Letters to the Editor | 19 August 2006

Too many or too few?
From K.R. Houston
Sir: Rod Liddle’s assertion (‘Our overpopulation is a catastrophe’, 12 August) that an ever-growing population fuelled by mass immigration is seriously debilitating our quality of life was spot on. But it also highlights the question of why we ever reached this state of affairs in the first place. When my three children were born between 1977 and 1982 — a period which took in both Labour and Conservative governments — new parents were sent a missive from the local health authority stating that while family size was a matter of personal choice, Britain needed to have a population level that it could ‘sustain’. The underlying message was clear: don’t have too many children. A generation later, we are informed that the economy would collapse without a massive influx of immigrants, even though most of them do not speak English or have any capital to invest, and some of them actually wish to do us harm.