The conditions of growth - why our declining birth rate is the most pressing issue our nation faces
"It’s a real honour to be speaking at the very first National Conservatism Conference in the United Kingdom.
Over the next few days we will hear from some of Britain’s - and the world’s - leading thinkers about the need for a renewal of conservatism.
We’ll hear how and why liberalism and globalism have failed to deliver a strong economy, robust national security, successful industrial policy, and a cohesive national story.
We will discuss what answers UK National conservatism may have to offer, and I have no doubt we will have fascinating debates.
But these issues are peripheral at best, unless we first turn our attention to the most pressing issue of our generation.
I don’t care if you’re a Red Tory, a communitarian, a follower of Burke, or, heaven forbid, a libertarian free marketeer.
None of these traditions has a future, none of our philosophical musings or policy proposals will amount to anything long lasting unless we address the one overarching threat to British conservatism, and indeed the whole of Western society.
No it’s not climate change.
It’s not Russia or China or Iran.
It’s not the neo-Marxist ideology that has so weakened our institutions.
It’s not inflation or taxation or poor productivity.
No.
There is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has completely failed to deliver and that is babies.
Across the nations of the developed world, the birth rate is collapsing. In the 1960s,
British women each had an average of around 2.6 children. Now it is fewer than 1.6.
For the first time ever last year, half of women reached their 30th birthday without having a child.
The fertility rate in the UK is now well below replacement rate and it continues to fall.
Perhaps you’re thinking that this is not a problem, or only a minor problem, or a problem for the future.
But there simply is no future if we don’t reverse this trend.
A fertility rate of just 1.55 is not ‘gradual decline’.
Even without further fall, in just two generations time there will be 40% fewer births than there are today.
That is population collapse.
Now, you might not be the broody type. Perhaps nothing fills you with dread more than the thought of changing nappies - although our first keynote speaker, a father of six, has famously managed to avoid that duty.
Perhaps you weren't expecting to have to think about making babies at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning.
But if you want to be a national conservative, you need a nation to conserve.
So let’s take a moment to consider the economic impact of an inverted population pyramid.
There are currently around four working-age people for every pensioner in the UK.
But based on current projections, in just one generation’s time - in 2053 there will be fewer than three working-age people for every pensioner.
If we think that our defence capabilities, our health service, and our infrastructure are underfunded now.
if we believe that taxation rates are currently unsustainably high, then we are completely unprepared for what is coming down the line...
And a low birth rate is not just a problem in itself, it’s also a symptom of serious societal malaise.
Wanting to reproduce is - biologically - the most natural desire in the world. And having children is a sign of hope for the future, of believing that your family, community and nation are good places to bring up a child.
How can we claim success for our economic and political framework - and even try to export it around the world - when it is failing to produce the one thing required to sustain it into the future?
Now I want to make clear that I am not at all saying that everyone should have children.
There have always been - and always will be - those who don’t want to or can’t have children, and that is absolutely to be expected and respected.
But in recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of women who want to have children but don’t, with some analysts predicting that around 30% of women may never become mothers.
This ‘unplanned childlessness’ represents millions of personal tragedies as well as a national one.
If as conservatives we want to preserve our nation and our heritage, if, like Burke we believe that society is a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born, then we must at the very least try to remove the barriers to having children for those who wish to do so.
Before I was an MP I used to be a biology teacher.
Now I admit that I find it hard to get excited about plants - one of the many reasons I didn’t join the Green party - but I did enjoy teaching about photosynthesis.
And for those of you struggling to remember your GCSEs - they’re a bit like O levels but newer - photosynthesis is the chemical process by which plants convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen.
The rate of photosynthesis, which determines how quickly the plant grows, is dependent on a whole range of factors - temperature, humidity, wind speed, carbon dioxide concentration, light intensity.
If just one of these factors is sub-optimal, the rate of photosynthesis slows down or even stops.
And just like photosynthesis, or any other biological process, the conditions have to be right for babies to be made and born, because biological human beings - not insensitive machines - choose to have or not to have children.
Therefore if we are going to have any chance of reversing plummeting fertility rates we must look closely at the social, economic, and political factors - the environmental conditions - that appear to be acting as national contraceptives.
Traditional Left wing ideologies see everything through the lens of economic inequality.
You will frequently hear it said that it is economic factors that prevent women from having children.
‘If only we had free childcare from birth, better maternity pay, no gender pay gap, then women would have more babies.’
But the evidence suggests otherwise.
I recently visited Finland, a country with one of the most generous - and high quality - childcare offers in the world.
Every baby from the age of ten months old has the right to largely free, full time, day care.
Maternity leave is more generous than here in the UK, and the Finnish average wage is 20 per cent higher than ours.
A perfect place to start a family - and yet the birth rate in Finland is one of the lowest in the whole world, at just 1.3 children per woman and falling.
The Finnish people have fought for centuries to preserve their independence and national identity and yet they now face an existential threat - not at the hands of an invading power but as a result of population collapse.
Finland should serve as a warning to all Western nations, and yet liberalism continues to double down on misconceived ideas of what gives life meaning and how we create the conditions in which young couples decide to start a family.
Of course people respond to economic incentives.
But as human beings, our social behaviour - and that includes family formation - is heavily influenced by what we perceive that society values.
We tend towards the choices to which others attributes value, and steer away from choices that are seen as undesirable.
Couples will have children if they believe it is a socially valuable endeavour and that they will be rewarded with status, respect and support for doing so.
Fertility rates decline has not occurred in spite of the economic and social policies of the last thirty years,
it is a direct result of how those policies have failed to value and reward the behaviours that lead to starting a family.
Let’s consider what behaviours and choices current policies do and do not value.
We now place little value on the financial sacrifices that are required to have and raise children.
Changes to the tax system in the 1990s removed the ability to share tax allowances between couples, and ended additional tax allowances for each child.
More recently, we have removed child benefit from a fifth of families with children, and imposed a two-child limit on those claiming welfare.
Our fiscal system has gone from seeing the family as the fundamental unit of the economy and subsidising couples for the cost of raising children, to not even recognising family at all.
British families now pay far more tax than in comparable countries, and the message from the state is clear: having children, and investing in their upbringing is of no economic value to the nation.
The implication is that having children is an entirely private enterprise, a bit like buying a luxury car.
Don’t do it unless you can afford it.
I have heard many people say - including those who claim to be conservative - that having children is a ‘lifestyle choice’,
But having children is about as much of a ‘lifestyle choice’ as eating - It is fundamental for survival.
In comparison to earlier generations, we place very little value on stable couple relationships, which are of course highly desirable for the raising of children.
Very few women want to have a baby without a committed partner, and yet now there is little incentive - either social or financial to enter into and remain in a lifelong relationship.
The creation of no fault divorce has removed any value at all in the eyes of the law for getting married, a risky move when marriage is objectively the most successful institution for the raising of children.
Of course, divorce and separation are sometimes necessary and even desirable, but when we lessen the societal and economic value of marriage and commitment, we should not be surprised when peoples’ behaviour changes as a result.
The UK now has the highest family breakdown rate in the OECD, with 44% of children experiencing some form of parental separation during their childhood.
This is not only a social issue - with trauma and misery and poorer educational outcomes following children through life - it’s an economic one.
Family breakdown costs the UK taxpayer more than £50 billion pounds per year, it drives housing demand and is responsible for an enormous welfare bill.
If we do not value lifelong committed relationships - through social and economic policy and our political narrative - we erode the value of family.
The Chancellor’s recent announcement that the taxpayer will spend four billion pounds on childcare for babies from 9 months old to get women back into work devalues the crucial role of motherhood.
There is no shortage of evidence supporting the long term benefits of a mother’s physical closeness and nurture for the first two or three years of a child’s life, and polling reveals that the majority of mothers want to spend more time with their young children.
And yet this childcare policy implies that the chief role of a mother should be as a GDP contributor, whilst outsourcing her child to the state.
The language of many politicians and commentators paints motherhood as an oppressive drudgery that any self-respecting woman wants to avoid and stay-at-home mothers as lazy, economically inactive or unambitious.
When motherhood is so undermined and undervalued by public policy, is it any wonder that fewer and fewer women choose the role?
The great hypothesis of the liberal elite that women have babies in order to outsource their care as quickly as possible, that women should derive more fulfilment from a paid job - any job - than they do from nurturing their own children is just a thought experiment - one that is in conflict with empirical evidence and biological reality.
It’s not progressive; it’s a fantasy that is slowly strangling Western nations.
It’s tempting to believe that the State is, or should be neutral on matters of family and fertility - but how can it be?
Economic and social policies either do, or don’t, value raising children.
Having children is risky and costly - why take the risk when society places so little value on your endeavour?
Our housing policy is also a deterrent to family formation.
Huge developments of tiny flats and gardenless homes are not conducive to raising children.
Our recklessly liberal immigration policy has seen the demand for housing soar and a failure to build enough houses has kept prices sky high *and out of the reach of young people.
If a home and a job are basic foundations for starting a family, at least one half of that equation is hard to come by.
And whilst the other half - a job - may be more available, the decimation of British industry since the 1970s has meant that in whole regions of our country, there is a lack of high skilled, well-paid secure work - particularly for men.
In its heyday, Stocksbridge steelworks in my constituency employed 11 000 local men - steel work still pays 50% more than the average wage in Yorkshire - but the plant now supports fewer than 750 jobs.
In the past, having a job that could support a family was a source of status and security to many working-class men.
In failing to support our critical foundation industries through economic policy, and by importing cheap goods from abroad, we have not only increased our dependence on questionable foreign states and reversed our balance of trade, we’ve robbed whole communities of the economic engine that provided quality, high status employment - one of the basic conditions for starting a family.
Our education policy has also, indirectly, contributed to declining fertility.
Tony Blair’s plan to expand the middle class has resulted in nearly 50% of our young people going to University.
Our labour market is now so saturated with graduates that over a third of them can’t find a graduate job, meanwhile our manufacturers and technical sector can’t recruit young people with the technical skills they require.
Of course we need - and want - world class higher education institutions, but what are the social and economic impacts - including the impacts on family formation - of sending half of the emerging generation to university?
Many young graduates are saddled with debt, and so less able to afford to buy a house, and start a family.
Spending so much time and money on education also makes it much more difficult - especially for women - to decide when is a good time to pause a career to have children.
For many women, delaying having children means never having children at all, and for many young men, going to University can result in lower earnings than alternative pathways.
Unusually, in Britain, Higher Education is almost always residential, which is an expensive model and often results in young people moving away from home permanently. This breaks up the network of extended family that can offer so much support to young couples with children.
Hardly surprising, then, that some estimates suggest graduates are 50% more likely to remain childless.
People do what others value - and when the UK taxpayer spends £14 billion pounds a year on universities, when our culture says that university is the passport to respectability, and tells young people that fulfilment is only to be found in education and career, then our bloated higher education system has become a hindrance and not a help to family formation.
British economic, industrial, educational and social policies over recent decades have collectively increased the cost and diminished the returns of raising children.
But having a home, a secure job and support from your family, community and nation are not the only pre-conditions to starting a family.
You must also have hope for the future.
And that hope is sadly diminishing in so many of our young people today.
Because liberal individualism has proven to be completely powerless to resist the cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.
When culture, schools and universities openly teach that:
- our country is racist
- our heroes are villains
- humanity is killing the earth
- you are what you desire
- diversity is theology
- boundaries are tyranny and
- self-restraint is oppression.
Is it any wonder that mental health conditions, self-harm, suicide and epidemic levels of anxiety characterise the emerging generation?
If we do not teach our children to value - to be proud of - our nation and its history is it any surprise that they do not want to be responsible for continuing it?
Liberalism is - literally - dying out.
Our hope must lie in a resurgent national conservatism, a conservatism that recognises and thrives when we take responsibility to pass on prosperity - and the best of our national culture, values and traditions - from one generation to the next.
A conservatism that respects and celebrates patriotism, the love of place, and aspires to status, security and belonging for all.
A conservatism that was demanded - but not yet fulfilled - by the political realignment of Brexit and the 2019 general election.
A conservatism that will re-establish the optimum conditions for having and bringing up children by restoring value to the essential endeavour of parenthood.
We must reform our tax and welfare system to recognise - and support - families raising children.
We must celebrate motherhood and fatherhood, giving women genuine choice about how to nurture their babies and meaningful support to return to the workplace at the time of their choosing.
We must actively support strategic industries to restore good jobs and economic prosperity to young men in the regions.
We must dramatically reduce immigration and build more homes to make housing more affordable for young families.
We must repurpose much of the money that is spent on Higher Education, using it instead to develop technical and vocational training to give all young people opportunities for meaningful, skilled work.
We must end the indoctrination of our children with destructive and narcissistic ideologies, Instead protecting childhood, training children in the timeless virtues and teaching them how to love our country.
But first of all, as conservatives we must be bold enough to speak about the importance of strong families - to make the case for a politics, an economy, a nation, that values and celebrates raising children.
The liberal left will characterise anyone who takes this view as bigoted, or intolerant, or anti-feminist.
Perhaps the Guardian will report this speech as ‘right wing MP at right wing conference advocates right wing agenda to have children and raise them well - since when was having children right wing.
And many on the right are uncomfortable speaking about anything other than economics, fearing being accused of stoking a culture war.
But there is no dividing line between social and economic policy.
If you want a strong, enduring economy, you need social policies that value families.
If you want strong, enduring families, you need economic policies that make family formation financially attractive.
You cannot be socially liberal and economically conservative.
If you think government and society should have nothing to say about the conditions that promote strong families, do not be surprised when you end up with a high tax, high spend economy, with a nation of broken people dependent on the State.
There is an alternative to decline.
It can be found in a common sense conservatism that is rooted in the values and hopes of ordinary British people and not the Westminster - or Global - elite.
A conservatism that deliberately, obviously, focuses on pursuing the economic and social conditions that give people security, confidence and hope in Britain's future.
So this week, as we seek a renewed national conservative vision for UK growth and prosperity, let us consider how to encourage the particular kind of growth that is most fundamental for the future of the United Kingdom.
People do what others value - and so, as conservatives, we must seek to restore the value of children in British society.
For children are not an economic burden, they are not a threat to personal autonomy, or a lifestyle choice.
Children are a joy and a blessing, they are the symptom and the cause of a society that has hope.
Our children are the reason that we seek to rebuild a nation whose future is prosperous, safe and free.
Speech at National Conservatism Conference | London | May 15 2023 | Check against delivery
