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Thread: There& #39;s so much wrong, or, to put it charitably, misrepresented in this piece by @ClareFoges that it is hard to know where to begin. So for ease, let& #39;s start at the beginning. 1/
If you are complaining about population increases then it is probably worth not blaming the whole thing on migrants if you don& #39;t want to be called "racist" for starters. Just a helpful hint to kick things off. 2/
Let& #39;s look at this. Usual trick here of scary numbers not actually meaning much. UK pop currently about 66.65 million, so 10 year increase of 3.35 million. That& #39;s 335,000 people per year, of which by Foges own figures only 264,650 are migrants, or 0.4% of the UKs population. 2/
What is often used at this point is that UK is the "most densely populated country in Europe". Funnily enough, just dividing land mass by population isn& #39;t the most accurate way of judging space for people to live, not least ways because it ignores increasing vertical living. 3/
Depending on the calculations used, buildings, that& #39;s all of them residential and non-residential alike, cover between 1.4% and 2% of land in the UK. Not exactly the dramatic squeeze which @ClareFoges makes out. 4/
While successive governments have shouted "build, build, build", they haven& #39;t actually built. In 2019 the Public Accounts Committee warned government construction figures for new homes was "artificially inflated" by 40,500, and still failed to meet targets by nearly a half. 5/
It doesn& #39;t seem unreasonable to assume that when you have only 2% of land used for building, shortfall on targets and a small 4.5% decade long population growth that when you blame a 0.4% increase of current pop on "overcrowding" you may have an alternate agenda than housing. 6/
