Miriam Cates: Britain needs more babies, and the time to start doing something about it is now

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

Donald Trump’s knack of generating international headlines shows no signs of waning. From trade tariffs to mass deportations, Trump’s agenda provokes performative outrage across the Western media. Yet his supporters argue Trump’s policies are a sensible response to real challenges faced by America.

The White House latest proposal – offering $5,000 to women who have babies – typifies this radical but apparently rational approach. The US birthrate is too low to replace the current population, so why not incentivise people to have more children?

Predictably, this idea has been met with ridicule by liberal Europeans. Whether it’s immigration, trade imbalances, or falling birth rates, liberals lurch from claiming that there is no problem to dismissing potential solutions as ‘foolish’ or ‘far right’.

And just as they are wrong about immigration and trade, the libs are wrong about birth rates too.

Yet it’s not just the political left who fail to take seriously the consequences of the Western birth dearth – British conservatives seem blissfully unaware of the terrible fallout from half a century of below replacement fertility rates.

This is puzzling, especially given the readiness with which many conservatives adopted the ideas of climate catastrophism. Such was the zeal of the Tories for Net Zero that the last Conservative government left us with sky high energy bills and our major industries on their last legs.

In hindsight, as Kemi Badenoch has recently admitted, this was a damaging over-reaction. Climate change is a problem, but not an existential one. Falling fertility, by contrast, is by definition an existential threat. If global warming is a chronic illness, demographic collapse is a terminal diagnosis.

If a nation’s population is to sustain itself, every older person who retires must be replaced by one younger person coming of age to join the workforce. To achieve this, a country needs a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of at least 2.1 children per fertile woman. This ensures that there are enough working-age adults both to support economic productivity and care for the young and the old.

Yet since the 1970s, Britain’s TFR has been below replacement and falling, hitting a record low of 1.44 children per woman last year. This means that 100 British adults selected at random today will have just 52 grandchildren between them. We are witnessing the halving of Britain’s native population within two generations.

Spare a thought for the South Koreans who, with a TFR of just 0.7 are set to lose 80 per cent of their working age population by the end of the century.

We can already see the cracks in our economy, labour force, and family structures. There are persistent labour shortages in many key sectors. Taxes have reached record highs. The ratio of working-age adults to pensioners shrinks year by year, and with it, the sustainability of our welfare state. Health and care services are struggling to cope.

In 1985, Britain had nearly ten 20-year-olds for every six 60-year-olds. In 2025, we have just five 20-year-olds for each six 60-year-old. We are facing a future of shortages, stagnation, inflation and soaring public debt. And you can forget about care for the elderly; competition for able-bodied working age employees will be so intense that only the very rich will be able to afford sufficient support.

Yet many people – including numerous Conservatives – need convincing that falling birth rates should even be a topic of conversation.

Perhaps British complacency stems from the very high levels of immigration have masked the impact of an aging society. Of course, there are many problems, both economic and social, that have been caused by mass immigration. But in comparison to a low birth low immigration country like Japan – where debt to GDP has reached 250 per cent, and elderly people die alone and undiscovered – it has at least delayed the consequences of falling birth rates in the UK.

Yet even if mass immigration has been a palliative, it is not a solution. First-generation immigrants often have more children than native Brits, but then fertility rates quickly decline. Thus, even more people must be imported to prop up the workforce and pay for pensions and welfare, and mass immigration becomes a giant Ponzi scheme.

Another reason the birth rate crisis is ignored is the lingering myth of overpopulation. In 1968, the publication of Paul Erlich’s book The Population Bomb steeped the West in Malthusian pessimism, popularising the belief that the Earth cannot sustain more people.

But this is demonstrably false. Global food production per capita is at an all-time high. Poverty has fallen rapidly. Fewer people die from natural disasters today than ever before. Life expectancy has soared. Human beings are extraordinarily ingenious and industrious. The more we collaborate, the more prosperous we become – and the more of us there are, the more we collaborate.

Yet the lie of overpopulation has so brainwashed Western nations that many genuinely believe falling birth rates are a good thing, perhaps confusing the negative effects of a rapid immigration-driven population surge with the benefits of organic, sustainable population growth.

If you still think the world is overpopulated then you’re in luck; global population is set to peak in the coming decades and then decline rapidly. By the end of this century, almost every country in the world will have below replacement birth rates. Even China (TFR 1.2) will be on the verge of collapse.

Even if we reversed fertility decline today, a generation of economic pain from aging populations is now baked in.

Those who claim that AI will dramatically reduce the need for human labour are denying the evidence of history. Every industrial revolution has been accompanied by predictions of mass unemployment, yet this has never materialised. The nature of work has changed dramatically over the centuries in response to disruptive technological innovation, yet human beings seem to have a limitless capacity to create employment for ourselves.

The challenge presented by below-replacement birth rates dwarfs the problems posed by climate change. Eastern European countries, especially Hungary, have been focused on trying to increase fertility for years, and now America seems poised to follow suit.

The sooner British politicians understand the seriousness of the situation, the sooner we can begin to try to reverse birth rate decline. The all-important question is, of course, how do we do it?

Among the UK’s small community of pronatalists, discussions often focus on the economic and social pressures faced by young people (student debt, housing, online dating, delayed marriage, high childcare costs, et al) and how they can be overcome.

But it’s not only young people who need to be persuaded about the benefits of having children. If Britain is to have any chance of implementing pro-family policies, there is a much larger and much more powerful group that must be convinced: the Boomer generation.

Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are an historically unique generation. During their lifetimes, life expectancy has increased enormously, from 68 to an incredible 82 years. Boomers are the first generation – and likely the last – to enjoy funded pensions for, on average, two whole decades of retirement.

Better (or worse) still, thanks to international financial reforms in the 1970s and 1980s asset price inflation has delivered many Boomers unearned property wealth worth hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of pounds, a phenomenon that has simultaneously locked younger generations out of home ownership altogether.

In other words, the Boomer generation had everything… everything, that is, except for enough children to sustain the population and support the costs of an aging society.

This isn’t to say Boomers haven’t worked hard or contributed much to the nation. Of course they have.

But neither is it the case that this generation has been uniquely diligent or sacrificial – certainly not in comparison to the “Silent Generation” which fought two world wars. Boomer prosperity cannot be attributed to unparalleled self-sacrifice; it was enabled by luck, timing, and government policy more than individual effort.

Yet the entitlement mindset of some Boomers that accompanies their extraordinary good luck presents a significant political barrier to taking the necessary steps to reduce the costs to young people of having children.

To raise the birth rate, we will have to redistribute a significant proportion of state spending from older people to young families. In a democracy, such a shift requires the electoral consent of the Boomer generation who, due to their sheer number, exercise far more political power than the young.

Take, for example, the pensions triple lock. Every year, the state pension increases by the highest of inflation, wages or 2.5 per cent. Yet for couples with children, a combination of fiscal drag, the removal of child benefit, house price inflation, and individual rather than household taxation (boomers were the last generation allowed to share their tax allowances between married couples) have made it more and more expensive to have children.

The costs of pensions have been fully socialised (qualification for the state pension does not depend on having had children of your own) yet we have privatised the cost of raising children, who need to pay those pensions via their future taxes.

Unless we ditch the triple lock, Britain can’t afford to improve economic conditions for families. Yet we can only achieve this if Boomers become convinced of the need to make childbearing more affordable, and then vote self-sacrificially for family-friendly policies.

I don’t underestimate the political challenge ahead. I am frequently berated by Boomers who strongly object to the claim that pensions are unaffordable, that families need more help, or even that the low birth rate should be cause for concern.

But the reason that I keep on raising the alarm over falling birth rates is that I believe Boomers care deeply about their children, grandchildren and the future of our nation and that, once the consequences of falling fertility are properly understood, this golden generation will use their political power to demand pro-natal policies.

Politics is all about persuasion. Public opinion can move very quickly once the facts are known and understood by sufficient numbers of influential people. Concerns over mass immigration, gender ideology, and the costs of net zero are all recent examples of this.

Given the fact that demographic collapse is the single biggest long-term threat facing this country, it is inevitable that sooner or later the question of how to raise birth rates will begin to dominate our political discourse. But until that time, I intend to keep on banging the natalist drum. Because Britain needs more babies, and the time to start doing something about it is now.