Miriam Cates is a presenter on GBNews and the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
Boris Johnson is a clever and educated man. As a King’s scholar at Eton, classics scholar at Oxford, President of the Oxford Union, and author of numerous books, no one can doubt the former Prime Minister’s literary talents. Yet I am sure that even Johnson himself would admit that maths was never his strong point. The previous government’s woeful response to the Covid pandemic may have been significantly less destructive had our former Prime Minister’s grasp of statistics been half as a good has his knowledge of Greek mythology.
Last week, Johnson’s innumeracy struck again, this time leaving him struggling to grasp the implications of falling global birth rates.
Writing in the Daily Mail last week, Mr Johnson claimed that rapidly declining global birth rates are not a “crisis, but a sign that the human population is organically self-regulating” and that “after years of demographic strain we are in sight of a demographic dividend”.
Online, Johnson has been roundly derided as a hypocrite. For a man who has fathered at least nine offspring to publicly celebrate a global fall in the number of children demonstrates a lack of self-awareness to say the least. And it is somewhat galling for a former PM who oversaw record levels of immigration and population growth to welcome a decline in national births.
Yet Johnson’s views on falling fertility rates are not just hypocritical; they are plain wrong.
In his article, Johnson recognises that, across the world, ageing populations are transforming societies. He writes that in Italy there are now more funerals than weddings, in Tokyo children’s playgrounds are deserted, in India schools are empty and in China thousands of family apartments lie empty. Yet the former occupant of 10 Downing Street mocks leaders who are raising the alarm about this worrying trend – such as Italy’s Georgia Meloni and Emmanuel Macron of France – accusing them of having ‘spasms’ and saying ‘Crisis? What crisis?’
But the global ‘baby bust’ is no joke. Here in the UK, our total fertility rate (TFR) now stands at just 1.4 children per woman. This means that the number of yearly births is around a third lower than what is necessary to maintain a stable population. Who will care for the elderly when there are not enough young people to go around? Who will pay the taxes that fund pensions and healthcare when each year, more people leave the workplace than enter it? How will our business and technology sectors grow without the young minds that drive innovation? How will our economy be revived when the most important driver for growth – the labour force – is shrinking not growing? How will we survive the ravages of inflation and shortages as the productive workforce declines?
Below-replacement birthrates will not result in a one-off population reduction like after a war or pandemic. Rather each generation will be a third – or in some countries a half – smaller than the one before, in a tailspin of decline where the old always outnumber the young.
As a classicist Boris Johnson must be familiar with the fall of the Roman Empire, which was brought about in part by collapsing fertility rates. Yet he fails to recognise a parallel impending catastrophe of our own times. In fact, Johnson says that falling populations are a “blessing” and a “ray of hope”, because of the “crippling burden” human beings place on nature.
But are people not part of the natural world? Are not the desires to grow, reproduce, harness nature and build civilisations a core part of what it means to be human? Of course it is true that human beings have had an impact – in some cases negative – on the environment and other species, but is Johnson seriously suggesting that the world would be a better place without us in it?
Johnson admits that the dire prophecies of Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” have not come to pass. As the global population has grown, we have not, as Ehrlich predicted, run out of food and natural resources. In fact the opposite is true; as the demographer Paul Morland writes in the Telegraph:
“At eight billion, humans as a whole live immensely longer, healthier and richer lives than when we were four billion, at four billion living standards were higher than when we were two billion and at two billion, people were living much better than when, at the start of the 19th century, there were just one billion of us.”
Global food production has already increased by over fifty per cent in the first quarter of this century. Meanwhile, the proportion of the world living in absolute poverty has fallen from around half in 1970 to under ten per cent today. It turns out that population growth catalyses rather than curbs human flourishing. We should certainly be concerned – and try to mitigate – the impact of global warming, yet over the last century, the risk of dying from natural disasters has decreased by an astonishing 98 per cent, as technological capabilities (driven by population growth) have enabled us to save countless lives from the ravages of earthquakes, floods and famines. Cold-temperature related deaths – which account for nine times as many deaths as heat-related mortality – are also falling.
It is true that the global population is still rising; we are in a lag phase where falling birth rates are still masked by rising life expectancy. But even if we were to arrest the fertility decline tomorrow, the earth’s population will peak some time in the 2080s, followed by rapid collapse.
Yet despite these undeniable facts, Boris Johnson is far from alone in his misguided belief that falling birth rates should be welcomed. The message of “The Population Bomb” and generations of relentless environmental campaigning have been so pervasive that it now seems counter-intuitive to worry about population shrinkage.
In Britain, high levels of immigration in recent years have also disguised the problem of low birth rates. Since 2010, the UK population has increased by seven million people, almost entirely as a result of new arrivals. As is now abundantly clear, this kind of ‘transfer’ growth (as opposed to natural growth driven by births) has had a negative and deeply unpopular impact on our economic and social conditions. Adult immigrants compete for housing and infrastructure. Language, cultural and educational differences create friction and reduce social trust. Mass migration has transformed our cities, and not for the better; it’s unsurprising that many British people might be relieved to hear that we may be moving towards population decline.
But natural population growth – the birth of new babies – carries none of the downsides of mass immigration. Babies are born into existing families, without requiring any additional housing, and making negligible contributions to consumption or infrastructure demand for at least eighteen years, by which time natural deaths will have freed up housing stock and other resources. Children born in Britain are educated in the British education system, learning our language, culture and the skills they require to positively contribute to our society and economy. While net migration of 300 000 or more foreign adults each year has placed huge strain on society, an additional 300 000 babies born each year – the gap between current annual birth numbers and population sustainability – would have little impact in the short term but store up a bountiful demographic dividend for twenty years time.
It is sadly ironic that Johnson’s gravest political error – the “Boriswave” – has become the greatest political barrier to understanding the consequences of falling national birth rates. But it is a barrier we must try to overcome; the fact that the ratio of working age people to retirees has continued to decline despite such an enormous influx of young migrants should be an indicator of just how serious Britain’s birth dearth really is.
As a former Prime Minister and prolific columnist, Boris Johnson is still an influential figure. Yet it is noticeable how far the debate has moved in the last three years. Back in 2023, discussions about falling birth rates were derided as ‘far fight’ moral panics by much of the mainstream media, yet all of our national news outlets now regularly profile this issue. Just last week the Guardian published a comprehensive report on the economic impact of declining fertility.
Johnson is now an outlier in his demographic denialism as more and more of his peers are becoming worried about the baby bust. But worrying isn’t enough – we must act. Most young people still want to become parents, and the average desired family size is a healthy 2.2 children. The task of government and society is to break down the barriers that stop these dreams from becoming reality. If we could devote half as much time and energy into saving humanity as Johnson has devoted to saving the polar bears, perhaps we might have a fighting chance.