The pop-culture status of the so-called banking crisis has seen an unlikely group using the debacle as a reference point in a new marketing campaign.

The London Sperm Bank, which opened in March following the merger (no pun intended) of two similar institutions, has launched with a clever awareness campaign.

The main hook is that the real banking crisis is not high finance related but in the shortfall of suitable sperm donors for would-be mothers and couples that otherwise cannot have children.

The London Sperm Bank was founded to address the acute donor sperm shortage in the UK.

Incorporating Dr. Louis Hughes sperm bank (established 1976) and The London Women’s Clinic sperm bank, it is now the country’s largest provider of donor sperm.

For the comics and cynics among the British public (and there are many) the analogy between the City of London’s financiers and insufficient numbers of sperm donors has the potential for more material than can be written in this article.

Nonetheless, and more seriously, there is a fierce debate in Britain at present that population growth has blown out of control.

According to Britain’s fear evoking parts of the media, the so-called explosion is partly due to immigration from developing nations and partly due to those immigrants themselves having babies.

However the fact of the matter is that Britain is a developed nation, and like many of its peers, people are living longer and (in addition to the newly arrived apparently having babies themselves) it is in the midst of a broader baby-boom.

There were 791,000 babies born in the UK last year, an increase of 33,000 on a year earlier, and almost twice the rise seen at the start of the decade.

The UK experienced its greatest population increase in almost half a century last year, with a baby boom pushing the number of people living in the country above 61 million for the first time.

The debate (fear mongering some might say) is that Britain’s population is likely to top 70 million people in the not too distant future.

According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 408,000 more people in Britain in 2008 than in the previous year and the overall population has risen by 2 million since 2001, to a peak of 61.4 million.

In Britain, there are now 1.3 million over-85s, making up 2% of the total.

The population is growing by a rate of 0.7% every year, more than double the rate in the 1990s and three times the level of the 1980s.

The increase is being driven by a baby boom as fertility rates reached their highest level for 15 years, yet according to the London Sperm Bank, there are still many people who want children that are not able to do so.

The average UK-born woman now has 1.84 children – an increase of 10% in just four years – while women living here who were born abroad have about 2.5 children.

The ONS figures show that nearly a quarter of babies in England and Wales in 2008 were born to mothers who came from outside the UK, most commonly women from Pakistan, Poland and India.

The overall fertility rate is now 1.96 – the highest since the 1970s.

Given its smart campaigning the likely success of the newly launched London Sperm Bank is only going push things in one direction – up.