"A baby, a baby, my kingdom for a baby"

Well...We, [British] have low birth rates and an aging population. The EU predicts that (for the EU as a whole) the aging population will increase from 14% (1995) to 22.4% in (2025)...Britain's over 65 population currently stands higher than the EU average at 15.8%.

Let me put Britain's dependents into a figure for you:

Labour force = 30.07 million
Total population = 60.2 million
Dependency = 30.13 million

Now with an increase on expected life length and a decrease in the birth rate...Things look a bit glum, wouldn't you say?

Britain's dependency level is growing and more are retired individuals rather than educating individuals who will enter the economic world in the future. Therefore, in the future the problem will escalate unless action is taken. The reasonsing for this is we have an increasing number of dependents who will not contribute in the future (retired) and a decreasing number of dependents who are preparing to enter the economic world and contribute (children). What may this lead to? Quite simply it will inevitably lead to a decrease in public spending and therefore decrease of the quality of services, as our Government tries to battle the problem and then another increase of the retirement age to try decrease dependency levels and finally the loss of the pension, it's starting to happen now.

Our immigration policy is clearly not working on the social side and it's not a long term sustainable scheme, in fact, it's a disgrace. People have yet to realise that importing masses of workers may be working for now (economically) but what happens when they don't have children because they're working just like the rest of the population?...Well, it means it further increases our dependency level in the future. In 2004 the increase of population by immigration (number of immigrants coming in minus the number of Britons leaving) was 223,000. That's 223,000 people who will be dependents on our ever decreasing wealth producers. It's merely making problems much worse for the future which our Government is a master of. Currently we are a naturally growing population of 0.58 children/1000 (127,00o people) which is a perfectly sustainable situation, but this figure is magnified by the population increase of ~ 233,000 (2004) by immigrants. With only a natural population increase of 127,000 people per year you can clearly see the strain that our mass immigration policy has on this problem...A new born is already 'assigned' two dependents when they begin to work through immigration population increase of that year alone. Obviously though, other factors contribute to how many people are depending on one person's wealth such as more immigrants which also work and the number of British that are depending on people. If soon this is not solved then in the near future we will have a population with well over 50% depending on the workers and this will inevitbly harm our country and it's people's standard of living. Another problem is that our major sources of immigrants are China, India and Eastern Europe, all of whom are developing and once they have accomplished such a step, the amount of immigrants will rapidly decrease thus plundging us into a massive problem. It is better to work out a solution now and work towards solving the problem than simply delaying the problem until it reaches crisis point and our welfare collapses. Immigration must be tightly controlled and quotaed atleast until we have increase the birth rate for a prolonged period of time.

Given all of this pessimistic talk I believe it's time to start thinking of ways to solve this problem.. Yes, we have to think of a solution, a long term one and that is to increase the birth rate. How do we do that? Family planning and encouragment may well be worth while but not sufficient. We need decrease work hours and adopt a policy such as France's genius system, their production has even increased. Give it 50 years without doing anything real except the stupid and illogical idea of bringing in masses of immigrants and people wont be able to have pensions, it'll just be impossible for the Government to spend so much money. The problem is even starting now. Recently we saw the pension age increase from 65 to 67 and encouragment on life savings...Soon the age will get higher and higher until it's just pointless and they'll say that if you're below a certain age you must save and live off that when you retire. The logical solution is to tighten immigration the year after these ideas are implemented, encourage families and decrease work hours.

I hope I have brought you around to my way of thinking.