Splendid stuff from the BBC.
No point me summarising, posted here for reference. Suffice to say, my local council area (half of which is inside the M25) is 80% farmland and only 8% built on - the local NIMBYs have been putting up a fine resistance to anything since forever.
No wonder he's never around
2 hours ago
9 comments:
Mine is 3%. 92% farmland. :-)
Suppose in your local council area, the amount built on were increased from 8% to 10%, which may still seem small. However, it represents a 25% increase and a consequent 25% increase in school pupils, train commuters, car commuters etc . In a couple of years, my train service will be standing room only for my 40 minute journey. The platforms are too short to add more carriages and I can't see them being lengthened in the near future. Not too bad for me, as I can then retire, but perhaps you can appreciate why some people are very much in favour of the population not growing.
L, you win!
JB, look, do I personally want more people to move to my commuter suburb? Of course not, if I'm being selfish about it. That doesn't mean I have any moral right to oppose it, or else I am a total hypocrite. I live in a house in this area, I didn't create the area, it's not actually mine.
I'd also prefer it if there were far fewer cars on the road so I can whizz round unimpeded, does that give me the platform to campaign against fewer new car registrations, increasing the age at which you can have a driving licence etc?
Firstly no, seondly, if my campaign succeeded, there would ultimately be fewer roads for me to whizz round on.
JB, the term "population growth" is unhelpful in the context.
Would you also campaign for a One Child Policy like in China so that the UK population declines?
Immigration from abroad causes social/cultural frictions for sure and they let in plenty of people that they shouldn't, but that is a separate topic.
If it weren't for all the immigrants (more good ones than bad ones, fact), the UK population probably would be falling. In which case, who's going to pay your state pension (and my state pension) come to that?
Should it be overrun with housing?
JH. Well perhaps some of the heavily subsidised farmland could stand an overunning if it pushed the amount of land built upon up a percentage point or two...
@JB a lot of pressure on public services is from the elderly - just go into your GP or hospital to see. To a lesser extent schools are also having problems recruiting. How to solve this problem without building more housing? Getting workers to commute in from miles is difficult in terms of recruiting (who would want to spend hours getting to a £25k job?) and of course will make the traffic situation worse. Absent building more housing near the jobs, what else can be done? Ship the elderly off to lower value sites? Sterilise public sector workers so that their contributions aren't partially offset by further demands for public services? We could of course tackle the work shyness of the over 66's by raising the retirement age a lot but that's politically very difficult. The ability to draw your private pension from 55 is something that definitely needs to go - lots of people in very valuable areas sitting on their bums at state expense.
JH, define "overrun". Then define "hypocrisy".
PC, M, ta for input.
"Sterilise public sector workers so that their contributions aren't partially offset by further demands for public services? Sounds like a plan. In the sense that a talent and mindset necessary to be a 'bureaucrat' must be partly nature partly nurture. So a bit of eugenics on bureaucrats would in the medium to long term save us all a lot of grief.
Go for it.
:-)
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