Let's not leave the baby-making debate to Musk and Vance – the left has a stake in this too
Roses are red, violets are blue. Rightwing politicians around the world want women to have more babies, and if you find this idea the opposite of romantic – well, me too.
Pronatalism's cause is not exactly helped by having as its best-known figureheads JD 'childless cat lady' Vance and Elon Musk, seemingly on a personal mission to reverse what he calls the 'underpopulation crisis'. Even Nigel Farage, a twice-divorced father of four who takes the firmly libertarian view that private lives are no business of the state, squirmed when tackled on the subject this week, before eventually venturing that the west had 'kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture' and that 'of course, we need higher birthrates, but we're not going to get higher birthrates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism'. But do progressives, who are after all supposed to be in the optimism business, have a stake in the baby-making debate too? A new collection of essays published this week by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank argues that they should.
The children of Britain's last baby boom, my own son among them, are now pretty much grown up. Though it didn't always feel that way at the time, as their parents we had it relatively easy: the 00s were in retrospect the golden years of a Labour government seeking to lift families out of poverty, extend maternity leave and take work-life balance seriously. It wasn't men preaching traditional values, but working mothers in parliament determined to make life easier for others coming up behind them that unexpectedly helped send the birthrate in England and Wales shooting up from an average of 1.64 children for every woman in 2001 to 1.97 at its pre-recession, 2008 peak.
But by 2023 it had plummeted to 1.44, and the SMF calculates it will be under 1.4 by the mid-2030s. Though some of that fall involves people happily choosing to be child-free, that seems unlikely to be the whole story, given the SMF notes that the big fall happened during the austerity years and it was sharpest in more deprived neighbourhoods. Who could have guessed that if you offer would-be parents stagnant wages, galloping rents and some of the most expensive childcare in Europe, while limiting some child benefits to the first two children only, they end up having fewer children? Not five avowedly pro-family Conservative prime ministers in a row, apparently.
The problem for Labour now, as the SMF points out, is that fewer babies equals an ageing population. This means a tax base shrinking at such a rate that the rate of productivity growth would need to more than double (a challenge that has famously defeated the government's predecessors) for us just to enjoy the same mediocre growth in living standards we have been complaining about for years. Yet there remains an instinctive 'ick' factor to politicians trying to engineer more babies, inextricably associated as that has become with dangerously reactionary attitudes to women's bodies, or efforts to reduce the need for immigration.
More pragmatically, even if we could get past that, it's far from obvious how governments actually make it happen. Hungary's rightwing pronatalist government poured 5% of GDP into tax cuts and bribes for parents, yet birthrates are now falling again after a temporary surge. Even the Swedes and Finns, with their enviably cheap nurseries and egalitarian workplaces, are struggling. And that's where the SMF's essays come in.
Co-editor Phoebe Arslanagić-Little, who runs the pro-parenthood campaign Boom, argues there's nothing innately conservative about helping people live the lives they actually want, and that for most – though very much not all – that includes parenthood. More than half of British 32-year-olds already have children and half of the rest would like to, according to research from the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies, while about 12% of those without children are sure they don't want to be parents. Yet only a quarter of those who knew they wanted either to start or add to a family were actively trying for a baby. Money worries, concerns about the impact on careers, not feeling ready and not having the right partner were the most common hurdles. Though there is little the state can do about the last two, it definitely has a role in the others.
Many of the ideas in this book are easy ones for progressives to get behind, from tackling Britain's woefully stingy statutory paternity leave or funding NHS fertility treatment properly, to transferring wealth from old to young. The family-friendly parts of Angela Rayner's employment rights bill may well be pro-baby too, given flexible working keeps the show on the road for many parents. What's unclear is whether any of this is enough to sway young couples contemplating bringing children into a world now seemingly on fire.
Gen Z and their serious-minded younger siblings, gen Alpha, are already showing signs of being more socially conservative than millennials, which suggests their attitudes to parenthood may yet surprise us. According to YouGov, they are more pro-marriage, and less likely to say one-night stands are common in their peer group. There is a distinct yearning for the cosy and domestic among those who grew up in lockdown and seemingly love nothing better than staying in, snuggled up under a blanket. (Though admittedly that creates its own problems, with Finland's demographic rapporteur Anna Rotkirch arguing in her SMF essay not just for financial help, such as student loan reductions for younger parents, but more help with social skills to help teenagers form relationships.) Watching the new Bridget Jones film in a cinema full of nostalgic mothers and teenage daughters, I thought the girls might be bored by an unashamedly middle-aged film with parenthood past, present and future unexpectedly at its heart. But something about Bridget clearly touches a gen Z chord, though her setup – splintered by widowhood but cushioned by the perfect nanny who just falls into her lap, a boss thrilled for her to resume her old career whenever she's ready, and a huge house on the edge of Hampstead Heath – is miles from what most will experience.
Still, it's a reminder that what ultimately makes people feel ready to have children is security, economic and emotional: the intangible feeling that everything is where it should be in life, love and work, so now you can relax and settle down. Having children is the ultimate gesture of confidence in the future, but that confidence has understandably drained away over the last decade and a half in response to more brittle and precarious circumstances. Fix that, and politicians may find the baby business looks after itself.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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