‘Marriage is essentially meaningless if it is easy to get out of’
Miriam Cates interview with Sienna Rodgers, The House:
Conservative MP Miriam Cates talks to Sienna Rodgers about population collapse, plus why she thinks all surrogacy should be outlawed and no-fault divorce was a ‘mistake’
It is rare to interview a politician so straightforward and candid as Miriam Cates. The 41 year-old MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge offers a direct answer to every question, even – or perhaps especially – in response to difficult ones. Articulate and hardly shy of expressing controversial views, it is easy to see why she is seldom off the airwaves.
We meet for the ‘Children’ edition of The House because much of Cates’ contentious political platform revolves around this theme. Maybe most pertinent is her concern that we’re not having enough children. The Conservative MP believes the United Kingdom’s declining birth rate – averaging 1.6 births per woman in England and Wales, well below the replacement level of 2.1 – will lead to population collapse.
“If you think taxes are high now, if you think the NHS is underfunded now, if you think we can’t find enough social care workers now, you’ve seen nothing compared to what’s coming down the line because of this declining birth rate,” she says.
Aren’t women in the UK simply exercising their freedom not to have children? Perhaps motherhood is not that appealing; from the potentially difficult pregnancy and childbirth to the loss of income and huge childcare bills, they might be deciding it’s simply not for them.
“We know from the polling that roughly eight per cent of young women say they don’t want to be mothers, and of course that’s absolutely fine,” says Cates. “But around 30 per cent of this generation of young women will probably not become mothers, we can see from the demographic trends. That’s an awful lot of young women who are not going to get what they want.” She adds: “One of the most basic biological instincts is to want to reproduce.”
Europe’s populist right has put reversing the decline of birth rates at the top of its agenda, with prime minister Viktor Orbán spending five per cent of Hungary’s national GDP on pro-natalist policies. What is her response to those who say she sounds like the far right? “I’m not sure why it’s far-right to think it’s a good thing to let women have what they want,” she replies.
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