Who ate all the pies?

"People do not quite realise the scale of the issue," added Bevan. "This is one of the most serious problems that science has ever faced." In Britain the lives of hundreds of thousands of people will be threatened by food shortages. Across the globe, tens of millions – if not hundreds of millions – will be affected.

Britain faces a bleak future of food shortages. The food was never very good, but soon there will be less of it. There will also be more British people, which is bad enough in itself, but worse when they are hungry. Soon, cannibal chavs will be roaming the streets of Romford.

The tragedy for the British is that they have become too stupid to understand the horrors that await them. The media in Britain is entirely dominated by celebrity - people who have become famous by having some sort of showbusiness career - and by reality - people who have become famous for being ordinary, in most cases downright vulgar. Even the quality papers are obsessed with these ghastly people, although they pretend their interest is merely "ironic" or "cultural."

So there is little space for the discussion of the impending disaster, and only a handful of people still capable of understanding it. The British shall starve to death, uncomprehending, helpless and probably hoping that Jonathan Ross or Jeremy Clarkson will be along in a minute to save them. Thus will end a proud, stupid and defeated people.

We in New Zealand will do our best to help them and to profit from the situation. The vast dairy factory we have become in the last decade will continue to grow, producing more milk products and killing off what remains of Nature. Meanwhile Dr Don Brash and his deluded millionaire friends will continue to demand that we destroy what remains of the welfare system, so they can become even richer and so we can catch up with Australia by 2025. Meanwhile, Australia will have become, by 2025, a desert. Like the British, we will not understand these circumstances, because we will be distracted by shiny trivia of all kinds.

If anyone survives, they might look back upon our age as a remarkable one, dominated by an economic dogma which gave great importance to single measurements like M0, but which ignored the obvious fact that all economic activity occurs within an environment, one which we were steadily destroying. The survivors might also realise that we destroyed ourselves because we allowed ourselves to become stupid.