The immediate effect of The Sustainable Population Party’s policies would be on current plans for massive infrastructure developments. If we recognise that their purpose is to cope with present and future capacity problems arising from our growing population, and then suddenly we don’t have a growing population, these plans can be scrapped.

Brilliant! All those people who have been campaigning to save ‘areas of outstanding beauty’ from being torn apart to make way for HS2 can heave a sigh of relief. People who live in the vicinity of Heathrow need not worry about having another runway built. The ancient woodlands around Gatwick will be saved. We will not have to endure the construction of several new cities the size of Birmingham (the requirement arising from the currently predicted population increase in the next few years). The money that would be needed to fund these massive developments can be used to reduce our debt.

In the medium term, we can expect that there will be a noticeably reduced pressure on all services dealing with the public, perhaps within 5 years.

Within ten years, by which time our population could be 3million lower than now, there will be no housing shortage. House prices will become more ‘affordable’, so that they will become more accessible to our young people. House building programmes can be aimed at replacing our old and nasty housing stock, rather than building more houses.

The falling population will remove the need for continuous infrastructure expansion, which came at a great cost to taxpayers while bringing no improvement to their lives, and caused increases to cost of living, the national debt, social tensions, and immense environmental damage.

A lower population will improve our lives in many ways: it will make our environment more beautiful, less crowded, and quieter; it will remove the discomfort and frustration associated with travel by reducing traffic volume; it will enable wildlife to proliferate by reducing pressure on their habitat; we will be able to demolish areas of squalid wasteland and have more forest, farmland, parks and wilderness. We will be able to improve our historic cities, sites, and landmarks by removing ugliness around them, which will enable growth in tourism. Eventually we could become self-sufficient in food, making us more secure.