Grey Britain: Do We Need To Have More Children? (Dr Paul Morland)

28:23If you go from the DRC to London or from Syria to Germany or from El Salvador to the States, to do the work for those people who won't have children but expect labour done, then your emissions might multiply 60 or 70 times. Very nice for you. You're having a higher lifestyle. But you're not actually saving the planet by refusing to have children. You're simply reallocating people to higher emissions countries. If Sir David Attenborough were here, maybe he is in some sort of spirit. If Sir David Attenborough were here, he'd say, but actually, Paul, the history of the past 100 years is that humans are the problem.

28:56The real story of the earth that we inhabit is the loss of biodiversity, the rise of extreme weather events, sustained global heating and the desecration of our natural environment. And the cause of that is that like little amoeba in a Petri dish, we have multiplied in a way that's unsustainable. Well, let me say two things. First of all, that all the solutions are going to come from the 20 and 30 and 40 somethings. they're not going to come from an old population. So if you look at the extraordinary progress we've made in this country at reducing our emissions, it's not because of 60 and 70-year-olds.

29:33And we've seen with Japan, as you get an older population, it's a less creative, less inventive population. Less dynamic and less able to come up with solutions. I'm not arguing for everybody to have six or seven children. I've got three, you've got four, lots of people have two. That seems to me a normal range. But if you have two, and we're way below that, the population stabilises. I'm not saying we should go from 8 to 16 to 32 to 64 billion. I'm saying can't we get as developed countries with welfare states, with what we would call a civilised standard of living, can't we get to a state where we level off?

30:17I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Dr Paul Moreland. I'm so sorry to butt in, but I just had to, to say, if you are enjoying this conversation, if you've enjoyed some of the others we've had with people like Brenda Hale and Laura Bates and Neil Ferguson and Billy Bragg, please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds. And that way you won't miss future episodes. And also it gives us great data and detail about the sorts of people who are listening, the sorts of things you like, which helps us serve you with your interests much, much better. And if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on.

30:49And that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Thank you so much for doing that. Thanks so much for being part of this exciting and fast growing community. And now back to Paul. This advertisement feature is paid and presented by Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Looking for the perfect place to grow your business? For over 30 years, Poland has been a launchpad for innovation at the heart of Europe, powered by world-class research and ambitious young talent. From bold startups to established powerhouses, Poland offers the momentum, resources and reliability you need to take your business further.

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32:16Obviously, we can't talk about the demographic change of this country or lots of other countries without talking about immigration. Now, one of the things that's often said about immigration, even by people who recognise that at 930 ,000 net immigrations, that's people have gone out and people have gone in. It's unprecedented. It's a doubling of kind of what it was in the immediate post-Brexit years and so on and so forth. It's often said this has always been a country of immigrants, just in historic terms, just to be clear. immigration has led to a demographic transformation of this country in the last 20 or 30 odd years yeah totally i mean i remember when when i when i was up when we first met when we were talking about the human tide in 29 january 2019 that was such a memorable experience for the week i said to you of on the question of mass immigration and ethnic change it may be a good thing it may be a bad thing but it's a new thing and if you look at all the immigration into the british isles let's take the British Isles as a single unit, because of course there's been a lot of movement from Ireland into England, at times from England into Ireland, from Scotland and so on.

33:18If you look at the British Isles as a single unit, there has almost certainly been significantly more immigration every single year since 1997 than in the whole period from the Anglo-Saxon arrival in the 600s or whenever to the Second World War. So in that whole period of 1500 years, there was probably less inflow into the British Isles. Than there was every year. Than every single year since 1997. And is it just, I want to get into some issues that some people say are controversial and answer them with facts. Is it broadly speaking the case that migrants come in many, many different forms, rich, poor, from different cultures, different countries.

34:03Some come here to work, some come here to study, so on and so forth. But very broadly speaking, in some parts of British politics, there's an increase in concern about whether or not migrants are just having so many more babies than, as it were, native white English. I've got a graph I'm going to show you in a second about that. But broadly speaking, what's your overall sense about whether or not that's true? Well, part of the reason that immigration can't be the long term solution is that it's not true. So if you look at that, it's not great data on fertility by ethnicity. But if you look at Hindu and Sikh women, they probably have a lower fertility rate than the national average now.

34:45And if you look at the Afro-Caribbean population, they were the only minority in the last census to decline in numbers. Now, that's partly to do with intermarriage and people re-identifying as mixed race as the generations go by. So part of the reason that immigration cannot be a long-term solution, even if you have no issue with the ethnic change, is that wherever you get immigration, you get a rapid conformity towards the local fertility norm. And you see that, for example, with Mexicans going to the States. You see it with people from South Asia coming to Britain. And of course, the other thing is that the countries they're coming from no longer have high fertility rates.

35:25Mexico, if I said to you between 1970 and today, the differential between Mexico and the US in terms of fertility rate has probably gone from five children to a quarter of a child. Wow. India, as you probably know, has gone below replacement level, below two now, or it's about two, and lots of parts of India. But they're in the demographic dividend right now, aren't they? They absolutely are. Go to India. India is a bundle of contradictions. It's the most diverse civilization, let alone country on earth. I think India in terms of absolute poor, just for people interested, I think it's got nearly 400 million people who are below what we call the poverty line, a dollar a day.

35:59And yet at the same time, India has this extraordinary youthful energy. And the demographic dividend in practical terms is that India adds something like a million workers to the workforce every single month. But the point is when they come from India to Britain or Pakistan to Britain, Pakistan's got a higher fertility rate, but also falling. They're not coming from a country where people are having six or seven children anymore. So unsurprisingly, they arrive in Britain. They used to conform to British norms. Now they're actually coming from countries with quite low fertility rates and arriving in a country with quite low fertility rates.

36:33So when you have a large influx of people who don't have a high fertility rate, they will get old. In fact, I see this because I said I was from Wembley and my mother, I used to take her to the local supermarket in Harrow. And you suddenly saw what I never saw as a child. lots of elderly South Asians. You never saw... Harry is full of elderly... So you then say, OK, we've now got this big, diverse population of older people and we need even more people from elsewhere in the world to come in and support them. Now, first of all, to be able to attract those people, you need to be a relatively wealthy country.

37:08People from Ireland and Poland, big countries of immigration to Britain in the past, have a very low fertility rate now. and we're not that much wealthier than them. So this idea that we have the luxury for other people to do our breeding for us and we can just ship them in to support our growing cohorts of older people is simply not going to work. So what do you make of this? I just want to show you this graph which I saw in the Telegraph recently and this is the kind of graph which I'll describe it for our podcast listeners. People watching on iPlayer will be able to see this. This is the kind of graph that I'm seeing a huge amount on social media at the moment, particularly on some social platforms like Twitter X.

37:43And what this graph shows is basically children born to foreign parents in England. This is England rather than Great Britain. And it shows it's pretty flat, around 34%, 35 % from 2016, immediately after the Brexit vote, to about 2021, which is obviously after the 2020-ish Brexit deal was concluded. And there's a sharp rise, a very sharp rise, so that it goes over 40%. And the suggestion is that that's going to continue, even though migration is forecast to fall, though net migration is forecast to fall and still stay at about 300 ,000. But what explains, Paul, this sharp, seeming sharp, sudden rise in the children born to foreign parents in England?

38:26Right. Well, I mean, first of all, I could say I'm a child of a foreign-born parent. And so am I. Maybe you are. I'm a child of two foreign-born parents. My parents were born. And I'm myself foreign-born. I was born in Calcutta. I was born in the UK. So what is going on here is two things. first of all the huge number of people in the childbearing cohort who are foreign born so although whatever share of the population they are they're much less coming here when they're small children or they're old but the foreign born share of the population among the cohort of child bearers 20 30 is very high because that's when people come and they do still have a relatively higher fertility rate, particularly Muslims, less Hindus, but probably Hindus who've just arrived perhaps slightly higher, Sub-Saharan Africans probably slightly higher.

39:19So there's a slightly higher fertility rate, and there's just a huge cohort of 20 or 30-somethings who were born overseas, whereas in the population as a whole, they're a smaller share of the population. So it's a mixture of who are the child bearers, what's the share of child bearers in terms of their origin, their ethnicity, and where they were born, and not just their fertility rate. So the question that I see lots of people, and by the way, this is happening not at the extremes of politics, but right across politics, sorts of questions I see asked, particularly in light of Trump's re-election in America.

39:57In America, they ask, can America be the same with different people in it? and they're particularly talking about the Hispanic increase in the proportion of America with Hispanic heritage. And they're using graphs like this to talk about Britain and the question, can Britain be the same with different people in it? Bearing in mind your stat about post-1997 migration being bigger every single year than in the 1500 years or the millennia beforehand. What's your answer both to the question can Britain be the same with different people in it? But also, what's your take on whether that question ought to be asked?

40:32Okay, I think this is a little beyond the strict remit of a demographer. I like to feel that I am playing back what's happening. But I think, first of all, can the question be asked? Let's ask that question before we ask the question. I think it's absolutely absurd to think it can't be. I don't understand why anyone would think it can't be asked. Because a nation is its people. A nation is its people, and a nation is, to a very large extent, I had a very good friend called Anthony Smith who was a theorist of nationalism, quite a well-known theorist of nationalism, no longer with us. And I don't think it was his term, but he often used the term the myth of common ancestry.

41:09Now, we now have DNA tests, so it's not a myth anymore. The idea that a people has a continuous existence, that the ancestors are the ancestors of the people there now, and the descendants are going to be the descendants of the people who are there now, that there's a continuity is a very important part of the myth, the story, what holds the nation together. Now, can we get beyond that? Can we get to some kind of cosmopolitan ideal where it simply doesn't matter? Maybe. Should we be getting there? That's open for debate. But we seem to be in a world where even to say it's open for debate opens you up to being criticised.

41:54and I think that is something that is peculiar to certain parts of the world if you said to the Japanese in a hundred years time the people who are in Japan will majority be people who aren't their ancestors won't have been in Japan they won't look Japanese and maybe they'll have learnt Japanese they'll probably follow a different religion they'll have different ancestry they'll look different surely that shouldn't matter that doesn't matter does it the Japanese would look at you in astonishment. Well, they've got very, very low migration rates. Very low migration. They've taken a national position on that question, which is that Japan, as it were, quote unquote, should be Japanese for the Japanese, as it were.

42:35And they perhaps don't have the concern that other people, including this country, have, which is that a concern about differential rates of fertility among people of different ethnic heritage, including by this is happening in America, where Hispanic people can, And some Hispanic populations can have more than, as it were, for instance, Catholic Americans who've got white heritage like J.D. Vance does. There's a concern in some parts of their politics that this can slip into a kind of nativism, which injects kind of racial differences into politics. And that's got a nasty set of echoes, particularly in the 20th century.

43:12Well, I had this discussion, funnily enough, with Nigel Farage. I was once on his show on GB News, and he was taking that position, interestingly, that we shouldn't really talk about it. I mean, you're looking shocked, but this is... What position was Farage taking? He was taking the position that really humans are fungible and that we shouldn't have any... And this will surprise people, although it won't surprise people who've followed Nigel Farage's interviews with people like Stephen Edgerton or Winston Marshall. and where he's positioned himself, which doesn't necessarily make himself very popular in reform circles, at least in his interview with me and his subsequent interviews, whether he was interviewing me and then he was interviewed by other people, was that this doesn't matter and it shouldn't matter.

43:56I think that is asking an awful lot of the people who have had this common sense of ancestry to say when you come back in 100 years' time, there will be very, very few of your descendants here. The country will look different and its religion will probably be different and its traditions will be different, but you shouldn't matter because a person is a person. I think we have to find some kind of middle ground between saying, you know, a very strict ethnic sense of purity and a sense that, you know, which is very unpleasant, has awful echoes in the 20th century, and the sense that it absolutely doesn't matter at all.

44:37So I like to feel that people like you and me, Amal, can join the nation, that it's not just a question of ancestry. And feeling what you might call an immigrant patriotism. Totally. And that was what I was brought up with. My father was in the army and, you know, that was his Britishisation, if you like, was his experience in the army. But interestingly, that crosses party political lines as well. So Kevin Baydon would talk about that with his side at Khan, who's in the Labour Party. Yes. But that doesn't mean that people are completely fungible and that the ethnic majority in the British Isles should have absolutely no sense of caring whether their descendants are present or not.

45:18But there's a big but to that. The pushback to those people. And I have had these conversations with lots of people on the right. Names you would you would know and recognize is don't complain. if you're not having children. If you say you don't want immigration, but you're not prepared to have your own children. If you say you want the country to reflect your values and your tradition and your heritage, but you're not going to have any kids, don't complain. You bring in immigrants to do the jobs that need to be done, and then you complain about ethnic change. If people are sensitive to the ethnic composition of the country, which I think they have every right to be, and if they are resistant to endless mass immigration, which I think they have every right to be, then they have to understand there's a flip side of that, which is a fertility rate which replaces themselves.

46:13And if they're not going to replace themselves, if for a whole set of reasons they don't have children, excuse me, or they won't have children, they still expect the society to function, then they are going to have to accept immigration. And I wrote a paper again with Philip Pilkington on this, on what I call the demographic trilemma, which is that you can have low fertility and you can have a functioning society and you can have low immigration. You can have two of those, but not all three. I want as a sort of mission for this podcast to give people a very, very clear sense at a time of these enormous upheavals, deep, deep global trends reshaping our world, of which demography is absolutely front and centre.

46:53And I actually mentioned demography in this very, very context in the first episode of this podcast. I want to give people a sense of how to win the future, what they need to do to get ahead of these enormous trends. In order to understand how to win the future, you need to first understand why you might be losing the future. So in the context of all that we've discussed over this very, very enjoyable conversation, for which I'm grateful, I just want to ask you two questions. First of all, why is it that through demography we're currently on the wrong side of history? and the second question is if we want to win the future how do we need to change our demography?

47:29We're on the wrong side of history because we have simply had too few children to replace ourselves and we've done that now for a couple of generations and if we want to be on the right side of history we have to change that by reorienting the state radically around reproduction, around family formation and reshaping the culture which is harder to do and not just down to politicians but down to each and every one of us whether it's you with your four kids God bless you me helping out with my grandkids so that my children might have that extra marginal child because they know mum and dad or grandma and grandpa around to help them it's not just about government it's not just about politics it's not just about policy where are the companies that are setting up nurseries to make lives of working women easier on their properties not just gyms Why not have nurseries?

48:22It's down to government. It's down to corporations. It's down to opinion formers. And it's down to each and every one of us in our daily lives. Extra marginal child is, I think, my new nickname for my 18-month-old baby. EMC. Nesta, stop screaming at me, you extra marginal child. You are always the extra marginal child. I love you dearly, my darling. If you're listening to this 20 years hence, 20 years after I recorded it, you were never extra or marginal to us. Lots of love. Paul it's fantastic to speak to you thank you very much indeed and if people want to read your books and explore this the most recent is called No One Left and I'd strongly recommend they read The Human Tired and Tomorrow's People riveting full of facts and pretty radical thank you

49:06I really hope that you feel you got a lot of value out of that conversation with Dr Paul Moreland and also that it delivered what we're trying to deliver on this podcast which is a deep sense of how the world is changing and what we might need to do to get ahead of history. There's two things I want to pull out from what he said. The first is I've been banging on about demography quite a bit in various places for the last few years. I don't think I've ever heard a more pithy articulation of the idea of the demographic dividend. And what Paul identified was that in the 1960s and particularly the 1980s, that booming decade in this country, there was this demographic dividend because there were a lot of people of working age per retiree.

49:50But the fact that that demographic dividend, in a way, if you don't have enough babies to replace the population at the existing rate, or at its current level, that demographic dividend stores up problems of the future, was the new idea to me. It was a thing that hadn't quite clocked. It's the consequence of the fact that things were great in the 1960s and 1980s if you're part of that baby boomer generation coming into work. it's that very same generation that is now having to be as it were quote unquote paid for and just to reiterate i really believe in longevity i think it's a wonderful thing i hope lots of people are living longer and living fulfilled lives but the idea that the very same generation can at one point be a dividend and at another stage be not a burden because it's not how we should cast old people but have associated costs is a very very powerful idea as is the idea that right now around the world, the demographic dividend is being felt most keenly in places like the land of my birth, India, which adds around about a million workers to the workforce every single month.

50:50Now, the other thing that Paul said, which jumped out at me, and I'm sure jumped out at some of you who've been listening to the Today podcast before you heard Radical, is that Paul was sat in the very seat where, yeah, maybe it was a year, maybe it was 18 months ago, Torsten Bell, then boss of the Resolution Foundation, now a Labour MP. Torsten Bell was advocating the very same politics and policies that Paul Moreland was advocating. Support for young families, better childcare provision, tax breaks maybe, tax incentives to incentivise people having more kids, basically trying to shift the benefits of our taxation from old people to young people.

51:28And there was a sense in which Paul, I thought was very moving actually as a 60 year old with this free pass for the tube was saying, why are we giving all these benefits to old people when it's young people we should support? But though he and Torsten Bell were advocating similar policies, they were doing it for different reasons. I think Torsten was making that argument because he wants to advocate intergenerational fairness. He thinks it's a question of unfairness or injustice that young people are, he wouldn't say the word shafted, but are getting screwed over by the taxation system in this country.

51:59and that same system is rewarding old people. Paul is advocating those policies, not primarily out of a sense of fairness or unfairness, though I think there was a bit of that in what he was saying, but more in a slightly more utilitarian, overall national picture way, which is he was saying that we urgently need to help young people because we need to grow the national pie and reverse demographic and therefore national, perhaps even civilizational decline. So it's really interesting that you can have two people who don't necessarily share the same politics, advocating the same policies, but through two entirely different moral and philosophical frameworks.

52:36One, intergenerational fairness within a society. The other, a utilitarian belief that you need to do your utmost to grow a national pie. Otherwise, that entire nation is going to sink. And I know this is something that you guys are thinking about, because we got a message last week, got an email from Joe. Joe, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being part of the pod squad. he emailed in to say hi I'm all and pod squad I'm really enjoying the new podcast and I have a suggestion for an episode as a cohort pensioners are wealthier than people in their 20s and 30s and yet the state pays them an income for potentially 30 years once they retire I wonder if it is time to start means testing the state pension so that I mean there's a radical idea so that it is paid to those in need rather than to all pension age citizens what would the savings be?

53:25How could those savings be applied for younger people? Would it help to reduce inequality? And is it even possible politically? Keep up the great work. Joe, thank you so much. Keep up the great messages because we love getting them and that is an idea that I shall certainly float when we get some politicians into radical as we fully intend to. Thank you so much for all of your messages. It really is the most amazing thing. You get this during the Today programme, of course, but there is something about podcasts where you get such amazing responses. And since the last episode of this podcast was recorded.

53:56Some of you will know, I've been to rather a lot of live sporting fixtures. I went to Lourdes to watch a cricket. I went to Wimbledon to see the final with my son. And look, I'm just going to say it and I'll probably get in trouble saying it. I was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of people who came up to me at those hallowed sporting venues and said they love these podcasts. When I was walking out the Wimbledon final, these two, if you're listening now, guys, I'm going to call you lightly lads. These two lightly lads, One supported Man United, one supported Manchester City. The Man United fans are obviously a big fan of Nick Robinson for obvious reasons.

54:30And you were so nice and so kind about Radical, which you're subscribing to. And I'm really sorry that I told you off for swearing in front of my son. But you were swearing quite a lot. And Winston's lovely nine-year-old ears didn't need it. But my ears hugely enjoyed the fact that you're big fans of Radical. Send us in a voice note just to confirm to the pod squad that I'm not making this up completely. That I did bump into you guys and I really appreciate your kindness. in fact whoever you are send us in your wonderful voice notes because we love getting them you can email us on radical at bbc.co.uk or you can whatsapp us on 0330 123 9480 0330 123 9480 loads of you have been in touch with your responses to the billy brag episode which seems to be going great guns online and that is it for this episode to make sure you don't miss future conversations about these deep global trends reshaping the future and the radical ideas that you need to win that future, just subscribe.

55:28So subscribe to Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds. And by the way, you can also watch episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan on iPlayer. And lovely, they are too. Speak to you next week. Bye.

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56:40by world-class research and ambitious young talent. From bold startups to established powerhouses, Poland offers the momentum, resources and reliability you need to take your business further. Poland, where businesses don't just grow, they're built to last. Find out more at polandyourplacetogrow.com. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

57:22What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.