Miriam Cates, MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, launched her own culture war at the National Conservative populist rave this week. Her central point, which she called “existential”, was the need to stop the falling birthrate, which she said was threatening British culture. “If you want to be a national conservative, you need a nation to conserve … As conservatives we want to preserve our nation and our heritage.”
On the baby drought, I agree with her, but for very different reasons. I share none of her explanations nor her remedies – though I agree the lack of babies is “a symptom of a serious societal malaise”.
Her use of “existential” echoed all you would expect of the NatCons, who have in the past hosted pro-natalist nationalists such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Though she only lightly touched on immigration – “We must dramatically reduce immigration and build more homes to make housing more affordable for young families” – it’s not foreign-born babies she wants. Nor, from her policy choices, is it the wrong sort of British babies either.
The fault, she says, is “liberal individualism”, whose “ “critical outcome” “has completely failed to deliver … babies”.
Motherhood is devalued, while “cultural Marxism” causes mass indoctrination of young minds. No-fault divorce “has removed any value at all in the eyes of the law for getting married”. Motherhood is painted “as an oppressive drudgery that any self-respecting woman wants to avoid and stay-at-home mothers as lazy, economically inactive or unambitious”. She blames Tony Blair’s surge in university places, as she claims “some estimates suggest graduates are 50% more likely to remain childless”.
The “liberal elite” thinks women should outsource their children’s care for a paid job, instead of nurturing them. “Perhaps,” she told the NatCons, “the Guardian will report this speech as ‘rightwing MP at rightwing conference advocates rightwing agenda to have children and raise them well’; since when was having children rightwing?” So here’s a Guardian reply.
There is nothing rightwing about having children and raising them well, but her rightwing government has done everything it can to punish parenthood. Families can’t manage on one income and childcare is astronomically expensive: the OECD says UK parents spend a third of their wages on it, double the average for western economies. The young are worse off than their parents were at baby-producing age, with higher rents and, lower incomes and burdened with debt. Very few under-35s can buy homes, unless they have parents to help.
Yet there is no shortage of those who want more children: the tragedy is that so many are prevented from having children they long for, as the Social Market Foundation (SMF) reports in “Baby bust and baby boom: Examining the liberal case for pronatalism”. Just as abortion is an absolute right, so should bearing children be a right. It’s not as if they would choose large families, but possibly just enough for the 2.1-per-woman replacement rate. In a decade, the birthrate in England and Wales fell from 1.93 in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021, according to the latest figures available.
But anti-natalist Conservative policy bars benefits to more than two children in a family on universal credit: those families, mostly in work, lose £2,800 for a third child, impoverishing 1.3 million children.
Those babies (yes, from hard-working non-graduate families) get no mention from Cates. Indeed, when the Daily Mail reported on the baby drought, that familiar anti-baby Tory attitude spewed out in the Mail’s comment thread below: “Of course, the usuals on state support will still churn them out”, “Many of those with children, shouldn’t”, “The Jeremy Kyles, the newcomers and deadbeat dads knock them out like there’s no tomorrow, largely at others’ expense”, with plenty of disgusting racism.
The SMF warns falling fertility rates mean “long-term economic stagnation” as the ratio of workers to pensioners shrinks, to 3.5 retirees for every 10 workers by the next decade. “Low fertility rates are set to shrink the workforce, stifle demand and slow innovation, suppressing GDP growth and stretching the public finances.”
That point about innovation is vital: if you think the environment requires fewer babies, be warned that an elderly conservative population wooed by the right cares less about the future than a society defined by the dynamism and social concerns of youth.
The SMF’s remedies for the baby bust include payments to parents, better parental leave and cheaper childcare with Whitehall officials adopting a “population test” for every policy’s effect on the birthrate. France, always pro-natalist, has a grant of €950 (£825) for each newborn, and a much higher birthrate.
If Cates was serious, she would look at what worked, right here. When Labour inherited a falling birthrate in 1997, it welcomed babies with 3,500 Sure Start centres, free nursery education, childcare tax credits and a child trust fund endowing every newborn. Schools were rebuilt, education maintenance grants helped keep poor children in the sixth-form and wraparound breakfast and tea clubs in many schools made life easier for working parents. Good enough? No, but it was the beginning of a celebration of babies and childhood.
What happened next? Two years after the Tories took power the birthrate began to plunge again, with George Osborne’s austerity especially targeted on children and families. The number of babies born in 2019 fell a startling 12.2% from 2012. So we know how to make babies. And it has nothing to do with “cultural Marxism”.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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