A great many of us dream of living abroad - so why is Britain set to become even more crowded?

It comes as no surprise to me that British motorists are seen as a menace in France. With the reckless abandon of Mr Toad, they race along the French roads, ignoring the speed limits, and are surprised and indignant when stopped by the police. "The mentality of letting go across the Channel seems to be the same one that makes les Anglais get drunk as soon as they leave their country," said one philosophical French police officer (who clearly doesn't know that we get just as drunk at home).

Thanks to growing poverty and high petrol prices, there is reported to have been a slight alleviation of traffic congestion in Britain, but the freedom offered by France's long, straight and empty roads is of a completely different order. No wonder it turns the heads of British holidaymakers when they are suddenly released from the misery and frustration of driving at home. The temptation to flout the French speed limits must be irresistible.

The glory of France, and the main reason why hundreds of thousands of Britons want to live there, is its enviable emptiness. It offers tranquillity and freedom on a scale that is unimaginable here. And now we are told by the European commission in Brussels that the overcrowding from which we suffer is going to get dramatically worse.

The commission has published a report saying that Britain is set to become Europe's most heavily populated nation in just over 50 years, with its population rising by 25% to 77 million, overtaking even that of Germany, which is some 40,000 square miles larger than the United Kingdom. By 2060, it predicts, there will be 822 people per square mile in the UK, compared with 525 in Germany and 341 in France. The forecast seems to be based mainly on predicted levels of immigration, together with the expectation that the British will live to be much older.

These predictions could, of course, be over-pessimistic. They assume immigration levels similar to those of the past few years, whereas recent measures to clamp down on illegal immigrants seem to be having some effect and, according to Migrationwatch UK, the influx of people from eastern Europe - the biggest single wave of immigration in British history - is tailing off and may soon be equalled by the number returning home.

Still, one can't count on it. An interesting investigation on Newsnight by Sorious Samura has been illustrating the remarkable perseverance shown by Africans in their efforts to smuggle themselves into Britain, many believing that they will be treated more compassionately here than in countries such as France or Italy.

Our only native contribution to population growth is a reluctance to die, for we are reproducing most sluggishly. The commission refers to our "persistently low fertility", which, according to a report in the New Scientist, is increased among men who use heated car seats or carry mobile phones in their pockets.

We could do more of that, of course, but it's unlikely to get us very far. The only sure way to avoid the threatened nightmare will be to emigrate in our millions to France.

Ryanair had a bad day on Monday, when it had to make two emergency landings. One of them could not be blamed on the airline, for it involved a jar of mushroom soup dripping from an overhead locker on to the neck of a passenger, causing it to swell in an allergic reaction. The plane, flying from Budapest to Dublin, was diverted to Frankfurt so that the man could receive medical attention.

Michael O'Leary, Ryanair's combative chief executive, had no reason to apologise for this weird and unforeseeable incident, and didn't indeed do so. But one might have expected a rather more sympathetic response to the other event, in which passengers feared for their lives when their plane dropped thousands of feet on a flight from Bristol to Barcelona's Girona airport and had to land at Limoges in central France.

The aircraft had suffered a sudden loss of cabin pressure, and many passengers by their own admission were terrified. But they complained that there was no word of explanation or reassurance from the flight crew until some 20 minutes after the plane started to plunge towards the ground. O'Leary, who has described others in the air industry as "platoons of goons" and told passengers they should "sell your car and walk" if they were worried about carbon emissions, has seen his airline prosper despite his castigation of his customers, for they have remained unable to resist the cheap deals he offers them.

But times are now hard, and getting harder, for the airline industry, and Mr O'Leary - though he may not "give a shite if nobody likes me" - might now find it prudent to curb his habit of casual abuse. In a radio interview on Radio 4's Today programme, he didn't manage to express an ounce of sympathy for the passengers on the Barcelona flight and said only that his crew had followed "exact and correct safety procedures". The crew may well have done so, and the procedures included them putting on oxygen masks themselves, which must have made conversation difficult, to say the least. But Mr O'Leary wouldn't have needed to be disloyal to the crew to say that he was sorry to the passengers for what had happened.

But if you never apologise on principle, and have made robust, politically incorrect language your trademark, it must be very difficult to change your ways when the circumstances require it.

This week Alexander has been glued to the television coverage of the Democratic Convention in Denver: "With Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and even Joe Biden, the Democrats are streets ahead of the Republicans in oratorical skill. George Bush, Dick Cheney and John McCain are pathetic by comparison. But it seems to be doubtful how much this matters."