Easter Sunday-The Day Britain Starts Living Off The Rest Of The World

Nor does Britain just have a deficit in medical personnel and food. Three decades after crude started to gush out of the North Sea, stocks of oil and gas are dwindling fast: the UK became a net importer of energy in 2004. And when it comes to our national game, the foreign dominance at the top level is complete. Half the teams in the Premiership this season would have been putting out six-a-side teams if they were forced to choose from home-grown players; Arsenal will fly the flag for England in the Champions League semi-final this week but they will probably do so without a single player born in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the starting lineup. Ecological debt Does it matter? NEF says it does. If every country had Britain's level of consumption, it says, there would need to be not just one world but 3.1 worlds to cope with the demand. At just 22 weeks old, an average British citizen will be responsible for the equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that someone in Tanzania will generate in a lifetime. The UK is not quite in the same league as the US; it would take 5.3 worlds to supply the necessary resources if the 6 billion people on the planet had the same appetite as the 300 million Americans. But Britain's position has changed radically in the past 45 years and, lacking North America's natural resources, it goes into what NEF calls "ecological debt" long before the US. Back in 1961, according to the NEF calculations, the UK could manage until the second half of the year under its own steam. It was July 9 before we started to call on the rest of the world to top up our own efforts. Twenty years later, the end of national self-sufficiency came on May 14; the date this year falls on April 16 - one of the earliest in the developed world. · The UK Interdependence Report: New Economics Foundation www.neweconomics.org http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1754290,00.html

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