Thread: There'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'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't want to be called "racist" for starters. Just a helpful hint to kick things off. 2/

Let'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'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'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'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'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'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/