There are queues everywhere in Britain, says Rod Liddle. The country has long since reached saturation point and it’s time for the government to admit that we have a problem
There were two stories in our morning newspapers this week which seemed at first sight unrelated. The first was a report from the Local Government Association warning the government that council tax charges might need to rise by as much as 6 per cent because the number of immigrants to the UK had hitherto not been properly accounted for. Immigrants placed a new and costly burden on local councils and there were many more of them than had previously been imagined.
The other story was an announcement from the transport minister, Stephen Ladyman, that the government intended to overhaul road speed limits and, in most cases, impose rather stricter limits.
Don’t worry; I’m not about to argue that the need for new and tougher speed limits is the result of Poles and Kazakhs tearing around our green lanes in second-hand Ford Cosworths. But it is nonetheless the case that these two stories — both of them, I suspect, annoying to the average person, although not catastrophic — are indirectly linked. They are both, in their way, functions of what will be by far the biggest problem facing our country in the next 20 or 30 years — overpopulation. And the reason that we will do nothing about it is twofold: first, there is no political will to deal with it. If you are on the Left, you are inclined to welcome immigration for perfectly well-meaning, historical reasons. If you are on the Right, you will most likely adopt the stance which characterised both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations — and which continues under New Labour today — that matters of migration and family size should be left to the free market and the whim of the individual.
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