Like many life-long Conservative Party voters, I’m pondering a switch to Reform in 2025.
If I do decide to take the plunge, it will be because of immigration. Last month’s bombshell figures – which put net migration last year far higher than anyone expected – may be the final straw.
There was no blaming Labour for this. These gigantic numbers were old numbers. Tory numbers. I may have voted for Kemi Badenoch as leader. Boris Johnson’s memoirs may have been my favourite book of the year. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the Conservative Party broke its solemn promise to take control of who comes here.
Having grown-up in the multicultural laboratory which is Bradford, I take a sceptical view of the unalloyed benefits of migration. Like most right-thinking people, I don’t disdain the contributions of migrants who come here to work. But the numbers of recent years make successful assimilation impossible. We need to be far more discriminating about the cultural values we import.
So Reform is right to make a massive cut in both legal and illegal migration its Big Idea. It’s what most voters want, and what every other major party fails to fully understand.
But Reform’s pitch to the public is like an equation that fails to balance. Because slashing migrant numbers is only half the story. Yes, we need to stop the boats. But we also need to fill the cradles.
It’s true (although never obvious to the BBC) that cutting migrant numbers will ease the pressure on public services. In particular, fewer migrants will reduce the soaring demand for housing. And we know that not being able to buy a home is one reason cited by young people for not starting a family.
But less pricey accommodation will not be enough to solve Britain’s birth dearth. And, unless we do, it won’t matter how many illegal migrants we deport. We will have too few new Britons to pay taxes, buy stuff or, if it comes to it, fight wars.
In its manifesto Reform says “Britain’s future depends on our young people”.
Reform must be the party of the babies, says Colin Brazier
GB News
But the measures it proposes, including tax support for marriage, are not enough. Reform’s Contract with the British people sets aside one page for family policies, illustrated with a picture of two parents and their three children. A lovely image. But essentially a fantasy. Not since the 1960s has a family this big been normal here (UK fertility hit a post-war high of an average 2.88 children per woman in 1964, and recently hit a record low 1.4).
Put simply, Reform need to have an answer to the question: if immigration is discouraged, how can we ensure we British have enough babies to keep the country functioning?
My answer is that Reform must announce itself as Britain’s Pro-Natal party. Elon Musk may or may not offer Reform money, but the party must take his warnings seriously. The developed world faces a sustainability crisis. Not because of climate change, but depopulation.
Pro-natalism is just about the most substantive (and overlooked) issue in politics today. There is an emerging populist consensus – led by the likes of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni – that fertility is the one long-term problem that grown-up government’s can’t duck. By joining that consensus, Reform shows not only that it is a serious player with an eye to the future, but it also spikes the guns of critics who (wrongly) castigate Reform as backward looking and caring only for older voters.
Some will say the decision to have children is a private matter. At an individual level, of course, that remains true. But as a society, the State can longer be neutral on this. Nor need it be sexist. In pro-natal circles, there is an acceptance that too many previous attempts at getting the birth-rate up have involved old men telling young women what to do.
But in countries, like ours, where millions of women are not even having all the children they say they want, the argument about ‘choice’ has changed. No longer is it about choosing not to have a baby – as it was for early feminists – but about actually STARTING a family in the teeth of economic and cultural head-winds.
So how do you convince a cohort of young people who no longer see having children as a debt they pay off to society, history and parents? A decade ago, I wrote a pro-natal book based on my own experiences as a father of six, and concluded that culture is a far more important catalyst for fertility than money. That said, cash isn’t a bad place to start.
Which is why, if I was writing Reform’s manifesto, I would add this pledge: to write-off student debt for anyone – male or female – who is married and expecting a child. With the scheme to be paid for by cancelling our foreign aid program, currently costing UK taxpayers £13bn a year.
There would be howls of protest from the Left, about how we were abandoning our obligations to the world’s hungry. But the truth is, if we don’t act now, Britain will be starved of children. And our only alternative will be to countenance immigration on a scale far, far beyond anything we have hitherto seen.