Racism is a result of poor psychological functioning

I'm sorry, CariadAgain.

I pointed out that we weren't self sufficient in food during
WW2 when the population was about 45 million. And that was with people doing all the things you described, growing their own fruit and vegetables, keeping hens and rabbits for food and foraging (my mother & grandmother were great foragers)

We still had to import food. What do you think the Atlantic convoys were all about?

Add to this the fact that significant numbers of the population can't even cook from basic ingredients, they wouldn't know how to go about it..

I don't get the "growth" thing either. I think everyone should have a reasonable standard of living and that's it. That's one whole huge question on its own. Starting with the obvious over-consumers (influencers/other celebrities/royal families) and I guess they all start off "copy-catting" amongst other people - who can't reach their level of consumption but will give it their best shot to have "more"....

Adverts out to grab our money off us and many of us succumb to that pressure. I'm grateful that one of the lessons I recall from that schooling I had latterly included one analysing adverts and trying to teach us how to resist the pressures applied on us by them - and that was a useful lesson. But....we're all human and that only gives us a little bit of info. and moral support to help us resist the mental pressures they put on us - when yet another face pops up and goes "My stuff is special....it's unique....you really need it" and with, say, books for instance I have to remain aware that many of them are just rehashing books I got back in the 1970s and what they're saying often isn't unique and new and they're just copy-catting and there's nowt special about what they're saying at all.

So yep...that school lesson back along was a useful starting point. Schools could also have other useful lessons along those lines - eg maybe geography lessons saying "This is what that country is like - now see photos of all the piles of rubbish sitting there spoiling it" and there are two very different sides to it. History lessons could also usefully include pointers on all this - and I certainly don't recall anything much when it came to wars as to just why they started - eg whose ego/financial grabbiness/etc was responsible for it.

A lot could be done in school lessons all round for a start-off.

Governments are directly influencing people to "consume more/more/more". I had 3 spells of unemployment back in the 1980's to my shock and horror and they totalled over a year between them. Believe me - I was very conscious that there was a low limit to how much savings I was able to have before the Government started means-testing them out of me. On my low income getting savings in the first place was not easy - but, as I recall, it was only £6,000 savings one was allowed and, after that, they'd start cutting your benefits. I think (unsure/don't quote me on that) that it's still that level of savings now (ie barely any savings these days) and so there's another incentive to buy/buy/buy and so people spend any that might take them over that level - on something/anything just in case they get thrown onto benefits and the Government grabs their savings that way (yep I was thinking back then - "I'll have that £100 suitcase - I need a suitcase and so I'll get a really good one that shouldnt need replacing ever" and "At least that £100 I've just spent is safe from the Government". It certainly exercised my mind as to how on earth I was supposed to save up for a house deposit if the Government felt free to even grab for savings specifically set to one side for that purpose. So the government could play their part by saying that savings specifically set aside for a house deposit wouldnt be touched by them doing means-testing on them and cutting peoples benefits accordingly if they did become unemployed. I was really scared in case I managed somehow to save for a house deposit and became unemployed again and the Government effectively grabbed it.

A whole question of what different people regard as "theirs" re their standard of living they have individually. I'm quite clear as to what I regard as "mine" and thought is given if I've not achieved "mine" and have to manage with less....eg "organic food" is what I regard as "mine", a detached house with garden as "mine" (but I wouldnt want an executive size house - as it's more than I need and too much to do housework on). So just why do people buy themselves excess houses and/or mini mansions (yep...a Pfizer executive owns three houses to my knowledge - the one she lives in and two in Newport, Pembrokeshire) for instance?

I did say the population was already 70 million. That number is readily available without ChatGPT.

90% of UK land is not developed. 35% is natural. Mountains, hills, lakeland, grassland, moorland. That cannot be touched. 55% is farmland.

All I said was that 1% of under-utilised farmland which is being used to grow food that nobody eats could be reallocated for development. That would be just 330,000 acres to support the housing, education, healthcare, work and day-to-day recreation needs for a 10% rise in population. As I said before, to put it into perspective, we have 700,000 acres of golf courses.

About 12% of UK land, over 7 million acres is in the hands of just 50 owners. The aristocracy owns 30% of all UK land including farmland.

I have yet to see houses, schools, hospitals, roads, railways etc being built by AI. We need fit young people to do that.

We have an extensive skills shortage list which includes construction workers and many other trades and professions. Visa are available for migrant workers who can do these jobs.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/skilled-worker-visa-temporary-shortage-list/skilled-worker-visa-temporary-shortage-list

I am 70 and retired four years ago. My kind of work is now on the skills shortage list with pay well about the national average. The job can’t be done by AI.

We need economic growth not least to support the needs of an ageing population. If you subscribe to the notion that taxes pay for public spending (which it doesn’t but that’s how most people think about it) how do you generate more taxes? By more people working and more productivity.

The current cost of paying the State Pension alone is £146 billion a year. If it continues to rise by an average of 4% a year for the next 20 years the cost by 2045 will be over 300 billion a year. More than double. The government spends 1.4 trillion a year on everything. Pensions alone will account for one fifth of ALL public spending unless we have growth. The net pensioner population is growing by about 150,000 a year - 750,000 new pensioners, 600,000 pensioners dying. Per capita, the cost of the SP will decrease as, contrary to what some people think, the new State Pension will be cheaper in the long run - no addiional state pensions to pay - but the exponential growth in the number of pensioners will wipe out the saving.

On the question of food, which end do we approach it from? Most people now shop in supermarkets. Supermarkets demand mostly unblemished produce of uniform shapes and sizes. (Some will stock wonky carrots or offer bags of irregular-size apples but not much more.) Supermarkets screw farmers on wholesale prices because customers demand low prices because their household incomes are squeezed by rents and mortgages and child care costs.

Personally, I cut out the supermarket by buying fruit and veg in farm shops and have the occasional organic fruit and veg box delivered if I can’t get there. I don’t eat meat and fish so my food bill is low anyway but I know I am in a minority. I make salads, soups, stews and curries. A £17.75 veg box from Abel and Cole goes a long way. In summer, I also grow easy veg, beans, courgettes and tomatoes and freeze the surplus. It doesn’t take much time space to grow food and cook from fresh but many families are too time poor.

Food security will remain a vicious cycle unless we have a massive paradigm shift.

Although i haven’t read and understood the economic/social implications - I am instinctively someone who thinks growth after a certain level of standard of living is unnecessary and bad for the world. But how a stop to the growth can be achieved I have no idea.

Re the self-sufficient in food - and there's a whole other angle one could go off on there and maybe Chat GPT is taking that into account at the higher optimum population thing first mentioned. That being the amount of extra food, for instance, that could be foraged if we didn't have so much of our land built on or polluted or inaccessible to us "hoi polloi". The experiments that have been done by a few people as to how well they could manage to feed themselves personally taking that into account have, by and large, indicated a shortfall on food available to them if they tried to manage with that alone. But these people have been trying in our current climate - ie much of our land built-on and/or polluted.

Add in just how few gardens are being used to produce any food at all. When I first moved here my own garden was a barren/dead/"concrete garden" and I literally couldnt spot a living thing in it (not even an earthworm). Fast forward to now and mine is now a food-producing one and the huge garden behind mine (how can you tell I'm envious LOL?) is now growing food and the one behind that has just started growing food. It sorta seems to be spreading here #grins. Various foodgrowing projects have been starting up here too and there's noticeably more of them than there was here....

Yep....there's a lot that could be done in a variety of directions that people have barely started in on across the country.....
So I don't know so much about regulation - and that wouldnt apply anyway, I'm guessing, if any food surpluses were just given away (yep...that's starting up here too).

MaizieD regarding food, particularly vegetables, many supermarkets are now doing wonky veggie boxes or even better individual veggies labelled as wonky, this must help towards food wastage before it even leaves the farms.

I am a fan of Farm Shops, but appreciate that for some they can be more expensive. In my case it works out cheaper as I only buy what I need (individual onion, a couple of carrots, handful of beans etc.) I loathe food wastage and do anything I can so as not to throw anything out.

(Soups can be interesting in the winter, DH looks on in horror and is so pleased he doesn’t like soup of any kind apart from Thai clear spicy soup 🤷‍♀️)

Whitewavemark2

I think that the weakness in the figures are that it appears to take no account of the demography of the population.

Not much good if they are all or even the majority of ancient relics.

I don't quite understand what you are getting at here, especially in relation to 'ancient relics' Whitewave.

CariadAgain does ask a number of interesting questions.

I'd be interested to know what criteria Chatgtp was using to calculate the 'optimum population'. Just post WW2 our official population was 45 million, so we passed 40million a long time ago.

As far as self sufficiency in food is concerned we haven't been self sufficient since at least the 19th century. We couldn't even manage it during WW2 with rationing of scarcer commodities and we don't have the climate to produce many foods that we consume as a matter of course. WRT to this I take PaynesGrey's point that a great deal of the food we produce is wasted; rejected by supermarkets for not meeting standards for size and appearance, or thrown away because of overbuying by the populace. But to to anything to combat this would involve regulation which would be fiercely resisted.

Just to add, the amount of food wasted before it gets to the supermarket and the amount wasted afterwards by households is just wicked and something that has annoyed me for a long time.
I do know how disheartening it is for farmers too.

Same with tea. We don’t grow Yorkshire tea.
😂😂😂

Sorry, but that made me giggle and splutter into my cup of Yorkshire, PaynesGrey

I think that the weakness in the figures are that it appears to take no account of the demography of the population.

Not much good if they are all or even the majority of ancient relics.

Just had a quick nip-over to GPT to ask what it's got to say about our optimum population. It made an error there to start with - as it said our population is 67 million. Wrong - there's been research to see how many people we've really got (ie because a lot don't show up officially) and I don't recall the exact figure but a small survey of "unofficial" housing (the beds in sheds stuff) and how much human waste is heading down our drains shows we have a lot more people that are "unofficial" and not being counted and it certainly came to more than a million "unofficial", as well as our official population (people like thee and me that fill in our census forms studiously and pay our taxes etc).

I have a vague idea we're well up into the 70 million plus population when trying to estimate the "unofficials" as well.

So - Chat GPT said:
Depends what you want and so:

Environmental sustainability = 20-40 million (yep.....that's the one we should be heading for - even if it was a peaceful world we lived in and no risk of a World War 2 rationing situation reoccurring)

Balance of prosperity and liveability = 40-60 million

Economic growth = 70-80 million

I can feel the next question for it coming on, ie "Why do some people want "economic growth". What purpose is that supposed to serve? Why do some people regard that as good?"

foxie48

MaizieD

Excellent post by PaynesGrey at 01.04 this morning. Thanks.

agree. just to add our society has also changed with regard to housing. Children used to live with parents (as a matter of course) until they married, now they don't. There are many more single person households as a result of this and also because of divorce or the death of a partner, older retired people used to live with their children but most now stay independent. All of this puts additional pressure on our housing stock which has not been met.

But I'd say that is balanced out rather by the fact we are now down to 1.4 children per household - ie not even replacement rate. That being if we're talking about our own indigenous population. The reason our population is still growing is not down to us - ie the indigenous population.

There's the "Who will do the jobs?" question too - but the way jobs are vanishing to technology is distinctly concerning. At only early 70's agegroup I'm there thinking "What job could I honestly do if I had my time again - but with today's technology?" and I think the answer probably boils down to "There isn't one I would do" (yep I do distinguish between "would" do and "could" do). I was basically a secretary....but was shocked to find that, when I was only about halfway through my worklife that office jobs were declining - and there was attempts (including on me personally) to shove us sideways into callcentre jobs (which had me thinking "If I'd wanted a factory job and to have to sometimes work outside normal workhours - then I'd have taken a factory job in the first place". But I wanted an office job and it took a LOT of doing to just about manage to hang onto that until retirement.

Add the next level up of jobs and I'm thinking "If I'd had a more encouraging/intelligent mother and not being carted round the world as a military brat - what might I have done instead?" - researcher? legal executive? Yep those jobs are going now too - AI has done for them.

Cue for I've been checking Chat GPT for instance and what took me days/weeks of research for info. on dealing with bad neighbour issues I've had here only took hours and I caught it out on one point it was wrong on - but whew! So there goes a lot of our mid-level jobs too then.

So - yep....we no longer need anything like as many people in jobs as we used to. So it's not just housing and foodgrowing to take account of and we mustn't forget wildlife needs to live too - not just us and so space is needed for them.

So yep....where do all these people live (without interfering with our countryside etc) and just what jobs are available for them to do? When I've checked out before now what is the optimum population for Britain it came up with between 17 million and 30 million (dependant on things like just how self-sufficient in food do we want to be). So make that 17 million then - as we seriously do need to be as self-sufficient as we possibly can be. I can feel some more questions coming on to see what comes up on Chat GPT on that topic.....

PaynesGrey

^… we are too full to take any more of ANY race^

It only seems over-crowded in some places because successive governments have failed to plan for exponential population growth and the land we have isn’t used efficiently.

The same problem would have occurred if people still had the same-sized famiies they had a hundred years ago. What we have instead is both migration and people living far longer than they did a hundred years ago. It’s not uncommon now to be a great-grandparent and see those great grandchildren grown to adulthood, needing their own homes.

A friend in her 70s moans repeatedly about the new housing development in her town but fails to recognise that her family is part of exponential population growth. Her parents are still alive in their 90s. She is one of four children. She and her siblings have all had three chidren who themselves have had at least two children. Nothing unusual in that perhaps but it’s still 2 + (4 x 3) + (12 x 2) = 38 people needing homes. Had everybody in her family only had two children that would be 2 + (2 x 2) + (4 x 2), only 14 people needing homes.

But because people are having fewer children, we now have an unbalanced population becoming increasingly top heavy with old people. In addition, 25% of working age people are not working.

Less than 10% of the UK's 60 million acre landmass is developed. That includes all buildings and infrastructure, road, rail, airports plus all the urban space, residential gardens, parks, sports pitches, golf courses etc.

The land given over to golf courses in the UK exceeds the size of Greater Manchester.

Meantime, we have an excess of farmland with farmers growing food that is not harvested as it isn’t economical to do. 3 million tonnes of food including around 30% of all the fruit and vegetables grown never reaches market as it doesn’t meet the aesthetics demanded by supermarkets and their customers.

Some sources claim that 50% of our food is produced in the UK. That’s misleading. It doesn’t mean it is grown here only that the final product is made here. Tomatoes are imported from say the Netherlands and Spain and are used to make soups, purees, pasta sauces etc in factories in that 10% of developed land. Same with tea. We don’t grow Yorkshire tea. It’s imported and processed in a factory in Harrogate in the 10% of urban space. In reality, about 80% of our food is imported.

If that 10% of developed land including green space currently supports 70 million people, it would only take a 1% increase to support another 7 million. The population of Greater Manchester is around 3 million. Again, the land given over to golf courses in the UK exceeds the size of Greater Manchester.

In addition, we already have around a million homes in England alone which are classed as long-term empty. They need to be brought back into use as permanent homes.

What we need is a vision for the future, investment and fit young men to restore or build the new homes and the infrastructure that a growing population needs.

We need to start joining the dots on this. Next time Reform’s Zia Yusuf describes migrants as fit young men of fighting age, I want someone to challenge him and point out these are also men who could be building the country’s future if we would only give them a chance.

And remind him too that he is the son of migrant parents who left a country in civil war. He loves to remind us that his parents, a doctor and a nurse, worked for the NHS. Why did they not stay and use their skills in Sri Lanka? He would not be where he is now but for the opportunities he has had in the UK. He built his fortune using family money as seed capital. Why does he not want others to have the same chances?

Brilliant post PaynesGrey👏👏👏

A very large proportion of the arrested rioters were already convicted of domestic abuses, on women and girls.
Those rioters were not there to protect women.

25Avalon

Oh so no illegal migrants have been charged with sexual assault on women and girls? Wasn’t there one charged from The Bell at Epping? That is what started the ‘trouble’ there. Not TR although he was one of the first to speak out against the Asian grooming gangs in Rochdale but had to be shut up as it was brushed under the carpet.

Yes, one of the migrants was charged and found guilty however, to stigmatise a whole group of people on the basis of one person is what is at the heart of scapegoating. Thank you for raising this.

Oh so no illegal migrants have been charged with sexual assault on women and girls? Wasn’t there one charged from The Bell at Epping? That is what started the ‘trouble’ there. Not TR although he was one of the first to speak out against the Asian grooming gangs in Rochdale but had to be shut up as it was brushed under the carpet.

MaizieD

Excellent post by PaynesGrey at 01.04 this morning. Thanks.

Thank you for highlighting PaynesGrey's post Maizie. It would have been easy to miss if, like me, you have been busy elsewhere.

It is such well researched, erudite posts that are a joy to find on Gransnet. Thank you PaynesGrey. I come on GN to learn - which always means I'm asking for other people's time, knowledge and research - and I'm very grateful when it's given.

This idea that immigrants pose a big threat to women and children is IMO extremely pernicious, completely untrue and probably the most damaging lie to social cohesion. It's being spread by people like Tommy Robinson, he mentioned it in his opening speech on Saturday and that is one of the main reasons why I feel so strongly that people who join his marches should be well ware of who they are helping to gain power and authority in this country. There were 827,609 cases of domestic abuse reported in the UK in 2024. Half of the men who were arrested at a protest led by TR had convictions for domestic abuse/ assault etc I think TR needs to look closer to home to see who is a danger to women and children!

MaizieD

Excellent post by PaynesGrey at 01.04 this morning. Thanks.

Yes I’ve just read it.

Clear thinking😊 - something I’m bad at.

MaizieD

Excellent post by PaynesGrey at 01.04 this morning. Thanks.

agree. just to add our society has also changed with regard to housing. Children used to live with parents (as a matter of course) until they married, now they don't. There are many more single person households as a result of this and also because of divorce or the death of a partner, older retired people used to live with their children but most now stay independent. All of this puts additional pressure on our housing stock which has not been met.

Excellent post by PaynesGrey at 01.04 this morning. Thanks.

I do say WAS because my tolerance for the aggressive insistence on changing to meet the needs of medieval outdated practices and cultures is very thin now, and I feel the safety of my children and grandchildren is under threat. This fear makes me far less tolerant and open.

I wonder if you could expand on ‘the aggressive insistence on changing to meet the needs of mediaeval outdated practices’.

What ‘needs’ are you thinking of and who is aggressively insisting that we change to meet them?

I’m also wondering how a miniscule percentage of the UK population could pose such a huge threat to the safety of our children and grandchildren when there is an indigenous population which poses a much greater threat.

If the idea is that if these people are removed there would be no more change in culture and complete freedom from fear danger to’ our ‘children and grandchildren’ then I think it’s doomed to failure.

Taking an aspect of FranP's post and remembering words and phrases from other posts and threads, the feeling of being 'overwhelmed' is strong in certain geographical areas.
So, shifting the focus from 'racism' to 'rivalry for resources', which is a primitive survival instinct, I think politicians of all stripes should be paying much more attention with money, services and support to immediately address the problems, needs and views of the 'beleaguered' populations.
That's what I take from the recent march and growing support for Farage.

FranP puts it in a nutshell. I fully agree with her.

There are some posters on here who must think about racism pretty much all the time, who seem to assume all those to the right must by default be racist. It seems to be all they think about.
I think you're getting close to what is being discussed here, even though it isn't exactly touched on in the OP. That an obsession about seeing racism where there is none, is just as prevalent and unwarranted as the excessive anxiety felt by those whose thinking patterns differ.