When Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe rose recently in the House of Lords to speak on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, one could not have anticipated the detour his remarks would take. Instead of focusing solely on the grave ethical questions surrounding assisted dying, Lord Brooke turned his attention to population growth and its supposed role in climate change. In words that startled many in attendance and later provoked widespread commentary, he declared:
...this century’s growth in the world population from 6.1 billion to 8.2 billion – a 25% increase in 25 years. Just think what the 2025 numbers would be if abortion had not been legalised or there had not been wide-scale usage and advocacy of contraception. Indeed, the growth of homosexuality throughout society has reduced the number of children that we would have had. Had the churches had their way, we would have had a very much bigger population than we presently have, facing the difficulties we have with climate change.
Some observers were horrified. Nikki da Costa, a former Director of Legislative Affairs at No 10, asked pointedly in a widely viewed and commented upon X post whether Lord Brooke was “advocating for assisted dying as a tool of population control” and noted that it was “an extraordinary contribution suggesting human life be actively sacrificed to prevent climate change”. The Spectator’s Madeleine Grant was even more scathing: “This was without doubt one of the most surreal speeches I have ever heard in my
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Tilak is mistaken. Population has risen in direct proportion to the rate of hydrocarbon offtake (which Malthus failed to anticipate), which we convert into fertiliser and then into food. Hydrocarbon discovery peaked in 1970, defining the future profile of hydrocarbon production. Rystad – a respected scouting firm – estimates that Western oil companies have around 15 years of commercial oil reserves left. The resulting rate of energy contraction will cripple all industrial systems, including industrial agriculture.
This is not a “leftist” observation, but rather one derived from petroleum engineering fundamentals.
The author claims that “Global fertility rates are falling everywhere” and cites only Japan, South Korea, Europe and India.
No mention of sub-Saharan Africa I notice.
Love this, great way of looking at this that I haven’t seen before, cheers
Doshi’s Panglossian rant ignores reality – there’s a finite amount of physical space, for a start. People take up space, ergo there is a limit to the number of people that can be accomodated. Human ingenuity has merely postponed the inevitable. Malthus will be proved correct, but like Enoch Powell, his words were premature.
“Among the multitude of animals which scamper, fly, burrow and swim around us, man is the only one who is not locked into his environment. His imagination, his reason, his emotional subtlety and toughness, make it possible for him not to accept the environment, but to change it. And that series of inventions, by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution—not biological, but cultural evolution. I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. I use the word ascent with a precise meaning. Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts. He makes plans, inventions, new discoveries, by putting different talents together; and his discoveries become more subtle and penetrating, as he learns to combine his talents in more complex and intimate ways. So the great discoveries of different ages and different cultures, in technique, in science, in the arts, express in their progression a richer and more intricate conjunction of human faculties, an ascending trellis of his gifts.”
Jacob Bronowski
For context:
Clive Brooke, Baron Brooke of Alverthorpe (born 21 June 1942) is a British trade unionist, and Labour Member of the House of Lords.
The son of John Brooke and Mary Colbeck, Brooke was educated in Thornes House School, Wakefield. From 1964 to 1982, he worked as Assistant Secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation, from 1982 to 1988 as Deputy General Secretary and as General Secretary from 1988 to 1995. In 1996 Brooke became Joint General Secretary of Public Services Tax and Commerce Union and held this post until 1998. He was Member of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) between 1989 and 1996 and between 1993 and 1996 of the TUC Executive Committee. Brooke is a Member of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), the successor to the civil service union he led.
On 23 October 1997, he was created a life peer as Baron Brooke of Alverthorpe, of Alverthorpe in the County of West Yorkshire.[1] He sits on the Labour benches. In the same year he became Trustee of the Institute for Public Policy Research. He has been a trustee and Council member of Community Service Volunteers (CSV) and is a trustee… Read more »
He is 83 years old. What’s he still doing here?
Spending some time in a comfortable environment, with an established emergency hospital quite close to hand, perhaps?
Isn’t it interesting how some of Adolph’s favourite ideas – eugenics and antisemitism for example – once viewed with abhorrence, are gradually gaining acceptance amongst our political elite class.
From “never again” to “maybe soon” in a matter of a few decades.
Antisemitism was still a loosely organized political movement in Germany (including Austria) which sought to correct the ‘error’ made with the Jewish emancipation during the Napoleonic wars by turning Jews back into the stateless foreigner that had been before and preferably, get rid of them in some way.
There’s nothing comparable to that today because there’s no comparable situation. Nobody’s is planning to strip Jews living in Western Europe of anything because they’re Jews.
Yet
Yes.
One can conjecture that a future muslim majority may want to change that. But it’s not currently part of the left-wing agenda and in any case, not antisemitism in the proper sense of the word. That’s a German term derived from the German classification of certain language historically or currently spoken in the Middle East – Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic among them – as semitic languages, named after Noah’s mythological son Sem. Chances are that nobody outside of Germany/ Austria even knew about it much before 1933. Yet, hostility to Jews was widespread elsewhere, too, and existed way before the term.
The policy of the NSDAP wrt “the disabled” was, contrary to the persistent myth, not particularly horrifying: They created a council of medical professionals which could decide – by majority vote – that people who needed 24×7 care to survive and had no chance of ever recovering were to be killed “out of mercy” in a humane way. That’s essentially what the NHS still does today: People whose persistent life-supporting care isn’t considered “cost effective” are killed.
The main difference is that nowadays, many ailments, especially mental health issue, can be treated effectively which couldn’t be treated in the 1930s and 1940s.
I beg to differ, although I do not support any organised reductions in population growth.
In my opinion the size of the population is a Goldilocks problem. Too large a population is too much, but the opposite too small a population is too little. The optimum answer is a population size that is ‘just right’.
People naturally feel their right to have children is under threat (and it is in some places) but state imposed programs to decrease or increase the number of children per woman seldom work. Similarly concerns about the ‘greying’ of a population will correct themselves in due course.
Any political argument to limit population size fails – because it is only about numbers. Show me a political argument that promotes both the limited size of a population and the quality of life of the individual then I might pay more attention.
The biggest threat to the right/ability to have children is the failure to form lasting bonds and delay in starting. While a man’s creative effectiveness slowly declines a woman’s goes into rapid decline and nullify at about the age do many now try for a family.
Nature does have a tendency to sort these problems out for us, at least I think the Darwinian view would support that. So I suppose human interference in population changes support the Darwinian theory because we are a product of evolution, so we have produced people who think they can “intellectually” influence our evolutionary development. It works both ways, if they are right population may or may not increase because they will have stopped potential extinction etc etc. But the result is that a relatively small number in the population can have a massive effect on our evolutionary development. One way or another nature will win, it just depends what is meant by nature.
Nature does have a tendency to sort these problems out for us
This works in a really simple way: Children, especially small children, are much more fragile than grown-ups who have not yet reached old age (traditionally starting with 70) and will thus die first if circumstances get dire. When children largely survive to become grown-ups, all is fine. This may sound drastic but the earth cannot ever be overpopulated by humans beause their birth rate is low and their children need seriously long to become viable humans of their own.
Yes, the big problem I see ahead is whether this manipulation of humans will result in people reverting to their base instincts to defend themselves against the aggressive left wingers.
As far as the cushioned elites are concerned, it’s always the masses that are the problem. As far as the masses are concerned, the problem lies in the elite.
Isn’t it funny that all these people who support population control, support late term abortion and of course the Government sponsored killing bill, never think to follow their own creed and not produce children themselves, or indeed take advantage of reducing the worlds population by taking their own lives. Nope its always someone else who needs to be eradicated to meet their beliefs, never themselves or their own. Strange that.
Leftist thinking does not seem to add up, on the one hand the promote mass immigration and on the other hand appear to promote eugenics, the subtext being you are welcome but don’t expect to have a long and fruitful life.
It’s also ironic that many of the so called elites who promote this viewpoint are technology experts in the computing field and associated areas who gained their expertise playing with their computers in dad’s garage while the rest of the population were out doing normal things such as having a good time. When these people make their fortunes the are deemed to be experts on human nature and development and seek to manipulate societies based on their narrow worldviews which they gained in dad’s garage.
“Too many people” – apart from themselves and their families.
Would this prat and his no doubt large family be first in the queue to lesson the current population crisis if hes so concerned about it?
Indeed. They should run naked to the nearest woods and reduce their ‘carbon’ to zero. Survive or die in the wild. Lead by example. Instead they are millionaires + living life large. Pharisees, Sadduccees and Demons.