I certainly agree wholeheartedly with the second part, and this is by and large the most important aspect and what politics should be about. I'd be interested to hear how you think we might advance on these issues when poliitics is often about relatively trivial jousting amongst vested interests.

As for population, I agree it's a global issue, but the nature of politics means that there is a focus on the short term and little appetite to address the longer term stuff. Sometimes I wonder if we had the best of all worlds - or, the least worst - in that we had membership of the EU, but at a distance, so some of the bigger issues were being looked at. We retained some sovereignty outside of the euro, so had more economic autonomy. We have a democracy, with some oversight. Not a utopia, but a sort of muddling along sommewhere in the middle.

Have we stopped discussing the funny looking bloke?

Hehe, I wonder what the SS would've done with him.

Discuss.

Strapped him to a V2 more likely.

I think he looks like John Redwood's love-child.

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. [Orwell]