Puerile... but fanny

Bruges' answer to Manneken Pis

Belgian railways: Calling it the way they see it

Population Density Fun

From The Daily Mail:

England is now the most overcrowded country (1) in Europe... Officials said that by next year England will have 402.1 people for every square kilometre, overtaking the figure of 398.5 in Holland and 355.2 in Belgium... (2)

Recent EU figures have shown that Britain accounted for nearly a third of the total increase in population across the whole of Europe last year (3), with 412,000 extra people in this country in 2009.

Whitehall has also acknowledged that 100,000 new homes will be required each year for the next 25 years to cope with the growth of population as a direct result of immigration. (4)

The figures have underlined concerns over the effects of rising population on transport and housing (5), and on both cities and countryside, as numbers rise towards the officially predicted level of 70 million by 2029.

James Clappison, Tory MP for Hertsmere, said: 'Population density of such a level is an issue which politicians must address. Immigration is the major driver of population increase.' (6)

Two can play at that game:

1) 'The most overcrowded' is a tautology at best.

2) As I've said before: "From Wiki, UK population 61 million, surface area 94,526 sq miles = 645/sq mile (249/sq km). Not spectularly high, so they strip out S, NI and W and look at England only. From Wiki, population 51 million, surface area 50,346 sq miles = 1,000/sq mile (391/sq km).

But why don't we go one further and strip out Greater London? English population (excl. GL) 43.5 million, surface area 49,727 sq miles = 874/sq mile (342/sq km). That gets us down to well below The Netherlands and only a quarter of Malta's density."

Conversely, Greater London has a population density of 10,596/sq mile. If a high population density were such a terrible thing, then nobody would want to live there, would they?

3) Which underlines the point that it's net immigration from outside the EU that's behind this, which is entirely self-inflicted.

4) I cheerfully agree that Labour were letting in far too many of the wrong sort of people, but, being The Daily Mail, they merrily ignore another factor that is just as important: increases in life expectancy.

The UK population pyramid at the ONS shows the number of people aged 60 or under going up from 46 million to 52 million between 1971 and 2029, which is a compound annual increase of 0.2% [=(52/46)^(1/58). The number of people aged over 60 goes up from 10 million to 19 million over the same period, a compound annual increase of 1.1% [=(19/10)^(1/58)].

And how much housing would we need to build to accommodate an extra 9 million people in 58 years? Call it 1.5 old folk per home = 6 million homes, which is just over 100,000 per year.

5) What 'pressure on transport'? Seeing how many bus or train drivers are fairly recent immigrants, we'd be in a bigger mess if they all left.

As to 'pressure on housing', see (4). Is building 100,000 new homes, i.e. expanding our housing stock by 0.3% every year (=100,000/27,000,000) really that terrible, seeing as it'll be recent immigrants doing a lot of the actual work?

Even if we leave the floodgates open (which I do not recommend) and have to build 200,000 homes a year (for the immigrants and to accommodate for the additional old folk), that's an increase of 0.6% a year, against compound annual increase in overall population of 0.4% per year between 1971 and 2029 [=(71/56)^(1/58)], big deal.

6) No it's not. See (4).

UPDATE: Adam Collyer dissects a similarly hysterical article in The Torygraph, illustrated with some bonus Top A-Level Totty.

Tide turning or King Canute?

From the BBC:

Female students wearing a full face veil will be barred from Syrian university campuses, the country's minister of higher education has said. Ghiyath Barakat was reported to have said that the practice ran counter to the academic values and traditions of Syrian universities...

In 2009, Egypt's then foremost Muslim cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, barred female students from wearing the full-face veil at the al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam's centre of learning and scholarship. He also upset other Muslim scholars by saying French Muslims should obey any law that France might enact banning the veil.

Earlier this month, France's lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public. It must be ratified by the Senate in September to become law. Belgium's lower house of parliament has also passed a bill to ban clothing that hides a person's identity in public places, although it does not specifically refer to full-face Islamic veils.

See also Italy.

Fun Online Poll

Over at Westbournemouth UKIP.

"New Belgian cabinet ends crisis"

Damn and blast!

The Golden Era of central-government-free Belgium has ended after nine months of glorious non-legislation - nothing was banned, no new taxes were introduced, no EU treaties were signed, nothing.