Britain's fertility crisis -we need to get serious before it's too late

Thoughts on the scale of the problem and possible solutions

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Here are two shocking facts about Britain’s population that you might have missed in recent weeks.

The first is that deaths now outnumber births. For the first time in half a century, there are more funerals than baby celebrations.

The second is that our nation’s fertility rate has now plunged to 1.44, which is the lowest since records began, in 1938.

A fertility rate of 1.44 is well below what is called the ‘replacement rate’, of 2.1, which is needed for a population to replace itself.

And this decline, unless we change direction, will only accelerate. One study forecasts that the fertility rate will slump to 1.3 by the end of this century. Our population is ageing and shrinking.

Although the UK does not gather fertility rate by ethnicity, we also know that women born in the UK have ‘half a child’ less than those born outside.

Our majority community could be close to halving every generation, which will radically transform our country.

This isn’t just a problem for the UK.

Too few children are being born in countries as different as Jamaica and China, Germany and Thailand.

But in Britain, our hapless political leaders on both the Left and Right have long lulled people into a sense of false security, claiming that we can continue underproducing the next generation and resolve the shortage of people through mass immigration.

But as demographer Paul Morland points out in his recent book No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, this is a hiding to nothing. Why?

Because, firstly, immigrants grow old and their fertility rate declines, so we need more and more people to support an ever ageing society, creating a vast Ponzi scheme.

This approach is pushing many Western states into a ‘population trap’, whereby the sheer scale and size of their population change is now outpacing the capacity of the state to provide basic public services, like healthcare, housing, safe streets, and so on.

Second, countries that have traditionally been poorer than the UK and with higher fertility rates – such as Ireland and Poland – have got rapidly richer and seen their fertility rates plunge, so there’s no longer an available surplus population for them to send, nor much of an economic motive for them to come.

The remaining countries which do have high birth rates, meanwhile, are increasingly places which have lower levels of education, lower rates of economic productivity, and completely different cultures which have not produced prosperous and cohesive nations. Quite the opposite.

Which is why bringing people from these nations to Britain in ever-growing numbers not only risks eroding our social cohesion, which we see reflected in the worrying rise of sectarianism, segregation along religious and racial lines, Islamist terror, and record low levels of public trust, but is also economically counterproductive.

As I’ve pointed out, contrary to what you’re told by the elite class mass immigration is not driving prosperity -it’s undermining prosperity by flooding our economy with low-skill, low-wage migrants from outside Europe who are not only take more out of the collective pot than they put in but come from entirely different cultures, pushing us into a low-trust, segregated, conflict-ridden society.

If mass immigration is so good for the economy then ask yourself a question: why has our ‘GDP-per-capita’ growth rate, which measures the average value of output per person in an economy, more than halved since 2008, falling to the lowest levels since the 1990s?

And if mass immigration is so beneficial then why, two decades on from when it started, are we still locked in a low-growth, high debt, unproductive economy?

To top it all, most people coming to this country are not coming because we have decided we need them to plug a gap in the labour force. Most are asylum seekers, relatives of immigrants, or people claiming to be students.

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But the argument goes further than this.

In much of the rest of the world, an indigenous population’s concern for its own survival and flourishing is taken for granted.

In Japan, despite a low fertility rate, mass immigration is heavily resisted because it’s simply assumed that an ethnically Japanese Japan is worth preserving.

The same is true of Korea.

In Tunisia, a country with a surprisingly low fertility rate, the President rails against the prospect of being swamped by Sub-Saharan Africans and non-Muslims.

Making a taboo of this sort of thinking is a white, European tendency. Very few countries around the world think like our political leaders do.

But here in the West, in sharp contrast, our liberal if not radically ‘woke’ rulers try to persuade us that any kind of ethnic continuity, any sense that we are bound to our country through ancestry, and any desire to preserve and pass on this inheritance to our children, is considered “wicked”, “backward”, and “racist”.

Demoralised and demonised, no wonder we don’t want to reproduce ourselves. We never really talk about our fertility crisis and when we do we are called far-right. This is not a serious response to a major social, economic, and cultural crisis.

But however much the ruling elites of Europe have tried to shut down any suggestion that native Europeans should want to preserve their predominance in their homelands, the peoples of Europe have now started to push back.

The liberal taboo is being shattered, from one election to the next.

In France, a Marine Le Pen presidency is now a real possibility. In Germany the Alternative for Germany is on the rise. Italy has an explicitly anti-immigration (and pro-natal) president. And parties opposing mass immigration, including ones that call for ‘remigration’, have risen to new heights in the likes of Austria and Sweden.

In Britain too, many people are waking up to the reality of years of too-low-fertility and too-high-immigration.

Many cities, not least London, have become majority-minority and places where native British people once lived have seen them displaced by millions of incomers who share none of the country’s traditions or affiliations.

Already, between 50 and 57% of births in English cities such as London, Manchester, Cambridge, and Leicester are to mothers not born in the UK, while nearly one in three children in the UK overall, or 32%, are born to mothers born overseas —the highest proportion since records began.

The prospect of this continuing and pushing ever-outwards while native Brits retreat to the periphery is something which the majority of the population of this country can see happening before their eyes, are not happy with and have every right to resent. But anyone who wishes to preserve the British majority, along with its culture and heritage, is automatically stigmatised by our ruling elite.

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Worse still, that same elite refuse to acknowledge the disastrous demographic crisis that we’re now in. They have their heads in the sand, refusing to even talk about it.

As Paul Morland points out, after half a century of our having too few children, no front-line politician is prepared to acknowledge the problem.

In fact, if anything, we’re going backwards.

We now have a Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, who explicitly states this is not something he is going to have a view on.

Our government is prepared to tell people how to think about everything from radical trans ideology and Islam to the point of threatening to lock dissenters up.

But it has not a word to say about what is now very clearly the most pressing issue of our time —whether or not we produce our own future.

As Morland rightly argues, it’s time for a complete revolution in our cultural attitudes —we need, in short, a fundamentally different approach.

What does this mean? It means …