This was the week Nigel Farage put his finger on one of the most serious long -term problems that our country is confronted with, with deeply disturbing implications for the economy and everything that my generation was raised to be dear.
The fact is that those of my colleague born who were born here do not have enough babies.
I know that many will disagree, and tell me that this would be a richer and happier country, if there were only fewer people in the area, repress our villages and cities, hold the roads, swallow the resources of the earth and it Environment in general polluting.
Indeed, people merged almost the same argument in the 18th century, when Thomas Malthus wrote his influential treatise, an essay about the principle of population, in which he argued that population growth was an obstacle for progress and inevitably lead to famine and will.
But has history not explicitly proven?
When he wrote that alarming essay in 1798, the world's population was about a billion, and famine and wanted to be widespread. Nowadays there are eight times as many of us on the planet and our species as a whole are never better nourished, dressed and housed or live longer.
Take the sage of Montecito, Prince Harry, who has sworn that he will have no more than two children, out of respect for the environment and the Mother Earth.
“I always thought this place was borrowed,” he said, in one of the countless media interviews he has given since he fled to California to escape the publicity.
“This was the week Nigel Farage (photo) put his finger on one of the most serious long -term problems that our country is confronted with,” writes Tom Utley
Prince Harry (photo) has sworn that he will have no more than two children out of respect for the environment and the Mother Earth
“And certainly, be as intelligent as we are all,” – We all, your grace? – “Or evolved as we all have to be, we must be able to leave something better for the next generation.”
I'm sure he wouldn't approve me. Over the years I have been on the receiving side of a good piece of stick to have more than double the average British number of children. At least that is according to the miserable standards of today.
As I may have said before, I remember a conversation that I had some time ago when I had the accident to find myself in addition to an exceptionally destroyed woman on a dinner.
She opened with the well -known question that many of us ask when we want to break the ice with someone at our first meeting: “Do you have children?”
When I answered that, yes, my wife and I had four sons, she looked at me with contempt and broke, “Isn't that rather selfish from you?”
She then turned to the man who was on her other side and did not appeal to me for the duration of the meal.
As long as I was able to continue our conversation, I would have told her that adding four British citizens to the national total was actually about the most public things I had ever done.
Take a look at the numbers. According to the Office for National Statistics, the country is aging so quickly that by 2045 the number of us older than 85 will reach 3.1 million – almost double the 1.7 million that was registered only five years ago.
Labor should not stop so 'miserable' and 'declinist' to grow the British birth rate again, Nigel Farage (depicted) insisted yesterday
He suggested that both Labor and the previous Tory government made the mistake of ensuring that the fertility percentage in England and Wales fell to the lowest level last year
But at the same time, the number of people of working age, available to support the old, is expected to fall from 3.7 per pensioner in 2020 to only 2.9 in 2045.
If this trend continues, such as the leading demographer Dr. Paul Morland has noticed, there will be a time when that number is shrinking in just one.
“We have never had a country that has a dependency ratio of 1: 1 – one employee to one pensioner,” he said on Radio 4 last month. “That is where we are going. It's not going to work. The public finances will break down. The private sector will break. The health service will break it. '
Of course the point in the past was made powerful by the American Vice President, JD Vance, and the current favorite of Donald Trump (but for how long?), Elon Musk.
“There is a terrible morality for those who deliberately do not have children: they effectively demand that the children of other people take care of them in their old age,” says the eccentric multi-billionaire (who is supposed to have conceived no fewer than 13 children themselves yourself ).
But it is a point of view that gets far too little attention to this side of the Atlantic Ocean, where the birth rate in England and Wales fell to the lowest between 2022 and 2023, at only 1.44 children per woman-space below the replacement speed.
If we only trusted British women and their partners, our population would be in sharp decline, making the dependency ratio still alarming. So, yes, Mr Farage praises this crisis in the making at this week's international conference in London of the Alliance for responsible citizenship, which brings leaning figures from all over the world together.
Tip-toe around the elephant in the room-the massive immigration of people from foreign cultures, allowed by successive governments to fill the gaps in our Workshy-Personnel Bank: 'What supports everything is our Jewish-Christian culture , and that's where we have to start. '
Only higher birth rates will enable us to retain that culture, he seemed to say, but we will not get them until we breathe new life into a 'feeling of optimism'. That is why Labor should stop being 'miserable' and 'declinist'.
“To be honest, is led as we are – doesn't Rachel Reeves just want to reach you to the cry tissues?” he said.
But I wonder. Explains the gloom of the Chancellor why so many British women limit the size of their families, or postpone getting babies until it's too late?
Does Mr Farage seriously believe that if Mrs. Reeves only smiled a little more naturally, the strange joke cracked and surrendered to a little Johnsonian boosterism, more young men and women would have the contraceptives and become busy between the sheets?
If you ask me, there are more obvious reasons why today's young couples hesitate to breed. These include the acute difficulty to an affordable, family format house, the paralyzing costs of childcare and the rise of a relatively new breed of career grouw, which are concerned that maternity leave will damage its chances of promotion.
In the meantime, child benefit drops sharply after the firstborn, and the tax system offers sweet huuptasy Adams to reward the marriage and the family. Even after 14 years, that is under a Tory government that both constant lipservice paid to both.
No wonder that so much in the British -born couples hold back. It may not be a surprise that almost a third of babies who were born in England and Wales nowadays have mothers who were born abroad – many of them in poor countries where even the lowest living norms offered here as lush be considered.
How long do we have to trust them to maintain the balance of the generations, before ministers encourage those who were born in Britain to do their bit?
I am happy to be able to report that my own boys and their other halves answer the call after they have produced four children between them so far, with a fifth on the way. But what about the rest of their generation?
Come on, you slackers! Go out for your country and multiply!
