Immigration

For anyone tempted to try to predict humanity’s future, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is a cautionary tale. Feeding on the then popular Malthusian belief that the world was doomed by high birth rates, Ehrlich predicted: ‘In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.’ He came up with drastic solutions, including adding chemicals to drinking water to sterilise the population. Ehrlich, like many others, got it wrong. What he needed to worry about was declining birth rates and population collapse. Nearly 60 years on, many predict the world will soon reproduce at less than the replacement rate. But by my calculations, we’re already there. Largely unnoticed, last year was a landmark one in history.

A few days after having Sunday lunch at the hotel where Michael Collins ate his last meal, we found ourselves on the road to Beal na Bla. We had gone to get hay and the hayman was out to lunch, so we followed the heritage signs to the site of the ambush where Collins was shot dead. The events of 22 August 1922 immortalised this picturesque valley in West Cork near to where the builder boyfriend and I have bought an old country house. Beal na Bla, or Blath, translates as ‘entrance to the good land’. The memorial by the curve in the road where Collins was murdered is surrounded by lush pastureland.

Halfway points Rishi Sunak told us we would have an election in the second half of the year, and we will have one on 4 July. When, exactly, is the halfway point of 2024? – There are 366 days in 2024, so we will be halfway through after 183 of them. That brings us to midnight at the end of 1 July, a day later than many might assume. – However, there is also the effect of daylight saving, which takes a hour away from March and puts it in October, shifting the halfway point of the year forwards by an hour to 1 a.m. on 2 July. Only two days of campaigning plus the voting itself will therefore fall in the second half of the year. – In 2019, 21% of people had a postal vote; if this is repeated a fifth of the population will be voting in the first half of 2024.

I am delighted to report that some £800,000 of taxpayers’ money is to be spent ‘remediating’ the works of Robert Louis Stevenson to show what a racist bastard he was. 70 per cent of Irish mums say they would stay at home to look after their kids if given the opportunity I assume the decision was taken because, as a nation, we are absolutely awash with cash at the moment and need somewhere to dispense of it. This project, funded by the quango UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will be carried out at Edinburgh University. I hope that, aside from clobbering Stevenson for having been born during a different time period, they also have a go at him for his stereotypical portrayal of the disabled – and indeed pirates.

When so many polls suggest that restricting mass immigration would be to politicians’ electoral advantage, voters in the West are continually stymied by why the immoderate flow of foreigners into their countries continues apace. Online comments abound with theories. Biden could lose the coming election because of his lovey-dovey border policies alone A global World Economic Forum-led cabal is intent on eliminating the nation state by fracturing polities into mutually hostile subgroups, making them easier to control. (An atomised in-fighting rabble would seem rather harder to control, but maybe that’s just me.) In the US, Democrats are intentionally importing minorities who will supposedly all vote Democratic and usher in a one-party state. (If so, an iffy plan.