Full of babies
The Prime Minister-in-waiting’s wife, Samantha Cameron, is officially pregnant, as of 22 March.
The Daily Mail explained:
The couple decided to reveal the news now, aides say, because Mrs Cameron is ’starting to show’.
They also felt that if they waited any longer, they might be accused of deliberately holding back until the election campaign to win votes.
The baby is likely to have been conceived during the Camerons’ Christmas holiday, which they spent at their constituency home in Witney, Oxfordshire.
Meanwhile, in Lancaster at around the same time, David Cameron appeared on the front cover of People Talk magazine cradling a baby.
As this is more than the second child of a two-person reproductive unit, the Daily Mail included the following context to assure readers that the leader-in-waiting was closed-minded about the risks and threats of over-population:
Answering a question on population growth from an audience member at the Woodstock Literary Festival in September, he said: ‘I don’t believe Britain is over-populated. I don’t have any plans to reduce it.
‘I would quite like to add to it, personally, by quite possibly one, at some stage in the future.’
Interestingly, the same exact paragraphs appear in the Guardian article with the by-line “Paul Owen and agencies”:
Answering a question on population growth from an audience member at the Woodstock Literary Festival in September, Cameron said: “I don’t believe Britain is overpopulated. I don’t have any plans to reduce it.
“I would quite like to add to it, personally, by quite possibly one, at some stage in the future.”
As a Green Party supporter who believes my lying eyes that the ecosystem is a finite entity, it drives me nuts that a political leader is able to justify taking a view for its convenience to his personal lifestyle choice.
Even Wilkins Micawber, who always believed that something would turn up, knew that computing the accounts was essential when he said:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Are we too full of people? I don’t know. Depends on what kind of surprises the future has in store for us and how robust our economy is when faced with a crisis of physical resources — as opposed a crisis created by out of control pen-pushers.
It looks as though UKIP think we are, according to their leaflet delivered further down the River Ribble from Lancaster.
Somehow I don’t think they mean “Full” in the sense that I mean it, like “This boat is too full it’s going to capsize if there is a big wave”. It’s probably more in the sense of “This country is too full of foreigners, everywhere I look I can see more of them. But there is plenty of room for British people to have more babies.”
Over-population is such a politically messed-up hard question politicians don’t want to talk about it.
Will this question be asked during the election campaign, or we going to be less inquiring than the audience of the Woodstock literary festival?
Nobody’s asking because it’s a non-issue. Humanity has constantly found ways of adapting to new environments and circumstances.
The global population will peak in the middle of this century and then fall anyway due to people getting richer, having less babies, the “demographic dividend” etc.
Global catastrophe thanks to climate change is also predicted by 2050 so that’ll probably cut population growth too!
I guess our civilization hasn’t had the benefit of experiencing a good proper collapse in its fortunes. If it had done, it would be dust to the wind, like so many civilizations that have failed.
It’s always pretty misleading when you look down your own time-line. At every stage you got lucky and survived.
I agree, population needs to be discussed without resorting to looking at the colour of people’s skins or the language they speak. But yet our economy must grow every year? We need more working age adults paying tax to pay into our pensions and healthcare? Surely this system is some kind of time bomb?