I rarely get involved in geopolitics on this blog, it’s not my lane and not my instinct but an unplanned stopover in Cairo this week left me with an image I couldn’t ignore.
It wasn’t the pyramids (impressive as they are) that stuck with me, it was the pavements. Street after street lined with men. Not working in any formal sense. Not moving with any obvious purpose. Just standing, waiting, watching and in many cases hustling for a living because that’s the only way to survive. Informal trades, quick deals, opportunities seized in the moment. Pure economic improvisation.
Let’s call the backdrop what it is: too many working-age males and not enough opportunities to absorb them. That’s not judgement – it’s arithmetic. Large pools of unemployed, predominantly men, create pressure: economic, social, migratory. People don’t stay constrained if they believe there’s somewhere better to go.
Population dynamics matter. Increasing a population exponentially – UK, Spain, anywhere – brings obvious stresses: jobs, housing, infrastructure, social cohesion. Systems scale slowly, people don’t. Ignore that mismatch and problems will inevitably follow.
Hours later I’m reading Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s comments on ‘colonisation’ and immigration in the UK. The terminology was clumsy but the tone was unapologetic and in no short time a predictable backlash followed from the usual left-leaning voices shouting the loudest in a condemning tone, yet offering no credible or practical alternatives. Outrage is easy. Solutions are harder. Housing capacity, labour saturation, integration challenges, these are real problems right in front of us that need addressing, not slogan-driven hyperbole.
It’s a simple question, when there’s not enough in one place and opportunity in another, people move. Economic migration in its purest form but bringing population pressure somewhere else doesn’t solve it, it just shifts it. If the receiving sysyem isn’t designed to absorb it properly, strain shows up somewhere: wages, cohesion, services, benefits, politics. Sound familiar?
Standing on those Cairo streets watching people graft (and grift) however they could then seeing the UK Ratcliffe debate unfold, the conclusion felt uncomfortable but clear: we’re not having an honest conversation about what’s right in front of us. We’re arguing emotionally not logically while the polarising dynamics continue regardless.
Travel has a habit of educating you more than any classroom ever can and my overriding emotion when leaving Cairo was; keep pretending the numbers don’t matter and the future won’t arrive gradually, it will arrive all at once and on nobody’s terms.
Until meaningful debate replaces emotional rhetoric I’ve seen enough to feel I’ve glimpsed the future and it’s not good.
MAN IN SAN AN by Martin Makepeace 