No, because I can't trust them on immigration. I'm desperate to save what's left of the countryside, but that's not going to happen unless we massively clamp down. In 2022, 750,000 extra people migrated to this small island. When you add in illegal immigrants, it was probably closer to a million. There's only one word for that – insanity. To house all those people, we'll have to build three new Manchesters every year.
In the last ten years, my local woods have been hacked down to build two giant housing estates, and a second housing estate has been built at the other end of the village. I drove to a village two miles from here last week and was shocked to see yet another massive housing estate going up – including a block of flats. When we're building blocks of flats out in the countryside you know something is wrong. As if all that wasn't enough, we've just been told that the long road connecting our village to the local town is going to have 800 new homes built alongside it. That road is choked with traffic NOW, so what the hell is it going to be like when those houses are built? And no matter how many of these ghastly rabbit hutches they jam on top of another, it's never enough. We always need more, more, more.
If the Green party really cared about the environment, they'd be fanatically campaigning for birth control and family planning across the world. I know someone will say "actually, we need more babies, not fewer," but they forget three things. First of all, the world's population has exploded over the last 100 years. In 1900, the were a billion of us. By 1960 that had trebled to three billion. It's now eight billion and we're heading for ten. So even if the world's population does begin to fall (which it's predicted to do in the 2060s) it will be falling from a great height. Second, though the birth rate is falling in Europe, in Africa it is booming, and the African population is going to double – right in the middle of a climate crisis. And third, there will soon be ways of slowing and even reversing human ageing. Lifespans of 130 or 150 will soon be normal, meaning people won't be dying and making room.
I'm green to the bone, in the sense that I want to save beautiful woodland and rivers and so on. I'm also keen to help in the battle against climate change. But there are two issues that scare the hell out of me, and they're both closely related to climate change. The first is overpopulation and the second is the mass movement of people. We're facing a double nightmare in which the world's population peaks just as climate change is begins to cause havoc.