Room for one more then Reiner!!

The article (as opposed to the headline, which would have been written by someone else) isn't actually about immigration but about the rising population of the UK, to which in fact immigration is a relatively insignificant contributor, whatever the gutter press might scream at us. What it is, though, is scaremongering fluff which again is all too prevalent in suposedly intelligent news media these days. The author quotes a projection that the population of this country will reach 77 million in 50 years' time ("if present trends continue", which they very seldom do on a timescale like that) and then tekes this out of context to conjure up a vision of what Britain as it is now would be like if you suddenly dropped another 16 million people in the South East. It would grind to a halt of course. But history doesn't actually happen like that. I just don't see the point in writing this kind of ill-informed and misleading stuff.

On the contrary, ONS figures show that net migration to the UK in 2006 was only 191,000, with a trend line that is not climbing particularly fast:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?id=260

These figures also show that those leaving Britain are doing so for longer, while those arriving are staying for shorter periods.  I've got some experience of how the European Commission (mis)uses numbers -  and in this context I'd add that open borders and Schengen make population movements within the EU very difficult to estimate (Britain of course is not part of Schengen) and I'd personally trust the ONS over the Commission every time.

The point, presumably, is to help prompt the changes in infrastructure that will allow 16 million people to be dropped into the South East.

There are two ways of looking at these sorts of changes. The first is to hope that the change will, of its own accord, achieve its own kind of equilibrium. The second is to attempt to bridge the gap between social need and the chronically slow reaction times of governments by raising awareness of the issue - often through this sort of scaremongering.

While I'm not necessarily suggesting any kind of equivalence, here, the global warming situation wouldn't even be getting the pitiful governmental attention it is without the extremist 'scaremongering' of certain individuals over the last two decades. Changing the course of Governmental policy is like trying to turn the Titanic, in that by the time the danger is obvious, it's far too late: the wheel needed to be turned back when the issue still looked like paranoid pipe-dreams.

Fourth strategy: urge the absurd "national government" to go into voluntary liquidation, abolish the silly and old-fashioned idea of "my country", and join all the other former "nations" in a European - and eventually world - union.

Who would rule the world and how would they be chosen to do so? After they started their reign what methods of accountability would exist with regard to the actions they undertook?

Baz

This makes me think about the way that most African countries have preserved their colonial borders.

Many of these countries are riven by ethnic division, having been sandwiched together by their 'benevolent and enlightened' invaders and having had the continent divided up on the basis of land rather than of ethnicity. When there is talk of Mugabe dispossessing and oppressing his 'own people' that's not how he sees it: he's favouring his own tribe against another.
In many ways, it would make sense to redivide the continent along ethnic lines, but this would mean rebuilding infrastructure from scratch, or at least an extremely costly remodelling. It has happened in a few places but it has been bloody and painful.

What I'm trying to say is that it strikes me that infrastructure is one of the most important aspects of politics, and much more important than patriotism. In order to build a true European Union, new infrastructure would have to be developed in a sensitive, open and equal way. There are no good models for such a large federation (except in science fiction perhaps, but I can't remember any example in the genre that gives a detailed suggestion as to how this actually works), since I think it is clear that our current ideas about how politics function would just not work with a federation of that size, let alone a federation of the size of the planet.

I also think that, as a species, we're just not developed enough to get to the kind of altruistic non-partisan government that this would necessitate. I think of the Anglican Communion's internal wars. If a religion supposedly based upon self sacrifice and charitable acts cannot maintain a union of a considerably smaller size, what hope do politicians have? (And in case anyone thinks that I'm suggesting a difference between the politics of the church and the politics of the 'world'... No. I'm not that naive. It just seemed to be an interesting comment.)