Embarrassing dad

There was a hilarious quote yesterday from Stanley Johnson, the bonkers father of the buffoonish Mayor of London.

"Britain's population should be 10-15 million people. That would do us splendidly. It's a nonsense that we are confronted with 70 million people. But we have been shunted aside by the rise of liberal correctness. You cannot talk about [population] now without being accused of being anti-feminist or a racist. The government has to start taking immigration seriously. If you look at the rise of Britain's population you see a really serious differential in the fertility of the immigrant as opposed to that of the [indigenous] population."

Britain's population was between 10 and 15 million during the first half of the 19th century. It was around 14 million in 1832. I'm assuming this is the sort of halcyon era Stanley is harking back to. That year saw the Great Reform Act, when the vote was extended to 1 in 6 of adult males (5% of the population). Splendid indeed.

I love the suggestion that the growth of the population from 14 to 62 million now (I'm not sure where he has conjured the figure of 70 from) is the result of political correctness. I'd always thought it had something to do with the birth rate and increased longevity. Given that the dread PC (in the sense Stanley uses it) was only invented in the 1990s, this implies a lot of furious population growth in recent years.

Clearly the loon is banging on about immigration. Given that the population was 50 million in 1950, at the start of the period of large-scale immigration, the lion's share of responsibility for the growth beyond his ideal must be taken by the indigenous. Stanley Johnson is the father of six.

I'd hazard a guess that Stanley is not just keen to see the back of our immigrant communities, but also of most of the working class and pretty much everyone in those areas of the country (i.e. outside of London) whose landscapes he would like to enjoy uninterrupted. That would reduce the headcount to between 10 and 15 million. Lovely.