March 10, 2009

UNCONTROLLED immigration has sent our population soaring and that is why the Government is removing planning controls. The safeguards protecting rural and greenbelt land from housing sprawl are being abandoned to let developers build over what is left of the British countryside in a bid to meet a “housing shortage”.

The Tories and the Lib-Dems agree with Labour that we “need” to build three million new homes - a city bigger than Birmingham - within the next 11 years to cope with the expected increase in population.

The Government wants to build a quarter of a million new homes a year, a target supported by both Tories and Lib-Dems. It plans to take away protection from greenfield sites, allowing an estimated 16,000 small towns, villages and hamlets across Britain to be blighted by more sprawling housing estates.

There are two reasons why these new houses are supposed to be needed. The first is the genuine problem that many local people in rural Britain can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages. The cause of this isn’t that there aren’t enough houses for everyone, it’s that second homes bought by wealthy outsiders have pushed up prices in some areas to over 13.5 times average local income.

The result is that young villagers have to leave communities their forebears have built up over hundreds of years because they have nowhere to live. Whilst their villages die as living communities, turning into ghost towns peopled only at weekends and during school holidays by incomers who live and work elsewhere for the rest of the time.

The answer here isn’t to build more houses. It’s to put local people first in their own communities. A local version of the BNP’s policy of putting our people first in our own country. Local people should have the right through parish and village councils of vetoing house sales to outsiders and deciding who they let move into their areas. The Government should also target economic development to ensure there are jobs for young rural people, instead of letting “the Market” shift jobs to cities or indeed countries far away. That way - without building any more houses - British people would be able to live in the areas in which they grew up.

As for the second issue - the supposed ever-rising total number of houses needed in Britain - that is mainly caused by an increase in a population that is expected to soar to over 70 million from its current 60 million by 2030. A rise greater than the entire population of Greater London plus Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds put together! As the native British birth-rate has been far below replacement levels for over 25 years, it’s obvious where all these extra people will be coming from: immigrants and their growing families. Migrant groups for the most part have birth-rates far higher than those of our own people.

We don’t need these extra people. In fact, we can’t take them. With climate change, soaring world population and resource exhaustion, together with the increasing instabilities in global markets as the Capitalist system shakes itself to bits, we’re going to find it ever harder in the coming decades to feed and fuel the number of people we’ve already got.

The BNP is the only party which actually faces up to this issue of sustainable population - the Greens are paralysed by political correctness on this and many other issues from following the logic of their often worthy ideals. The Tories, Labour and the Lib-Dems just seem to think the more people, the better!