Babies are beautiful. I always want to smile at them in the street, perhaps because they are a rarer and more precious sight in this ageing country or because they remind me of my grandchildren. There are about 3.5 million children aged four and under, while dogs on the streets are a more plentiful 13.5 million. Is the dog boom compensating for fewer children? As time goes by, there are going to be ever more grandparents and ever fewer children to beam at foolishly.
That is not only a sadness and a loss, but becoming an aged society is a cultural and economic threat. Older people, by and large, are not the innovators or new thinkers. An ageing society risks declining in optimism, creativity and, above all, risk-taking: a top-heavy preponderance of older people makes for a conservative and fearful electorate. We are there already – and it’s getting worse.
The low priority given to maternity services in England, revealed yet again in Lady Amos’s report today, would be astounding if it weren’t so familiar. Why are mothers and babies so low down the NHS priority list when they matter most? A third of trained midwives in the UK can’t find jobs, while cash-starved obstetric departments need them but can’t pay: the over-60s take up most hospital resources.
What an odd anomaly that it is the right, especially the hard right, that wants more babies. The Reform UK candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection, Matthew Goodwin, has been hammering on about it recently, joined by Danny Kruger, a recent defector from the Tories, who would rescind no-fault divorce, with a return to household taxation, as though that would cement families and raise the birthrate. “We are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy,” he says.
Goodwin calls for childless women to be taxed more with a “negative child benefit tax” on “those who don’t have offspring”, and “remove personal income tax for women who have two or more children”. He wants fewer women in higher education, excoriating childless female academics. Equality laws will be abolished, says Suella Braverman, with warnings to girls of the ticking clock of their fertility. This sending women home is the road to The Handmaid’s Tale. Or it would be if there was any chance that modern Britain would buy it. Making women yet more financially subservient to husbands, locked in for life, is not a winner.
Elements of the right are pro-baby in the nastiest possible way, but it’s a perverse political stance: Reform’s supporters are by far the oldest cohort, the ones who vote consistently for more spending on their pensions and energy bills, and less on families, children and education. The awful grin of Nigel Farage doesn’t look like the warmest of welcomes to babies into his world. If the aim is for the country to breed more white Christian babies to help Reform achieve its net-zero immigration policy, it won’t work. Even as the party promotes child-bearing, in the same breath it announces it will restore the two-child benefit cap, supposedly to deter (it has no effect) the wrong sort from having more children.
Pronatalism doesn’t belong to the right: it should be pro progress, welcoming new life and energy. But currently that’s at huge cost to mothers in exhaustion, independence and lost earnings. Five years after giving birth, mothers have lost 42% of their incomes, research by the Office for National Statistics reveals. That motherhood penalty acts as a block. Sad research from the Social Market Foundation’s report, Baby Bust and Baby Boom: the liberal case for pronatalism shows most women in England and Wales want more children than they have, enough to keep the birthrate at a stable 2.1, but instead they only have 1.4. The right to have children is as important as the right not to, but the obstacles for those who do want to are well known. Lack of housing, high rents and falling home ownership are prime causes, with rising numbers of 25- to 34-year-olds living at home, finds the Institute for Fiscal Studies report Hotel of Mum and Dad.
Governments everywhere are struggling to raise birthrates – not even communist China or the mullahs of Iran can stop them plummeting. South Korea, with the fewest number of babies in the world, has just announced two years of an upward trend. Only time will tell whether or not that is a blip.
French governments have always been pronatalist and though the country’s birthrate has been falling, it does better than the rest of Europe, at 1.5. Free egg-freezing is offered to 29- to 37-year-olds, which costs about £5,000 in the UK.
New Labour did well without a deliberate policy. Inheriting a falling rate, its female MPs drove forward free nurseries, childcare tax credits, 3,500 Sure Start centres in England and a trust fund for babies born between 2002 and 2011. Decrepit schools were rebuilt and teachers better paid, with wrap-around breakfast, afternoon and holiday clubs helping working parents. Causation or mere correlation? The birthrate shot up to 1.96 by 2009, the highest since the 1970s. It fell right back down after austerity cut all that away, with 12.2% fewer babies born in England and Wales in 2019 than in 2012.
Environmentalists have worried that every extra human footprint treads heavily. But in the end it is human politics that will make or break the planet. An ageing electorate is far less concerned than younger voters. Polling shows the old are more conservative, rightwing and selfish, the least supportive of net-zero carbon emissions, while the young who have longest to live here are the most anxious campaigners to save the planet. The ingenuity and better consciences of the young are Earth’s best hope. Pronatalism certainly doesn’t belong to the right.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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