Category Archives: Government

Arts, Britain, Economic, Government, Society, United Nations

The plunging birthrate will usher in a terrifying dystopia

SOCIETY

FOR MANY PEOPLE the cities of the future will be a landscape of glittering skyscrapers, bullet trains whizzing past green parklands, flying taxis and drones for deliveries, and limitless clean energy.

If this is the picture you envisage, then I’m afraid you may be disappointed. A century from now, swathes of the world’s cities are more likely to be abandoned, with small numbers of residents clinging to decaying houses set on empty, weed-strewn streets, much like Detroit is today.

According to a new report from the Lancet medical journal, by the year 2100, just six countries could be having children at “replacement rate” – that is, with enough births to keep their populations stable, let alone growing.

All six nations will be in sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe and across the West and Asia, the birthrate will have collapsed – and the total global population will be plummeting.

Eco-activists and environmentalists have long decried humans as a curse on the planet, greedily gobbling up vital resources and despoiling the natural world with their activities. Greens purport the message that “human population growth is our greatest worry… there are just too many of us. Because if you run out of resources, it doesn’t matter how well you’re coping: if you’re starving and thirsty, you’ll die.”

Activists seem to think that if we could only reduce the overall population, the surviving rump of humanity could somehow live in closer harmony with nature. On the contrary, population collapse will presage a terrifying dystopia.

Fewer babies mean older and ageing populations – which in turn means fewer young people paying taxes to fund the pensions of the elderly. And that means that everyone has to work even longer into old age, and in an atmosphere of declining public services and deteriorating quality of life.

If you worry that it’s hard now to find carers to look after elderly relatives, this will be nothing compared to what your children or grandchildren will face when they are old.

In modern industrialised society, it is generally accepted that the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the average number of children born to each woman during her lifetime – must be at least 2.1 to ensure a stable population.

By 2021, the TFR had fallen below 2.1 in more than half the world’s countries.

In Britain, it now stands at 1.49. In Spain and Japan it is 1.26, in Italy 1.21, and in South Korea a desperate 0.82.

Even in India – which recently overtook China as the world’s most populous nation – the TFR is down to 1.91.

There are now just 94 countries in which the rate exceeds 2.1 – and 44 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, which suffers far higher rates of infant mortality.

The dramatic fall in Britian’s birthrate has been disguised until now because we are importing hundreds of thousands of migrants per year to do poorly paid jobs that the native population increasingly spurns. In 2022, net migration here reached more than 700,000. The Office for National Statistics expects the UK population to reach 70million by 2026, 74million by 2036, and almost 77million by 2046 – largely driven by mass migration.

Unless migration remains high, the UK population is likely to start shrinking soon after that point – especially as the last “baby boomer” (born between 1946 and 1964) reaches their 80th birthday in 2044. This mass importation of migrants to counteract a falling domestic birthrate spells huge consequences for our social fabric.

In years to come, Britain is set to face a pitiless battle with other advanced economies – many of them already much richer than we are – to import millions of overseas workers to staff our hospitals, care homes, factories, and everything else.

And once the global population starts to fall in the final decades of this century, it will become even harder to source such workers from abroad. At that point, we may find hospitals having to cut their services or even close.

So, while medical advancements will likely mean that people will be living even longer, we face a grim future in which elderly people will increasingly die of neglect or be looked after by robots – an idea that has been trialled in Japan already.

How has this crisis crept upon us so stealthily? It wasn’t so long ago that the United Nations and other world bodies were voicing concern at overpopulation.

For decades, self-proclaimed experts have warned – in the manner of early 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus – that global supplies of food and water, as well as natural resources, would run out. Graphs confidently showed the world’s population accelerating exponentially, with many claiming that humankind had no choice but to launch interplanetary civilisations as we inevitably outgrew our world.

They could not have been more wrong.

Amid all the activist-esque hysteria about a “population explosion”, many failed to notice that birth rates had already started to collapse: first in a few developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, and then elsewhere.

As societies grow wealthier and the middle classes boom, women start to put off childbearing. This means that they end up having fewer children overall. In Britain especially, there are the added costs of childcare and the often-permanent loss of income that results from leaving the workforce, even temporarily.

The striking result of all this is that the number of babies being born around the world has, in fact, already peaked.

The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as the one in which more babies were born than any other: 142million of them. By 2021, the figure was 129million – a fall of 9 per cent in just five years.

To be clear, the global population is for the moment still rising because people are living longer thanks to better and improved medical care. We are not dying as quickly as babies are born.

According to the UN, the global population reached 8billion on November 15, 2022. It should carry on growing before peaking at 10.4billion in the 2080s – although the world will be feeling the effects of the declining birth rate long before that.

On current trends, the world’s population will start to fall by the 2090s – the first time this will have happened since the Black Death swept Eurasia in the 14th century.

What, then, if anything, can be done to stop ourselves hurtling towards this calamity?

For one thing, governments must work tirelessly to encourage people to have families. Generous tax incentives for marriage, lavish child benefit payments, and better and cheaper childcare, are all a must. This would mean that many mothers wouldn’t have to stop their careers in order to start families.

Britain could, if it chose to, lead the way on this.

But that seems highly unlikely with the imminent prospect of a ruling Labour government: the statist Left habitually loathes any measures that could be seen to benefit the nuclear family or that incentivise people to have more children.

In truth, however, the scale of this problem is so vast – and the issue so widespread – that effectively counteracting it may be next to impossible.

Bar some extraordinary shift, the gradual impoverishment of an ageing and shrinking population seems the planet’s destiny. It is not an attractive thought.

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Arts, Britain, Government, Life, Politics, Society

A debate on family needs is much needed

SOCIAL POLICY

OVER the past 60-years, society has witnessed multiple revolutions in the status of women, in the nature of family life, and the way the next generation is being raised. Yet, in politics, it is astonishing that the position of women, and especially that of mothers, is rarely discussed.

Some of the changes over the last six decades have been driven by deliberate Left-wing social policy and militant feminism. Some have suited business very well, as it has benefited hugely from the expansion of the female workforce and the vast reservoir of talent this has provided that they can draw on.

Some societal changes have their roots in the lingering effects of the Second World War, which placed terrible strains on so many young families and led to far more widespread marital breakdown and divorce. This caused far more women to go out to do paid work than had ever done so before.

Other changes are the result of medical and scientific innovations, from the introduction of the contraceptive pill for birth control to the development of labour-saving devices in the home.

The rapid growth of mass car ownership has made it first possible and then almost compulsory for young women to multitask as both mothers in the home and as contributors of the economy in the form of paid work.

The results have been the usual mixture of good and bad, but Conservative politicians – in particular – have tended to go rather too readily with the flow, endorsing or accepting radical changes without asking if they are beneficial to our society. So, in the UK we should welcome the intervention of Miriam Cates MP, a former biology teacher and mother of three, as a starting point for a very necessary debate.

Ms Cates, who is refreshingly willing to think aloud and to fight her corner, is rightly concerned about the pressures on women who pursue careers and motherhood together, often trying to postpone parenthood. She says the vast majority of young women do want to become mothers but that there are many reasons why they don’t have children at the time they want to.

She is correct. The relentless passage of time, in reality, greatly limits the opportunity to choose parenthood.

Despite all the pressures of liberal media, economic need, and fashion, many people – both men and women – still rather like the idea of enjoying as much traditional family life as they can reasonably arrange. Work-life balance is similarly a pressing and parallel priority.

Many would probably have more children, sooner, if they could find the time and the money. Generally, however, the historical trend is that if you have one, you cannot have the other.

Some European countries are considerably more generous to young families, through their tax and benefits systems, than we are.

Of whatever political persuasion we may be, Britain should also be moving in this direction. Other problems that arise as a consequence – of good, reliable, and affordable childcare, and of housing costs in a tough market – also require some attention.

Any future UK Government needs to offer a thoughtful and unwoke approach to social policy, rather than just continually following in the footsteps of Blairism. Changes are needed in a world where people wishing to combine careers and parenthood become the priority in national life.

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Britain, Defence, Government, Politics, Society

Defence is our first priority

BRITAIN

OUR political leaders are always gushing when reverting to how they feel about British troops. Recently, the prime minister said: “In a dangerous world, I’ve seen how you’re working around the clock for the good of us all.”

So much for the gratitude of politicians. While our leaders are quick to become dewy-eyed over the selfless dedication and bravery of our servicemen and women, they are depressingly reluctant to match their words with deeds.

Even Conservative governments – who should know better – have run down the Armed Forces they are so ready to send into battle or on other perilous deployments.

Defence budgets have been plundered to prop up unsustainable levels of funding elsewhere, most strikingly for health.

Those elected to govern make choices, of course. But the choices made are coming back to haunt Britain.

The threats facing us are far more unpredictable and serious than even during the Cold War. Yet the British Army is so short of soldiers, it can’t even field a single 10,000-strong division. The Royal Navy has been reduced to little more than a coastal force.

To make matters worse, the House of Commons’ spending watchdog says Defence faces a £29billion funding black hole, which means further vital equipment could be axed.

With war raging violently in Europe and authoritarian regimes on the rise, it is simply astonishing that not a bean was conjured up in last week’s Spring Budget. Our threadbare defences urgently require to be upgraded. Our political masters are short-sighted and have made a dangerous mistake.

Former defence secretaries, top brass, and war heroes are all calling for increases to Ministry of Defence funding from 2.3 to 4 per cent of GDP within a decade.

With the Budget gone, the perfect time to announce a surge in defence funding would be NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in July.

On the campaign trail in America, Donald Trump has said he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to pact members who failed to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence. His comments may have been puerile for many, but it is hard not to have a grain of sympathy with his sentiments.

For far too long, some European countries have skimped on security, opting instead to ride-off-the-back of America’s military might.  

By pledging to bump up our military budget to realistic operational levels, Britain can show real leadership.

If we are to get serious about defence spending, the MoD’s notorious procurement operation requires radically overhauled and reformed. The department has long set the Whitehall benchmark for incompetence and serial mismanagement of its budget. Taxpayers’ money has been squandered by the billions.

And while we need more troops, battlefield tanks, armoured vehicles, weaponry, and fighter jets, modern warfare involves cyber conflict, the use of unmanned aircraft, drones, and computer-controlled battlefleets. There needs to be proper provision for all of these things.

With a general election looming, Rishi Sunak fears losing votes by slashing other departmental budgets. But none of the other Government’s obligations is more crucial than the defence of the realm. If our security is compromised, all other areas of life are endangered. Only through military strength will we deter our enemies.

Time and again, British Forces have proved their incalculable worth to this country. The very least we can do in return is give them the resources and tools they need to do their job and keep us safe.

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