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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Arts, Culture, History, Society, Technology

Deepfake technology and the rewriting of history

SOCIETY

THE PRACTICE of doctoring photographs can be a very wicked thing, as we shall see. But it can also be trivial. Many of us must wish that various pictures of us did not exist. That awful school photo from primary school, or other disastrous snaps from our early childhood.

Is it wicked for us to do what we can to keep other people from seeing them? The fashion desert of the 1970s, for instance, where countless couples were married, do not display their wedding photographs. And who can blame them?

And to the Royal Family. Many of us still have no idea what the Princess of Wales was up to in her recent family snapshot, and outrage should be far from our minds.

The public demands a lot of photographs of the Royal Family, and why not? Half its power comes from the fact that it is a family, rather than a gang, cabinet, or a board of directors.

But families, even Royal ones, are not always as cheerful, contented, or well behaved, as we wish they were. It would have been a cleverer thing not to have done whatever it was that they did.

Far worse, and much fishier, was the curious case of the Bullingdon Club images of David Cameron, Al “Boris” Johnson, and George Osborne, from their Oxford days.

David Cameron obviously detested these records of debauchery, not wanting the public to be reminded of his time in this alcohol-fuelled society of well-heeled brutes. Was it a mere coincidence that they were mysteriously withdrawn by the company which owned them in 2008, so newspapers had to stop using them?

As it happens, Coincidence Theory (the idea that things happen by accident far more often than by design) is often believable. But not in this instance.

Odd was the obviously doctored 1992 Bullingdon pictures, featuring, among others, George Osborne and his (now former) friend Nat Rothschild. At first glance, it appears normal, but look carefully, and you will see it is full of suspicious peculiarities.

To the left of the middle, there’s a mysterious gap where somebody ought to be standing but isn’t. Weirder still, there’s a patch of shirt-front and waistcoat there, with no person attached. The right trouser leg of Mr Rothschild has a white lapel on it, not usual even under the bizarre dress code of the Bullingdon.

On close examination, the three seated figures at the front appear to have been stuck in place after being moved from somewhere else.

But again, these are tiny things compared with the monstrous crimes which the truly powerful commit with photographs, when they can. In pre-internet days, they simply hacked up the old pictures and replaced them with new items. Only the tiny few with access to original archives could ever be sure that what they were seeing was true.

TWO

THOUSANDS of images of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, sometimes standing near the Soviet demi-god, Vladimir Lenin, were wiped from Soviet history books, magazines, newspapers, and encyclopaedias, after Trotsky fell from favour.

In 1997, David King chronicled the photographic murder of the past, in his book “The Commissar Vanishes”. And it was murder. Those whose pictures were removed usually became dead soon afterwards.

The most poignant story of this kind is told by Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It concerns the Czech Communist Vladimir Clementis. Clementis was standing beside the Czech Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, at a huge public meeting in Prague to mark their takeover of the country. It was snowing heavily, so Clementis lent his fur hat to the bare-headed Gottwald. Pictures recorded the comradely scene.

But four years later Clementis was purged for having the wrong view of Marx. He was hanged, cremated, and abused still further after death on the streets of Prague in a most barbaric way. And he was wiped from the images of 1948, leaving only his hat behind.

THREE

WHO knows what a future totalitarian regime might do, with the limitless powers provided by modern technology? This cannot only erase the past but can, through deepfake methods, create a wholly different past so convincing that only those who were actually there would be sure it was not a lie.

If human gullibility is anything to go by, even eyewitnesses of the truth might eventually fall in with the new altered version.

This was prefigured, as are so many evils of today, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The central character, Winston Smith, has the highly responsible job of cleaning up the paper archives of The Times, to make sure they do not clash with official lies. His discovery of a photograph, of three leaders of the ruling party – Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford – fills him with terror. Its obvious location and stated date show that official history is false.

He sends it swirling into the “memory hole” which leads to the great furnace where all inconvenient facts are burned to ashes.

But he is still not safe. What if someone else saw him as he looked at it? What if the surveillance cameras picked it up (as we learn later, they did)?

The mere fact that he has seen this picture puts him in danger. He knows what nobody should know. He can never forget it. He cannot unsee it. His actual existence is a peril to his totalitarian chiefs.

Orwell writes: “It was curious that the fact of having held it in his fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?”

As it turns out, in the torture cellars of the Ministry of Love, Winston, amongst other humiliations of the mind, is compelled to affirm that the photograph never existed.

In the end, with tears in his eyes, he joins the great deceived multitudes who believe what the authorities tell them and who have no idea what the past was really like, even if – especially if – they lived through it.

It is that sort of thing, not a mildly doctored family snapshot trying to provide some cheer and happiness, that we need to be worrying about. Useful as it is to know that the technology exists to turn anyone with the right equipment into a potential liar and fraud, and to make us all open to monstrous deceit, of a kind that even Stalin never dreamed of.

The truth needs to be told.

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