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To George Dutton:

• The UK's problem is not "overpopulation". Overpopulation affects specific locations - for example, London. Overpopulation does not affect areas with low populations in the UK, by definition. Moreover, the UK does not actually suffer from the classical problems of overpopulation, save one.
• Traffic levels are insane. True of any society with poor investment in basic public transport infrastructure, and true of specific, overpopulated areas of the UK.
• Drug use is not population-related. Drug use is about individuals taking drugs; while, technically, if you increase the amount of people, you increase the relative number of drug users, areas of low population suffer just as badly from drug use as high population areas. What's different is the level of community and medical support; and what matters is the amount of money, per drug user, spent on rehabilitation. This number, this important figure, remains incredibly low in the UK.
• There is no "solution" for the drug problem. The people who are on them wanted to take them in the first place; depending on the drug, they may be unable to break that cycle of drug use and dependency. Treatment is the only way of breaking that link - time and time again, we continue to use prison instead of rehabilitation.
• The days when countries needed to be self-sufficient are long since over. It makes no sense to produce things that others produce better; there is no shame or harm in getting one's grain from areas of the world that have better climates for producing that grain. There is no shame or harm in importing coal. Nor steel. The question is one of macroeconomics - as long as export is roughly equal to import, the items being exported and import matter little; as long as GDP can afford the import of items, and the items in question can be attained from multiple sources, there is no "problem" with the insourcing of, for example, foodstuffs into the UK. You live in a global economy - get rid of the idea that you're living on an isolated island, and drop the island economy mindset. This isn't the Industrial Revolution any longer; IR economics no longer apply.
• Population size has the largest and most important impact when one considers the aging population; in order for the oldest generations to get tax-free services, enough younger people need to be around paying that tax for those people. That's the whole point of a social policy as exists in the UK; it's the single biggest danger that any country faces. Countries in Africa are getting their populations wiped out - whole economies may fall apart because none of the staff with any training will actually survive. These are real problems - not shadowy, vague outlines of problems as "overpopulation", which isn't even necessarily a problem at all.
• Do not pretend to know why people take drugs; you are almost invariably going to be wrong.
• While you're at it, don't make the ill-begotten assumption that mentally ill people turn to drugs; or, conversely, that anybody who would take drugs must therefore be mentally ill.
• Do not pretend, for one moment, that the problems of mental illness are any better handled in this society than the drugs problem; if anything, drugs have a higher profile, and you are more likely to get treatment as a drug user than you are to get diagnosed and treated of particular mental illnesses. One in four will suffer mental illness of one form or another, treatable mental illness at that, within their lifetimes. A handful will take drugs and need treatment to get them off of it. Now look at the resources going to both, and start wondering where the problem is.
• Enforced euthanasia is a rather bizarre conclusion for you to come to; I imagine, at the age of 59, you're starting to feel the crisis that many seem to go through when they hit the ages where one starts to consider one's self as being "old". Nobody's going to euthanise the elderly against their will. Feeding the elderly does not mean leaving the young of today in "abject poverty", and older generations have every right to feel that, after a lifetime of providing for others, society will do them the same favour. More importantly, and never forget this, the elderly are one of the single most organised and powerful voting blocs in politics today, and will likely remain that way in the future.
• 59 is not old. The elderly are not a "burden on society"; if we all live to 100, then by your definition, 35-40% of our society (depending on where you draw the line at retirement) is "elderly", quite frankly. Those people deserve to live their lives just as much as the other 60-65%.

I just find it really, really hard to truck any of your ideas - it's not that they're poorly researched or anything, I'm sure you're reading figures that back up your ideas - they're just antiquated. Not just "not modern", but archaic; concepts about drug use, mental illness, and population concerns that have been commonly accepted as being very different than your current opinions on them.

"It is showing sign`s off suffering now as you have pointed out."

...And as I pointed out, none of those things are related to "UK overpopulation".

"I class any nation as over populated if that nation cannot feed itself!"

That's ridiculous. We can do what we've always done; subsidise farming until the whole of the UK isn't dependent on foreign food, but that's ignoring reality: We seem to want the cheapest goods in the supermarket, not the ones marked British. Why subsidise with taxes what you can get more cheaply abroad? You're arguing that Britain can't feed itself; I'm trying to tell you that Britain, every day, is choosing not to, at the checkout counter of every store in the UK.

Moreover, your idea that Britain should be completely self-sufficient is an outdated ideal of the 50's; we do not *need* to produce all our own energy reserves; we can buy it cheaper than we can produce it from the market. We don't *need* to produce all our own food; we can buy it cheaper from Africa. In fact, the whole argument over food is particularly nasty; Africa has been complaining, and rightly so, for years that the UK and other countries subsidising their local agricultural markets makes Africa non-competitive in that market; if we want to help Africa, we need to give them a level playing field. That, by definition, means cutting the subsidies which are the only reason UK foodstuffs are competitive in this market.

Close our borders, and move back to a pre-WW2 policy on international trade; that's what you're really asking for. The whole purpose of the European Union is to eliminate the trade barriers between European countries - that alone is anathema to your statements on what is essentially a "protectionist" market strategy. That's what I meant by horribly outdated; that stopped being valid a long, long time ago.

how long will that "better climates" be better climates!

If the UK suddenly becomes the perfect growing climate, the cost of production of foodstuffs will drop and it will become competitive, in the marketplace, to be a producer of foodstuffs; no subsidies required. As some countries cease to be strong producers, they will need to find new ways to employ their workforce; such as Britain's transition through industrial and into what is now an IT and services marketplace.

And I remind those who don't know: I was born and raised in a family of farmers. I've watched them lose their farms, their subsidies, and their livelihoods, as their farms fail to be cost-effective, and the subsidies fail to keep them afloat. I've watched them retrain to become nurses and construction workers.

I know full well what it means to lose your farm, and what that does to your life. But the days of protectionism are over; and all we can do now is help those who lose their jobs to foreign markets to retrain in new jobs. That's what the words "changing economy" really imply when spoken - some people are losing their jobs, and having to get new ones in different fields, because their old jobs just don't exist anymore.

That's, unfortunately, progress. Progress means that some people fall off the bottom and need to be helped back on. Damn it if you like, but we all have to live in it. I, a programmer, have gone from a rare breed to a populist workforce who will, in 20 years, be nothing more than a sweatshop worker in Singapore, desperate to find a job in a market that no longer considers my skills in the UK to be cost-effective. I must continually improve and refine my skills so as to avoid that dead end. That's my life.

"Once before people went hungry in this country that was because of german U-boat`s stopping food from coming in from the rest of the world"

Those countries can just as easily strip-bomb your farmland and drop airborne contaminants onto your crops now. Those fears cannot be allowed to continue to run the world; we cannot allow ourselves to live under the shadows of war, real or imagined.

"if SOME prediction`s from SOME expert`s are correct and that there are going to be food shortage`s in the year`s ahead"

Screw our food. There's tons in Africa desperate for imports to the UK, none of whom can thanks to our taxpayers ensuring that our own food is kept artificially low priced. Take, instead, the fact that large sections of the world, over the next few years, are going to start battling over drinking water. Now there's a real problem.

And you won't solve that by putting up walls around Britain to prevent "other people" from drinking your water. Nor will the people of Britain be safe from the chaos and war that the thirsty countries will wage amongst each other fighting for those rights. The days when we can pretend we are not a part of the world around us are over; if we continue to pretend that these issues won't affect us, we will wake up not from a dream, but into a nightmare. That's not a prediction.

The latest on this I can tell you is that far from being a warmer place for Great Britain it could well be a FAR colder place for Great Britain as the amount of fresh water running into the north atlantic from the great river`s of northern Russia and northern Europe will dilute the amount of salt in the north atlantic, this in turn will switch the gulf stream off!

If you want to stop global warming, start voting for people who want to stop global warming. Unless you're voting Lib Dem or Green, you're not doing enough to stop global warming, plain and simple. Pretending otherwise is sticking your head in the sand.

Drug addict`s tell us they take drug`s because there is no point to there live`s and it give`s them a form of escape as does alcohol.

Don't get into the War On Some Drugs with me. Trust me. You *cannot* simplify the whole of drug use down to "people are unhappy". People take drugs for lots of reasons, and lots of perfectly healthy kids do it *every single weekend*. The drug problem is not a problem of overpopulation, and it's not about a nation with suicidal tendencies; it's the very nature of humanity and culture, and it's a universal problem that cannot be solved with mindless, gross exaggerations. In fact, it's a problem that cannot be solved at all; only treated, and its harm reduced. That whole "otherwise, what would be the point of taking them in the first place" end of that paragraph is the whole point - because you clearly *do not* have the answer to that, and neither does anybody else around us. There is no one reason. Don't make the problem worse through oversimplification.

As for drug dealers: You're probably living within a few houses of one right now, regardless of where you live. They're that common. And it's not a problem of the poor, or a problem of the rich, or a problem of the mentally ill.

As I say time will tell Gregory but I have the feeling that my generation will be the one`s that have seen the last day`s of life that we all are used to at the moment.Time will indeed tell.

Do not assume that your generation - and you are my elder by thirty ears - is the last generation to give a damn. Do not assume that men and women younger than I aren't reading this right now, and care just as much about everything happening as you or I do; nor that people older than you have somehow lost enough of the clarity of their vision to no longer see the problems that plainly exist around us, nor the reason to care.

Nobody's losing hope; nobody's losing faith. Nobody's giving up the fight, with or without you. We're all involved in politics for highly personal reasons; reasons which will drive us throughout are whole lives and, ideally, infect those around us with a passion to care about the government that governs our societies and the laws which protect our rights. Every generation since time immemorial thinks that the good times are times gone past; every generation thinks the future is bleak. To date, most of them have been wrong, and it's because we continue to have hope, faith, and fight for what we believe in that this continues to be true.

Tomorrow is not the dawn of a new Dark Age. Not if the people living today have anything to say about it.