This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Population ponzi

Alistair Haimes (“OUR REVELS NOW ARE ENDED,” AUG/SEPT) is wrong to focus our future exclusively on our economic prospects when he sees them as having been underpinned in the past by globalisation and demographics.

Globalisation has been of doubtful value to a great many of our fellow citizens; this is evidenced by median wages — the point at which half the population is earning less and half earning more — which have hardly shifted since 2008. 

Nobody should deny the very real contribution made by new arrivals to our economic and cultural life. The concern is about scale. In 1996, just before the Blair Government began its policy of encouraging large-scale immigration, the UK’s population was 58.2 million. Today it is 10 million higher at 68.6 million — an increase of not far short of 20 percent; and this trend continues.

To suggest that all the above is free of downside is fanciful. Inter alia, last year’s arrivals will require us to build more than 200,000 homes — an intensely unpopular policy in those areas where they are to be built — and that is before tackling the existing backlog.

And what about the impact on our environment and countryside, our ecology, our food security. As Robert Kennedy famously pointed out, GDP measures almost everything except those things that make life worthwhile.

Two immediate policy decisions would help. First, to wean British industry and commerce off its knee-jerk reaction to regard immigration as the default option. Second, to take a much more positive and open approach to employing older people — the over-fifties find it astonishingly difficult to get a job. But older people may well be more reliable and more productive.

Such a move would do much to address the dependency ratio which looms large in Alistair Haimes’s article, but which ignores the fact that today’s young people are tomorrow’s old people who will in turn require yet more people to look after them — a population Ponzi scheme.

According to recent polling, more than 70 percent believe the country is already overcrowded. It is important we begin to analyse these inevitable trade-offs in population change (up or down). That is why I have been pressing the Government to set up an Office for Demographic Change (along the lines of the Office for Budget Responsibility) to carry out strategic, evidence-based work and so respond to these public concerns. My Private Members Bill, which I introduced in February would have done just that.

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts CBE

House of lords, London

A King for all

George Owers (“PREACHING THE GOSPEL OF PROGRESSIVISM”, AUG/SEPT) takes up the cudgels on behalf of “a tiny public foothold” for Anglican monarchy as “an ideal counter-narrative to the religion of progressivism”. 

However much the maintenance of “the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law” befitted a Coronation Oath of 1953, the thought of subjecting the present Queen’s immediate heirs to such a divisive and probably unmaintainable sacred pledge, seems in the light of sociological and multicultural realities, a backward step. A simple inclusive reformulation of ceremonial utterance — as has been indicated by the heir apparent’s interest in the formulary, “Defender of Faiths” — would do the trick. 

It is not abandoning Anglican preferentialism that is “at our peril”, but sacralising and institutionalising by law, culturally outmoded, politically destabilising, and for many offensive solemn promises that put future monarchs in hock to a narrow and quite possibly inciting minoritarian denominationalism.

William Keenan

Nottingham 

A reliable partner

Leaving the Council of Europe and its human rights court, as Suella Braverman proposes, would make the UK “a European outcast like Russia and Belarus”, according to Joshua Rozenberg (“JOHNSON’S DISRESPECT FOR THE LAW,” AUG/SEPT). As Groucho Marx nearly said, who would want to be a member of a council that has serial human-rights-abusing Albania, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova as members? 

Der Spiegel recently reported that the Baltic countries, Poland, the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries regard London, not Berlin, as a reliable partner adding that, at a time of crisis in continental Europe, there is no substitute for Britain.

Dr John Doherty

Vienna, Austria 

The wrong rocket-man

Andrew Roberts makes a common mistake (“PRESENT DAY LESSONS FROM PAST-MASTERS”) in suggesting that the crazed Dr Strangelove of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film is based on Henry Kissinger. It isn’t. It is a caricature of Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who created the V1, and later the Saturn V (of moon landing fame). 

Von Braun was lucky not to be strung up after the war as a war criminal; but he was just too useful and was spirited with his team to the USA, courtesy of Operation Paperclip — a cynical ploy to beat the Soviets in the Cold War. He liked to build rockets; he wasn’t too fastidious about who for or where they landed.

Nicholas A. Bird

London