, in part, responsible for weakening food security and undermining confidence in the - very safe - supply chains for the food us regular folk buy at the supermarket. The abuse of an ill-defined term like "locally produced" results in confusion for consumers - we are unable to say precisely what it means and frankly explaining that "I buy from Steve in the market" is no help as the chances are that Steve neither grows the stuff locally or buys it locally. All you've done is move the supply chain to someone else and claimed some sort of righteousness as a result.

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"New economics" really is nonsense isn't it?

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From that point on the summit developed a powerful sweeping narrative. We heard about how happiness and equality are new measures for economic performance. The growing force of the co-operative movement in the UK. About emerging technologies that will to allow us to organise differently and even create money without the need for interest on debt. All this can be done despite the old economic power structures. With little change to the current system we can use our influence as investors via our pension funds to call major corporations to task.

Seriously guys, seriously?


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Things that just aren't true...

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Planning has played a transformational role in improving the quality of life of all of our communities. In the past, planning has proved itself capable of dealing with overcrowding, poor quality housing and public realm, creating jobs, improving infrastructure and most importantly, securing greater social equity.

OK the author of this staggering piece of nonsense is the boss of the Town & Country Planning Association. But really!

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George Galloway blames Ukraine's problems on Israel

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Quite incredible really but true. George told callers to his programme on Iranian propaganda channel, Press TV, that 'the Zionists' had sent gunmen to the Maidan to help the 'revolution' so the Nazis could win and the remaining Ukrainian Jews would have to go to Palestine.

It's bad enough that one of Bradford's MPs isn't remotely interested in the problems of the City but when he spouts such nonsense you have to question Galloway's fitness to be an MP at all. Although he carefully skirts around outright anti-semitism (unlike some of his callers), the language and approach is still pretty appalling. But not quite as appalling as his use of lunatic conspiracy theories as a way to wind up naive supporters.

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The BBC really is a joke....

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...a cruel joke on all those poor folk in council houses coughing up for the license fee (and filling up magistrates courts when they struggle to pay it):

The BBC sent 140 crew members to cover Nelson Mandela's memorial despite receiving more than 1,000 complaints over its 'excessive' coverage of his death. The number of staff dedicated to the iconic leader's death was far greater than its rivals, including ITV which reportedly despatched just nine staff to South Africa.

I'll grant it's a leading news story, I concede that it merits high profile coverage but this scale of indulgence - it has cost the BBC over £1m to cover just this one story - is an insult to all the people who fund the BBC.

Apparently this degree of coverage was justified because Mandela was:

 “the most significant statesman” of the last 100 years. 

Seriously - not Churchill who led Britain through the war, not Kennedy who started the space race, not Gandhi who help create the world's biggest democracy, not Thatcher and Reagan who with Gorbachev brought the 'Cold War' to an end, not Roosevelt who led America through depression and war, not Kohl who unified Germany, not any of these people.

I give up with the BBC. And so should the rest of us, it doesn't serve us, it just exploits our credulity and indulges its own bias. At an unnecessary cost in taxation.

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Should we end the subsidy of newspapers?

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OK I hear you - what subsidy? There is no subsidy of newspapers and nor should their be.  Except that some people believe that newspapers (and books, and children's shoes and jaffa cakes) are subsidised:

Dwarfing this is an estimated £4bn p/a subsidy on the direct consumption of petrol, gas and coal through a reduction in VAT from 20% to 5%.

Yes I know, this author - drawing on a piece of egregious research from some folk called Oxford Energy Associates - is talking about domestic fuel. But I guess that is no different from the zero rating of food, publishing and children's clothing?

The truth is that this argument - used again and again by green sorts to excuse the actual subsidy of renewable energy - is a load of old cobblers. A subsidy is where I give you money to reduce your costs not where I reduce your (and lots of other businesses') rate of taxation.  Unless, of course, that rate of tax is set to be negative when it is a subsidy.

We do not subsidise fossil fuels not even a little bit. We give producers tax breaks on exploration and development just as we give pharmaceuticals businesses tax breaks on R&D and manufacturers tax breaks on investing in new plant. And these aren't subsidies either. Neither is a hypothetical (and doubtful) estimate of the externalities related to carbon dioxide emissions. These may well be such externalities but their existence is not a subsidy.

If we're to have a debate about whether energy should be subsidised (it shouldn't be) let's have that debate about the actual subsidies rather than some make-believe ones dreamt up by people with a direct vested interest in the continuing subsidy of renewable energy and the promotion of a particular policy response to climate change.

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Basic income, human nature and freedom

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I thought about this basic income idea - it sounds, as these things do, wonderfully Utopian:

A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement.

And, for it to make any sort of sense, it has to be big enough for people not to have to work so as to live. According to some this is a good thing but I'm not so sure - it does rather depend on the nature of the choices made by individuals whose only options are low paid work at a level slightly above the basic income.

I recall a lecture on crime and social conditions during my masters degree study. The lecturer (I'm afraid I forget his name) began by asking us: "would you work 35 hours a week for £7?" That was - give or take a few pence - the difference then between what we might get on benefits and what we might earn in a low paid job. The response was mixed - some said 'yes' arguing that this might lead to opportunities for still more lucrative work while others said 'no' since there is no real prospect of advancement (and we could earn a little on the black).

The idea of basic income makes this even more stark. That £7 a week job is now gone since the basic income is far in excess of the previous level of benefits. And because that income is enough to live on (that's the whole point after all), the number of people who become drones - living off the efforts of others - increases and is not tolerated. It may seem cute to say this:

Jobs are scarce, so it's better for workers if some are subsidized not to seek them, leaving more opportunities for those who do want to work.

...but that little tic of common sense suggests that those idling their lives away on basic income will be resented by those working and paying for their idleness. And that more and more people would seek such a life - after all most people see their job as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. So if the reason for working - providing for self and family - is removed, these people will stop working. And will be resented by those who are working.

All this is wrapped up in the view that there are too many people - or rather, too many workers. And that this problem will increase as technology finds more ways to do things without people that now require people to do them. Hence we need to either find things for the surplus to do ("the government must create jobs") or else we pay them to sit around doing nothing.

In the end, if we pay people to do nothing (in the mistaken belief that there's nothing productive for them to do) what we'll end up with is the corvée. The workers (assuming there's a sufficiency of them) will expect those idling around on a basic income to do something. And government will find that something. The drones stop being an escape valve for supposed excess labour and become a slave resource for the wealthy governors.

Welcome to the new slave state, the 21st century oikos society!

So a glimpse at the possible future. In his monumental “History of Government”, Finer used the Greek word oikos to describe ancient world governments. Oikos means “the household” which for the Greeks meant family under a male head including slaves and other dependents. We are headed back towards such a polity – where we are free in our daily actions within the constraints placed on that freedom by the government and its advisors. And the product of our labour belongs not to us but to the group and to the state – not through confiscation but through a combination of taxation and benefit dependency. It may even be the case that those out of work will be directed toward “socially useful” labour – a precursor of which we see in Labour’s “Future Jobs Fund”. Future jobs are not wealth creating but have a social purpose paid for either through taxation or (less likely) through philanthropy.

It may be "efficient" but it won't be free.

I prefer free.
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"Microlives": I'm pretty certain this is utter tripe...

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...from the Guardian (where else) with some people's wonderful new 'live forever' theory:

The Norm Chronicles, a new book by journalist Michael Blastland and Professor David Spiegelhalter that has a neat idea which turns all these abstract dangers into a concrete figure.

It centres on this idea: once you hit adulthood (or, being more precise, 22 for a man and 26 for a woman) you can expect to live for around 500,000 more hours – or a million half-hours. Each of those 30 minutes of life is a "microlife".

By working out the average effect of, say, smoking or eating red meat, we can figure out a cost in microlives for different habits. A portion of red meat, for example, costs you a microlife – in the words of Blastland, it's "a 30-minute chip off your stock of adult life".

This seems to me to be ignorance squared - taking averages (I guess 'norms') and using them as a predictor of individual life expectancy is not either good maths or good science. Maybe that's not what the book says - the good professor is, after all, a statistician. But it is what the Guardian says the book says - essentially that we can quantify the effect on our individual health of actions where the effect is based on estimates of how much the action adds or subtracts from our lifespan.

The problem is - and if we thought about it for a second we'd know this - that the estimates are open to question. We really haven't much of a clue about the impact of eating red meat on life expectancy even if we do have a general (if challenged) idea that a diet of red meat isn't ever so healthy. For sure, where there's a known dose-response effect (e.g. with smoking - note the word is smoking not tobacco - or alcohol) there's perhaps a bit of a case. But for things such as exercise there is little evidence that getting sweaty on the treadmill extends life - the the adding of microlives on the rowing machine is probably nonsense.

What we have here is extending the general to the specific (from the whole population average to little old me or you) combined with evidence that, to put it mildly, is open to question and perhaps not epidemiologically sound.

But I guess that the gullible Guardianistas are looking for a 'Spirit Level' for personal health and these authors have delivered! However, such tripe is best served with onions and accompanied by a good claret.

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Of course Public Health don't want us to understand it...

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This quote sums up everything wrong with Public Health:

But Greg Fell, consultant in public health, who was leading the discussion, said the idea of an Easy Read version had been considered but rejected.

He said there was a concern that it could be too “reductionist”.

Even the explanation of why it's incomprehensible is difficult to understand! And just for flavour:

“It is recommended that we make greater, but still intelligent and parsimonious, use of the wealth of epidemiological data that can be found within existing but as yet untapped sources of data.”

Suck on that ordinary member of the public!

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More daft 'Green Belt' nonsense...

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Planners have got something of a reputation for being sticklers for the finest detail (unless of course it's a large industrial operation that's planned for that Green Belt of course) and this is a fine example of such clipboard love:

A grandmother who spent £10,000 turning a field into a landscape garden has been ordered to rip it up because it breaches greenbelt planning rules.

Planning bosses said the garden, home to fish, frogs, newts, birds, insects and a variety of plant life, 'erodes the character and quality of the area' and is 'inappropriate for the greenbelt'.

Now before we start tearing planners to shreds, let's be clear about the regulations. A garden is 'development' and therefore not permitted (without special circumstances) in the 'Green Belt'. This isn't an anti-garden thing but a protection - because the garden is 'development' this changes the status of the land and raises the possibility of it being developed for some other more permanent and intrusive use.

However, this argument (one that the planners will have waved about in this case I don't doubt) is a weak one. The land remains 'Green Belt' and the strictures on openness and the restriction on development still pertain. But, as usual, the top councillor demonstrates a worrying ignorance of the regulations and simply says:

Council planning leader, Cllr Eddie Boden, said he 'appreciates the position' the family is in but added 'planning requirements have to be obeyed'.

He said: 'No special circumstances exist to justify what has to be considered to be inappropriate development within the greenbelt.'

This statement is, quite simply, wrong. Councils have discretion, the concept of "exceptional circumstances" is not defined and councillors can override the constraints of 'Green Belt' in circumstances like this - I know this to be so because I have argued this case before planning committees and won permissions for local residents in Bingley Rural.

Mrs Bailey should submit a planning application, get her neighbours and the Town Council to turn out in force and perhaps shame this idiot councillor into allowing her to keep her garden.

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While people die from neglect, the NHS employs a 'life coach'...

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Really! A "life coach":

"...Jayne Morris, the resident “life coach” for NHS Online..."

A life coach who - talking about clutter - believes this:

Keeping something in the loft, garage or other part of the house, does not help because it is still connected to the person “by tiny energetic cords” she claims. 

Seriously! I'm all for being tidy (well some of the time) but for the NHS to employ someone who believes such arrant nonsense is appalling. Especially when that organisation can't manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Says everything you need to know about NHS priorities.

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Transition Towns - or how to be less resilient and exclude the poor

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Maybe I've been asleep - I don't usually miss left-wing, green wibble - but 'transition towns' were a new one on me. Apparently there's a whole movement of them:

Transition Initiatives, community by community, are actively and cooperatively creating happier, fairer and stronger communities, places that work for the people living in them and are far better suited to dealing with the shocks that'll accompany our economic and energy challenges and a climate in chaos.

The point about these 'transition initiatives' is that they involve the capture of a local agenda - and policy-setting within a specific community - by a small group of committed, green extremists. The point and purpose of these groups is to ensure that all the focus within the particular community is on "resilience". We are told the problem is - without evidence or the proffering of choice - with things such as 'runaway' climate change, peak oil and that:

Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with energy shocks.

The chosen methods for these activists are to stress those parts of the local agenda that are open to criticism on 'environmental' grounds - it might be anything from local concerns about proposals for a coffee shop or a supermarket to campaigns against housing development or new transport infrastructure.

These campaigns give the green extremists the crack into which to ram their anti-development, anti-industrial wedge. At the heart of this extremism is the seemingly benign idea of 'resiliance' - making communities more resistant to shocks such as "fluctuations in energy prices" and "anticipated changes in climate". And this resilience is all about excluding the regional, national and international - thus the lower prices and distribution resilience of the large supermarket is denied in favour of local growing initiatives, jolly little town currencies and campaigns to defend independent shops. All of which, of course, make it more difficult and more expensive for the less well off.

And cutting yourself off from wider distribution systems does not make you more resilient. You only need to look at the aftermath of the recent Hurricane Sandy to see that national retailers were far more able to respond to the crisis than were local independents. Why? Because their national distribution networks, dispersed warehouses and truck fleets allowed them to quickly redirect stocks to places affected by the hurricane.

The truth is that the last and best protection - that resilience - comes from well-managed private business rather than from government. The Transition Towns idea deliberately sets out to exlcude these systems claiming they damage the environment or actually threaten local resilience. Worse still Transition Towns seek to create local systems that are more expensive to manage, less robust and excluding of the poor - they are not just twee little groups 'doing good' but organisations actively damaging communities.

Most depressingly these Transition Towns do not seem that way. Clever and articulate people promote them, the same naive churchy types as were suckered by 'fair trade' get involved and none of these people realise that the losers in all this are the poor. The one's who'd rather like a nice supermarket or a Costa coffee. The one's who would benefit most from connection to the international network of trade. The one's who'd like their sons and daughters to have a fighting chance of affording to carry on living in the smart little market town. The people who benefit from that "industrial society" our Transition Town advocates disdain.

Transition Towns really are less resilient and exclude the poor.

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Doctor know everything...

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Including about marketing and pricing strategies:

...citing an article from a medical journal in 2009 by a leading liver specialist which suggested supermarkets were overcharging for food to pay for cheap drink.

This is the Prime Minister - yet again revelling in his ignorance of business. Or rather his minions at No 10 digging him out from the latest hole into which he'd dived. It seems that the PM believes that offers on beer are "subsidised" by more expensive food.

This is nonsense on sticks. For two reasons - firstly we don't go to supermarkets, in the main, to buy drink we go there to buy food and other household necessities. And secondly, the price of X isn't subsidised by the margins on Y - supermarket pricing strategies just don't work like that.

More importantly however, what qualification does a "leading liver specialist" have to talk about the pricing strategies of supermarkets? None whatsoever - I'll take his advice on my liver, maybe on some other doctoring stuff but not in an area where (despite not being a specialist) I know more than he does.

But then 'Doctor know everything', he is mighty god and great know-all.

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Because the left like to target "groups" for punishment doesn't mean the rest of us do...

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The problem with the left is that they think other people will behave as unpleasantly as they do. This leads to the belief that negative consequences of policies are always 'deliberate'. Here's a tweet from Clare Gerada, top GP, leftie and self-professed feminist:

#demoswomen Women hit much harder than men by recession. Kate Green "this is deliberate". Women double whammy - tax credits & benefits 

Now I don't know who Kate Green is but I'm assuming that she's another lefty and that Clare Gerada approves of her views. And this is pretty scary from someone who is bright enough to be a proper doctor. I'm guessing that, like all the other lefties, Kate and Clare think the Conservative Party's inner sanctum is like something out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with besuited Tory toffs guffawing as they deliberately design policies that "target" women. I find it deeply worrying that such people - Kate and Clare that is - are anywhere near the levers of power.

The Labour Party when in power may deliberately target groups it doesn't like - parents of children at grammar schools and private schools, people living in rural communities, smokers, small businesses and drivers spring to mind. But Conservatives don't think that way. We really don't.

I know the lefties might be shocked by this revelation but it's true. That doesn't stop us from proposing policies like minimum pricing for drink that fall heaviest on a particular group but that is a consequence of a daft policy not a deliberate act of punishment. It may be true that women suffer more from recession (a recession caused by the last Labour government but we'll let that pass) but it is an enormous leap to believe that the Conservatives are deliberately manipulating the economy and the government's spending just to "target" women. On a scale of 1-10 for stupidity that is definitely an eleven.

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Seems that being good at bridge doesn't free you from believing in nonsense

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The Telegraph reports - without once raising its literary eyebrows or even saying; "you what?" - on the triumph of the English women's bridge team* which is, it seems, down to lavender oil:

Mrs Smith, the daughter of Nico Gardener, the celebrated bridge author, devised the lavender tactic three years ago.

She insists on using only the lavender oil she buys from the medieval hilltop village of Tourrettes-sur-Loup, near Nice, in the south of France.


“It has to be high-altitude lavender, grown in the mountains – the stuff lower down is cheaper, but not as good. I am a great believer in alternative medicines, and our lavender oil definitely helps the concentration."

Now it's fine that this woman believes this and I suppose it's harmless. But why does no-one look Mrs Smith in the eye and tell her that it's utter nonsense? And why does the Telegraph publish this twaddle without pointing out that is isn't true?

*As an aside, why is there a woman's bridge team and a men's bridge team? I can see nothing in the game that suggests one or other gender has an advantage qua gender.

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This isn't about beer...

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It's about mass-produced alcoholic fizzy-pop. But then the big brewers have long seen the traditional UK markets for beer - places know as pubs - as an expensive inconvenience. To fully understand everything that is wrong - really wrong with the UK beer market just read this:

Additionally, Burgess said that the company was “thinking” about opening up its own store in the UK as a showcase to try “different things and really immerse people in the brand”.

He adds: “How much we can deliver of that in-store realistically in an environment where we are very passionately focused would be a challenge. I’m not sure its high on our strategic priorities at the moment but maybe there will be something like the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam in the future.”

For crying out load you idiots, beer is an exciting, living product not something for you to practice impenetrable marketing jargon on. If businesses like Heineken weren't so resolutely focused on flogging idiot juice at the lowest possible price maybe we have less nonsense from New Puritans. nannying fussbuckets and neo-prohibitionists.

I hate them (but not as much as the health fascists).

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When a meeting in a pub needs an "inclusion policy", you know there's something not right with the world!

OK it's David Allen Green but surely this is a joke?

Westminster Skeptics Civility and Inclusiveness Policy

I appreciate that "skeptics" (apart from their inability to spell the word) are a little odd but I can see no point or purpose to such a policy. They'll be having published standing orders and rules for debate next. Followed by endless debates about the rules requiring meetings to resolve those disputes - before you know there's politics followed inevitably by governance and leading to that ghastly excluding organisational mindset that leads most of these bodies to be come self-referencing and purposeless cliques.

How long before Mr Green publishes his "draft" equal opporutnities policy (for a meeting in a pub)!

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Today's load of old nonsense...

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...courtesy of the Centre for Local Economic Studies & New Start:

We’re in a systemic crisis of human and environmental capital. This is the moment that things are going to get re-organised and radically transformed. Our generation will see the biggest transformation since the corporate firm was born 200 years ago. We will see that same magnitude of change as we fundamentally shift how we, as humans, organise ourselves. This transformation will take place whether we like it or not, the economic conditions are there. We’re going to need to rebuild most of the institutional infrastructure of the UK. Some of it because there’s no other viable way of keeping it going, while other institutional infrastructure – like education – is being actively challenged by changes in business model, by value extractable. We’re in a remarkable place that’s changing the nature of being, of who you are and how you have to behave. Whether you call it the Big Society or the Good Society, the idea that civic society is going to become more self-organising will happen. We’re on the verge of new tipping point around that. Whether it’s about setting up a co-op to buy energy that creates a whole new market relationship with providers or about DIY-producing our own furniture, this is the new behaviour of society and it will fundamentally change the nature of production, the relationship between consumers and producers, and the nature of investments. We are in a great restructuring, a great transformation. Technology, culture and human consciousness – how we exist in the world – are changing.

I'm not even going to try to get underneath what this is all about - every trendy community, greenie, social enterprise cliché is crammed into a hundred words of so. Let me just pick out one sentence of astonishing wiffle:

We’re in a remarkable place that’s changing the nature of being, of who you are and how you have to behave.

Now please tell me that I'm going to grow long har, wear a kaftan, live in a yurt and listen to the Grateful Dead? This sort of hippy nonsense went out with that generation I thought! The capacity to string senseless platitudes together to make a pleasing sound was fine when it was just a few teenagers sitting in muddy fields but when a 'repsected' academic body - a veritable think-tank promotes it, I start to wonder.

This 'fundamental shift', the re-organisation and 'radical transformation' - all just meaningless mumbo-jumbo designed to impress the gullible. The 'speaker', one Indy Johar, provides not substantiation for his trendy polemic, there is not challenge, just the spouting of what might be described (and was by my wife) and "the words of a naive but articulate 15-year-old.

CLES really should do better.

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On the matter of lunatic statistical projections....

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...this one is a real winner!

It would take 1.4 million years to clear the backlog of northern families waiting for social housing if the housing market does not improve, the National Housing Federation has said.

What are these people on?

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Doesn't look full too me!

The Greens, their fellow travellers and the proto-fascists at the Daily Mail have returned to the subject of population and how the human species, like some spawny bacterium, is devouring the planet with its excessive breeding.  And coming up on the rails is the BBC celebrity – in the form of “wildlife expert” Chris Packham. Demonstrating an almost complete ignorance of population geography or demographics, Mr Packham launches an appeal for us to have fewer sprogs:

The Springwatch presenter suggested offering Britons tax breaks to encourage them to have smaller families. He effectively endorsed China’s controversial one-child policy, which sees couples who adhere to the rule given a lump sum on retirement. But he stopped short of suggesting people should be penalised for having too many children.

This charming childless chap thinks that the pandas will die out if we don’t stop breeding:

‘I question the way, for example, people have two children with one partner, then split up and have two with their next partner, just to even up the score.

'Fact is, we all eat food, breathe air and require space, and the more of us there are, the less of those commodities there are for other people and, of course, for the animals.’

I hate to be a controversialist on this matter but it really is about time we started thinking about this issue on the basis of fact rather than prejudice (indeed the Daily Mail’s problem with population growth appears to be the lack of blonde, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon Christians).

The Journal of Comparative Family Studies celebrated its 40^th anniversary with this observation:

A global fertility decline has left only a small set of countries and a few percent of the global population with very high fertility. The dominant pattern is fertility decline to low levels-with over half of the global population now living in countries with below replacement level fertility. Concerns of a population explosion are now geographically concentrated and are being supplanted by concerns of a population implosion (i.e., declining population size and rapidly aging populations).

Britain’s problem is going to be an ageing population, declining fertility rates and the crisis of too few workers (something that contributed to our recent immigration episode). Yet there remain useful idiots like Mr Packham to indulge the nastier elements of the Green movement such as the Optimum Population Trust – the ones who think the UK population should be cut to just 29 million and who promote draconian disincentives to larger families.

It is organisations such as this – and the equally unpleasant uber-greens at Forum for the Future – who are wrong, both in their science and in the proposals they put forward to control fertility. Just because a few celebrities can be rolled out to tell us not to have babies doesn’t mean for one second we have a population problem.

As the picture at the top makes pretty clear – whatever is said about England’s population density (and it does suit the green fascists to select England rather than the UK for their figures) – the country is a long way from full and very unlikely to be concreted over anytime soon!

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