Demographics – turning opportunity into catastrophe?

(Friday/Saturday/Sunday blog)

You’ll all know that most advanced Western countries (including Japan) are facing what alarmists like to call a ‘demographic time bomb’. Actually, all that is happening is that the indigenous populations are not reproducing at replacement rate.

This has two main consequences:

• A shrinking economy as older people tend to spend less

• The number of working age people to every pensioner, or the “old age support ratio”, is forecast to fall to 2.9 by 2050, from 3.3 in the mid-1970s to 2006. And the ‘experts’ give us warnings such as “Tax revenue from those in work may fail to keep up with demand for social security and healthcare from an increasingly large proportion of people aged over 65 and out of work and who have poor health”.

A once in a lifetime opportunity?

But is this situation actually the disaster our rulers and the ‘experts’ and journalists in search of an attention-grabbing story predict? After all, is Britain a better place with an ever-growing GDP as the population rises to 70 million people then 80 million then 90 million? What if our rulers were to realise that the quality of life in Britain would actually improve if we could slowly manage the population down towards 55 million or 50 million or even fewer people? There would be less overcrowding, less congestion, less pressure on public services, less pollution. Yes, in terms of GDP the economy would shrink, but perhaps this would give a better life for everyone?

As for the fact that there would be fewer people of working age supporting the retired – well firstly, with the pension age rising and in order to maintain a healthy life, many people are choosing to work well past 65. And secondly, with robotics and automation, there are ever fewer people working in industry and agriculture producing ever more. So ratios of working people to the retired that applied in the past are no longer meaningful or relevant.

Of course, this summary is necessarily over-simplified. But hopefully it shows that with a little imagination, the supposed ‘demographic time bomb’ is nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s a wonderful opportunity to substantially improve the quality of life of British people – precisely the people whose interests our rulers are supposed to work for.

Turning opportunity into catastrophe?

But what have our rulers done? They’ve taken the opposite path and decided that we must keep increasing the population to maintain supposed ‘economic growth’. But it’s not totally obvious that many of the people they are bringing into Europe and thus Britain are really going to make a substantial contribution to our economy.

Are we getting this?

or are we getting this?

Not all the members of the migrant invasion army are highly-educated doctors, architects and engineers. In fact, well over 95% of all the migrants to Austria, Germany and Sweden over the last 2 to 3 years are unemployed and most have absolutely no intention of ever getting a job. Why not? Our rulers have the wonderful idea that we need more people of working age to support the increasing elderly population. But these ‘people of working age’ have to want to work. Unfortunately for our floundering rulers, many of the new arrivals have their own retirement plans – father as many children as possible with several wives and they could easily be getting €100,000 or £100,000 a year in benefits. If you can do this, why would you bother working?

So there is a more than insubstantial conflict between the ‘contributions’ our rulers hope the ‘New Europeans’ will make and the plans the ‘New Europeans’ have for their own lifelong comfort at our expense.

Running harder for ever less reward?

In Britain, there are more people in work than ever before. Moreover, more older people are working than ever before. The Government should be raking in tax revenues. But it isn’t. Every year the Government borrows increasing our national debt and the interest we’ll all have to pay. Why? Because the Government’s open-doors immigration policies mean we are importing ever more people who have no intention of ever contributing anything to our country and are only here for what they can leech from us.

I humbly propose that our useless rulers have managed to turn a huge opportunity into a catastrophe which we’ll all be paying for in an ever-declining quality of life – increased over-crowding, inter-communal violence, collapsing public services, terrorist attacks, pollution and social breakdown.