Britain’s declining birth rate is becoming a problem too big to ignore

Dec 22, 2023 by Jill

by Fraser Nelson, Telegraph:

Politicians risk ceding the whole debate to the conspiracy theorists if they continue to treat it as off-limits.

The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years, according to Elon Musk, is “population collapse”. In Japan, he says, nappies for adults now outsell those for children and he sees the same trend threatening the rest of the world. He’s hardly alone: fears of demographic decline are growing across Europe. But what should be a dry, statistical topic is being treated as a dangerous conspiracy theory of the far-Right – as I found out a few weeks ago.;

I was invited to chair a discussion in Westminster about the “birth gap” on a cross-party panel. The speakers included Miriam Cates, a Tory MP, and Labour’s Rosie Duffield. Just before the debate started, we were told that Duffield had received so many online threats for even agreeing to appear on the panel that she had to pull out. This gave a certain samizdat feel to the debate. We had come to discuss whether the low birth rate is a problem and what, if anything, government should do about it. A debate which, it seems, some people believed should not be allowed to take place.

There were no radicals or skinheads in the room. The panel included an actuary and a filmmaker, Stephen Shaw, who ran through his argument. The audience was young, by Westminster standards: perhaps more religious than average (I saw one gentleman in a cassock) but everyone there had come to hear a debate now being held world over.

[…] Most people now live in countries with a fertility rate lower than that required to sustain the population without immigration: 2.1 per woman. The UK’s ratio is 1.55 and it already shows. School rolls, for example, are now understood to be in terminal decline. But this trend is barely discussed in Westminster.

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