from Sunday Herald, 10/8/13
Suddenly,
everyone's doing it. Following the royal baby. and the news that
Edinburgh Zoo's giant panda, Tian Tian, may be pregnant, we hear
that the birth rate in the UK is at its highest rate since 1972,
according to the Office for National Statistics. It's official:
we're bonking for Britain.
And
for Scotland - at least a little. For the astonishing news is that
Scotland's population is now higher than it has EVER been : 5,31
million - 14,000 more than the previous peak recorded in 1974.
Yet only a decade ago, we were being told that Scotland was dying
out, as the population dwindled to less than 5 million.
Back
in 2003, the Registrar General forecast that, by 2017, there would
only be 4.84m Scots. The workforce would fall by nearly 10%; the
number of under-sixteens by 80% while the number of Scottish
pensioners would increase by 25%. This was called the Demographic
Time Bomb, and we were told that public finances would be destroyed
by the greyquake.
As
recently as 2005, the First Minister of the day, Jack McConnell, was
desperately looking for ways to reverse what looked like a terminal
decline in Scottish population. And meeting resistance from
Westminster for his plans to increase immigration by, for example,
allowing foreign students to remain in Scotland after graduation.
Professor
Robert Wright of Stirling University, dismissed the Scottish
Executive's measures as too little too late: "The demographic
problem in Scotland is very, very serious," he gloomed. "The
government is very näive to believe this problem can be solved by
trying to retain a small number of foreign students."
Well,
it seems that the problem was not quite as serious as supposed, and
that under their duvets, Scots were taking matters into their own
hands, as it were. Perhaps, with diminishing incomes, people have
turned to sex as a low-cost recreational activity.
But
more important than the increase in the birth rate in recent years
(it actually dipped last year) has been the decline in the death
rate. Thanks to remarkable work by the NHS, combatting heart disease
and cancer, Scots are not popping their clogs as they were even ten
years ago. Measures like free personal care and the smoking ban in
2005 have had a remarkable impact on the health of Scots. People are
drinking less, taking few drugs and some of us are even exercising.
However,
this most remarkable demographic turnarounds in Scottish history
could not have been achieved without another significant factor:
increased immigration. Not only are more people coming to
Scotland, they are having larger families when they get here. And
this is a UK phenomenon - which takes us into rather murky waters.
