They have just announced our fares will be rising in London for the next 10 years to pay for an increase in population of 2 million, mainly from immigrants and their children being born here. Am I the only person who sees this as something wrong, as not only will it raise the density of an area already jammed (I can vouch for that personally) but they have actually planned it deliberately over the next decade? Here's an earlier estimate but may find the story soon as it's only been announced today.

London growth

Notice they say the 2 million is in 20 years while today's report halved that to 2020. Don't most countries regulate this sort of thing to make sure it can't happen?

Yes they do, but as long as we are members of the EU we cannot stop anyone from another EU country coming here. Until that is changed we will continue to concrete over green belt for housing, have no jobs for our youngsters as they leave school or university and our population ewill continue to grow and grow. Not just in London but over the country as a whole.

In the 16½ years I've lived in Dallas, I've seen the population go from about 4.4M metro to just over 6.5M. Two suburbs have gone from 8,000 (Frisco) and 33,000 (McKinney) to over 120,000 each! Allen has gone from about 10,000 to about 85,000 in the same time. I could list others, but it's keep me up too late lol.

There is another aspect to the migration of so many people from other EU countries and that is the lack of younger people in some of those countries. Many of the younger well educated people and the trained people such as building workers have left which means that the workforce is getting older and there are fewer well educated people to take on the roles they would have in the past. It could reach a stage where qualified, let us say plumbers, are retiring and there are none, or few, to do the necessary work and also to train up the younger generation. People who would have become the managers etc will not be there. I fear for these countries' futures.

Last week I was sitting next to a charming lady from Bulgaria, she had excellent English and was very intelligent. In her own country she had a degree and was a professional person but decided to move to England with her young daughter. The only work she could get in the UK at that time was to become a domestic, her English was quite poor at the time. Now she has her own business and employs about 20 staff, still in the domestic line. She says when she goes home there are few of her generation left, they have all left. Her daughter is about to go to university here. She is a huge loss to her country.

Satguru, you should be grateful you have the tube and a decent public transport system. Sydney is a car park during peak hours and not much better at other times.

We certainly have the most expensive public transport probably in the world, and although I haven't used it for some time my friends still wait a regular 10-30 minutes for the bus, while the trains are packed like Tokyo in the busy periods, which was the same when I used them in the 80s. Back then there were two different trains out of London from my station going home, one I needed and another, and when I got there soon after 6 by the time the train came maybe 30 minutes later the platform was absolutely jam packed, every single day. That was the best they could do, and taking the wrong train and changing made little difference as you still had to wait for one when you changed platforms later along. Having been to Paris and Brussels their tube system is fast and efficient, as are the buses as well in Paris and dirt cheap. We missed one to town and by the time I'd stopped swearing the next was there, and we got a train in less than a minute each time we used the Metro. That is good public transport, ours is dire.

That is a very good point Sue. I doubt if many of us have considered the effect on the EU countries that people are leaving. I think the whole of the EU made a very big mistake with the open borders, work in any country you like policy. It was always obvious that people would leave the poorest for a perception of a chance of a better life elsewhere.

I would say social engineering of any sort is dangerous, and the larger the scale the greater the potential chaos. And if everything was set up over a number of years and for whatever reason many people then left where would we be then? Before the EU and outside it countries had border controls and only opened them when they were hiring. I can't see a single reason why that should change now.

It isn't a term one tends to hear these days but a couple of decades ago there was the 'brain drain', lots of highly qualified people leaving the UK. I just Googled and there is actually an item about the current UK situation dated today. Masses of UK graduates are leaving the UK, presumably because the chances of getting a graduate job here has lessened.

A link to The Mail Online article