“God, they talk about almost nothing else here (apart from immigration),” a friend in Budapest responded when asked about the Hungarian Government’s family policies, the aim of which is to promote childbearing and avert demographic collapse.
In Britain, on the other hand, we for the most part avoid these subjects, thanks to rigorous self-censorship by mainstream conservatives who wish to be accused neither of support for the present governments in Hungary and Poland, nor of ordering women to have more children.
Fear of condemnation diminishes debate both on demographic trends, and on what, if anything, can be learned from the policies introduced by Hungary, Poland and many other countries in an attempt to raise birth rates.
Last summer, Paul Morland, a demographer at St Antony’s College, Oxford, wrote a piece for The Sunday Times in which he pointed out that the number of children in the UK is falling, and went on:
“With labour shortages already a problem in this country, the population winter has only just begun.
“We need a national demographic strategy, both in terms of immigration — especially after Brexit, when we should have more control over who enters our country — and for incentivising families to have more children and to have them when they are younger.”
In Morland’s view, “we are approaching a population emergency, and if well-informed people cannot discuss these matters, the field is left to cranks and fanatics.”
In his article, headlined “Should we tax the childless?”, he recognised that taxing those without children would be regarded as “unfair”, but pointed out that “we all rely on there being a next generation”, and urged that we need to create a “pro-natal culture”.
The moderation of his tone did not save him from a torrent of abuse in the Comments section after his piece: “sickening”, “ridiculous”, “deeply offensive to anyone who does not have children”, “crass and unacceptable”, “outrageous”, “insane”.
He was condemned not only in The Guardian but in Vogue, which detected “an uncomfortable whiff of the Blackshirt” in Morland’s talk of “home-grown” babies.
Such unmeasured denunciations mean natalism is indeed liable to be left in the hands of cranks and fanatics, and the experience of countries like Hungary and Poland goes unexamined.
The United Nations has suggested that Hungary’s population could decline from 9.7 million in 2019 to under 6.9 million by 2100, a fall of 29 per cent, while Poland could drop from 38 million to 23 million by the end of this century, a fall of 40 per cent.
Such predictions are, of course, almost invariably wrong, but the actual figures are pretty worrying too. Hungary’s population reached a peak of 10.7 million in 1980 and has since fallen by a million.
The fertility rate in Hungary, which stood at 2.17 in 1977, had by 2011 declined to a low point of 1.23. For a population to remain stable, a rate of about 2.1 per cent is required, before one takes into account the effect of emigration, quite considerable in both Hungary and Poland.
Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary from 1998-2002 and again since 2010 (profiled here on ConHome), is a nationalist who portrays himself as a defender of Christian civilisation and opponent of immigration (except by ethnic Hungarians), and especially of Muslim refugees, whom during the crisis of 2015 he called “a Muslim invasion force”.
With characteristic audacity, he has sought to turn the decline in Hungary’s population into an opportunity, by creating a benefits system which will incentivise couples to have children, and to vote for his party, Fidesz.
A system was devised which exempts any woman who has four children from income tax for life. Every married couple where the wife is between 18 and 40 is eligible for a general purpose loan from the Government, with repayments suspended for a number of years after the birth of the first and second child, and written off after the birth of the third child.
Housing loans and mortgage relief can be obtained by families intending to have three or more children. Help with the cost of buying a large car can be obtained by families with at least three children,
Orban has also maintained his grip on power by subjugating the media, manipulating the electoral system, undermining the judiciary, dominating the universities, paying off oligarchs and obtaining large sums of money from the European Union while at the same time roundly abusing that institution.
But his gifts as a campaigner are particularly conspicuous in his family policy, where he has been quick to claim success, as in this official report of his speech in September 2021 to the Fourth Budapest Demographic Summit:
“He stated that if the new special Hungarian family policy had not been introduced and everything had remained the same, over ten years 120,000 fewer children would have been born. He added that since 2010 the number of marriages has almost doubled, and the number of abortions has fallen by 41 per cent in Hungary…
“He also drew attention to the fact that the Hungarians are defending themselves because the Western Left keep attacking: they attack the traditional family model by relativising the concept of the family. In his view, the LGBTQ lobby and gender propaganda are used as the means of these attacks.
“‘They target our children, and so we must defend ourselves,’ he stressed, indicating that Hungary has a constitutional family and child protection system which ‘automatically activates itself if it sees that families are in danger’.”
Hungarian families in mortal danger from Brussels and the Western Left! Here is a powerful rallying cry, and Orban has always understood how to gain from being provocative, the insurgent on the side of ordinary Hungarians against an overmighty imperial power, though at the same time he is willing to be suspiciously close to Putin.
But is Orban’s population policy actually working? Hungary’s fertility rate has risen to about 1.5, which is a long way short of the 2.1 needed even to stand still.
And as Morland pointed out to ConHome, this rise could be because of the “tempo” effect, which occurs when women start, say, to have children at the age of 32 rather than 27, with a consequent reduction, for a few years, of the fertility rate, which subsequently bounces back.
Morland observed that both France and Sweden, which spend heavily on encouraging women to have children, have fertility rates of about 1.85, well ahead of Hungary. Culture matters, and countries where it is relatively easy for women to move in and out of work, and men are willing to accept domestic responsibilities, tend to have more children than those where it is difficult to go back to work and men don’t help in the home.
State action in this field can have the most dreadful unintended consequences: one thinks of China’s one-child policy.
After Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian communist leader, banned abortion and contraception in 1967, the fertility rate shot up from 1.9 to 3.7 per cent, and many children were consigned to state-run orphanages which became a byword for horror.
No two countries are the same, but Poland, like Hungary, has a fertility rate of about 1.5, and a populist government of the Right which sees advantage, as the Centre for European Research points out, in taking on Brussels:
“For their part, Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczynski, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and their junior coalition partner, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro are wary of what they consider to be the EU’s liberal agenda and are pushing a national-conservative strategy to defend Poland from what they see as the Union’s encroachment on national matters. They are also staunchly anti-Putin.”
There will be elections this autumn in Poland, which the ruling coalition hopes to win by continuing its pro-family policies.
“Hard-working families” is a phrase Gordon Brown liked to use, but was unable to embody in distinctive policies. In Poland, families will be offered yet more generous housing subsidies and child care.
How can Hungary and Poland afford such subsidies? It is not clear that they can.
But the desire for greater solidarity is, as Brown perceived, widely shared. “British jobs for British workers” was another phrase he used, without knowing what to do about it.
When I lived in Berlin in the 1990s, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many East Germans looked back with pride and regret to the system of child care which had existed under communism.
In Poland Law and Justice came to power in 2015 by promising lavish monthly allowances to parents for each child after the first, or for the first child if you were very poor. The money might actually be spent on foreign holidays, or on drink, but what a pleasure it was to be trusted by the state with actual money, rather than palmed off with second-rate services run by bureaucrats.
Here was an arrangement which appealed not only to conservatives: people of a leftish disposition might also find it attractive, for it enabled one to live as one wanted to live, perhaps in some alternative manner, liberated from the demands of the free-market economy, and able to have and care for children one could not from one’s own resources afford.
Great religions have said, “Be fruitful, and multiply.” Our own, more nervous culture says don’t have children unless you can provide a proper home for them, which in the present state of the housing market looks to many young couples to be impossible.
But if we have no children, who will look after us when we are old? This question is more acute in Hungary and Poland than it has yet become in the UK, but we ought at least to be able to talk about it.