Tory MP: Global warming is my generation's Dunkirk

"Climate Change is the defining issue of our age. Previous generations had to deal with the rise of Nazism or communism. This is the issue on which my generation of politicians will be judged. This is our Dunkirk."

- Richard Benyon MP

That is the extraordinary answer the Tory MP for Newbury gave to a Rough Guide survey on climate change.

MPs were asked three questions by the Rough Guide's Mark Ellingham on how seriously they took climate change as politicians and as responsible, active citizens.  The Independent concludes that "their replies show a Parliament almost unanimous in its belief that this is the major issue, bar none (Scottish MP Brian Donohoe is a lone sceptic among our respondents, looking forward to a warmer garden)."

The response rate was exceptionally high amongst LibDems (88.9%) and lowest amongst Labour MPs (39.7%).  58.1% of Tory MPs replied - the 41.9% hopefully including MPs with Lord Lawson's sceptical perspective and some who are more worried about nuclear proliferation or other immediate security challenges.  Such MPs would be what Mr Benyon would probably call 'climate change deniers'.

If you want to see if your MP responded... The Independent publishes the answers each MP gave to Rough Guide's three questions.

Comments

[David Walker]

I find this comment offensive. How dare he compare mass slaughter in the name of racial purity with a debate over something that hasn't even been proved is occuring.

In fact as I write my anger increases. There is being green and then there is being shameful.

[Tory Loyalist]

Quite right. Utter tosh and his analogy is entirely inept and maladroit whichever way you look at it.

Who are the "Nazis" in this feeble analysis? Bush and the Americans? If that's what he thinks he should say so.

Benyon has reinforced my earlier comments about the poor intellectual quality of many of the Tory MPs who have come into the House since the departure of the excellent George Walden.

I know nothing about this person. Is he related to either of the previous Tory Benyons, I think Tom and Bill? Not sure they were related.

[ToMTom]

Benyon was born in Reading, the son of Sir William Benyon of Englefield House, and was educated at nearby Bradfield College and the Royal Agricultural College. He served in the Royal Green Jackets for five years from 1980 to 1985. He was elected in 1991 to the Newbury District Council, he became the Conservative group leader in 1994. He lost his council seat in 1995.

My relatives were at Dunkirk having tramped from Belgium to get lifted off by HMS Harvester only to be KIA later in the War

To have this individual trivialise what took place in May 1940 when RAB Butler was trying to negotiate peace with Goering's go-between behind Churchill's back by associating it with a religion based upon computer-simulations of ambient temperature fatuous in the extreme.

If this is the Conservative Party it will be an ever decreasing presence on the Opposition benches.............but with his father Sir William Richard Benyon (born 17 January 1930) is a retired British Conservative Party politician, Berkshire landowner and former High Sheriff................he no doubt doesn't care about anything north of Oxford

[Sean Fear]

That's a pretty silly comment by Richard Benyon.

[Tory Loyalist]

The party appears to be regressing into a Trollope-style world of silver-spoon nepotism. Is this really the face we intend to present to the 21st century?

We are told that the Thatcher Party was full of vulgar grammar schoolboys. Vulgar they may have been, but they certainly had a better idea of what ordinary British people were all about than Cameron's Eton mafia.

People like Benyon are part of the problem.

[Captain Planet]

Oh for goodness sake, don't get your knickers in a twist.

The Dunkirk analogy is very apt for the inhabitants on low-lying nations likes Maldives, Tuvalu and Bangladesh.

Puffed-up outrage at Nazi analogies ill behoves those who often use them to condemn irritating but hardly genocidal EU regulations... or who talk about 'health fascism' as if Jamie Oliver is somehow comparable to Mussolini.

At least Benyon is describing something that could kill millions of people.

[Esbonio]

Yes, a fatuous comment.

Climate change may be an important issue but if so it is only one of many challenges facing us all. And to compare it with Dunkirk is entirely inappropriate.

Still I guess we might expect this sort of comment with Dave in charge given his passion for windmills and interest in chocolate oranges and other such irrelevancies.

[Anonymous]

The fact that climate change may result in the deaths of more people than were killed in both world wars together seems not to worry most of the posters on this site.

Yes it's not proven beyond doubt, but the responsible thing to do is to take the threat seriously, not dismiss it out of hand.

The only thing saving me from being properly angry is that the opnions expressed here are in a shrinking minority and entirely irrelevant to most of the country and the world.

[Umbrella Man]

The parliamentary Tory party has gone mad.

Iran is about to get nuclear weapons and a Conservative MP thinks that gobal warming is the Nazism of our age.

Churchill must be turning in his grave.

[William Norton]

Does this count for Godwin's Law purposes?

The Newbury Association must feel awfully proud of all that work they did to unseat the Lib Dem MP.

[Esbonio]

William

Remind me what Godwin's law is.

FWIW
I remember meeting Ted Heath at the Newbury Conservative Association during the "who is running Britain election" back in the 70s. I even got his autograph which just goes to show how impressionable the young can be. What memories? Sitting round the fire in darkness with my parents. Three day week. 50 mph limit on deserted motorways. If these climate doomsters have their way it'll be just like the old days again.

[Editor]

Godwin's Law defined here.

[dose of reality]

idiot. the global warming ecofundamentalists ARE our generation's Communists/Nazis/whitch burners -ideolagical, damaging, and wrong.

[Esbonio]

Thanks Editor.

I should have remembered the wonders of Wikipedia.

[ToMTom]

he fact that climate change may result in the deaths of more people than were killed in both world wars together

MAY result

Then again it might not, Lembit Opik was worried about asteroids - have the Conservatives any policies on asteroids..............or over-population ?

[esbonio]

Well said, TomTom.

Instead of battening down the hatches one might equally argue that we should be going for growth to sought the problems out with technology failing which we could be promoting space travel so we don't have to worry about the asteroids either!

[Clausewitz]

Dunkirk was a British defeat. Is Richard Benyon being incredibly subtle in his use of coded messaging?

[Robert McIlveen]

It is a rouch overstated - but it seems slightly bizarre to suggest ("the 41.9% hopefully including MPs ... who are more worried about nuclear proliferation or other immediate security challenges") that you can't worry about nuclear proliferation adn climate change - they are unrelated but both are serious threats to our well-being.

[Editor]

Of course you can worry about both, Robert, but the whole political class has buried its head in the sand re nuclear proliferation but is devoting enormous political energy to the much less immediate danger of climate change. There must be some sort of psychological explanation...

[RodS]

Yes but....... Why cannot any commentator face up to the underlying issue of population growth - both globally and within the UK. Any marginal benefit of persuading individuals to modify their energy use will be blown into insignificance if the population continues growing at the rate it is. This is not to advocate mass euthanasia but simply to focus on government led action e.g. why do we have such a generous child support system ? why do we encourage evermore creative fertility treatments ? There are also questions for the Catholic Church on its stance on bith control.

One refreshing development would be if we openly discussed the effects of 'induced' population growth on Climate Change rather than treat it as a total given. We should be aiming to improve the 'quality' of life for a manageable optimum population rather than coping (badly) with sheer quantity.

It would be more accurate to say that Mass Inward Immigration is our Dunkirk !!

[George Hinton]

Tom Tom 10.44
I thought Lembik was worried about heamorroids, and whether it would effect his relationship with Sian.
But:
So, all the MP's are agreed about global warming. All political parties are attempting to seize the middle ground. Parties and politicians are trying to avoid contentitious subject matter. Politicians are corrupt or spineless or both.
Clearly the way forward is to have a National Government, that will make the UK a paragon of eco-friendly life.
In the meantime whilst we go bust and starve and lose business to the rest of the world and the EU refuses to assist our refugees, we can at least be solaced with the fact that we tried.
What a load of untested and suspect tosh we are falling for, peddled by those that seek to gain or wish to rule by interference in our daily lives.
Whilst global issues of warming matter, they are not over-riding to the other hum-drum issues facing the real people in this land - Taxes, Crime, Bureaucracy, Red Tape, VAT, Europe, NHS, Pensions, Bloated State Payrolls, Utility Prices, Inflation, Stealth Taxes, Pensioners, etc etc.
Can we please get real and address the real issues that the man on the street wants addressed.

[david]

Dunkirk was not a defeat, what happened prior to Dunkirk was the defeat. Vice-Admiral Ramsey (probably the single most important organising genius of the second world war) and his staff, created at Dunkirk a victory. To recover 338.226 men from that disaster was simply amazing. For the Germans to fail to prevent their withdrawal, was a defeat. The Germans achieved a similar victory after the fall of Sicily, the Germans managed to evacuate over 100,000 German and Italian troops, despite overwhelming allied air/sea power.

[Esbonio]

RodS is quite right. If human based climate change is a real problem then population control needs addressing as much as anything else. I would have far more respect for the politicians jumping on this band wagon (and tend towards believing their gloomy forecasts) if instead of making pretty much useless gestures (eg windmills) they talked about the hard issues and possible solutions including population control and nuclear power.

[Simon Chapman]

"Of course you can worry about both, Robert, but the whole political class has buried its head in the sand re nuclear proliferation but is devoting enormous political energy to the much less immediate danger of climate change. There must be some sort of psychological explanation..."

The madness of crowds, Editor (to adapt one of your favorite theorems)?

Micro-climate change at Westminster - the product of too many heat-oppressed brains (sheer hot air being the cause)?

[Michael McGowan]

Yet more posturing by another Tory politician anxious to prove that he ie leftier-than-thou? By the way, can we have a clear statement from Dave's Green Tory Party that none of its MPs will now be going on environmentally-unfriendly taxpayer-funded junkets (usually known as fact-finding missions) like Miliband's little jaunt to Kenya? Or is this another example of left-wing patricians intending to compel others to practice what they merely preach?

[malcolm]

I wonder if the psychological explanation that you mention above Tim has occured because nobody really has a clue what if anything can be done to halt nuclear proliferation. As we have seen, the American and European approaches to Iran have seemingly failed and I seriously doubt that the political will exists to go to war with them.Where we go from here I just don't know.
As regards Benyons' comments I agree with Robert Mcilween.

[Michael McGowan]

You're probably right, Malcolm. Bloody terrifying isn't it? At least when Abyssinia showed Mussolini and Hitler that the League of Nations was a busted flush, neither of them was on the point of going nuclear....

[Londoner]

Rather than quibbling about this MP's use of language (he was presumably trying to be dramatic to emphasise how important he felt the issue was), isn't it rather encouraging that there is such a strong consensus that this is an important issue?

If anyone thinks this is a "lefty" concern, please be reminded that the first major mainstream politician who dedicated a major speech to it, and I believe would certainly have followed it up with a lot more action if she had not been so wrongly ditched two years later, was Mrs Thatcher in 1988.

I checked my own (Labour) MP's response (Kate Hoey). Quite rightly she pointed out the political illiteracy of the Independent by noting that the question talked about the actions of Britain, and yet our country is the United Kingdom. And then the Independent article was surprised that no Northern Ireland MP responded!! She would be a good non-Tory for DoughtySt TV to interview.

[Michael McGowan]

I agree that pollution is not a purely leftwing concern. However, the Tory Party is in serious danger of shackling itself to the leftwing "solution" for such problems. That is the point.

I agree with you about Kate Hoey. She is a top-notch politician. Were she my MP, I would not hesitate to vote Labour. Ditto Frank Field. Recently, she has been undercover again in Zimbabwe charting the unfolding disaster in that country which right-on Dave seems to have forgotten about.....because no doubt it would be "racist" to criticise one of the BBC's and Guardian's favourite black African dictators.

[Richard Weatherill]

From these responses, it looks as though the Climate Change bandwagon has already reached breakneck speed and poor old Nigel Lawson (and other sceptics) had better just jump out of the way!

[Esbonio]

Michael McGowan is quite right. The left are and will use climate change as yet another excuse to promote their wider wacky destructive agenda. Accordingly the Tories should not give them a free pass on climate change by trying to out do them. Unfortunately on this (as with other issues) that is excatly what the Cameron leadership appears to be doing.

[Sean Fear]

Broadly, there are two elements to the environmental movement. One, the left wing, regards environmentalism as a handy stick with which to beat capitalism. The State can seize back the Commanding Heights of the economy (and regulate peoples' lives) and claim it's necessary to save the environment.

The other is the romantic right element, which dreams of a return to an imaginary past of jolly squires, happy peasants, and country pubs.

[TomTom]

Amusing article on Yahoo News from AP

LOS ANGELES - Special effects explosions, idling vehicles, teams of workers building monumental sets — all of it contributes to Hollywood's newly discovered role as an air polluter, a university study has found.
Advertisement

The film and television industry and associated activities make a larger contribution to air pollution in the five-county Los Angeles region than almost all five other sectors researched, according to a two-year study released Tuesday by the University of California at Los Angeles.

Although Hollywood seems environmentally conscious thanks to celebrities who lend their names to various causes, the industry created more pollution than individually produced by aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels and semiconductor manufacturing, the study found.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061114/ap_en_tv/hollywood_pollution

[Captain Planet]

Sean Fear:

"Broadly, there are two elements to the environmental movement. One, the left wing, regards environmentalism as a handy stick with which to beat capitalism. The State can seize back the Commanding Heights of the economy (and regulate peoples' lives) and claim it's necessary to save the environment. The other is the romantic right element, which dreams of a return to an imaginary past of jolly squires, happy peasants, and country pubs."

Which element do Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain fall into? Not to mention Lords Brown (BP) and Oxbrough (Shell)?

Broadly there are two elements to the climate sceptic movement -- the mad and the stupid. Not true, of course, but I just fancied descending to the general level of debate on this thread.

[Andrew]

Hehe, not a surprise, the film industry is incredibly wasteful. LA is a smoggy mess - although mostly that's down to massive car use and its geography. Unbelievably, it used to be even worse before the locals got tough with pollution laws in the 90s - I met one old guy who talked of sometimes not being able to see across the street 50 years ago.

[TomTom]

Not to mention Lords BrownE (BP)

We don't hear quite so much from Lord Browne's PR people about the Texas City Refinery deaths; the oil pipe leaks into the bay in Long Beach, or the pitiful state of maintenance on the pipelines in Prudhoe Bay.................perhaps Lord Browne would like to explain why he was so much more keen on Stock Options and dividends than the environment when BP was getting such a lousy reputation for skinflint maintenance and killing employees

Settlement not the last lawsuit for BP

By TJ Aulds
The Daily News

Published November 10, 2006
TEXAS CITY — Settling the final death-related lawsuit is not the end for BP of the embarrassing, sometimes damning, probably painful and certainly expensive investigation and litigation that began in 2005 when blasts ripped through its Texas City refinery, killing 15 and injuring 170.

The oil company still faces more than 150 injury-related lawsuits, a federal criminal investigation, release of a study group’s report on its safety culture and the final investigation report from the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.

The Galveston County District Attorney also has said his office could initiate a criminal probe when all the federal investigations are complete.

Up next for BP will be a committee report detailing safety culture in its U.S. refineries.

The panel, headed by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, is scheduled to release its findings Nov. 29.

While BP has settled more than 950 claims related to the March 23, 2005, explosions, more than 150 civil lawsuits are pending. The trial for those cases is scheduled to begin in February.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe at the request of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Federal safety officials have not said when that investigation will be complete.

The Environmental Protection Agency is also conducting an investigation.

The safety board, which has been BP’s harshest and most vocal investigative critic thus far, is scheduled to release its final report on the blasts in March.

It was the safety board that revealed how BP used outdated and ineffective blow-down stacks to relieve pressure, violated its own policies by placing temporary work trailers near active units and cut maintenance and operation budgets at its Texas City refinery by 25 percent in the years before the blasts. The board also reported that knowledge of problems at the refinery went as high as BP’s board of directors.

The settlement also won’t be Eva Rowe’s last foray into workplace safety. The 22-year-old, whose parents, James and Linda Rowe, were killed in the blasts, pledged to become an advocate for improved safety standards at petrochemical plants nationwide.

Her attorney, Brent Coon, said Rowe would work with labor unions to push for the passing of Eva’s Law, state legislation aimed at forcing certain safety standards to be adopted at petrochemical plants throughout Texas.

DEEDS count for more than words

[Opinicus]

Cometh the hour, cometh the Man.

[michael mcgough]

"This is the issue on which my generation of politicians will be judged. This is our Dunkirk."

May I nominate him to be judged in next years ConHome awards ,(category to be decided after ther watershed).

[Robert McIlveen]

_Of course you can worry about both, Robert, but the whole political class has buried its head in the sand re nuclear proliferation but is devoting enormous political energy to the much less immediate danger of climate change. There must be some sort of psychological explanation..._

Unfortunately there's almost nothing we can do about either, except at the margin. The difference is that the environmental movement has convinced itself (and lots of people) that diastrous climate change can be averted, whereas anyone who has carefully observed Pakistan, Iran and N Korea's drives to nuclear status should conclude that very little can be done there.

[Mark Riley]

Spare me all the hot air on this thread. No wonder the planet is warming up.

Let's honour the previous sacrifices made by our predecessors fighting tyranny by leaving this small, lonely planet in good order for our successors. Go visit http://www.climatecrisis.net/ and see for yourself what Benyon is rightly banging on about.

[Londoner]

"The other is the romantic right element, which dreams of a return to an imaginary past of jolly squires, happy peasants, and country pubs."

No, Sean, the other is the classic conservative position that we have a leasehold on this planet for our lifetimes, and a moral duty to pass it on to future generations in as good order as possible.

And my habitat is a City bar, not a country pub.

[TomTom]

I'll swap my movie for your movie

http://www.obsessionthemovie.com/

[Michael McGowan]

Londoner, I don't think there is much of an issue about what the classic conservative position is. The question is how do you achieve it? Sterilising our leasehold of this particular bit of the planet with regressive taxes and intrusive regulations doesn't strike me as passing it on in good order.....especially when as Iain Dale points out today, this will not make a blind bit of difference unless China and India play ball. The Benyons of this world run the risk of advocating the green equivalent of Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament...

[Richard]

"isn't it rather encouraging that there is such a strong consensus that this is an important issue?"

No, because that means a lack of choice for the electorate.

The conservative solution to global warming should not be to cripple our economy, which benefits China and India. Instead we should be encouraging economic growth so as to promote further technological advance. It is technological development that has improved energy efficiency and reduced pollution rather than taxes, taxes and more taxes.

Furthermore, if a major ecological crisis does occur we'll hardly be in a position to deal with it if our economy is stunted.

[Esbonio]

Re McGowan and "The Benyons of this world run the risk of advocating the green equivalent of Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament..." a good line and all the more amusing as Greenham Common is on the doorstep of his constituency. I really do wonder how this current lot of Conservative MPs would have stood up to the umions and the Soviets if they had been around in the 80s.

[Umbongo]

esnonio

"I really do wonder how this current lot of Conservative MPs would have stood up to the umions and the Soviets if they had been around in the 80s."

They would have done what their predecessors did from 1945 until the late 70s which was to operate "slow-motion" socialism and manage British decline. Despite his "Selsdon Man" manifesto of 1970 Ted Heath funked it. In reality all Heath was interested in was signing up to the EEC. His solution to British decline was to shackle us to the emerging super-state across the Channel. Of course he never told us the bit about the super-state but, there again, when did Europhiles last tell the electorate any (let alone, all) of the truth?

The acceptance by the Tory Party of the post-war "settlement" with Old Labour ran this country into the ground. You would have thought the last 10 years would have taught us something. But no, Messrs Cameron and Maude are doing exactly the same and are positioning the Conservative Party (if it ever gets to power) to manage a renewed British decline - this time with green knobs on.

[Tory Loyalist]

And my habitat is a City bar, not a country pub.

__________________________________________________

As if we hadn't already guessed, Londoner.

Has anybody noticed that "good causes" now fall into two discrete categories?

There is the traditional type which Conservatives such as myself have been generously supporting for years. RNLI, Haig Fund, BLESMA, Church Restoration etc

Then there is the fashionable sort which provides so many great photo-opportunities for rock chicks and leftwing politicians plus fantastic salaries for their CEOs.

These are easily recognisable by their coloured ribbons and bracelets, and of course all the "environmental" charities are part of the action.

Guess which bandwagon the Notting Hill Set prefers to crawl onto?

[Tim Worstall]

'If human based climate change is a real problem then population control needs addressing as much as anything else.'

Sigh. Population control has been addressed. Go look at the UN projections: peak global population around 2050 then falling back to 7 billion in 2100.

They've also used that as the basis for some of the IPCC scenarios.

One rather important point though. The mechanism by which fertility rates are caused to fall. It's called getting rich.

So if population is the thing you worry about you should be urging those policies which help to make the currently poor countries rich. Like, say, the EU getting rid of all its trade restrictions. Best thing we could do to help them get rich after all.

[Josh]

Yes, yes, yes. Free trade for the environment.

Timmy, you should get an article Your Platform. We could use a proper neo-liberal perspective on this issue rather than the editors always trying to dig up the most Bennite Tories they can find.

[Yet Another Anon]

Nazism could be sorted out in a matter of years, climate change is not so easy to sort out and there is a mixture of artifical and natural causes of it, if the North Atlantic Drift stops it won't start again for 10,000 years and simply stopping emitting Greenhouse Gases will not cause it to start again, in the British Isles it would lead to temperatures several degrees celsius on average throughout the year making Summer Spring like and there being long snowy winters, even if it merely continues to slow it would take some time to return to normal, Greenhouse Gases will not just return to historic levels in a few years, it would take decades or even centuries.

[Denis Cooper]

Tim Worstall @ 18:18 - "Sigh. Population control has been addressed"

To a limited extent. Some countries continue to double their populations every twenty-odd years, more as less as they were doing fifty years ago, and others have slowed their growth but not as much as hoped or expected.

The UN 2004 Revision:

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2004/2004EnglishES.pdf

offers a number of projections. The medium projection is for the world population to increase from its present 6.5 billion to 9.1 billion by 2050, but that's not the peak - that would occur later, at closer to 10 billion. However:

"Future population growth is highly dependent on the path that future fertility takes. In the medium variant, fertility is projected to decline from 2.6 children per woman today to slightly over 2 children per woman in 2050. If fertility were to remain about half a child above the levels projected in the medium variant, world population would reach 10.6 billion by 2050. A fertility path half a child below the medium would lead to a population of 7.6 billion by mid-century. That is, at the world level, continued population growth until 2050 is inevitable even if the decline of fertility accelerates."

And if there was no change in fertility, the population would be closer to 12 billion in 2050 - ie nearly double the present number.

It's worth pointing out that:

a) Fifty years ago the world population was about 2.7 billion.
b) Past UN projections have tended to under-estimate future population growth.
c) HIV-AIDS has become a significant restraint on population growth.
d) If China had not taken drastic action to control the growth of its population, it would now be 1.7 billion instead of 1.3 billion, and heading up rapidly, and China would not now be emerging from poverty.
d) Virtually all the projected growth in the world population will occur in the less developed countries:

"Because of its low and declining rate of growth, the population of developed countries as a whole is expected to remain virtually unchanged between 2005 and 2050, at about 1.2 billion. In contrast, the population of the 50 least developed countries is projected to more than double, passing from 0.8 billion in 2005 to 1.7 billion in 2050. Growth in the rest of the developing world is also projected to be robust, though less rapid, with its population rising from 4.5 billion to 6.1 billion between 2005 and 2050."

"Very rapid population growth is expected to prevail in a number of developing countries, the majority of which are least developed. Between 2005 and 2050, the population is projected to at least triple in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Uganda."

The idea that this problem will solve itself if we help poorer countries to become richer is way off the mark. Fifty years ago it was possible to believe that there would be a spontaneous demographic transition, but that ignores the fact that in many of these countries there is a strong religious compulsion to maximise the number of children, while the richer countries are making the problem worse for poorer countries by emphasising programmes to ensure the survival of children while neglecting birth control programmes.

We've already got ourselves in a godawful mess through wishful thinking about population growth, and the longer it goes on, the worse it will get, and the more environmental damage will be caused.

"Climate Change and Population – Links and Trade-Offs"

http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.sub.bullets.climate.Jul06.html

[Josh]

Ignoring the fact that overpopulation was supposed to have killed us already... many times, still, global free trade will help to mitigate population growth. It will also make the world richer so they can afford measures such as government subsidised condoms.

[Denis Cooper]

Just how many times was over-population supposed to have killed us in the past, and are you discounting the billions of people around the world who have had their life expectancy reduced by several decades?

[TomTom]

global free trade will help to mitigate population growth. It will also make the world richer so they can afford measures such as government subsidised condoms.

That is why Britain has the fastest growing population in the EU is it ? If only the govt would subsidise condoms Britain's 61.5 million population would not grow another 7 million in the coming 15 years................

[Chelsea Conservative]

Britain should be setting an example to the rest of the world by getting its population down. I have a home in Kent as well as London and I am frankly appalled by the way this filthy government is ruining the Garden of England with what accounts to people pollution.

We can start by reducing immigration to a trickle. Only really intelligent useful candidates should be allowed in, regardless of race.

The other problem is that the wrong sort of people tend to have large families.

Intelligent and successful couples tend to have few children or no children at all, but the "underclass" breed like rabbits. Take a look at any council estate to see this is true.

This means that the future genetic profile of the nation is likely to deteriorate.

It's a problem that we Conservatives should not be afraid to discuss. We need to encourage the best and discourage the worst, by the use of severe sanctions if necessary.

China has shown it can be done. Let's learn from them.

[Denis Cooper]

I certainly wouldn't endorse the brutal Chinese method of cutting the birth rate. However the South Korean government achieved similar results by less dictatorial means, which is one reason why that country was able to lift itself out of poverty.

[ToMTom]

Intelligent and successful couples tend to have few children or no children at all

I can see Chelsea Conservative you are writing your Term Paper on "Frigidity and the Graduate Woman".......it does seem that graduate men have their genetic predisposition to replicate inhibited by the pecuniary focus of their graduate spouses.............do you find in Kensington & Chelsea that house prices in Holland Park limit the reproductive urges of women you meet ?

Surely the ideal arrangement is working wife with highly-paid job and lots of overseas travel and well-remunerated husband with desk-bound job to help the Danish or Swedish au-pair into motherhood...............and as you commented It's a problem that we Conservatives should not be afraid to discuss. We need to encourage the best

I can think of no better way

[Londoner]

Excellent most recent post, TomTom (see I can give credit where credit's due). But I cannot really believe that the "Chelsea Conservative" post is genuine - I think it's been put there by an enemy so they can then quote it as an example of insufferable Conservative views.

Anyway, surely the justification given for all those Chelsea tractors is that they have masses of children to cart around? The rich can afford it. For someone claiming to live in Chelsea, I don't think this poster moves in the right circles - although admittedly the houses are bigger in Notting Hill.

Here is someone who regards people as "pollution", and yet trundles up and down to Kent. I suppose they think it a plus that one or other of their houses is always empty - empty houses are clearly the best anti-pollution measure.

I am not even sure that they are right on their basic premise any more. Although two income professionals may have children later, I'd love to see her evidence that they have less. I know of plenty of couples, even with both working, with lots. There's nothing like a few good City bonuses to set the reproductive juices flowing, and to provide the finance to allow them free rein. As for the rich with no-one to hand their wealth on to, that's sad.

But now I am in danger of taking this joker seriously.

[Jamie Oliver's Sausage]

Actually Londoner, it's very rare in my experience to meet professional people with more than two children and in my job I meet all sorts of people all of the time.

What the kind of people who earn city bonuses do I can't imagine, but they are hardly typical. Anyway, the later you have children the more likely you are not to be able to have any at all.

OTOH, in my experience the "working class" birthrate appears to be right down as well.

When you consider that many of the populace are childless, homosexual, or people who have had one child and decided the lifestyle's not for them we are looking at a native population that could die out in a few hundred years.

[annoymous]

Obsession Movie on Fox-Interview
http://www.TheMovieObsession.com/media_FOX_christian_american_turning_to_islam.php

[americaneagle77]

Great truths, all factual and very scary.
http://www.TheMovieObsession.com