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Britain's lop-sided baby famine Melanie Phillips - Daily Mail, 20 February 2006 http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001599.html A report by the Labour-friendly Institute for Public Policy Research says Britain is facing a baby gap of 92,000 births per year because women are leaving motherhood too late in order to build their careers. Although women still want children, they are putting off becoming mothers because of the professional and financial penalties. A mid-skilled 24year-old who has a child, says the report, will earn £564,000 less over her lifetime than her childless counterpart. The resulting drop in children, it says, could mean huge tax rises because there won't be enough younger people to support an ageing population. So it concludes that the Government should raise the birth rate by making working parenthood more attractive by providing more parental leave and free nursery places. The IPPR is right to highlight a serious problem in Britain's fertility rate. But having identified the problem correctly, it fails to analyse it honestly and so its conclusions spectacularly miss the point. The problem does not lie with the overall birth rate. It lies with who is and who is not having children. True, along with a large and increasing number of countries, Britain is not producing enough children to replace its population. If that remained the case indefinitely, we would indeed have a major problem. But our population is rising and will do so for a considerable time. This is because of a combination of mass immigration and the fact that we are still working through the consequences of the post-war baby boom. What's more, the birth rate for the past couple of years has been rising, possibly through the growing numbers of minorities who have a lot of children. True, there is an alarming decline in the proportion of young people to look after the elderly. But that's the result of the other end of the baby boom -- that it produced so many more Britons who are now growing old, and with life expectancy rising all the time. The IPPR suggests that having more children would solve the problem of the ageing of society. But this is not true. It would actually make hardly any impact at all on the proportion of older people. Statistics show that even if the birth rate were to shoot up from our current 1.7 children per couple to 2.5 by 2060, the proportion of older people in the population would still be greater than it is today. The real problem the report identifies is that fewer babies are being born to the relatively affluent because middle-class women are delaying motherhood. Proportionately many more babies are being born to unmarried or separated women at the bottom of the social heap. This is due in part to huge cultural shifts that affect all classes, involving changes in sexual behaviour and relations between the sexes. There is also a general commitment phobia resulting from mass family breakdown, and a culture that delivers the unremitting message to those seeking a mate that there is always a better deal just round the corner. Nevertheless, it is middle-class women who have most to lose from having children. Poor women have less to give up. They do not have engaging careers; they may not even have a job at all. Tragically, they may think a baby will fill an emotional void in their lives. And they are encouraged to have children by a welfare state which provides financial and other incentives which have removed all stigma from unmarried motherhood. But among middle-class women, the downside of having children is very large. It's not just that they stand to lose a huge amount of money. They are also often having too much fun to give up their responsibility-free lifestyles. They think medical advances mean they can stop their biological clock. But when in their thirties they try to have a baby, they find to their horror that it's much more difficult. In addition, as the IPPR suggests, having children will cost them dear. To put it crudely, the more affluent we are, the fewer children we want. The higher our material expectations rise, the more children prevent us from achieving them. An even more crucial consideration is education. With so many state schools now so inadequate, more and more middle-class people realise with horror that they will have to pay eye-watering school fees simply to get a decent standard of education for their children. This puts a severe dampener on any enthusiasm for a large family. Keeping the numbers down to one or two means a higher standard of living. Even more fundamentally, the middle classes aren't having large families because they have lost confidence in the future. Their values are quite simply under siege. The core middle-class virtue of respectability has been all but abolished. Marriage and home-making are financially penalised, the savings habit has been rewarded by the swindle over pensions, and attachment to the nation is vilified as racism while its character is altered beyond recognition through mass immigration a principal source of population rise and multiculturalism. And to cap it all, our society devalues motherhood by indicating through every policy and official utterance that the lives of women have value only if they work. And then we wonder why women's careers are so all-important to them. That's why the IPPR's proposed remedies of more childcare and paternity leave so woefully miss the point. It talks about encouraging women to have more children. But Government policy discourages mothers from staying at home and penalises marriage which offers most security for child-rearing. The more appropriate remedy would be to specifically woo, cosset, incentivise and reward the middle-classes and give them a reason to start having more children again. This is what the French are doing, after all, in offering professional women £700 per month for a year to have a third child. They also provide a large array of inducements to have children, including generous child allowances and a calibrated income tax system that means that families with more children pay less. We should follow suit. We should be directing very heavy financial assistance to middle-class women through significant tax breaks or income splitting, so that they no longer face a huge drop in income but have every incentive to have children -- and to look after them at home if they so wish. We should be incentivising marriage and prioritising not the Government's fetish of independence for women but inter-dependence between husbands and wives. And bringing back selection into the state school system would do more for middle-class reproductive energy than any amount of dodgy child-care or paternity leave for bemused fathers. The problem is that the Government's 'family-friendly' policies are almost wholly to do with its iconic goal of relieving poverty, as well as pursuing the ultra-feminist agenda of stripping men of their breadwinner role to give independence to women. As a result, incentives to have children have been showered upon people who don't need any, while the people who need the most encouragement to have children are given none -- because to favour the middle classes goes against every fibre of Labour's ideological being. That's why the IPPR analysis hijacks Britain's demographic crisis into a plea for more childcare and parental leave. What it won't admit is that the true nature of this crisis is at least in part the result of Labour's undying class war. Posted by Melanie at February 20, 2006 |