How does Britain boost birth rates?
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As UK birth rates hit a historic low, Reform's Nigel Farage calls for a return to "Judeo-Christian values" while Labour MP Josh Simons argues the real issue is the modern pressure of intensive parenting on women.
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In brief:
- Reform UK leader Nigel Farage suggests returning to "Judeo-Christian culture" to boost the UK's declining birth rates, framing it as necessary for national optimism.
- Labour’s Josh Simons disagrees, arguing that the pressure of "intensive parenting" on women is the real barrier to higher birth rates.
- Simons believes policy changes alone (such as tax breaks) are ineffective at increasing birth rates and instead advocates for changing how society talks about parenting to emphasise its emotional rewards.
What’s the story?
Nigel Farage wants you to have more babies.
The Reform UK leader recently spoke about how the family unit "matters enormously", and how the UK needs higher birth rates to spark a return to its religious roots.
“What underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that's where we need to start. If we recognise that, and if we value that, then I think everything comes from that,” Farage said at the right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.
He went on to say Britain won’t get its birth rate up until it gets a sense of “optimism” back, blaming Chancellor Rachel Reeves for the nation’s negative attitude towards parenthood.
“Doesn't Rachel Reeves just make you want to reach for the cry tissues? It's all so miserable. It's all so declinist.”
Birth rates have been in decline in England and Wales since 2012, with the average number of children born to a woman dropping to 1.44 in 2023 from 1.49 in 2022, the lowest since records began in 1938.
And while this is an issue that affects everyone, the debate on how to encourage people to have more children seems to be led by the right of British politics.
Does the UK need to return to its Judeo-Christian culture? And if not, what do the Labour government suggest?
Why don't politicians talk about how 'enriching' parenting is?
Does the UK need to return to its ‘Judeo-Christian culture?’
Labour's Josh Simons, MP for Makerfield, says Farage’s analysis of the UK’s “Judeo-Christian culture” is a “profound misunderstanding of modern Britain.”
While Simons, a dad to two young children, can’t understand why Farage has invoked this idea in the birth rate debate, he does agree that Britain needs more optimism and a cultural shift around parenting.
“You don't need the former to have the latter. And in fact, it's very, very dangerous to bleed the two, because it implies that you can't have optimism about the future without going back to some sort of protected Judeo-Christian culture,” he says.
“And that's mad.”
There are currently more than 69 million people in the UK, and this number is expected to climb over 73 million by 2036.
The white British population in England and Wales has declined in recent decades, however, from 87.5% in 2001 to 74.4% in 2021.
Jon Sopel believes what Farage is really saying is: ‘If only we had more babies, we wouldn't need to have migration.’
It’s “the great replacement theory”, Emily Maitlis says, “which means we want more white babies. We don't want foreign babies.”
Why isn’t Britain having more children?
Simons thinks the simple reason that people aren’t having more children, is that for parents today there is too much emphasis on “intensive parenting” – the amount of direct time parents spend with children, for example doing homework or talking directly to them – and this has become a “burden on parents, particularly women.”
That’s the reason, Simons says, that it’ll mostly be up to his wife to decide whether they have a third child.
“Although we try as hard as possible to share the burden of parenting… in the end, it's my wife who has to face the guilt that comes from not spending four hours a day with her kids or teaching them Spanish and piano and swimming and everything else.”
The idea that you need to spend such a significant amount of time each day doing ‘intensive parenting’ with your children in order for them to be happy, he thinks, is what puts women, particularly in their 20s - for whom birth rates have fallen fastest - off having children.
But, kids “do not need that kind of time,” he says.
Encouraging the people of Britain to have more children is not straight-forward, it seems.
And while Simons doesn’t believe in Farage’s solution, he’s also not convinced that policy changes work, noting that in Singapore paying people to have children through tax breaks didn’t make a big difference to birth rates.
Simons, who has been supporting The Dad Shift, a campaign for better paternity leave for dads in the UK, says that policy changes to encourage more people to have children are good things to do for other reasons “like growth, like celebrating the fact that parenting is a positive, enriching thing, not an exhausting and expensive thing.
“So there's lots of reasons to do it, but if you're just focused on boosting the birth rate, so far, it hasn't made much difference.”
Instead, he suggests what is needed in Britain is a change in how we talk about family and parenting, that we should discuss how raising children is “the most rewarding way you can possibly spend time” more openly.
“When was the last time you really heard a politician talk about how exhausting, but completely and utterly emotionally enriching parenting is?” Simons says.
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