Millennium3

I am not sure I agree with you U. I do think that this is going to present a problem in the not to distant future as there are a number of reasons to believe food supplies will be less available - not least because of a dramatic increase in demand from the Chinese [perhaps India too] as these countries become more prosperous. Bearing in mind the UK is capable of only feeding some 17m - perhaps the solution would be to round them up and keep them on basic rations until they volunteered to find their own way home.

When I first read the article 'Iron Law' came to mind - though I could not remember what it was. Two seem appropriate to our time.

From Wiki:

The Subsistence Theory of Wages, also known as the "Iron Law of Wages," was an alleged law of economics that asserted that real wages in the long run would tend to the value needed to keep the workers' population constant. The alleged law was named and popularized by the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid 1800s.[citation needed]
According to Lassalle, wages cannot fall below subsistence level because without subsistence, laborers will be unable to work for long. However, competition among laborers for employment will drive wages down to this minimal level. This followed from Malthus' demographic theory, according to which the growth rate of population was an increasing function of wages, reaching a zero for a unique positive value of the real wages rate, called the subsistence wage. Assuming the demand for labor to be a given monotonically decreasing function of the real wages rate, the theory then predicted that, in the long-run equilibrium of the system, labor supply (i.e. population) will be equated to the numbers demanded at the subsistence wage. The justification for this was that when wages are higher, the supply of labor will increase relative to demand, creating an excess supply and thus depressing market real wages; when wages are lower, labor supply will fall, increasing market real wages. This would create a dynamic convergence towards a subsistence-wage equilibrium with constant population.
As David Ricardo first noticed, this prediction would not come true as long as a new investment or some other factor caused the demand for labor to increase at least as fast as population: in that case the equality between labor demanded and supplied could in fact be kept with real wages higher than the subsistence level, and hence an increasing population. In most of his analysis, however, Ricardo kept Malthus' theory as a simplifying assumption.
During the mid-1800s, when Lassalle articulated his theory, wages for both manufacturing laborers and agricultural workers were in large part quite close to subsistence level.

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. The reasons for this are the technical indispensability of leadership, the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests; the gratitude of the led towards the leaders, and the general immobility and passivity of the masses.

There is more on both definitions.