It’s not racist to be worried about the UK’s falling birth rate

UK Labour peer Harriet Harman seems to think that anyone who’s worried about the UK’s declining birth rate is a racist xenophobe.

Speaking earlier this month to the parliamentary magazine, the House, Baroness Harman claimed that concerns about declining birth rates are often ‘tangled up with people wanting a high birth rate from the local population because they don’t want to have immigrants’. It’s ‘tied up with xenophobia and racism’, she said, before adding, ‘the pro-natal movement is a right-wing movement, like racism is a right-wing movement’.

Harman completely misses the point. It’s certainly true that debates about declining birth rates have been gathering momentum on the right over the past few years. (Although it’s gathering traction among liberal elites, too, if Silicon Valley’s ‘breeding to save mankind’ movement is anything to go by.)

Yet to dismiss falling birth rates as a right-wing, racist concern ignores the fact that it is a genuine global problem. In fact, the only part of the world expected to enjoy significant population growth in the future is sub-Saharan Africa.

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