In this age of financial austerity we are developing some more cautious habits. In most families, someone is going around turning off the lights, both metaphorically and in real life, and in every supermarket it’s now commonplace to see people with a calculator, totting up as they go around because their shopping budget is finite.
Economists will tell us that periods of recession are cyclical and also that the cycles are becoming shorter with each recession coming more hard on the heels of its predecessor – all this, of course, would be easier to chart if it were not for the threshings of the vicious tail of the banking crisis. Not too many bankers walking around Morrisons with a calculator, I suspect.
One thing is certain, we need to learn to adapt more easily to change because a great deal more change is on its way. Back in 2001, the Office of National Statistics talked about the British population rising as a result of an explosion in the number of ethnic minorities – a rise from 8% of the total population as shown in the 2001 Census , to 20% was forecast amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth and in the papers this month, there has been widespread coverage of the speculation that Britain’s population is set to rocket to 79million over the next 50 years making Britain the country with the highest population in the EU. Projected statistics for Germany, Spain, Italy and France show significantly lower populations over the same period and we already know that, in Italy, their current population is lower than five years ago.
Without doubt, the increase will make Britain the continent’s most overcrowded major country and will, yet again, place additional pressure on the infrastructure of transport, schools, health and housing. Significant growth in ethnic minorities will add more such pressure as their communities become stronger and their willingness to adapt and integrate may, quite understandably, be diminished. In other parts of the world, and particularly in the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, their population growth will make ours seem insignificant in contrast but all four of these countries have huge land tracts to accommodate their burgeoning populations. In this regard, if not a number others, Britain will suffer more than most.
Of course, British people have had to adapt to the pressures and rewards of net immigration and it hasn’t always been easy. For those of us who remember Enoch Powell, in his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in 1968 at a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham, the assertion that everyday Britons were afraid that immigration would make their country not fit to live in, seems in hindsight to have been wildly pessimistic but there are clearly political factions who would even today seek to limit immigration into the UK on similar grounds.
Without doubt, Britain is a radically different place in 2011 than it was fifty years ago and we should expect further changes, of at least this magnitude, if we are to provide homes for almost 80million people in another fifty years. Greater predominance of stronger ethnic communities will further dilute the British way of life – whatever that may be - and we will develop into far less a model based on our mediaeval and Elizabethan history than we are today, in terms of culture, faith and politics. Yet, do we have any choice?
It is fascinating to see groups of workers ranging from airport staff to community policemen and women going on strike in protest against economic cuts and November is being lined up as a month of industrial action in the same vein. As Enoch Powell said, “Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles”. Whether we like it or not, the State is not capable of sustaining a desirable way of life for every citizen throughout the economic crisis in which we find ourselves and analysis of public borrowing over the last thirty years indicates clearly that it has been incapable of doing so for some time. Without very significant immigration, there will be far too few UK tax payers to fund anything like the level of benefits which we all enjoy as a right, and even now, we have more people over the age of 65, in the UK, than we have under the age of 16. If economic privation is uncomfortable in the workplace now, one imagines that the problem will be hugely magnified unless we can increase the number of tax payers dramatically if only to fund the rapidly growing retirement sector which is already underfunded by private pension provision.
Britain isn’t alone here and in some countries, the problem of an ageing population will be far worse. The recent Eurostat report predicts that by 2060, one in four people in the UK will be 65 or older, compared with Germany where one in three will be dependent through older age. So, despite our rejection of change, our economic future depends on our success in attracting far more net immigration to Britain and not less. However, if we are to see around 180,000 new arrivals each year for the next twenty five years and a population driven by an immigrant baby boom, we should also expect a number of concomitant changes to our way of life and start to plan accordingly.
House prices are fiendishly high in the UK and predominantly so in the South. Life will be more affordable for a new sector of our population in the areas of Britain where its already cheaper to live and the ONS predictions show the population rising through a rising birth rate and net immigration by around 450,000 each year. That is equivalent to a new city, the size of Bristol, each year. So we should expect more and larger cities but with some degree of migration out of the cities as people become more affluent. However, a University of Leeds study predicts that black and Asian populations in the least deprived local authorities will increase significantly so we should also expect new areas of affluence to be created within these rapidly expanding cities.
How will we feed this developing population and what will we eat? Can we afford to continue as a net importer of food as we are today or should we aim to be more self-sufficient? Will these new, affluent consumers follow the patterns of acquisition and home ownership that people aspire to today, what will happen to the nation’s housing stock and what plans are there to provide decent, affordable housing for a huge number of people? Will we invest in meaningful changes in public transport or will communities be more self-centred with cities acting as a micro-cosmos for their residents and with travel discouraged by economic means? Not least, what will this mean for the veterinary profession in the UK. Many of us will not see another fifty years but we all fervently hope that our children and grandchildren will do so. In all probability, today’s new graduates will still be working in fifty years time and one hopes that they will be better at planning for the future than our generation has proved to be.
None of this is new news. We saw the ONS predicting huge population growth a decade ago but we are still encouraging young aspiring veterinary surgeons to enter small animal practice without very much thought about what the future for pet ownership may be, in a country with a more diverse ethnic and cultural make up, where home ownership will be unaffordable for many and where pressure on food supplies may well have an effect on the desirability of pets in our society. Conversely there will be an exploding need to generate food to feed billions more people in the world and almost ten million more in the UK, and a very real need to develop new skills in husbandry and in maintaining the health of increasingly precious, and different, food animals. The future can be bright for veterinary medicine but one wonders where the planning is taking place to allow us to meet this changing need.