Dear Polly,

I often read what you have to say, because it usually makes good sense to me - something I find greatly lacking in the media generally. I found this also to be the case with what you wrote in today's Guardian ("Blunkett is right to deny the Tories this minister's scalp") - until I got to the final paragraph, in which you express the opinion of a pure-bred Homo economicus: 

"GDP growth partly depends on population growth and helps to explain why the US streaks ahead of the EU. Size of GDP determines global power: Europe's influence will fade fast without more immigration."

After all the good sense I have read of yours, I can hardly believe you capable of writing such nonsense!

Britain and Western Europe (where all the immigrants want to come, of course, taking a short-cut to modern civilisation, rather than face the long, arduous task of creating their own, as the Japanese have) are overpopulated as it is. If our population were to shrink to half its present size it would be a godsend - not a catastrophe, as many mistakenly believe.

A fall in population would result in a fall in Europe's GDP and global power, you fear, concluding that [more] "people are the key to pensions and future wealth."

I find it hard to believe that you, of all people, can be so blind and narrow-minded.

Please, Polly, write and tell me that you are not, that someone else wrote today's comment for you, or at least added that final paragraph . . .

Or is there no one in this country - apart from myself, of course - with any sense?

Quite apart from arguments relating to the sustainability of maintaining  Europe's current population (certainly in the manner to which it has become accustomed, and is such an attraction to others), what relationship are future generations going to have to British and European history, prehistory and culture when the majority of them are no longer of European descent? How are conflicts between native Europeans and an ever increasing number of non-Europeans going to be avoided, considering that with some justification many will feel that they "be-long" in Europe more than non-Europeans do, just as native Africans or Americans, for example, "be-long" in Africa or America more than people of European descent).

Everywhere you look in the world there are bloody ethnic conflicts. Why, for heaven's sake, are we sowing the seeds of future conflict on soil that might otherwise be free of it, following hundreds of years of inter-European conflicts? 

Or could this, perhaps, be the twisted reason behind the present madness?