We’re not having enough babies
A spectre is haunting Europe. We’re running out of people to fill our workforce and fuel our economy because...
SIR Keir Starmer is under pressure to remove the ‘two-child’ benefit cap, having suspended seven of his backbench MPs who claim it discriminates against the poorest UK households.
Strikingly, some Right-wingers — including Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman — also oppose the cap, because they believe it discourages people from having larger families.
And the truth is that those on both the Right and the Left may have a point. The cap probably does have an effect on the number of children some families are prepared to have — and, spread across the population, that could worsen a rapidly growing disaster. A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of depopulation.
We are running out of people to fill our workforce and fuel our economy, for the most simple of reasons: we are not having enough babies.
This seems a bold claim when the world’s population has just exceeded eight billion and is continuing to grow. The conventional mindset, which has dominated political thinking since World War II, is that there are already too many people on the planet. There’s no room, the argument goes. We’re not going to be able to feed ourselves, we’re not going to have enough to drink, there will be nowhere for us all to live.
That argument is completely wrong, for a host of reasons that I set out in my book No One Left: Why The World Needs More Children. In the 1970s, the world’s human population was growing at more than 2 per cent annually.
Drastic
Now that growth has fallen by more than half, to below 1 per cent, and many major countries have had such a low fertility rate for so long that their numbers are actually decreasing.
That’s true in China, Russia and Japan. Germany, too, would have a falling population were it not for mass immigration. In the UK, our ‘natural growth’ — that is, births minus deaths — is nearly zero, our population growth is entirely dependent on migration as deaths could outstrip those born in the coming year.
All over the world, societies are both ageing and declining in absolute terms.
It’s even happening in relatively poor countries where big families were the norm until recently, such as Jamaica and Thailand.
The maths is simple. In order for populations to grow, women need to have an average of 2.1 children or more. That’s not happening anywhere in Europe.
The country with the lowest reproduction rate, according to Eurostat and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, is Malta, where live births per woman average 1.08. In the UK, that figure is 1.49, which is higher than Spain (1.16) but lower than France (1.79).
In London, the number of babies born yearly has dropped by a fifth in just ten years, a fall so drastic that the NHS is expected to close the maternity unit at either the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead or the Whittington in Archway. Across the UK, the number of children in education is predicted to collapse by an astonishing 500,000 pupils.
And in Italy, the newspaper La Stampa has warned that within just 25 years the ratio of pensioners to people of working age will be 1:1 — the point at which the welfare state collapses. That situation could get worse still, since Italy currently has five times more pensioners than children under the age of six. Ageing populations consume a lot of resources in healthcare as well as pensions. That’s the fundamental reason why government debt is out of control.
Japan has the highest ratio of debt to GDP in the developed world, and it also has the lowest rate of births in its history: last year, just over 750,000 babies were born in Japan, a 5.1 per cent decline from the previous year, and the eighth year of decline in a row.
Selfish
People are so conditioned to think in terms of an ‘overpopulation crisis’ they find all this hard to accept. An idea persists that it is somehow virtuous to abstain from having children. Prince Harry and Meghan were named as ‘role models’ by UK charity Population Matters for the ‘enlightened’ decision to have only two children.
In reality, it’s a selfish choice, because childless people still expect to share in the advantages of a thriving workforce. They want doctors and nurses, lorry drivers and reliable supplies of electricity and water.
The argument that a growing population drives global warming is also false. A child born today will not create a significant carbon footprint for the first 20 years of its life. Since Britain is steadily reducing its emissions, by the time that child reaches adulthood, their carbon deficit will still be negligible.
Populations are also becoming more urban, living in more concentrated spaces with more efficient housing and public transport.
Half the world’s population now live in cities. Anyone who believes Britain is overcrowded has only to look out of the plane window as they fly in to Gatwick or Stansted to see how much unused space we have.
Despite all our houses and schools, roads and hospitals, the impact humans have on the countryside is minor. So don’t be afraid to have lots of children to help to populate our green and pleasant land.
Elon Musk, an ardent proponent of expanding populations (he has fathered 12 children) advocates the colonisation of other planets. One thing I am sure: we don’t need to go into space. It might be a great adventure, but it isn’t necessary to prevent overcrowding — Earth has all the room we’ll ever need.
I would never advocate coercing women into having babies they didn’t want. That would be immoral.
But it is equally immoral to seek to dissuade people from having families, on the entirely specious ground that this is somehow ‘good for the planet’. China tried that experiment with its disastrous one-child policy and it is still paying the economic and social price.
Future
In most countries in the developed world, including the UK, women on average say they want to have two or three children. It is a tragedy for them that so many feel unable to do so, often because of economic constraints.
Being a parent is perhaps the greatest joy life has to offer. I have three children and two grandchildren, with a third on the way.
I don’t advocate that people should have children solely in the hopes of having carers to support them in old age, though there’s nothing wrong if that is one motivation among many.
Creating a new life for its own sake is a wonderful thing. But we also need to do that, as a society, to sustain our future.
■ PAUL MORLAND is the UK’s leading demographer and the author of No One Left: Why The World Needs More Children, published by Forum.