Yahoo News Britain’s politicians are ignorant of the scale of the crisis approaching
Imagine that Covid had been sweeping the world and while everywhere people were trying to cope with it, in one country they were simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of a problem. Anyone who raised the subject and suggested perhaps some precautions might be taken was described as a crank, a fanatic and an extremist. Months after the pandemic had started taking its toll, the very mention of its name remained anathema in this one, strange land.
The global pandemic of low fertility rates is rather like this. Many countries, our own included, have been having too few children to replace the population for decades. This used to be a rich, European problem, but no longer. Fertility rates – the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime – are lower in Thailand and Jamaica than in the UK. Populations having too few children age – meaning too few workers per retiree - and then decline.
We can already see the population falling in Russia (even without the Ukraine war casualties), China and Japan. Swathes of the countryside are abandoned as villages rot. The elderly die neglected in their homes. A lack of labour weighs on the economy. Government debt balloons as the number of pensioners and intense users of healthcare rise while the number of taxpayers falls.
Nobody has a simple cure to this problem yet, any more than we had a covid vaccine at first. But at least elsewhere the problem is acknowledged. President Macron, a centrist if ever there was one, has talked of the need for demographic rearmament. In many EU countries, with governments of the centre, left and right, politicians are addressing this issue and trying to find policies to resolve it. Tax cuts for parents here, subsidised childcare there; different countries are trying in different ways to raise their birth rates as more and more of them can see the unfolding of a demographic disaster.
And indeed there is a long tradition of pronatalism – seeing the bearing of children as a good thing to be encouraged – across the political spectrum. The most trenchant critic of anti-natalist Thomas Malthus was Karl Marx. Communist countries often encouraged childbearing – Moa did, and China is at it again after the one child policy hiatus. Cuba offers incentives for its citizens to become parents. In post-war Germany the authorities in the Communist East tried to persuade people to have more children – but so did the Christian Democrats in the West.
Some might think that this is not a matter the state should take a view on. But as long as the state is expected to provide doctors and nurses, carers and soldiers, it cannot afford not to. And even in sectors of the economy for which the state does not have direct responsibility, services must be kept running. If we are short of tanker drivers, for example, the government needs to get involved. This was clear to the Australian Treasurer Paul Costello who introduced the baby bonus earlier this century with the famous slogan “One for Mum, One for Dad, One for the Country”.
Britain, however, is the odd man out. No government minister, as far as I know, has ever had anything significant to say on the question of population, at least not since our fertility rate fell below replacement level in the early 1970s. Indeed, if you raise the topic you get strange looks. Those who do raise it, like the brave Miriam Cates, are kept firmly to the sidelines, while one Labour politician planning to address the topic at a public meeting was intimidated out of attending.
Perhaps it is because we have had the luxury of being able to recruit large numbers of people from high fertility neighbours for decades, even centuries. But the Irish are no longer having big families, and their economic success means they no longer have to come. The same is increasingly true of the Poles. Countries with high fertility rates from where we can recruit workers are getting fewer and further between and increasingly are places with low levels of education and productivity, limiting what these new arrivals can do for our economy.
The problem is only getting worse. Low fertility in previous generations means that those who are young and of childbearing age are going to shrink. Meanwhile, they in turn are choosing to have even fewer children than their parents. Time is running out to fix the problem. And yet we still seem unable even to talk about it.
Paul Morland is senior member at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book, ‘No One Left: Why The World Needs More Children’ is published on 4th July.
