IF you travel on the magnificent TGV network in France, along with your ticket to board you will also receive a seat allocation.

That means you can travel with all the comfort of a reserved place. Compare that with the packed daily commuter train from Surrey into Waterloo – or even worse, the desperate scramble to grab the tiniest space inside (or out) on the tired rolling stock lumbering into Mumbai – and you’ll have a view about the horrors of over-crowding.

Having incurred the wrath of the anti-Darwinian zealots, veteran naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has plunged into a bath-tub of shark-infested water after raising concerns for the survival of the planet in the face of the runaway population increase.

For a man steeped in a life-time’s observance of the natural world and the evolution of species, the implications are obvious. Coop up too many chickens together and they’ll soon start to peck each other’s feathers.

On a world stage, up to quite recently at least, we’ve been able to get away with expanding into open – or other people’s – territory with relative impunity. First it was the animals, then the colonialists displaced (that’s the most charitable word for it) native populations who from earliest time had lived in harmony with their environment, be it Aboriginals in Australia or American Indians in the New World.

And still modern-day settlers are pressing on with evicting indigenous populations who now have nowhere to go. So they are corralled into seething, resentful reservations, while their own numbers inexorably increase. The inevitable result of competition for increasingly scarce resources between directly opposed ideologies and backgrounds is institutional enmity and conflict.

Over the past century the world’s population has increased by a staggering seven billion; it is projected to reach nine billion by 2050. Such numbers are hard to contemplate. We have become accustomed to hearing such huge figures trotted out recently during the bail-out of world economies that they begin to mean very little.

To learn that 700 million people were registered to cast their votes in India’s election is just as difficult to comprehend. When you fly over countries, even our small island, it’s easy to look down at the land stretching out below and think, what’s the problem? Surely there’s plenty of room to absorb all.

But at the same time, these days, through television, satellites and the like, we are shown the indisputable entirety of our world. We’re now faced with considering very real limits.

Population growth is, of course, a hugely emotive subject snared with religious principle and tradition. There is no place here to launch a theological campaign about either the right to bear children or the natural instinct to reproduce the species. Procreation is certainly no sin, and on grounds of natural selection, the expansion of the gene pool is generally regarded as positive.

And the numerical increase of souls and bodies on the planet is matched by the hot political potato of how they circulate and where they settle. If you discount historic bursts of xenophobic excesses, culture and commerce have benefited hugely from influx and racial mix-and-match – it’s what gives us the confidence to indulge in international competition in sport or any other non-bellicose activity.

But assimilation does not tread an easy path. If your opinions are influenced by the columns of some newspapers, you could be convinced that UK plc has degenerated into the world’s social security one-stop, where the government appears to have abdicated any attempt to regulate the inward strangling flood of spongers and miscreants expelled or surreptitiously implanted from the mire of their own making.

Unless, like Australia, which has just announced that it will be reducing the amount of immigrants allowed to settle as their requirements for skilled workers from outside has dried up, you impose a draconian limit to entry, there’s never going to be a wholly acceptable balance struck.

Moral and economic aspects of the privilege to settle are greater than simply squatters’ rights. Which is probably why in the UK, for example, it has become such a sensitive issue. Repeated ministerial assertions that ‘undesirable’, uneconomic migration is being controlled are constantly disputed by local authorities, schools and social services, who are in the front line in accommodating the influx.

You can see how raw is the political nerve when whistle blowers right up to opposition Members of Parliament face prosecution for a breach of ‘national security’!
Inevitably, it comes down to perceptions about prosperity and survival and yes, numbers. And it’s of particular consideration for a small defined community.

Our Chief Minister’s initial assertion that the Island’s population could be permitted to rise above 100,000 now also appears to have been a numerical stab in the dark. It’s a round figure, big enough to focus minds, but apparently has less relevance to specific economic or demographic forecasting.

Much of the hot air it generated is likely to have been more a gut-reaction against the potential destruction of the environment than a considered rebuttal of his economic theories to address the ‘black hole’.

Short-sighted nimbyism, or a genuine concern for the integrity of the status quo? You takes your choice.

So while the ‘accommodation game’ is an imperfect science, the arguments are set to run. Indeed, they’ve already been rehearsed between those who would limit incomers on any grounds and those who warn that communities such as our own would contract and flounder if we didn’t attract new resource-generating blood.

But it remains highly emotive and with predictions of economic and climate-driven factors likely to exacerbate the dilemma, governments are under extreme pressure to slam the doors shut regardless and declare: ‘Full up inside.’