JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.
Mr. Porritt is right, there are too many people in the United Kingdom, and the only way to create a sustainable future for the United Kingdom will be to halve the population. There are many possible methods for halving the population, one might be to prohibit all and any medical treatments to persons over the age of 55. That would have two benefits, one it would quickly shrink the number of pensioners, and two, would greatly reduce the costs of the NHS. But, that would only be a partial solution as even without medical care many people over that age might linger on for decades, plus that part of the population are, for the most part, not breeding and creating the next crop of Brits. Another might be duomation a la the old Roman tradition (decimation was a form of military punishment, where 1 in 10 were killed by their cohorts, duo-mation would be slightly more drastic, but given the grave peril our planet is in, a necessary sacrifice), folks chosen at random lot, with even the royal family subject to the whims of a random number generator. But again, even after culling the population down from 60 million to 30 million, people would begin breeding away, and before long the population would grow and grow.
No, those processes might solve the problem in the short run, but they don't offer a long term fix. Here's my modest proposal on both immediately halving the population of Britain in the short term, and at the same time solving the problem of continued population growth in the long term. It's a simple solution, expel all males from the island. Anyone caught with a tallywhacker will be summarily vacated from Albion. Obviously, Northern Ireland poses some problem, given that it shares a border with Ireland, and men knowing that an entire population of women were bereft of male companionship might be tempted to sneak in if only for the sport of it. So possibly sell Northern Ireland to the highest bidder, and leave them to their own devices, then the task of patrolling the waters of Scotland, England and Wales and keeping walking tadpole factories off the shores of pristine virginal Albion would be far easier. With all the men gone from Albion, henceforth renamed Boudica in honor of one of its earliest known warrior queens, your two main problems with sustaining a green and good island would be solved.
As Boudicans adjusted to not having any men in their society, there might be minor upheavals, but the greater good would prevail and within a surprisingly short amount of time, their society would normalize. Men would be allowed to visit, but only if they were to submit to exams to prove that they have had a vasectomy, or were otherwise infertile, and never for more than a month at a time, or for more than two months in a calendar year. The citizens of Boudica would still create families, but instead of the willy nilly and capricious nature of biological reproduction that plagues our planet, Boudicans would instead have the serene and orderly process of matching prospective mothers with just the right sperm donor from special reserves of genetic material culled from only the finest men the globe has to offer. Births would be allowed in numbers just sufficient to account for the anticipated number of deaths that year, and of the women desiring to be parents, and physically capable of breeding, a lottery would be held to pick which women for that year would be allowed to attempt to breed. Special care would be given to only have female babies born, as any male children would have to be evicted from the island before they reach sexual maturity. While the particulars of how to best express sexuality in a nation without opposite sexes would be up to each individual Boudican, there would be certain accommodations made for those women who miss physical intimacies with males of the species. Boudicans would be allowed to go on holiday, just as before, with the one minor change that any pre-menopausal woman wishing to travel would be required to take oral contraceptive while travelling abroad, and be subject to a medical exam upon return, and should they be found full with child, submit to an immediate termination of their previously unapproved pregnancy. For women not interested in travelling (but still wanting for temporary male companionship), special clubs would be set up where male prostitutes, all of whom must have had a vasectomy, as well as use condoms during each sex act, would be made available for use by Boudicans at a nominal fee generously subsidized by the government. These men would only be allowed temporary terms within these 'workhouses', and would be rotated in and out on a regular basis so that clients wouldn't become too attached to any of the workers. In Boudica forming emotional attachments to a member of the opposite sex would soon be seen as a perversion of the grossest and most dangerous kind.
While this future Boudica might sound like the notion of someone writing a bit of Speculative Fiction, it's all well within the reach of modern science, and with the future of the very planet hanging in the balance, these sort of drastic measures will be required by citizens around the globe if we are to forestall the deleterious effects of our modern market economy on the fragile ecosystem Mother Gaia provides. Island nations serve as the perfect laboratories for incubating the sort of social change that would transform our planet and our relationship to it as a species. If not Boudica, then Japan, or even Australia might make excellent testing grounds for the sort of changes required to save this planet. People in the 'first world' are the worst for the planet, something must be done to keep them from living the sort of comfortable and productive lives modern technology provides. Maybe the example Boudica sets, and the success it is sure to have once all the men are removed, might start a wave of changes that will create sustainable systems throughout the globe, but somebody has to be first, and some sort of sacrifice must be made, might as well be the elimination of all the men in a particular society, in the name of Gaia, the most bountiful, it must be done.
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