It’s not racist to be worried about the UK’s falling birth rate

UK Labour peer Harriet Harman seems to think that anyone who’s worried about the UK’s declining birth rate is a racist xenophobe.

Speaking earlier this month to the parliamentary magazine, the House, Baroness Harman claimed that concerns about declining birth rates are often ‘tangled up with people wanting a high birth rate from the local population because they don’t want to have immigrants’. It’s ‘tied up with xenophobia and racism’, she said, before adding, ‘the pro-natal movement is a right-wing movement, like racism is a right-wing movement’.

Harman completely misses the point. It’s certainly true that debates about declining birth rates have been gathering momentum on the right over the past few years. (Although it’s gathering traction among liberal elites, too, if Silicon Valley’s ‘breeding to save mankind’ movement is anything to go by.)

Yet to dismiss falling birth rates as a right-wing, racist concern ignores the fact that it is a genuine global problem. In fact, the only part of the world expected to enjoy significant population growth in the future is sub-Saharan Africa.

Not a single European country has a birth rate exceeding replacement level. Little wonder governments are trying to come up with solutions. Hungary has gone furthest so far, offering large tax breaks and loans for parents. Meanwhile, in France, President Macron recently announced a policy programme, including fertility checks for 25-year-olds, to kickstart France’s ‘demographic rearmament’. Indeed, from Poland to Greece, European countries are doing their best to make it easier for people to have more children. (Whether these policies will succeed is another question.)

The UK finds itself in a similar predicament to its neighbours. The average birth rate has been falling steadily for the past 15 years. In 2022, birth rates fell to the lowest level since 2002, at 1.49 children per woman – well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Yet too many British politicians refuse to talk about it, and those who do are roundly attacked.

If Harman looked a little more deeply into the problem she would notice something else, too. That this is far more than a demographic, policymaking issue for national governments. It’s not simply a question of reaching certain population targets. No, falling birth rates attest to a far deeper problem – namely, that people who want to start families are finding themselves unable to. Their desires are being thwarted, their aspirations limited.

Of course, some women don’t want children. But they are a small minority, with just eight per cent of women aged between 18 and 35 feeling this way. Yet a far larger proportion of women (18 per cent), now reach the age of 45 without having children. It seems that many women, in spite of their own wishes, are delaying having children until well into their thirties, when it quickly becomes increasingly difficult to conceive.

The falling birth rate is a sign of a more fundamental problem. Our current social arrangement is not meeting the needs of our citizens. The extortionate cost of childcare likely plays a significant role in people’s decision to delay having children. As does the unaffordability of housing, especially in south-east England.

As newly independent MP Rosie Duffield has pointed out, this issue is not about being pro- or anti-natalist, let alone setting national birth-rate targets. It’s about giving people the freedom to have and raise children. ‘If you want to grow your family to two or three children, you should be able to afford that’, she has said.

Harman has got this so wrong. The UK’s falling birth rate is not a left or right issue. Rather, it is a sign of the growing struggle of millions of people to fulfil their desire to have children. Politicians should be doing everything in their power to ease that struggle, not dismiss it as a concern only for racists and xenophobes.

Rosie Norman is an intern at spiked.