Increased productivity is limited as a strategy, especially when other countries are increasing theirs more effectively and faster. Conquering new territories is no longer an option for the UK and the economic equivalent of expanding protected trade zones is not an option in the present free trade climate. That leaves internal expansion of the population, which amounts to increasing the national income by “renting” our space to productive incomers.

The result will apparently be the UK having the largest population per square mile of any European country by 2060 and we will have absorbed more than the total increase in the EU population by the same date, i.e. we will be expanding while other EU countries are contracting and we will have more than the population of Germany, a country several times our size!

What price road congestion and housing shortages then? Especially if the Tory “thinktank” has its way and a large part of the urban population in the North moves to the South East!

How is it that the rest of Europe can contemplate a reduction in population, while we cling to the outworn capitalist theory of an expanding economy?

Less people equals less cars, less overcrowded roads, less overcrowded cities, less overcrowded hospitals and less overcrowded cemeteries.

So the “simpler way of doing it” is very simple indeed. Just allow the population to decrease slightly and level out naturally at a sustainable level compatible with the existing infrastructure and conditions will improve and remain tolerable for those who remain.

The current government’s obsession with cramming in ever more people into a finite and already overcrowded space is completely at odds with its supposed aims of “opportunity for all”, “quality of life, “sustainable development” and “combating climate change”.

The road to ruin has got nothing to do with price of petrol.