United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Land Population

Discuss it with your group-mates.

1. What steps in reducing the stream of immigrants would you suggest to undertake if you were an official of the Migration Advisory Board?

2. Have you ever faced the problems of immigration in your own country and what is your attitude towards this?
3. The family
Family structure
The British live longer, marry later, have fewer children and are more likely to get divorced than ever before. Young people leave home earlier, though not necessarily to get married. More women now go out to work and more people, especially the old, live alone. The nuclear family (parents and perhaps two children) has largely replaced the extended family, where several generations lived together, but has also been partly replaced by patterns of remarriage, where children with different parents may live together with a family for some or all of the time.

Although patterns are changing, most people in Britain get married, have children and stay together until the end of their lives. People are marrying later: the average woman gets married at twenty-seven to a man who is just over two years older (although it is estimated that 40% of couples live together before getting married). Mrs. Average now has her first child in her late twenties, but she will have only one or two children: only one mother in four has more. Eight out of ten married women will have children at some point in their lives. And despite the changes in working habits it is usually the woman who has overall responsibility for domestic life: the traditional division of the family responsibilities still persists.

Britain has one of the highest divorce rates in Western Europe: approximately one in three marriages ends in divorce, half of them in the first ten years of marriage. As a result more people are getting remarried and there are now over 1.6 million single parents. There has also been a sharp rise in the rate of illegitimacy; by 1999 nearly 40% of babies were born outside marriage.