A reply to my liberal feminist critics.

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If there’s one thing the liberal class love more than debating ideas, it’s inventing arguments their opponents never made.

Such as the argument that I want to live in a world where women who have no children pay much higher rates of tax.

That was the charge levelled against me during the Gorton and Denton by-election, when left-wing media including The Guardian and The Canary made this false claim to try and derail our campaign among women voters.

And now it’s reappeared thanks to somebody called the Guilty Feminist (real name Deborah Frances-White) who you might know from her disastrous debate with Konstantin Kisin on the popular YouTube show Triggernometry.

That debate has been watched some two million times and led The Times newspaper to describe the Guilty Feminist as “a cartoon of progressive intolerance: patronising, hectoring and censorious”.

Anyway, last month Deborah Frances-White shared a post titled ‘Why women should never vote for Reform UK’, which included the false claim that somebody called ‘Robert Goodwin’, alongside a picture of me, had ‘said he wanted a negative child benefit tax for those who don’t have offspring’.

It subsequently went viral.

When I messaged Deborah to point out this was inaccurate she promptly released my direct message as some kind of ‘gotcha’ moment for her supporters and appeared to revel in all the likes she was receiving from other progressive ‘feminists’, including Green MP Hannah Spencer, Carol Vorderman, and countless others.

When Deborah is not pulling stunts like this she also appears to spend a great deal of time online, campaigning against ‘the far right’, Nigel Farage and Reform UK, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and calling on people to support Palestine and vote Green.

You get the picture.

So, I thought I’d take the time to respond to the charge while also explaining where, I think, liberal feminists are going wrong today. I think it’s important that you, my readers, know what I genuinely think about this issue because it is important.

Let me start by being as clear as I can be:

As the son of a single mother, and father of a daughter, I will always be among the first to advocate for women’s rights and choice. Women must always be able to choose what they do with their own bodies. End of story.

I am also intimately aware that some women who desperately want to have children struggle with infertility. I want to be clear how much I empathise with those women.

Because I really do.

But what is also true is that rather than engage with what I actually said, my liberal feminist and left-wing critics prefer to attack a caricature because they appear to find that easier than confronting the more nuanced argument I am making.

I never called for women without children to pay higher rates of tax.

What I did call for — in this post — is for Western nations to debate a whole array of policies and measures that have been put forward by leading demographers around the world to try and solve our rapidly worsening demographic crisis.

Why did I do this?

Because Western nations like Britain are in the midst of a severe demographic crisis.

Fertility rates have plummeted to record lows – 1.39 in England, 1.25 in Scotland – and are forecast to keep falling unless we take urgent, radical action.

Rates are already well below the so-called ‘replacement level’ of 2.1, which means that unless we find a way of encouraging families to have more children then Western nations like Britain will simply not survive.

This, of course, might be what some people on the left want.

But I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of people – including most women – do want Western nations to endure, not least because they are the only nations that have actually developed and protected broad-based rights for women.

There are also many reasons why liberal feminists and my friends on the left should take this demographic crisis far more seriously than they are currently doing.

Denigrating those who talk about it, and who dare to suggest ways of fixing it, as ‘far right’, ‘reactionary’, or ‘anti-women’, is curious given two points.

The first is that many of the things liberal feminists want will not be possible unless we all find a way of solving this demographic crisis and having more children.

If you are a liberal feminist who wants a functioning National Health Service then somebody has to staff it.

If you are a liberal feminist who wants a well-funded welfare state that supports the most vulnerable in society then somebody has to work and pay for it.

And if you are a liberal feminist who wants to live in a society with well-functioning public services then somebody will have to produce all the teachers, the civil servants, the nurses, the scientists, the workers, and the taxpayers to make it all possible.

You cannot simultaneously demand all these things while treating the only thing that makes all this possible – having children – as somebody else’s problem.

And you cannot demand all these things while attacking people who want to support and strengthen the very families that will make them possible.

This is not a serious response.

Nor is calling for mass immigration as a replacement for the failure of successive governments, both Labour and Tory, to support British families.

Mass immigration is not a serious answer to ageing societies; it is a Ponzi scheme.

Why? Because immigrants get old, too, so by importing masses of migrant labour you end up needing more and more people to service more and more pensioners.

That just pushes nations into a ‘population trap’ - which is what happens when the state can no longer provide public services for an ever-expanding population.

This is what we are now starting to witness in Britain with the glaring lack of available housing, quality healthcare, strong borders, and so on.

By ignoring this demographic crisis and calling instead for more immigration and porous borders, liberals are only undermining their project over the longer-term.

They are pushing us into a society in which the state will no longer be able to provide decent public services, while disillusioned British citizens will no longer be willing to pay tax and fund things like welfare because they will no longer feel any sense of solidarity with who is in the country.

The more diverse societies become, the less trusting they become; the less trusting they become, the less willing people become to fund welfare.

The fact that a quarter-of-a-million Brits left Britain last year suggests this weakening of the social contract is already underway and yet liberals appear blind to it.

Furthermore, I would say there is nothing particularly ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, or ‘fair’ about what the likes of Labour, the Greens, and liberal feminists are doing.

They are asset-stripping the best and brightest from low-income nations and putting them to work in the National Health Service while refusing to invest in young British people who want to become doctors and nurses and then forcing the British people to send the same nations that just got exploited billions of pounds in foreign aid.

And there is nothing particularly ‘feminist’ about refusing to address the demographic crisis while importing millions of people who are — as the evidence makes clear — far more likely to hold misogynistic, patriarchal, outdated, and grotesque views towards women, and also far more likely to rape and sexually assault them, too.

Green politicians such as Hannah Spencer say they are ‘feminist’ while importing nationalities that are far more likely to commit sexual violence against women, and while turning a blind-eye to the fact that her party’s Muslim voters have consistently been shown to be far more likely to think women should stay at home, obey their husbands, be kept separate from men, and assume traditional roles.

How is this ‘feminist’, exactly? And how is this ‘liberal’?

Attacking people like me who want to defend women’s sex-based rights while directly undermining the rights of women through these extreme policies appears rather odd.

It’s also not a serious response to a specific and growing problem that liberal women face, too. Those who are trying to shut down debate about how to boost birth-rates in the West are precisely the group that should be taking this crisis most seriously.

Consistently, across the West, liberal women on the left are having much fewer children than their Brexit-voting, Trump-supporting counterparts on the right.

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We are rapidly entering a world, in other words, where there will be far fewer Hannah Spencers and Guilty Feminists and far more Suella Bravermans and Sarah Pochins; far fewer AOCs and far more Sarah Palins.

Liberal progressives like to think they represent the future and they are on the ‘right side of history’ but if current trends continue they will soon represent the past while history will be written by the people who are actually having children.

Ideas do not reproduce themselves – people do.

By constantly promoting the very bad ideas that all men are toxic, children are unnecessary, and Western nations do not deserve to survive, liberal feminists and the ideologies they encourage are only setting the stage for their own demise.

More fundamentally, while liberal feminists are fond of lecturing the rest of us about ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, I would also ask them this: on what planet is it ‘fair’ or ‘equal’ to demand that the women who bear the enormous costs and burden of having children are treated the same as women who do not bear these costs at all?

It’s not fair.

It’s not fair at all.

Women who have children face much higher physical, financial, and mental health costs than women who do not — and we should live in societies that not only acknowledge this fact but respond to it.

And what about living in a society that actually helps women get what they want?

The vast majority of women — 92 per cent in Britain, according to one recent survey — hope to become mothers one day.

Liberals should not be making it harder for women to have children by shutting down debate and framing policies that are designed to help women achieve this as ‘reactionary’; they should be working to help women get what they want: children.

Personally, I would not go as far as suggesting that we should have a higher tax for women who do not have children. This was merely one of several ideas that were put forward by a leading demographer and which I merely said we should debate.

But what I do think we should introduce is sweeping tax allowances and other benefits for women who do choose to have children – especially British women and families who choose to have more than two children.

While liberal feminists like to portray all this as being something akin to the The Handmaids Tale, they are clearly not aware of the fact that we already do this.

It’s called child benefit. It’s called free childcare, tax-free childcare, maternity and paternity provision. All of which mean the principle that women who have children are treated differently is already established and should not be controversial.

The debate we should be having is whether this goes far enough. Clearly, given our rapidly declining birth-rate, I do not think it does. It needs to go much, much further.

I’d like to see the return of far more ambitious tax allowances for women and families that have children and which Britain used to have.

I’d like to see us replicate the pro-family tax policies in countries like Luxembourg, France, Germany, Canada, Hungary, Poland, and Cuba (presumably Hannah Spencer and liberal feminists are fans of Cuba?)

But I’d like to go even further.

Why not prioritise British families that have more than two children when it comes to housing and giving them far more favourable mortgage rates, for example?

Instead of giving scarce housing to the First Lady of Sierra Leone, we should give what housing we have to British women who have more than two children.

We should also teach children far more about the biological reality of having children, including the very real risks that come with having children later in life.

We either believe in science and biological reality or we don’t. We either want to protect women, or we are happy putting them at risk in the name of ideology.

Personally, I stand with science. I’m not sure when so-called ‘feminists’ decided it was ok to put women at risk by ignoring science but it’s happened. And it’s wrong.

And we should also find ways of cultivating a far more pro-family culture. We’ve already dramatically changed our culture when it comes to everything from driving with seatbelts to reducing smoking, protecting the environment, and more.

There’s absolutely no reason why we cannot also change our culture so that it is more supportive of mothers, puts families at the centre of our national life, and makes it clear that those who have more children will receive extensive benefits.

This is not inflammatory; this is how a nation and a people endure.

Lastly, let me say something about Reform UK — the party for whom I stood as a candidate and which is often accused of being ‘anti-women’.

Reform UK has certainly not helped itself by standing a candidate in Makerfield who, in my view, should have publicly apologised to women for his awful comments.

I did campaign in Makerfield but only briefly, on two occasions, because I wanted to thank the many activists who helped my own by-election campaign in Gorton and Denton. This is how political parties work. But I did think that allowing our candidate to stand without that apology was the wrong thing to do.

But while we’re here, have Hannah Spencer, the pro-Green Guilty Feminist, and countless other ‘feminists’ apologised for campaigning alongside dozens of anti-Semites, Islamist extremists who want to treat women like sex slaves and second-class citizens, Hamas sympathisers, and rape apologists?

I’ll leave that one here.

At the same time, the wider accusation that Reform UK is ‘anti-women’ is wrong. It is actually the only party that is standing up unequivocally for women’s sex-based rights – rights which Labour and Tory governments have undermined in recent years.

A Reform government would bring forward the Women’s and Motherhood Protection Act that will give women stronger protections, clearer rights, and greater certainty – extended time limits for pregnancy and maternity claims, stronger protections against dismissal during pregnancy, enhanced redundancy protections for new mothers, protection for women undergoing fertility treatment, alongside explicit breastfeeding rights, and additional rights for women who tragically experience miscarriage and stillbirth.

All this is ignored in the wider public debate about Reform UK.

Not to mention full justice for the countless women and girls who were systemically abused by the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs and who liberal feminists, strangely, never seem to talk about.

Reform UK will also fix Britain’s borders so that more young mums like Rhiannon Whyte do not lose their lives at the hands of illegal migrants, and more children are not abused by people who should never have been in this country to begin with.

If liberal feminists want to pretend none of this is happening while attacking all those who want to protect women as ‘far-right’ then that’s their choice.

But I would suggest this is another reason why Reform UK is topping the national polls — with more support among women than the Greens and Labour.

What I would like to see — put simply — is a country that recognises the very serious demographic crisis we are facing by providing much greater support for women with children, making family life much easier and more affordable, helping women get what they want, and feel more culturally valued when they do become mothers.

This is not reactionary, extremist, or far-right. It is how a healthy, forward-looking, and prosperous society should act.

We can either continue pretending this demographic crisis does not exist and attacking all those who talk about it; or we can have a serious, honest conversation about how to tackle it while also doing something that as a father and son I care very deeply about: protecting women.

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As always, I welcome your comments. I’m looking forward to joining our Inner Circle and Paid subscribers for our weekly Live discussion on the Substack App at 2pm today. Upgrade now to join us.

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