In the bad old days of the 80s Tory ministers were fond of telling us we were being "flooded" or "swamped" by immigrants. I've been reminded of this rhetoric by the apocalyptic scenes from the Thames Valley of watery inundation, made all the more shocking and bizarre by taking place in the blandest parts of the Home Counties.
There is a linguistic clue here that past generations seems to have missed. The low land of the Thames Valley is a flood plain, and the phrase "flood plain" contains the word "flood". If you build houses in such a plain, every hundred years or so the river is going to rise and wipe you out. And the south of England is full of such lowlands.
There is by common consent a housing crisis in Britain. We don't have enough houses to accommodate our growing population. Part of the recent increase is attributable to immigration - 800,000 Eastern Europeans cannot all be occupying the same Portakabin by a Lincolnshire turnip field. Moreover we have built in places that aren't really suitable, and as pressure for more housing grows this is something we're going to be doing more and more.
Both Labour and Conservatives have been looking at schemes to build new towns. Putting aside the elementary point that there won't be enough jobs to occupy their inhabitants, not even in the south, that the people will have to commute to earn a living, and that the towns will quickly become extended satellites of a vast, cancerously-expanding London, they are also likely to be built on low ground sites which flirt with flood risk.
There is another way of looking at the housing problem, however, which is to say that our population might be too big for a small island, and that a managed decline - deaths from old age exceeding the birth rate - might offer a better long term solution.
You will think this marks me out as a crank, and it's a shame that population control is, like immigration control used to be, the cause that dare not speak its name.
But the issue's flagship organisation, the Optimum Population Trust, is supported by luminaries such as David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt. Are they cranks too?
PS Four days after this post the Torygraph printed the following story to the effect that not only have many Councils in southern England earmarked for housing land which is at risk from flooding, but some of the sites are currently underwater.
Sometimes real events are beyond the reach of satire.
