 First of all, just a very warm welcome. I'm Paru Rahman. I'm chair of the Migration and Diolch Centre here at Siles and we're delighted to be able to welcome Professor Danny Dawley, who's going to give the last lecture in a series that we've had this year. So I just want to say a few words about that to put the lecture into some sort of context first. So during this academic year, the centre has held a series of seminars and lectures which have explored the relationship between the upcoming general election and Britain's migrant communities and British immigration policy more generally. What we've tried to do is offer an alternative perspective to the dominant narratives that we hear every day about migrants and immigration in this country. As I'm sure many of you will be painfully aware, much public debate is often extremely discriminatory towards migrants and also serves to divide the communities that we all live in. So you could say that we live in a climate of migration misinformation in a way which is circulated by the media. It's reinforced by politicians and migrant communities within this discourse are routinely racialized. They're judged in very narrow academic terms considering about how much they contribute to the state or how much they take out of the state. We're very quick to make moral judgments about the deserving and the undeserving genuine refugees versus so-called asylum, bogus asylum seekers. And it's really in this context, it's in this context of this sort of debate that we've had in the news today, the news about the ongoing tragic migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. And of course the trouble is that the internal debate, the domestic debate is not separate from what's going on in the wider context. So one clearly informs the other. And it's exacerbated by the way that politicians are dealing with this so-called situation as a form of risk management about where calculations have to be made. It's based on perceived threats to nation states and projected outcomes. And I would suggest that there's no sure way for us to lose sight of our common humanity. I don't really know how else we can explain the terms within which this discourse is taking place currently in this country. And of course although this might be for multiple reasons, historic reasons as well as the politics of what's going on at the moment, the human tragedy which is unfolding before us, is quite clearly partly due to the racist and discriminatory immigration policy which is run by the states in Europe and elsewhere. Somehow that's become rather invisible in this current debate. So one question I would ask is what leads to this invisibility. And I would suggest that it's sometimes an outcome of the very narrow vantage points that we adopt when we look at these issues, and I'm including academics in that. So in this last in our series, I'm really delighted that Professor Danny Dawling is going to help us by helping us look at the bigger picture. Okay, and I think he's going to do that very well. Danny Dawling is Professor of Geography at Oxford. He joined in 2013 when he took up the Helford Macindor Professorship. Some of you might know him through his cartographic work, his cartographic award, I'm not sure. But the World Mapus website, if you're not familiar with it, I would recommend it to you very highly. It's absolutely fantastic and engaging way of learning about issues that might otherwise seem a bit obscure to us. Today he's going to tell us the story of Britain's diminishing role in the world and the growing inequality that we see within the borders of the nation state. And he's very well equipped to do this. Earlier in the week I actually went online to have a look at an overview of what Professor Dawling has published recently, and I have to say that I was tempted to go and have a lie down in a darkened room afterwards because he is prolific. There's many articles out there. He writes on a regular basis on the Times Higher Education Supplements and The Guardian, Newt Statesman interviewed on the BBC. And that's really what I find most engaging about him, that Danny Dawling is not an academic that stays within the confines of his ivory town. He goes out there, gets his hands dirty and puts his argument across in any environment that he can. So today Professor Dawling is going to paint this wider picture for us, which explains migration, I think, in a whole series of international relationships and historic events that have been unfolding over time. And I have been told that he's also going to show us some new maps. So I'm going to hand over to Danny Dawling. He's going to talk for about 50 minutes, and that will be followed by questions. So please join me in giving him a very warm welcome. Thank you very much for that. I'm not actually that prolific. I just work with a lot of other people. And I was just adding it up in my head, and I think the majority of people I've worked with in the last few years have either been migrants themselves, they've crossed international borders, or they're the children of migrants. I've worked with very few people like me who are not the children of international migrants. I was also glad that you mentioned our common humanity, because I've put down a tag at GeoViews. The maps you're going to see later are produced by Ben Henig, who's from Germany, originally well. So it's learned all over the place. He's a normal European, so he doesn't really know where he's from. But you're going to be the only people who can see these maps, because Ben needs to produce his world Atlas of Humanity. So if you like any of the maps I show you, can you just tweet Ben, get your Atlas made to GeoViews, and we'll move the world a little bit forward. I'm going to talk for about ten minutes, quarter an hour about the UK context and the election, and then I'm going to go worldwide, because it's a lot less depressing to look at the planet as a whole, rather than this place. I have reasons in my head as to why the UK is in such a bad place at the moment. You shouldn't think it's always going to be like this, but it is particularly bad right now. I like drawing maps. Here's a normal map of the last election result. On normal maps everything always looks blue, no matter what happens, which is why normal maps are a bad idea. The other two maps are what are called two types of population cartogram, and they make areas where people live proportional to number of people, so that you can actually see who wins elections and where they win them. For those of you who are not familiar with British politics, where this Labour left, blue is the Conservatives, there are lots of other parties, they're not as important as they think they are. The purple areas here are the constituencies which the Conservatives won last time. They're suburban, they're all over the place, they tend to be pretty boring areas. I'm afraid if you don't have a vote in one of those places, you don't really matter. Come May the 7th. I'm not saying you shouldn't bother voting, but if you happen to have a vote in one of those places, if you're a student you can often have a vote in two places or three, or as many as you like, you're only supposed to vote once, but you can register anywhere where you have an interest, and if you haven't seen one of those purple places, that's the place you should be voting if you want to affect the election. If you're wondering what the parties are playing at, why does Labour produce those mugs with control immigration, it's because of that map, that's who they are, and because of their lack of moral fibre as well. The Office of National Statistics now produces these things as well, because the basic map essentially is a map of sheep and white people. If you want to see what Britain's really like, you can't use a normal map. This is the change in voting from 2001 to 2010 in the country. Many parts of the country actually moved away from the Conservative Party. Scotland moved away, Sheffield, where I used to live at this time, moved away. Oxford East, where I now live, actually saw a swing towards Labour. Running in South West London and Surrey, and Essex, that the Conservatives became more popular. That was very bad news for them in 2010, because they already held most of the constituencies in those areas. If you're a political party, you want to gain votes in areas where you're doing okay, but you're not winning so that you can win. You don't really want to gain that many votes in areas where you can't win, they're not going to give you a MP, and you really can't be bothered about winning yet more votes in areas where you're already extremely popular, because again, you've already got the MP. That is what is happening to the Conservative Party. At the moment, that is why they couldn't form a government in 2010. These two maps show you the share of the vote for the Libyles and the Conservatives put together, the bluer areas where they do better in the vote, the grey areas where they do worse, and the map, which is further away from me, is showing you how that turns into seats, because the first pasta post system polarises votes. If you've got a slight advantage in an area, you can win all the constituencies in the county just by being slightly ahead in the polls. So in Oxfordshire, the Conservatives win five of the six constituencies, but they're not in a majority anywhere. This is probably the most important graph that I'm going to show you in terms of the election. It's a segregation index for Conservative voters. So it's showing you the proportion of Conservative voters you'd have to move around the country at each election from 1918 onwards, right through to 2010, if you were to get an even distribution of Conservative voters everywhere. The Conservative Party used to be more polarised in particular areas in the 1920s and 1930s, including in Scotland where they did well, and other parts of the country which were more Protestant and more Unionist. That concentration of Conservative votes in particular areas reduced over time. The party went up and down, they won elections, lost elections, but they spread out more. You ended up with Conservative voters everywhere, and with people voting for other parties everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s. Then everything changed in October 1974. In October 1974, there was a second election. It's worth remembering that because we could have a second election this time, or even a third election. In October 1974, the people of the south-east of England swung to the Conservative Party in large numbers. Not enough for the Conservatives to win the election, Labour actually won that election, but that's your little blip there. Down again slightly in 1979 with Thatcher's mini landslide, and then ever since 1979, the Conservative vote in this country has become more and more polarised into the south-east, into the home counties, into the affluent parts of the country. People have stopped voting Conservative in the north. They've stopped voting Conservative entirely in Scotland. I didn't meet a single Conservative when I lived in Sheffield for ten years. They stopped existing, no Conservative councillors. And the polarisation is continuing. If that graph goes up again on May 7, there is no way the Conservatives will be able to form a majority government, even if they actually get an increase in their vote, because they'll be getting the votes in the areas where they don't need them. This is polls up until Christmas. They've kind of bubbled along since then. It's not a particularly good graph because it appears to go down for the others because UKIP has suddenly taken out, but essentially there's a rise in the others. The one interesting thing that's happened since Christmas, to my point of view, is that in the last few weeks we've seen university students move so that now more university students are planning to vote green than vote Conservative. There are quite a lot of university students who vote Conservative, but no longer as many as those who plan to vote green. If university students could only ever get their act together, they're an incredibly powerful force. There's about two million of them. They're highly geographically concentrated. They just need to pick one party and stick with it and make some deals with that party and they could hand that party a series of seats. But student politics isn't clever enough to realise it's worth doing that. This graph looks very similar to that graph of the polarisation of the Conservative vote. It's a share in income of the 1%, the best of 1% in society for six countries. The countries weren't picked by me, but they're a nice summary of what's happened. Everywhere in the rich world was extremely unequal around about 1913. Inequalities have increased, so when those graphs come down, that means the rich are taking a smaller share, things are getting better for everybody else. Inequalities reduced because of the cost of the First World War. They reduced because of the fear generated by the Russian Revolution, which was a real tangible fear for the 1%. They saw what happened to the 1% in Russia. They carried on reducing throughout the Second World War and through to the 1970s. Then with economic crisis in the 70s, different countries went in different directions. The UK went in the strangest direction of all. In the 1970s, of those six countries, the UK was the second most equitable. Only Sweden was more equal than the UK. This is a country I grew up in, this is a country I can remember. It is not a country that you're told about very much now, that we were second only to Sweden amongst large countries, but we were. Then you'll see that the UK line hops over country after country after country as we try to limit the United States and as our 1% take more and more, and the rest are left with less and less. If you include estimates for tax evasion, the 1% are currently taking about 15% of all income. So it's a very, very economically divided country. The most economically divided country in Europe. The poorest fifth of Britain are by far the worst off in Western Europe. Our median household is living on a lower income than the median, the middle household in France and Germany. Politicians in Britain never tell you this, that the median is doing better in France and Germany. And that's before housing costs. And we have the highest housing costs for the smallest housing. So part of the underlying political rhetoric of what's gone on in the UK is people have lost out. They felt they've lost out. They felt things would be getting relatively worse. And since 2009, 2010, absolutely worse. And they've been told that the reason they've lost out is the immigrants. Not the people who are taking 15% of all income. I promise not to show you any other graph as complicated as this. Again, this is another kind of statistic which just isn't shown very much. And it's showing for all large European countries in the USA the proportion of public spending as a share of GDP. The UK is the blue dots with a red line. And if you go right to the end, you'll see that we now have the lowest share of public spending of any of these countries. We are the sentinel nation for people who want to see what happens if you let the free market rip and cut the state as much as you can. We have now managed to overtake the United States of America and spend less on our public services than the United States of America is spending on its. This is painted as inevitable as the only way you can go. But if you look at those countries at the top, which are the ones at the bottom of the key, you'll see that there are many different options about how you can organise the state and how you can live. If nobody tells you that's possible, then you don't tend to imagine those kinds of futures. And you can accept the idea that we just have to cut and cut and cut. The difference between the Labour and the Conservative parties in terms of their spending plans for the next five years is about that on the graph. It matters, it's important, but when you get to vote, if you haven't delivered one of those constituencies that matters, the decision you're making is about moving the UK down to there or to there. Nobody's given the option of becoming an average European country. That's not on the cards of any party which has much of a chance of getting very close to power. Even the SNP are not talking about moving Labour towards heading towards the median European spending. I'm going to show you some of Ben's maps now of Europe. If you like these maps, don't forget to tweet your views and just tell them to do more of them. This is just a simple way of looking at things like unemployment. We've shaped the countries of Europe according to how many people are registered unemployed. You shouldn't necessarily take this as being a measure of economic failure. You can get your unemployment rate down to zero quite easily without creating many jobs. You do it by having the most draconian set of sanctions ever and the lowest rates of unemployment benefit. People will then do anything because they have to do anything. In the last year, the sanctions to people who are on benefits in Britain, the total amount of money they've been fined if they've broken one of numerous little regulations, has been more money than the entire fines handed out by all the magistrates courts in the country. That's very recent. It's very recent that that has happened. If you do that, you can get unemployment down very low. Zooming out now to the European level. This is the European Parliament. These are the major party groups in the European Parliament. The blue group is the Conservative group in the European Parliament. The red group is the socialist or if you like the Labour group in the European Parliament. Because almost all of the rest of Europe has democracy, you can actually vote on your vote matters unlike in the UK, there is a wider set of parties, there's a different set of choices, and so you have more colours there. Now I'm going to show you those votes distributed across the continent. The first thing is to look at the distribution of Conservative voters across Europe. It looks rather like the population distribution of Europe. That's where the Conservative voters are. There's Conservative voters in Spain and Portugal and in France. There's Conservative voters in Germany and lots of Conservative voters in Eastern Europe and still quite a lot there were back then, there aren't any more, but there were back then in Greece. You might have noticed that there aren't any Conservative voters in the UK. That's because people in the UK were not given the choice of voting for a European party that was Conservative. Our Conservative party in this country no longer belongs to a Conservative group in Europe. It belongs to a small group of right-wing extremists who are popular in a few parts of Eastern Europe as well. So that's the group that our current coalition leaders belong to. It's a very odd situation to be in. Here are the Liberals in Europe. We have a few Liberals in Europe but not very many. If we were a more normal European country we would have more Liberals. That's partly because we'd have PR which would give the Liberals more of a say nationally at Westminster and that would help them in other elections as well. Here's the so-called European Freedom and Direct Democracy party which is UKIP and their friends in Italy. Again, this is a fairly extreme thing. There are extreme parties across Europe. In a way the rise of UKIP is kind of a good thing because you don't really become a normal European country until you get a small semi-fashes party emerge. So the emergence of UKIP in a way could be seen as a signal that we are becoming more European but most of Europe really doesn't have many people in that particular block of voting. Here's the Greens and you see we're behind the curve with Greens. We've got a nascent Green Party. Not a properly developed Green Party yet whereas most of the rest of Europe has a much more properly developed Green Party. Again, because of the voting system in Britain that holds new parties back. I'm going to look out from Europe and look out from the UK and look out towards the world because it's a much more interesting picture if you begin to look at what's happening to humanity across the planet. It's a much less depressing picture than if you just concentrated what's happening in the UK and it may partly explain what's happening in the UK. I've been looking at these kind of maps and images for over 20 years so I'm very used to them but almost all of you are going to see these for the first time so I'll try not to go for it too quickly but if you feel you're getting lost by what you see in a minute that's because you're normal and your brain isn't as elastic as some very weird people's brains are. So don't feel surprised if you can't follow all of this. There's a lot of images to show. 7.3 billion people at the moment on the planet. It's not that many. It can appear to be a lot but it really isn't necessarily a huge number. Here we've just drawn a dot of light for each of those people but now what we're going to do is going to take the normal map and transform it. So instead of having... well it isn't even land area that map it's a really strange map that you normally see instead of having the normal map we're going to make each small part of the world proportional to the number of people who live there so that you can see what humanity looks like on the map. This is the planet of people that you're living on. So there's a normal map again and you'll see that the Sahara will begin to disappear the Himalayas will begin to disappear India will grow because there's over a billion people in India China will grow because again there's over a billion people in China Europe will shrink because it is a small part of the world of humanity getting smaller because we are having fewer and fewer children and that is the world that you are living in and what we're going to do now is show you various things draped over that world so you can get an idea of where you are what planet you're on and what's happening. So first of all major cities here are some of the largest cities on the planet and as you can see they're distributed fairly evenly over the population but there are parts of... well certainly Africa parts of India and China where they are going to have a few more major cities in future because of the number of people that are there urbanisation is likely to carry on at a greater rate there than elsewhere simply because of the weight of humanity in contrast Latin America is already the most urbanised part of the planet we just zoom into Europe again and I'll do some more pictures of the UK before we zoom out to try to keep some of you with me who I may have lost you'll see that we are a large chunk of Europe we are a significant chunk of the population of Europe if we leave the European Union it is a big issue possibly it would help mainland Europe move forward faster than if we stay with it it's an interesting question to ask and I'll end talking about that but we are a large part of Europe and we are largely a series of cities and the bulk of us is down here in the south-east in London Spain is Madrid, France is Paris centred Greece really is simply Athens and a few outlying places so when people tell you there's a Greek economic crisis they're really talking about one city that's how it looks from the point of view of human beings so this is this country zoomed in to get an idea about where matters and it's similar to those maps of elections I showed you before so I have just come from that little city squeeze between Birmingham and London I'm going to show you these maps now shaded by something else this is the regions of England and the Bowers of London and the size of them has been made proportional to the amount of money spent by houses and flats each year just to give you an idea about what the housing market looks like if that's confusing or if you want to get angry that's the amount of money spent every year on flats and houses so if you take two digits off that and get it to take one percent of it you work out how much money estate agents are making each year which is a lot of money but you can also see just how precarious the UK housing market is you can see the crash that happened in 2008-9 you can see how we're building up potentially towards another crash the more prices rise the more likely a crash will be slow down the crash is somewhat less likely I'll skip that one this is an attempt to look at overseas money we officially count as a tax haven under international definitions of tax havens again we're a strange country and just one more use of this kind of map to show you here's nuclear power stations and we've put rings around them at 20km and 30km and I think at 80km which are the kind of levels that people worry about if somebody blows one of these things up we have an earthquake we're lucky we don't have too many earthquakes exactly the same map but drawn over people and you can do the same thing for trauma centres or universities whatever you like and the interesting thing here is you'll see that in London or at least this part of London we're not that near the exclusion zone of a nuclear power station it's not because we have a lot of people here because there are a lot of people living up in Yorkshire and Manchester and Newcastle but they're allowed to live within that distance of a nuclear power station they're just less important people the reason I think you can say this is that Ben has drawn the same maps for France and Germany and surprise surprise Paris and Bonn and Berlin they're all excluded as well so it's just different ways of looking at data and looking at it over people and here is Germany here's a detailed map of Germany the colouring I'll show you for the whole world in a minute the colouring over there is population change the blue areas have been losing population population is going down population is going down in most of Europe in Italy they only have 1.3 children per couple they've had only 1.3 children per couple for years and years and years in Barcelona it's below 1.1 if you're worried about population and immigration you'd be sending boats down to the Libyan coast to bring people in to make up for all the children we have not been having in Europe for so long but in Germany the population is going down in the east in particular as people leave but in the industrial reau and in the red areas of suburbanisation it's increasing slightly here's the worldwide picture of population change the world hit peak baby in 1990 we've never had as many babies again as a number of babies we had in 1990 so those babies most of them have survived are aged 25 at the moment the world may never have as many 25 year olds again as it has now there are a lot of 25 year olds in the world there are a lot of 25 year olds fairly near the edge of Europe it's one reason why quite a few people are trying to come into Europe because there aren't quite a lot of people but we've had deceleration of population since 1971 it looks absolutely set to continue the average family in the world have three children now their children are dead set on only having two children each if you only have two children you have population stability the world is set to stop growing in terms of people sometime within the next 100 years I think near as 70 years UN estimates vary from saying we're going to get to 9 billion to 10 to 11 it all depends on mini baby booms going on at the moment globally only in the red areas are you predicted relatively rapid change and in the past all those estimates ended up being wrong so in the Yemen there was very high change predicted I would be very surprised if that increase in the Yemen actually happens it's always somewhere where there's a disaster where you have relatively high population change when things go wrong for people they have more babies when there's war people have more babies and there's famine people have more babies when there's economic uncertainty people have more babies when you get rid of a welfare state people have more babies because what you do if you're not going to get a pension you have a baby, that's your pension when there's stability, when things calm down when you get a choice when women manage to get the slightest piece of power ever so small you have fewer babies you can measure the power of women by the number of babies that people have essentially men tend to want an extra half to an extra one baby than women if any of you are female there's various good reasons for why this goes on only one of the two of you has actually got to have the thing right and after you've done it once or twice being asked to do it a third or a fourth time over half the world is now below fertility replacement level this is an incredibly good news story unbelievably good news story it's coupled with an amazing news story about infant mortality about three or four years ago we had a 5% drop as far as we can tell in infant mortality in one year probably I think the best news story on the planet in all history 5% drop in babies dying in one year they've been going down and down and down the faster infant mortality drops the fewer babies people choose to have so there are very very good things going on worldwide and I'm happy to talk in questions about it but it gets you out of the kind of depression of austerity cuts and idiot racist policies in Britain these kind of good news stories it's also linked to these policies of course because if we are heading for a world of stability and a dramatic reduction and shortage of young people worldwide then in 40 or 50 or 60 years time when people look back and say what do you mean you are trying to stop young people coming into your country they'll find it hard to understand what was going on now it is not hard to see why people think in the way they do at the moment because it's been such a long time since we last saw a population for worldwide the last population for worldwide was probably shortly after the black death and after the black death the power of labour rose people's wages rose there was a shortage of human beings and we're heading again to a shortage of human beings there's already a shortage of human beings in China that's what happens if you have so few children for so long in China in China the average number of children per couple had already fallen from six to just about two before the one child policy came in it fell from six to two in a generation and then goes down to just over one so you have a huge number of people who have two parents and four grandparents that enables you to move forward economically very very fast because your adult population are not spending their time looking after children because they are not children but it's a thing you can only pull off once you can only do that once all the blue areas in China are all the areas of China which are now currently falling in terms of total population so the largest part of the world in terms of people where population is falling is in China China also contains those red areas those are parts of China which are increasing in population not because people are having babies but because people from the countryside are walking in to those areas and the second largest part of the world with population falls is Europe the data is slightly out of date for the USA since 2008 the USA has now joined the club and the population of the USA is falling in terms of fertility an estimate of where the wealth of the world is or GDP over people and then I'll skip over the environmental maps but we really should look at these things from the point of view of people if you look at earthquakes physical geographers love earthquakes if an earthquake happens in the middle of nowhere it's not very important if it happens to many people if it does matter and again look at southern Europe and you'll see that near to here we have a large population who are at risk of earthquakes volcanoes distributed over the population rather than over space tropical storms and I'm going to show you a little animation now about the cold winter of 2013 and the point of showing you these various things is that we are getting climate change we're beginning to be able to measure the effects of climate change and to see it come in and to see the effects over us as a group over humanity as a whole who is affected when the cold weather comes in which people are most affected I'll show you about water now these are the kind of things that matter people need water so this is the rains as they fall over the population of the planet we have enough water for everybody there was lots of worries about water running out but it would be good if people were to move or stay near to where the water sources were and were not to move and populate areas without water particularly California if you've been watching the news last few weeks but that gives you an idea about how the monsoons move across the population and the water matters in terms of producing the food this is just a very different way of looking at things than the point of view of can we have immigration controls and will those ships carry on bringing the food to us I'm going to stretch the world even further now just to make sure I do lose almost everybody and then I'll bring it back to people but here's the planet draw on instead of drawing areas proportional to people I'm drawing it proportional to water or rather I should say Ben's drawing it so if you like these things don't forget to tweet Geofuse and tell him to get the Atlas done and this is the planet changing month by month as the rainfall moves across the planet these are the kind of things we need to worry about with 7.3, 8.3, 9.3 billion people this is what will matter because we need a stable planet we need people not facing drought if we have people facing drought and destitution it's not that large numbers will suddenly migrate across to other places those kind of silly fears about mass migration because of people leaving areas people will have more children if their lives are made more precarious and we don't really need to get up to 11, 12 or 13 billion people this is the world with every little square of latitude and longitude drawn proportional to the population growth I think in the last 25 years and you'll see we've got population growth in the UK we've actually got population growth in London and the South-East we're up to 63 million people now UK has just under 1% of the world's adults and only half a percent of the world's children living in the UK the growth has been concentrated in India and in Africa and to a lesser extent in those parts of China which are the urban parts that's Chongqing, the world's largest city which is the largest area of China that you can see there and if we now look at population decline this is each little square of latitude and longitude drawn in proportion to the number of people who no longer live there because the population has gone down the largest area of population decline in the world is many rural parts of China all drawn here in proportion to the number of people who no longer live in those parts and again Europe and in particular Russia Russia has absolutely collapsed in terms of population in the last 25 years Eastern Europe has been collapsing you've got a small reduction down there in South Africa and you can see the declines in various parts of the UK over that period some parts decline, some parts grow the most interesting part of the world in terms of tomography at the moment is probably China simply because of what's happened and what's happened so fast so this animation is going too fast for you but it's just showing you how different the map of the working age population is in China as it moves towards the coast to where the children are many of them are being left with their grandparents remember there's a lot of grandparents there won't be a lot of grandparents in the future the children are being left with their grandparents the parents are in dormitories in the large cities making iPhones so that you can Facebook your friends from anywhere in London and it's a dramatic changing picture we have to worry about food in the world but we don't have to worry that much about food we currently produce enough food for everybody on the planet we probably produce slightly too much we're wasting according to some estimates half of the food and at least half a billion of us including me, heading up towards a billion of us are eating too much of it people worry about fertilizer they worry about can we carry on producing as much food but the brilliant thing about food unlike other items is that if you consume a lot of it it's not good for you and if you imagine that wasn't the case if you imagine that you could eat ten times more food than somebody else you could suddenly see what a problem you'd have with food here's a pattern of water insecurity at the moment which populations have the most insecure water and hence where the crops are most likely to fail and I'm going to show you where people are not so this is the inverse this is areas made large if they're a long way away from where people are and we're getting more of these areas we're actually getting a return to wilderness in many parts of the world as you get more of the population as people come into the cities more and more parts of the planet are emptying out of people if you want to see this at a very advanced stage go to Japan and go out to Tokyo and go out to the farmlands of Japan where the elderly are farming the fields and go into forests there and watch what happens to forests when nobody's looking after the forests so this is already happening here's Germany in the UK in terms of where you need to go if you want to get away from people but the good news about this if you're being optimistic about the future is as we concentrate into cities there are more and more places to go not necessarily that far away if you want to get away from it all you don't have to fly to the South Pacific to do that made a seventh in all of this is a blip there's a much much bigger story of what's happening to humanity going on than what happens with the UK government in this country it does matter, it matters how you vote it matters how our politicians behave but they're just a small part of a small continent which itself is becoming less and less significant over time it just finds it hard to accept that and in particular the UK finds it really really hard to accept that or certain people in the UK people whose parents were incredibly powerful and rich and whose grandparents were even richer and I can see why they find it hard if granny and granddad were some of the most powerful people on the planet if your great great grandparents were slave owners and known plantations as is in the case of our prime minister then what do you do? Do you say I come from a legacy which isn't particularly great or do you say it was good and we need to bring the great back into Britain and we need to start winning the global race again and I think if you look at the economic decline of the country and look at the top echelons you can begin to think how they think and why they think because accepting what's really happened is very difficult for them to do just show you a few more pictures and then I'll wrap up this is a famous image, this is the Earth at Night you'll have seen this image but over a normal map on a normal map when you see this image you think that's where people are and the dark areas are where people are not this is very different because people are everywhere here we've got rid of all the places where people don't live and it alters the meaning of the map entirely if an area is dark on this map either people to have no electricity which is a declining proportion of people on the planet all the people in that area are clever enough that they're not wasting their electricity powering lights to shine up at the sky so that a satellite can pick it up so this is now a map of light pollution rather than a map of where people are just by altering the projection about how we look at it and the brightest part now is Cairo and Anial about five years earlier the brightest part was Tokyo but Japan shut down a quarter of its electricity generation because of the tsunami and part of that meant they had to turn some of the neon lights off in Tokyo they were a bit worried that some of the elderly were going to die in Japan because they couldn't afford to run air conditioning as it was we didn't have an increase in deaths amongst the elderly in Japan people started walking up stairs rather than using the lift but you need a disaster like a tsunami to be able to see that you can actually survive with a quarter less energy here are all the countries of the world drawn by population they look very strange but most of them you wouldn't know what they look like anyway here's the centre of the world from a human point of view it's in India it's actually here Ben and I thought of buying it we could have bought a small plot very cheaply but then we realised it moves as people move it's there in India and the reason it's the centre is that when you take all the oceans out this is the map you get and if you can remember way back to the beginning and the normal map of the world which is centred with the UK at eye level in the middle because it's such an important place that's naturally where it has to be the United Kingdom is a small cold little rock on the edge of humanity it's just a different projection a different way of looking at where we are and that's the planet you live in that's where the people are and it's stabilising that'll be your future and your children's future there's even a possibility that people might start to migrate towards where it's warmer and a bit more comfortable to live even with a bit of global warming it's a bit cold in some of these latitudes but there are things we've got to worry about this is how many planets you need if you all behave like the people in these countries so we always have to go to the USA if everybody behaved like people in the USA we'd need 4 planets but for us it's 3 so we're not doing that well that's the red areas I think Japan gets down to 2 Japan's very very good but you still need 2 planets which is too many if we take the same colours but put it over the population it doesn't look so bad because it's the areas with fewer people which are behaving most badly but if you do the same thing and put it over money which is more proportional to the actual amount of pollution caused it looks worse and if you look at the size of China and the size of the USA they're similar because China and the USA are both polluting by the same amount it's just that China has many more people in it than the USA and individually those people are polluting far less each here's the world shaped by the number of aeroplanes flying over people's heads every year there are more and more people on the planet who never fly the number of people who are never flying is going up far faster than the number of people who ever get to fly and here's the world shaped by GDP and this brings me back to UK politics I'll never forget the last Labour government Gordon Brown saying how it was important to get GDP growth up to 2%, 3% a year wanting to get GDP growth up to 2% or 3% a year is wanting this map to become more and more unequal wanting to have economic growth in those areas which have the richest economies to begin with is a recipe for growing inequality what's actually happened since 2008 is the most remarkable crossover where North America and Europe and to a much lesser extent Japan have seen economic decline and in Africa from a very low base you have for the first time in 40 years growth in Asia continual growth in Latin America continual growth and you have what the economists told us would always happen naturally we're beginning to get what looks like a very slight convergence in world economies because of the collapse of a market system just half a dozen more maps and then I'll finish so please think of some questions to ask me this is what North America looks like from the point of view of people the colours are altitude so all those people living at high altitude living in Mexico City North America is a sea of cities here's South America, even more urbanised if anybody's from Australia and New Zealand this is how small you are compared to your neighbours and here's East Asia and again this animation just to show you how dramatic the changes are the difference between where the children are their parents and the grandparents are across China South Asia, mainly India, Bangladesh and Pakistan so many people living in Bangladesh although the fertility rate in Bangladesh has come right down you can see the detail in the delta because of the number of people who are living there the Middle East where we have some of the high rates of population growth at the moment because we have some of the greatest instability at the moment here's Africa and if you look carefully you can spot Lagos and large parts of Nigeria an idea where people are there's Russia shrunken down to be largely Moscow and a few outlying parts so it worries our politicians enormously what's happening in Russia but in terms of people you're looking at a country that's becoming smaller than Turkey and there's the European Union and a few bits further east just to end with politics is election just say something about it we don't know this is the most unpredictable election that has been for many years it's at least 1992 people got 1992 wrong because people lied you're too young to remember 1992 people lied to the pollsters they said they're going to vote Labour but they didn't mean it because enough people wanted to keep their taxes low but they knew they were naughty they knew they were being selfish and they told pollsters they're going to vote Labour and they didn't so the Conservatives won that last election of those long conservative years people could be lying again to pollsters now but if they're telling the truth to pollsters then this looks incredibly close this country has no constitution so there are no rules for what happens in the event of what's most likely to happen in short an old woman calls Elizabeth has to decide what to do and suddenly turns up at her house in a car and says they want to form a government the newspapers and even the BBC will tell you that there are various rules but there are no rules so it's going to be interesting to watch what happens but also how it's painted how it's portrayed how the result is said to matter or not to matter if you're trying to work out how to vote and you worry about migration and immigration it is very difficult in a way it is relatively easy if you don't look like what UKIP stands for although if you would like the United Kingdom to rapidly become a normal European country I do suspect that the fastest way in which that would happen is UKIP doing well because if UKIP did well and formed part of a coalition and the Conservatives say and immediately changed immigration rules and had a referendum and we left the EU can you think how fast people who felt not welcome in this country would leave to go to Paris or Berlin or somewhere else how many months would it take for the housing market to crash with all those people leaving the country what happens to the economy of a country when that happens I'm not advocating voting UKIP to make the UK normal but just trying to take you through the scenarios you might think that the Greens are by far the best party to vote for on these kind of issues it's always interesting to ask the Greens in detail what they really believe about immigration they tend to get a little bit worried when you do that partly because the main reason why we need to build 200 or 300,000 homes a year is because we're lucky and more people are coming to the country no politician ever linked the housing crisis to immigration the two are absolutely linked if we had no net immigration we'd have to replace houses that wore out but you wouldn't need more housing we need more housing because more people have arrived if more people don't arrive you won't need more housing a quite a lot of people in the Green party are quite worried about building the housing where people want to come to which often includes on the edges of green belts in southern cities within cycling distance in the middle of those cities there's a common argument that's made on the Greens' side of politics that if you let people into a country that pollutes more everybody coming will increase the amount of pollution that happens it would be far better if people didn't come where they polluted less it's a very short term argument because one thing that happens when people migrate across borders is that they almost always, not always but almost always revert their fertility to very near the average of the group that they join so the faster we let people move around the planet the faster the population decline will occur because when people turn up in the United States they have fewer children than they would have had if they stayed in Mexico when people get into Italy from Egypt they have fewer children in Italy than they would have had in Egypt so if you're really worried about world population and pollution you want as much migration as possible for it to happen and the other good reason for migration occurring is that those parts of the world which are aging rapidly aging will be less of an issue not everything can be done by fit elderly people if you have migration of the young but we're a side issue the big issue is India and China China is aging, India isn't and if you really want to look at where something needs to happen it's over that side of the world and really much less over here thank you very much, I think that's 50 minutes please think of questions to ask me, thank you