Miriam Cates is MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
There has been much debate over recent weeks, months, and even years about the direction the Conservative Party needs to take to stay true to itself and its voter base. Many conservatives complain that the State is too big, taxes are too high – and I agree. The standard answers given to this problem are usually purely economic – cut tax, increase productivity, decrease regulation.
But, whilst I’m sure there are improvements that can be made to economic policy, these arguments miss the point: the biggest threat to our economy – and indeed our nation – is not the size of the State, or at least not in the sense that it is usually meant.
The one critical outcome to guarantee the prosperity of future generations is the existence of that very generation itself. And that is the one issue our politics has chosen to ignore.
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. This is not ‘gradual decline’. Even without a further fall, in just two generations time there will be 40 per cent fewer births than there are today and just two working age people for every pensioner.
If we think that taxation rates are currently unsustainably high, then we are completely unprepared for what is coming down the line.
We cannot continue to support young people in education for longer, fund our health service and our defence capabilities without at least maintaining the current ratios of young to old. In the same way that the best way to increase tax take is to ensure economic growth, the best way to sustain our economy and fund our public services is to grow the birth rate.
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. 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.
I am not at all saying that everyone should have children – many people can’t or don’t want to become parents, and that absolutely is to be expected and respected. 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 per cent of women may never become mothers. This ‘unplanned childlessness’ represents millions of personal tragedies as well as a national one.
If we are going to have any chance of reversing plummeting fertility rates, we must look closely at the social, economic, and political factors that appear to be acting as national contraceptives.
It’s frequently said that it is economic factors that prevent women from having children. Liberals and socialists alike say that “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 percent 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.
Fertility rate decline has not occurred in spite of the economic and social policies of the last 30 years. It is a direct result of how those policies have failed to value and reward the behaviours that lead to starting a family.
For example, 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 unity of the economy and subsidising couples for the cost of raising children to not even recognising family at all. Why take the risk and pay the cost of having children, when society places no value on your sacrifice?
The Chancellor’s recent announcement that the taxpayer will spend £4 billion on childcare for babies from 9 months old to get women back into work devalues the role of motherhood and misunderstands what many parents actually want.
The idea that women have babies in order to outsource their care as quickly as possible, and that women should derive more fulfilment from a paid job – any job – than from nurturing their own children, is in conflict with the empirical evidence and biological reality.
Far from being progressive, it perpetuates the narrative that motherhood is drudgery and inferior to paid work. Hardly surprising then, that fewer and fewer women choose the role.
Of course the Chancellor is right to support families and invest in the early years. However, a far more conservative policy would be to offer families vouchers to use as they wish, some for formal or informal childcare, and others to reduce their working hours. Anything that strengthens the bonds that bind families together will have long term benefits for children – and of course their ability to become citizens who make a positive contribution, including to the economy.
We also can’t ignore the impact of insufficient housing supply on preventing family formation, or the obsession with university education, which piles on debt and separates young people from their extended family and that support that can provide for raising children. And the decline in British industry has robbed whole generations of young men of the opportunity for secure work, a fundamental prerequisite for starting a family.
The state cannot be neutral on matters of family and fertility. Our policies either value the raising of children or they don’t. We must reform our tax system, our education, industrial and housing policy to make having children attractive – or at least positive.
But starting a family is also a sign of having hope in the future, and hope is sadly in short supply amongst our young people today. 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?
We must end the indoctrination of our children with destructive and narcissistic ideologies, instead protecting childhood, training children in the timeless virtues.
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?
Having children – like any biological process – depends on a whole range of ‘environmental’ factors. If our economic policies confer value on children and parenting, we have a chance of improving the conditions that lead people to make the momentous – but worthwhile – decision to have children.
If we want to reduce the size of the State and our dependence on it, we must find a way to encourage the most important kind of ‘growth’ that our economy required. Let’s focus on closing the reproductivity gap.
Miriam Cates is MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
There has been much debate over recent weeks, months, and even years about the direction the Conservative Party needs to take to stay true to itself and its voter base. Many conservatives complain that the State is too big, taxes are too high – and I agree. The standard answers given to this problem are usually purely economic – cut tax, increase productivity, decrease regulation.
But, whilst I’m sure there are improvements that can be made to economic policy, these arguments miss the point: the biggest threat to our economy – and indeed our nation – is not the size of the State, or at least not in the sense that it is usually meant.
The one critical outcome to guarantee the prosperity of future generations is the existence of that very generation itself. And that is the one issue our politics has chosen to ignore.
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. This is not ‘gradual decline’. Even without a further fall, in just two generations time there will be 40 per cent fewer births than there are today and just two working age people for every pensioner.
If we think that taxation rates are currently unsustainably high, then we are completely unprepared for what is coming down the line.
We cannot continue to support young people in education for longer, fund our health service and our defence capabilities without at least maintaining the current ratios of young to old. In the same way that the best way to increase tax take is to ensure economic growth, the best way to sustain our economy and fund our public services is to grow the birth rate.
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. 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.
I am not at all saying that everyone should have children – many people can’t or don’t want to become parents, and that absolutely is to be expected and respected. 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 per cent of women may never become mothers. This ‘unplanned childlessness’ represents millions of personal tragedies as well as a national one.
If we are going to have any chance of reversing plummeting fertility rates, we must look closely at the social, economic, and political factors that appear to be acting as national contraceptives.
It’s frequently said that it is economic factors that prevent women from having children. Liberals and socialists alike say that “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 percent 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.
Fertility rate decline has not occurred in spite of the economic and social policies of the last 30 years. It is a direct result of how those policies have failed to value and reward the behaviours that lead to starting a family.
For example, 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 unity of the economy and subsidising couples for the cost of raising children to not even recognising family at all. Why take the risk and pay the cost of having children, when society places no value on your sacrifice?
The Chancellor’s recent announcement that the taxpayer will spend £4 billion on childcare for babies from 9 months old to get women back into work devalues the role of motherhood and misunderstands what many parents actually want.
The idea that women have babies in order to outsource their care as quickly as possible, and that women should derive more fulfilment from a paid job – any job – than from nurturing their own children, is in conflict with the empirical evidence and biological reality.
Far from being progressive, it perpetuates the narrative that motherhood is drudgery and inferior to paid work. Hardly surprising then, that fewer and fewer women choose the role.
Of course the Chancellor is right to support families and invest in the early years. However, a far more conservative policy would be to offer families vouchers to use as they wish, some for formal or informal childcare, and others to reduce their working hours. Anything that strengthens the bonds that bind families together will have long term benefits for children – and of course their ability to become citizens who make a positive contribution, including to the economy.
We also can’t ignore the impact of insufficient housing supply on preventing family formation, or the obsession with university education, which piles on debt and separates young people from their extended family and that support that can provide for raising children. And the decline in British industry has robbed whole generations of young men of the opportunity for secure work, a fundamental prerequisite for starting a family.
The state cannot be neutral on matters of family and fertility. Our policies either value the raising of children or they don’t. We must reform our tax system, our education, industrial and housing policy to make having children attractive – or at least positive.
But starting a family is also a sign of having hope in the future, and hope is sadly in short supply amongst our young people today. 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?
We must end the indoctrination of our children with destructive and narcissistic ideologies, instead protecting childhood, training children in the timeless virtues.
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?
Having children – like any biological process – depends on a whole range of ‘environmental’ factors. If our economic policies confer value on children and parenting, we have a chance of improving the conditions that lead people to make the momentous – but worthwhile – decision to have children.
If we want to reduce the size of the State and our dependence on it, we must find a way to encourage the most important kind of ‘growth’ that our economy required. Let’s focus on closing the reproductivity gap.