Education when you like it, indoctrination when you don't?
I think it comes down to this - those people who want the level of immigration we currently have to continue need to either decide how we're going to expand facilities or decide how we're going to otherwise reduce demand on the facilities we've got.
As regards size of families, there's also the issue of distribution. If you live in an area where larger families are the norm, you're going to be more twitchy than if you live in an area where they're not. I'm not just talking about whether I'm twitchy directly but whether I'm twitchy about other peoples twitchiness.
The other thing as regards education vs indoctrination, is that family size isn't just a general thing, it's influenced by things like social class, religion, town/country etc. And being very undiplomatic, it's not just about the size of family that shows on the census, there's the size of family of the illegal community, which may be a small part of the population but which nevertheless has more of an impact on some conurbations than others.
I'm sure people here have heard me speak before of my views on the dreadful dilemma that will, I believe, strike us in relation to climate change. You see, I believe in the importance of taking people in need of a home. However, as more and more of the earth becomes more barren, more and more people will be starved into emigrating and more and more will come our way, not just from very far south but gradually from closer to home, such as Italy and France. We can, under our obligations under international law, send non-European would-be immigrants packing (except those that get in illegally which would, IMO, be a small proportion). But starvation brings war, war brings 'genuine refugees' (as if the risk of being shot is somehow worse than the risk of starving to death) and we will eventually have to decide whether to stick to our treaty obligations. I myself would want to know that I could rely on such obligations, so this breaks my heart.
So why do I raise this? Because now is the time when there needs to be a very public open and frank discussion not so much of whether we like foreigners or what their cultures are etc. but literally how many we have room for. Then we need to consider how many of our own people (including those we have adopted as our own by already allowing them to immigrate here, our lovely varied mix of neighbours, friends and relatives) we have space for and very specifically how we will feed them etc, in a very nasty 'global market'.
Because I'm not joking when I say that I believe that as global climate change escalates, we will be able to import less and less food and will need to become more and more self-sufficient and limit or reduce the size of our population or, within 50 years, this country will starve and have civil war or major gang war.
And closer to home is something I believe to be frighteningly true - as our population increases and our ability to support ourselves decreases, the temptation to kill people who are seen as the most burden increases. It is out of self-interest as much as anything that I'd rather start reducing birth rate now, look next at our immigration policies and keep my fingers crossed that we can stay within our ability to feed and accommodate people sufficiently for me not, as a 'useless mouth' to be got rid of as the most socially acceptable way of limiting the population.
So there you go. I'm afraid I'd rather have what some would regard as indoctrination now than killing later and I have an uncomfortable self-interest in it. An analogy I've used elsewhere is that the earth is a sinking ship and I'm asking myself at what point I'm going to find myself either hitting people's fingers and pushing them as they try to climb into my lifeboat or being unable to handle that and going down with them.
