Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
Things like that happen in Germany just as well, the entire Ruhrgebiet is slowly growing together. A lot of that is probably due to urbanization and less so due to immigration. When you zoom out from your google maps view, you see fields everywhere. Pinhoe and Exeter probably started to grow together somewhere around the middle ages. What's funny is that the Brexit also causes Britain to compete against its neighbors, and a larger population is a competitive advantage. So we'll see about that.

I would actually agree in general that the planet has far too much population given the goals of consumption everyone has. But Britain being overcrowded sounds a bit off given that Israel, Japan and so on are even more densely populated and seem to make it work. To just claim that they have problems from overpopulation does not convince me really, you'd have to show a bit more than that. I mean surely they have problems, but I'm not sure they're caused by overpopulation in a significant way. Tokyo's crowded subway system can be attributed to urbanization, centralization and the height of buildings just the same. If they spread the population more evenly around the country, that problem could be gone.
Pinhoe was mostly fields until a few decades ago, the bit that currently connects it to Exeter is an Industrial estate built, irrc, in the early 90's, so during my lifetime. Those fields are for sheep and cows, so as Exeter expands it destroys its own local food supply. Who's buying these houses though? Some are locals, true, but that's because people commute from Exeter to London and Bristol - that's threee hours to London. Rather puts London's quality of life into perspective. Urbanisation is part of a function of over-crowding. As more and more people are born the jobs dry up in rural areas, so people move to the cities, which therefore expand, swallowing the surrounding rural areas and destroying the basis for the rural economy (land). This results in rural over-population which causes people to move to cities and... you get the picture.

In Britain we're reaching a tipping point similar to the one after WWII where we had our last population explosion. the difference is that this time the population explosion is caused by immigration, without immigration the population would be slowly falling and might stabilise, alleviating the need for so much new housing.

As a result many people are resentful of immigration they see as uncontrolled (because it's enshrined in EU treaty and not a policy they can vote a government out for). This feeling of lack of control is a big part of why many people voted Out and the key theme my father returns to (you may recall he's Swedish, so he can't vote himself). Lack of control over agricultural policy is another reason people voted Out and probably a bigger one where I grew up than immigration.

Now, frankly, I think Pannonion et al bear a significant amount of the responsibility for the rise in racist attacks. It was Remain who said that those who voted Leave were racists and Xenophobes, so when Leave won the racists and Xenophobes felt empowered. That's why I'm annoyed people KEEP going on about it. If you're troubled by the racist attacks you need to find non-racists (like me) who voted Leave for political reasons or reasons of principle and not out of Xenophobia - and you need to engage with them publicly.

I want the same thing for Europe everyone else here does - peace, prosperity and happiness for everyone - I just happen to believe the EU can't deliver those things.