The BBC reported on 24th August 2006 that the UK population had exceeded 60 million - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5281360.stm .  The report was from the Office Of National Statistics for the year ended 30th June 2005.

I have looked back - in 30 year increments

33,200,000   1876 (includes Ireland)
43,400,000   1906 (includes Ireland)
47,100,000   1936
54,600,000   1966 Railway modernisation as per the Beeching report
58,200,000   1996 Privatisation
70,000,000   2026 (guestimated as of 30th June)

At Sheffield Park on Saturday, I picked up an old timetable for British Rail's Western Region dated 1965, showing services on lines lost over following years.  Some were - dire - in their frequency, not fast, and looking at the "diagrams" there were a lot of trains busy doing nothing for hours on end.   I find myself wondering with a 28% increase in population since then, and modern environmental concerns at the inefficiency of modern cars for transporting people (not only fuel use, but congestion and the need for road and parking capacity) how different things might have been had the population been so much greater in those days.

 

I wonder how many/what % of that number in 1966 were UK born, compared to today's figure.

 
Why's that matter?

 

I think the demographics are as of much interest as the headline numbers,  to help understand how society has changed.

 
For the record, I was born in Devon, of native UK parents (through several generations, on both sides) in 1959.

I don't think I have managed to change society.  Well, not much, anyway. 

CfN. 

 

That makes two of us! (Although in my case 1970!) 

 

Indeed - though we need to be very careful about which demographics we look at and how we see them in balance.

Personal declaration (and extrapolating from that) - I was born in England, my wife was born on a different continent, and I'm not sure that makes any significant difference to us / our travel habits at a "micro" level.   but ...
1. There used to be another travel element - far more longer distance journeys to Lisa's home country.
2. There's also the element that she moved here without an inherited / upbringing in the UK which leads to a lack of immediate local resources onto which to build a new life, and that can effect where people live for many years forward.
3. It requires a bravery (or deparateness in other cases) to move intercontinental, and that in itself brings about a different balance of people.

 

Society is affected by where one was born is it? I'm German born. What does that mean for UK society?

 

Nothing whatsoever. You don't have the reach or influence,  but throughout history waves of immigration from Europe and elsewhere have played a part in the shaping and evolution of British society - some very positively, some less so, and that's a pattern which continues to this day.

 
Going off at a bit of a tangent, again (and I can, because I'm an admin ), I offer here the example of my brother-in-law, who was born in Germany, of UK parents (British Army On the Rhine).

That means he is perfectly entitled to hold both a British and a German passport: he does.

When he emigrated to South Africa, and visited other countries on business from there, he simply chose to use whichever passport was less contentious in the destination country. 

CfN. 

 
He has the right to German citizenship? How so?

I was born to British parents serving in Germany (RAF, WRAF) and don't have the right to German citizenship, nor was I eligible in the past. Germany has only had jus solis since the year 2000, with citizenship granted to those born of foreign parents provided they've habitually and legally resided for eight years before the birth. This was decreased to five years in 2024. Also, the time spent serving in Germany, even if living off-base, didn't count toward settlement/residency.

Born before 1 January 2000: Germany did not have a birthright citizenship rule (jus soli) at all. Children born to foreign parents only received the parents' citizenship, regardless of how long they had lived there.

Having a Scottish father I await Scotland's independence to become a dual citizen.

 
Those of us who were born in the mid-1950s will be familiar with the idea of friends and contemporaries born overseas, in the last days of the Empire and or forces families posted overseas. There were two members of my year at school who were born in Singapore, and my wife  came into this world at the Royal Military Hospital, Nicosia.

Enlarging on Jaymac's theme, at one stage the German Government actually withdrew citizenship from those born there. In the late 19th century, the Kaiser's government did just this in the case of anyone who left and thereby avoided being drafted into the army. One of those affected by this was Donald Trump's grandfather. He'd left to make his fortune in the USA. It's not clear if the family habit of draft-dodging was also a motive. However when Mrs Trump, unhappy with life in America, persuaded him to go back he found that he was no longer a German citizen, so he had to return to the US as an undocumented, stateless alien immigrant.

There's something of an irony overload in this story....