Good news: Britain’s population has climbed to a healthy level. Bad news: doomsayers will misrepresent triumph as disaster. History can give us a rational, informed awareness of how and why levels rise and fall and help us to welcome — happily, unequivocally — the new-born and the newly arrived.
Population anxiety is usually ill informed and often ill intentioned — targeted against the poor who “breed like rabbits” or immigrants who “swamp” natives. When Thomas Malthus provoked Westerners into stressing about population, the results were abominable. Fears of diminishing lebensraum and resources provoked wars in the 19th and 20th centuries. Misguided do-gooders harassed the poor into birth control, demonising big families that increased earning power and provided care for ageing generations.
