please delete xenophobic post.

Well, a largely pointless post. & "SWP Monbiot"? Ermmm... no.

It's not Britain's job to be an economic promised land for the rest of the world and have to pave over Green Belt to house all comers. There is a difference if it's genuine refugees.

Funny that the same people who insist that we house economic migrants from the rest of the world, disagree with the right of Jews in their ancestral homeland in 1947 to self-defence in creating a State of Israel.

Which is quite a double standard, though they'd sue if you called them anti-Semitic.

Do not remove this post, its important. Does nobody understand the simple fact that more people demand more infrastructure? And that land goes under concrete as a result of the building this entails, houses (not homes, HOUSES, what happened to that word?!) roads, schools, etc. I despair at the idea unrestrained immigration is ok. Economic migration is not ok. We need a major downturn in the economy or the biosphere has had it. I know some people are fleeing oppressive regimes but even then logic dictates that they cannot all live here . Or do you really think we can crowbar them all in? We will be a repressive regime here anyway soon what with the proposed protests ban etc.
When the extra millions of houses have been built and britain is one big megacity, perhaps you idiots will then think to ask where all the birds and animals and green spaces went?
Somebody mention population as well, please One child or none or the Earth gets it. That about sums it up.

As for the idea that Monbiot is one his own about 9/11, there are many - including me - who entirely agree with his critique of the conspira-loons.

"To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever.

"In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.

"Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish."

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2017006,00.html

The last couple of paragraphs expose the truth behind the "shock-horror" headlines being used to justify even tighter immigration controls

eg: "Prof Janet Dobson of University College London said weekend reports that schools had been asked to cope with more than 200,000 east European migrant children in the last three years were wide of the mark. Slough, which had one of the highest migrant populations, had 258 new pupils from Poland in the last 18 months. She told peers the total figure was more likely to be in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands."

258 children instead of the predicted 200,000!!!

Or

"The official prediction that Britain's population could almost double over the next 75 years certainly makes an eye-catching headline. But there is such a wide variation between the "high scenario" and the "low scenario" published by the Office of National Statistics that their figures range between 108 million by 2081 at the top and 64 million by the same date at the bottom."

108 million or 64 million - big difference in the predictions!!!

"The biggest single factor in where the final figure will lie is thought to be migration and the "high" variant assumes that the population will increase by 250,000 a year due to migration. That seems unlikely as it is 60,000 higher than the net figure of 190,000 a year who came after Poland joined the EU in the biggest ever migration to the UK. "

Isn’t it strange that all those campaigning against being ‘swamped’ by immigrants wouldn’t dream of campaigning against the civil liberties of people leaving the UK, who are ‘deserting’ our way of life in Britain and presumably ‘swamping’ the way of life in Spain, France or Australia? As emigration from the UK historically has been just as high, if not higher, as immigration, then where is the campaign for stronger ‘Emigration controls’?

Whereas in Friends of the Earth they try to fob off any discussion of population, it seems in Indymedia discussion of migration and UK population is censored. Is it all because Dude wrote "Japanesation" and not "Japanisation"? For heaven's sake there used to be a hit records "Turning Japanese" and all the while a poor teacher's in trouble for calling a teddy bear "Muhammad", come on!

Jack to the Sound of the Underground! Acieeeeeed!