Sometimes reports appear in the press which, ostensibly unrelated, set off the car alarm in one's mind.
The first, which you can see here, suggests that Britain's population has been growing twice as fast as the rest of Europe for the last decade, gaining as many people as in the entire previous generation.
The Torygraph report today says that immigration accounts for "at least 60 per cent of the growth in the last decade . . . That does not include the knock-on effect of immigration on birth rates, with around a quarter of new babies in the UK being born to foreign mothers". In the year to mid 2013 the UK's population grew by about 400,000, adding "the equivalent of the population of Bristol in a single year".
The figures are from the Office for National Statistics, by the way.
Yesterday several papers ran a story about a report on the UK's food supply produced by the University of Cambridge. The BBC's version is here. Britain is apparently running out of land for food, and "faces a potential shortfall of two million hectares by 2030". The UK's population is expected to exceed 70 million by 2030, but already we run a food, feed and drink trade deficit of £18.6bn.
So there we are. Not enough land. Too many people.
Since this is a drum I've been banging for some time, I should be feeling quite smug. And I would, if I didn't have three children myself.
