THE housing projections for Worcestershire make depressing reading for anyone even remotely concerned about the direction in which this country is headed.

A bit like the blurb for Jaws 2 – just when you thought it safe to go in the water – we have the second blueprint for the further urbanisation of our county, a document that has now been floating around for a couple of months, presumably still being subjected to ‘public scrutiny’.

The last government believed in top-down rule, a Stalinist planned approach. This manifested in bureaucrats and planners cynically regarding the map of Britain as something merely to crayon over.

Twenty-five thousand more houses needed in south Worcestershire? Hey, hand me that nice red one – I’ll shade in everything from this place called Kem-P-sey downwards to Upton and nearly everywhere else to the right and left.

All right, I’m being slightly flippant.

To their credit, the Tories have devolved the big decisions down to local level in stark contrast to their predecessors’ diktat that had more in common with the former Soviet Union rather than Great Britain.

But where precisely will this all end? I’ll answer my own question – there will, sooner or later, have to be serious population reduction.

And before the slogan-slingers start squawking, perhaps they’d like to speculate what this country will look like in 100 years’ time.

That’s not long, remember – just three generations. So, if you’re in your 20s now, any grandchildren you may have will be around in 2111.Yes, think about it… it’s not that far away.

By then – at the current growth rate of three-and-a-half million extra mouths to feed every 15 years – we will have 85-plus million souls to house, educate and provide health care for.We’ll need to build three more cities the size of the Greater London area to achieve this.

The irrevocable loss of millions of acres of agricultural land will create a country that totally depends on imports.

Population management is the most pressing issue we face.

Alarmingly, none of the major parties has any answer whatsoever to these looming realities.

Meanwhile, counties like Worcestershire must wait for the bulldozers and chainsaws to get to work reducing our everdiminishing living space.