To the Nursery!

 

"Go Forth and Multiply", she says

While waiting last Friday for our “you’re-the-experts-so-you-do-the-picking” take-away Bangladeshi menu (they chose delicious, aromatic Lamb Shatkora), I picked up a copy of The Sun - you know how you do, chaps - 8^th June. There, on the anti-Woke page, was a demographic scare story Brits face serious consequences if our birth rate continues to decline by darling-of-the-Conservative right, Miriam Cates MP: (probably saved from a speech in May but trotted out by the Sun to match with a gender-wars story on policing).

Readers of this blog will know, eg from the piece We Forgot the Begat that demographics is the future, including its relevance for how we will meet the Aliens). I read the article with interest, and also as a piece of attempted social engineering. Mrs Cates, who has a degree in genetics and been a science teacher, has impeccable pro-natalist credentials, including doing her bit. She scores highly on the Kinder, Kirche categories but it would be unfair given her present employment to insist too much on the Küche aspects (but see on). She has just picked up on the fact that UK TFR (Total Fertility Rate) has been below replacement rate for the last 50 years (since 1973), with Conservative-led administrations for 32/50 years if that alone makes a difference to women’s choices (which seems unlikely). Her Sun article makes it clear that she doesn’t like immigration as a way to population stability (which would indicate around 200k per year net immigration to be the target for stability). Instead, she calls on her own government to ‘Remove the Barriers’ to women choosing to have children. As a father of two daughters in their early thirties, I’m right with you. But she rejects free childcare, because of the choices made by her Finnish sisters, although my daughters would vote for more help there (to counter the prevailing wisdom that ‘one partner’s wages all go on childcare’, as one of them told me). Cates wants the husband’s taxes to be, effectively, fully remitted (following her link from “Until the 1990s, our tax system…” will fail to inform you of the full details).­ This is supposed to provide funding and esteem for the wife’s many years out of the world of employed work. (Cates was lucky herself that she could benefit from being Financial Director in her husband’s company to top-up her earnings and self-esteem whenever she wished). Unless you are very high-end financially, like these prominent eugenicist Pronatalists, you may wonder how far the rebate of the Standard Rate taxation (20%, and after personal allowance) of an ordinary husband’s salary – the rebate she seems to be hinting – will go towards those childcare costs. And whether that will do much to reversing 50-60 year-old trends in the UK and, successively, every single other country in the world. Mrs Cates might like to ponder on why her sisters worldwide are choosing to have fewer babies, and not just people who look like her.

It's undeniable that economics and relative taxation/subsidy does have some effect on personal choices, but that’s probably a smaller consideration vs the personal choice element. If you want to see a worked example of a policy of her government working in absolutely the opposite way to baby-booming Mrs Cates’ wishes, here’s a some food for thought. The base data for her, and me, is Birthsin England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) – that’s everything, including useful definitions like age-specific fertility rates. The real fun bit is to go to Section 5, Figure 4, where you can see ‘austerity in action’. If you click on pause/play you can click through every year from 2001 to 2021 and see the dark blue (>2 children per woman) areas join up into a chubby bracelet stretching from Lands End to The Wash throughout the child-friendly Labour years, but scarcely beyond. Watch birth rates plummeting from the beginning of Conservative austerity showing up in the 2013 figures. Cates points out that rates “dropped dramatically over the past ten years” but doesn’t point out that the obvious fact that 2011 was at the end of a long boom period in the UK and with a large contribution from immigrant families and their choices. Not a good baseline. Neither is Singapore, a favourite nation of some of her Conservative colleagues, where the TFR is 1.2births/woman (2022 figures). My estimate of worldwide average trending to 1.6 when everyone is fully integrated into the world economy looks quite reasonable. With a standardised mean age of mother at childbirth at 30.7 years in 2020 in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics) and an average age of mothers giving birth to their first child in England and Wales at 29.1 years, my estimate of 3 generations per 100 years also seems OK. That underlies my estimate of extinction-due-to-lack-of-interest in about three thousand years.

Mrs Cates has her work cut out, but she can do a bit of good by adopting some of those child and mother friendly policies of 2001-2010.

NB, this week also marks the anniversary (10^th June), in 1956, of the first licensing of the progesterone-only hormonal ‘pill’ for menstrual disorders. The rest followed.

Picture credits: The Sun and Getty (linked)