As a vicar, I do a lot of funerals. In the past year I've done two where the only mourner has been the deceased's widow or widower - couples without children who have no other family. I compare this with the funerals I do for Travellers who still have fairly high fertility rates (though families with 15 or more children are now uncommon), so that there is a large network of siblings, children, cousins and so on to share the grief and support the bereaved. Lone mourner funerals are our future -- a world of solitary pain.
one of the most touching aspects of the RiH's JFK series was the description of Oswald's funeral where journalists end up as pallbearers because no one mourns him. A bad man, who committed a terrible crime, but still one of God's children.
Yes, that was poignant. On Monday I had a funeral with a solitary mourner, and invited people from my church to attend to support her - it was very moving to see them sitting there behind her so that she didn't have to be alone. In the low fertility world of extreme individualism and degraded social bonds what can mitigate the kind of support that families (both normally and ideally) give to each other? It's only the Church, I think, that might do that, because it puts sacrificial love at its centre. I really don't think though that people who choose childlessness in the present, because of the freedom it gives them, look to that lonely future.
Very true. My in-laws are a good example to us because they had six children and are now swimming in grandchildren and family goings-on, and my own mother would I think be very isolated without me and my sister. But my wife visits a care home regularly and is struck by how many of them feel the lack of children and grandchildren quite deeply.
Having young children is tough at times (I thrive on quiet, solitude and order, and there's little of any of those things in our house!) but we are acutely aware that this phase of life is allowing us to people the second halves of our lives with a new cast of characters.
Don't people have friends still? If not that seems like a major problem too. The funerals I've attended (at age 57 they're getting more frequent) almost always have more unrelated people in attendance than family.
That's true: single mourner funerals are rare -- that's why Eleanor Rigby has such an impact. But they will get less rare as more people are childless, or have no siblings, and as social networks degrade or wither with age.
Yes, though mainly for the unchurched. At least in Orthodoxy it is normative for the entire parish to turn out for a funeral insofar as they are able. Last March the wife of our old retired priest died after several years of being a shut in due to dementia (her husband still attended and assisted the new priest at whiles). Though on a Wednesday morning the funeral was quite well attended. This is one of several worldly reasons to maintain church membership.
I feel so angry at my stupid self for not considering all of this when I was in my twenties. Not that kids are completely impossible for me now but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. Please say a prayer for me.
Another, more popular, counter-argument is that we can simply make up numbers with immigration. This has two major problems: one, that high immigration is hugely unpopular, drives radical Right politics, and the numbers required for what the UN used to call ‘replacement migration’ are unfathomably large. Morland wrote recently that: ‘To achieve a reasonable old-age dependency ratio and therefore keep the economy growing in a sustainable way, therefore, the rates of immigration into Britain that would be required become completely nonsensical.’
There's also the much more blunt point of not turning Europe into Africa (as wonderful as I'm sure Africa is) which is the inevitable but unspoken consequence of mass migration from the one region with a huge and growing population surplus.
Among the many factors leading to low fertility, I would add this: tracksuits. I went to Glyndebourne opera for the first time recently, where the men in the audience wear dinner jackets and black tie, and the women nice dresses. Putting aside the majority of the audience who were beyond their child-bearing years, the younger people all looked 200% more attractive wearing smart clothes compared to standard comfortable weekend wear. And dressing up for a fun event adds a frisson of excitement, suggesting the possibility of a more adventurous, confident life that might well involve meeting a romantic partner. The loss of dressing up culture means many fewer such chances to meet someone you might one day start a family with. Then there's the decline of alcohol consumption. Obviously alcohol brings many problems but it also makes people more confident and randy. Less obviously, it offers people 'plausible deniability' if their flirtation is rebuffed, or if it's not rebuffed but the kissing or sex lacks chemistry and the relationship fizzles out. It can be very useful to both parties to blame a romantic failure on having been tipsy. "Hey, so about last night..." "Oh god, don't mention it, we were both blotto!" "Yeah, what are we like, huh?" kind of thing. This is a useful insurance policy when embarking on the emotionally risky gamble of flirting. The stone cold sober have no such crutch and must fully own their rejections. So in a nutshell, fewer tracksuits and more booze (within reason) at fancy events are what we need.
You don't have to wear formal clothes to look good. Office casual, even shorts and a T shirt can look good- if they flatter your figure. Too many people pay no heed to those factors and throw on whatever is cheap, not even noticing color clashes.
Making an extra effort shows respect for the occasion and the people you're with. I don't think the real issue is cost - plenty of people spend a lot of money to look dreadful. It's about the effort.
Through my work as a fund manager in Japan, I met a company called Katitas, who buy up homes, typically in country areas, mostly from people who have inherited them and don’t want to live there. Katitas buy them for £30-50,000 and spend about the same modernising them. The chairman told me in 2020 that while the UK had 210,000 empty homes (I have seen higher estimates), Japan already had 8.2m and was on the way to 21m by 2035.
Thanks, very interesting stuff. We have managed three children so far and I reckon there's still time for a fourth, but we shall see.
I daresay I'm unrepresentative but in my own peer group there's a big difference between the irreligious people (i.e. most people I went to school with) and the practising Catholics I tend to hang out with now. My schoolfriends have one child per couple or two at a pinch, whereas the Catholics have four or five. We live in a two-bed house and are squeezing the boys into one bedroom (they are still small) but many people seem to think you need one bedroom per child if you don't want to look eccentric.
We don't live near People Like Us (can't afford it) but we are in the catchment area for a good Catholic primary in Hertfordshire, attended by lots of Nigerian, Polish, and Irish families, and there seems to be no child shortage around here just yet.
I think the fact that so many people are childless, or have fewer children than they wanted, tells us something sad about the kind of societies we've created in the past sixty years. But I wonder if the dire economic consequences you foresee are a foregone conclusion.
I'd ask the following questions:
1) What assumptions does the projection that, e.g, Italy's dependency ratio will be 80% by the century's end, make about future life expectancy? A database I looked up just now online predicts that life expectancy in Italy will rise from 84 to 93 by 2100. But I suspect this is optimistic. The baby boomers were lucky enough to be raised on a wholesome, still fairly natural diet, at a time when people were more physically active than they are now; they tended to drink less than their parents, and they learned that smoking was unhealthy early enough in life to give it up. No wonder they live a long time! Younger generations may be more abstemious still as regards alcohol and tobacco, but they have been raised on ultra-processed food and lead sedentary lifestyles. We are already seeing growing rates of obesity-related diseases and an increase in early-onset cancers. This is obviously not a very happy situation for the individuals concerned, but the working-age population in a society with a life expectancy of 70 clearly has many fewer dependents to support than it does in a society with a life expectancy of 90.
2) What about the likely impact of ongoing mechanisation? AI is probably soon going to be able to perform clerical jobs, just as, from the Industrial Revolution on, machines took over manual jobs. That's to say, we may be able to maintain and increase productivity even with a smaller active working population. Science fiction has long imagined futures in which a workforce of productive machines and robots support a largely inactive human population. I wonder if it could really happen.
i'm fairly optimistic on technological issues. think it's possible lifespans might continue to rise, and healthy lifespan too. the political issues might be harder - forcing people to work later in life. Although I think yes there's lots of evidence my generation, those born in the 70s, will have worse outcomes than parents, as our youth and early adulthood coincided with peak alcohol and drug use.
I don't see how longer lifespans somehow ameliorates the dependency shortage. Shouldn't it make it worse? If your grandkid has to support both his parents, and you?
Ed is optimistic about life expectancy and therefore pessimistic about dependency. I am pessimistic about life expectancy and therefore optimistic about dependency.
Good article, and looking forward to the second part. I agree with Morland (and you), and think this is a real problem. I'd love to see a culture emerging that prioritises children, as that seems to me to be the sign of a healthy society.
In the interests of trying to look for a little balance to the gloom, a couple of small points:
- the economic dependency problem also affects countries with lots and lots of children. Eg, if you're Niger, you have a potentially productive workforce attempting to support huge numbers of economically unproductive (so far) kids, whereas here you have a workforce attempting to support multiple Simons and Lindas on their cruises. In purely economic terms, you can have too much of a good thing, fertility-wise, too.
- the dependency issue is also primarily a feature of the particular form of welfarism we have. If you fund the welfare costs of the old from current taxation rather than accumulated savings, then fewer kids is indeed disastrous. But there are other reasons for thinking that this model is unfair or unsustainable, so if an aging population forces reform, then that's possibly no bad thing in the long run. However, it is hard to see how any such reform might happen that doesn't leave a lot of people in pretty dire straits.
Absolutely - also demonstrated here by the reaction to May's 'dementia tax'. But unless more babies come along then at some point the money will just run out, and after that something will have to change. There are some tentative signs that Gen-Z is cottoning on to this: just about the only common thread in Corbyn's and Farage's platforms is that the burden on the young to support the old is now very unfair and needs to be looked at.
It's always going to be true that the young(er) population will support the (very) old population, howsoever the details work on that. Meanwhile employers still do everything they can to force older employees out of jobs, and won't hire older (>50) workers even while decrying worker shortages. Many of us can work longer than we do (in non-physically demanding jobs) but corporate culture militates against that.
A wild card: AI and increasing automation. How many jobs will the future hold and how many people, even younger people, will be unable to find work?
Thanks for cheering us up today. It does look like we have been too clever for our own good. It does feel that we have lost the 'je ne sais quoi?' of millenia that makes us want to replicate ourselves. Maybe we don't need sprogs to work our fields and fight our wars? Maybe we can't afford the property prices and need to work instead? And yet. we have lost that sense of working with nature and history and culture, that means we inherit, receive and then give. I would call that the religious impulse, which has been replaced by the material preference for the present enjoyment. That won't last it seems, hence more conflict as ethnic, class and age tensions become ever greater as we fight for resources and just to feed the debt.
The only consolation is that in a few decades, woke liberals will be extinct and there will be plenty of room for Jews, Christians and Moslems to spread themselves out in peace and harmony.
At risk of stealing your thunder on part two, I think Israel's situation is unique in that it is locked in an existential struggle with it's neighbors that has a clear demographic aspect to it. Also, because of the Holocaust, Israelis unapologetically think in terms of perpetuating the Jewish people while Europeans thinking about perpetuating the ethnic English or French people or what have you will be stigmatized as bigots in many quarters.
Further to other comment as a landlord we’ve tried and failed to rent to young families. They’ve all left London. Our last tenant left when his baby was way. Nomadic families are the future because of high taxation. Especially high always taxation in cities. We can’t find anyone but students anymore so we’re selling. Chinese want to buy and be landlords. Good luck London.
presumably the cost of housing is a big factor too. Not saying you're charging too much, but the market is what it is, and families especially want bigger space and access to nice schools and neighbourhoods, which is hard in London
I'm part of the young families cohort, and it is difficult to see how any of us afford to stay in London without inheritance, free childcare from the grandparents, or one parent having a very high salary. I don't think tax is really the problem: it's high housing costs. If you could own a decent-sized home in London on one reasonable salary I expect most of these people would stay.
Yes and that’s all down to tax. I’d recommend reading Daylight Robbery by Dominic Frisby to fully understand how taxed we are and how it influences choices even without realising. We are utterly constricted by taxes.
We don’t make any profit at all on our let.
I must say London was utterly brilliant for raising under 5s. “Free” (taxed) child care church groups and loads of play space. We worked with one salary. In the end no way we could have afforded to have more kids so I think it was divine intervention. Lower the tax burden and yes we might have.
Rather rude. I wasn’t rude to you. The housing crisis is well outlined by Reform and won’t be solved by building more. Our tax burden is such that we are headed out of the UK. And given my husband arrived from abject Brazilian poverty and worked hard to establish himself here that’s saying something. Tax isn’t piffle. And nomadic tourism is a thing precisely because of it. More and more families are jointing and we can’t wait to do
Likewise. This country is taxed to fuck and all western nations are raising tax because they’re losing revenue from it because of nomadic working lifestyles and corporations profiting from them. The tax burden will rise and rise as a result and families will pay. This isn’t rocket science.
You’d have to be an absolute fucking moron to stay in the UK raise a family here . Housing: all leasehold (ground rent / service charges etc are ALL TAXES) and many millions of families are caught in leasehold traps. And they’re building more. Vistry will also soon be the country’s biggest landlord : building houses to rent them. Council tax will rise to compensate for the governments inability o to raise income tax any higher, because it’s already too high. Debt burden is such that our kids will start their lives on high taxation to service the debt we allowed to rise. Stealth taxes: ulez and similar roll outs. The list is endless and yet people are too stupid to realise it. They want bigger government a larger welfare state and more immigration. I cannot wait to say good riddance to this dump and wish you the very best with it!
Coincidentally, me and my wife were at one of our sons primary leaving service yesterday morning and we were talking about this issue on the way back. When we sent our eldest to pre-school, the one we wanted was difficult to get into but luckily he got in. This was 10 years ago. Our second and third sons also went to the same pre-school and we saw the class size dwindle each time. We've moved to a different area now so our fourth has gone to another.
However, the original pre-school our other boys went to had it's last ever leaving service yesterday after being around for 60 years as there isn't enough kids to attend. Also, we know someone who works in a school close to the pre-school and she has said that that they are having to merge age groups as again, there isn't enough kids. I wondered if it was a localised issue but after reading this, it may be a national issue.
Can you then explain why I’m sat here on a short standard holiday break to Portugal surrounded by British women nursing babies toddlers and with large families comprising several kids. See what this encourages @ed just same old same old woman hatred.
Nothing like a bit of optimistic Ed West to put a spring in your step before 7.30 on a Wednesday morning.
Haha
About to say the same.
As a vicar, I do a lot of funerals. In the past year I've done two where the only mourner has been the deceased's widow or widower - couples without children who have no other family. I compare this with the funerals I do for Travellers who still have fairly high fertility rates (though families with 15 or more children are now uncommon), so that there is a large network of siblings, children, cousins and so on to share the grief and support the bereaved. Lone mourner funerals are our future -- a world of solitary pain.
that is incredibly sad.
one of the most touching aspects of the RiH's JFK series was the description of Oswald's funeral where journalists end up as pallbearers because no one mourns him. A bad man, who committed a terrible crime, but still one of God's children.
Yes, that was poignant. On Monday I had a funeral with a solitary mourner, and invited people from my church to attend to support her - it was very moving to see them sitting there behind her so that she didn't have to be alone. In the low fertility world of extreme individualism and degraded social bonds what can mitigate the kind of support that families (both normally and ideally) give to each other? It's only the Church, I think, that might do that, because it puts sacrificial love at its centre. I really don't think though that people who choose childlessness in the present, because of the freedom it gives them, look to that lonely future.
Very true. My in-laws are a good example to us because they had six children and are now swimming in grandchildren and family goings-on, and my own mother would I think be very isolated without me and my sister. But my wife visits a care home regularly and is struck by how many of them feel the lack of children and grandchildren quite deeply.
Having young children is tough at times (I thrive on quiet, solitude and order, and there's little of any of those things in our house!) but we are acutely aware that this phase of life is allowing us to people the second halves of our lives with a new cast of characters.
Eleanor Rigby!
Don't people have friends still? If not that seems like a major problem too. The funerals I've attended (at age 57 they're getting more frequent) almost always have more unrelated people in attendance than family.
That's true: single mourner funerals are rare -- that's why Eleanor Rigby has such an impact. But they will get less rare as more people are childless, or have no siblings, and as social networks degrade or wither with age.
Yes, though mainly for the unchurched. At least in Orthodoxy it is normative for the entire parish to turn out for a funeral insofar as they are able. Last March the wife of our old retired priest died after several years of being a shut in due to dementia (her husband still attended and assisted the new priest at whiles). Though on a Wednesday morning the funeral was quite well attended. This is one of several worldly reasons to maintain church membership.
I feel so angry at my stupid self for not considering all of this when I was in my twenties. Not that kids are completely impossible for me now but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. Please say a prayer for me.
Of course. I regularly pray for those who are longing for children and I will include you in my prayers.
Many thanks for your thoughts. Please post comments more often.
I'll try and think of things worth saying...
Oh, I can assure you that you have many insights worth sharing. Your voice is valuable and I'm not alone in believing this!!
Another, more popular, counter-argument is that we can simply make up numbers with immigration. This has two major problems: one, that high immigration is hugely unpopular, drives radical Right politics, and the numbers required for what the UN used to call ‘replacement migration’ are unfathomably large. Morland wrote recently that: ‘To achieve a reasonable old-age dependency ratio and therefore keep the economy growing in a sustainable way, therefore, the rates of immigration into Britain that would be required become completely nonsensical.’
There's also the much more blunt point of not turning Europe into Africa (as wonderful as I'm sure Africa is) which is the inevitable but unspoken consequence of mass migration from the one region with a huge and growing population surplus.
Among the many factors leading to low fertility, I would add this: tracksuits. I went to Glyndebourne opera for the first time recently, where the men in the audience wear dinner jackets and black tie, and the women nice dresses. Putting aside the majority of the audience who were beyond their child-bearing years, the younger people all looked 200% more attractive wearing smart clothes compared to standard comfortable weekend wear. And dressing up for a fun event adds a frisson of excitement, suggesting the possibility of a more adventurous, confident life that might well involve meeting a romantic partner. The loss of dressing up culture means many fewer such chances to meet someone you might one day start a family with. Then there's the decline of alcohol consumption. Obviously alcohol brings many problems but it also makes people more confident and randy. Less obviously, it offers people 'plausible deniability' if their flirtation is rebuffed, or if it's not rebuffed but the kissing or sex lacks chemistry and the relationship fizzles out. It can be very useful to both parties to blame a romantic failure on having been tipsy. "Hey, so about last night..." "Oh god, don't mention it, we were both blotto!" "Yeah, what are we like, huh?" kind of thing. This is a useful insurance policy when embarking on the emotionally risky gamble of flirting. The stone cold sober have no such crutch and must fully own their rejections. So in a nutshell, fewer tracksuits and more booze (within reason) at fancy events are what we need.
You don't have to wear formal clothes to look good. Office casual, even shorts and a T shirt can look good- if they flatter your figure. Too many people pay no heed to those factors and throw on whatever is cheap, not even noticing color clashes.
"even shorts and a T shirt can look good"
Making an extra effort shows respect for the occasion and the people you're with. I don't think the real issue is cost - plenty of people spend a lot of money to look dreadful. It's about the effort.
The issue is lack of taste and an unawareness of how one looks. It's considered rude to tell someone "You look like a slob" so there's no feedback.
Through my work as a fund manager in Japan, I met a company called Katitas, who buy up homes, typically in country areas, mostly from people who have inherited them and don’t want to live there. Katitas buy them for £30-50,000 and spend about the same modernising them. The chairman told me in 2020 that while the UK had 210,000 empty homes (I have seen higher estimates), Japan already had 8.2m and was on the way to 21m by 2035.
At least that might relieve another problem!
Thanks, very interesting stuff. We have managed three children so far and I reckon there's still time for a fourth, but we shall see.
I daresay I'm unrepresentative but in my own peer group there's a big difference between the irreligious people (i.e. most people I went to school with) and the practising Catholics I tend to hang out with now. My schoolfriends have one child per couple or two at a pinch, whereas the Catholics have four or five. We live in a two-bed house and are squeezing the boys into one bedroom (they are still small) but many people seem to think you need one bedroom per child if you don't want to look eccentric.
We don't live near People Like Us (can't afford it) but we are in the catchment area for a good Catholic primary in Hertfordshire, attended by lots of Nigerian, Polish, and Irish families, and there seems to be no child shortage around here just yet.
I think the fact that so many people are childless, or have fewer children than they wanted, tells us something sad about the kind of societies we've created in the past sixty years. But I wonder if the dire economic consequences you foresee are a foregone conclusion.
I'd ask the following questions:
1) What assumptions does the projection that, e.g, Italy's dependency ratio will be 80% by the century's end, make about future life expectancy? A database I looked up just now online predicts that life expectancy in Italy will rise from 84 to 93 by 2100. But I suspect this is optimistic. The baby boomers were lucky enough to be raised on a wholesome, still fairly natural diet, at a time when people were more physically active than they are now; they tended to drink less than their parents, and they learned that smoking was unhealthy early enough in life to give it up. No wonder they live a long time! Younger generations may be more abstemious still as regards alcohol and tobacco, but they have been raised on ultra-processed food and lead sedentary lifestyles. We are already seeing growing rates of obesity-related diseases and an increase in early-onset cancers. This is obviously not a very happy situation for the individuals concerned, but the working-age population in a society with a life expectancy of 70 clearly has many fewer dependents to support than it does in a society with a life expectancy of 90.
2) What about the likely impact of ongoing mechanisation? AI is probably soon going to be able to perform clerical jobs, just as, from the Industrial Revolution on, machines took over manual jobs. That's to say, we may be able to maintain and increase productivity even with a smaller active working population. Science fiction has long imagined futures in which a workforce of productive machines and robots support a largely inactive human population. I wonder if it could really happen.
i'm fairly optimistic on technological issues. think it's possible lifespans might continue to rise, and healthy lifespan too. the political issues might be harder - forcing people to work later in life. Although I think yes there's lots of evidence my generation, those born in the 70s, will have worse outcomes than parents, as our youth and early adulthood coincided with peak alcohol and drug use.
I don't see how longer lifespans somehow ameliorates the dependency shortage. Shouldn't it make it worse? If your grandkid has to support both his parents, and you?
Ed is optimistic about life expectancy and therefore pessimistic about dependency. I am pessimistic about life expectancy and therefore optimistic about dependency.
That same AI may also increase lifespans.
Good article, and looking forward to the second part. I agree with Morland (and you), and think this is a real problem. I'd love to see a culture emerging that prioritises children, as that seems to me to be the sign of a healthy society.
In the interests of trying to look for a little balance to the gloom, a couple of small points:
- the economic dependency problem also affects countries with lots and lots of children. Eg, if you're Niger, you have a potentially productive workforce attempting to support huge numbers of economically unproductive (so far) kids, whereas here you have a workforce attempting to support multiple Simons and Lindas on their cruises. In purely economic terms, you can have too much of a good thing, fertility-wise, too.
- the dependency issue is also primarily a feature of the particular form of welfarism we have. If you fund the welfare costs of the old from current taxation rather than accumulated savings, then fewer kids is indeed disastrous. But there are other reasons for thinking that this model is unfair or unsustainable, so if an aging population forces reform, then that's possibly no bad thing in the long run. However, it is hard to see how any such reform might happen that doesn't leave a lot of people in pretty dire straits.
yeah a high fertility for a country not experiencing much economic development is not good either.
re the second part, it will be a very bitter pill to swallow for the electorate. see how much the French resist pension reform
Absolutely - also demonstrated here by the reaction to May's 'dementia tax'. But unless more babies come along then at some point the money will just run out, and after that something will have to change. There are some tentative signs that Gen-Z is cottoning on to this: just about the only common thread in Corbyn's and Farage's platforms is that the burden on the young to support the old is now very unfair and needs to be looked at.
It's always going to be true that the young(er) population will support the (very) old population, howsoever the details work on that. Meanwhile employers still do everything they can to force older employees out of jobs, and won't hire older (>50) workers even while decrying worker shortages. Many of us can work longer than we do (in non-physically demanding jobs) but corporate culture militates against that.
A wild card: AI and increasing automation. How many jobs will the future hold and how many people, even younger people, will be unable to find work?
The most ridiculous reason I’ve heard people at dinner parties give for not having more than one child: ‘We can’t afford any more’.
Thanks for cheering us up today. It does look like we have been too clever for our own good. It does feel that we have lost the 'je ne sais quoi?' of millenia that makes us want to replicate ourselves. Maybe we don't need sprogs to work our fields and fight our wars? Maybe we can't afford the property prices and need to work instead? And yet. we have lost that sense of working with nature and history and culture, that means we inherit, receive and then give. I would call that the religious impulse, which has been replaced by the material preference for the present enjoyment. That won't last it seems, hence more conflict as ethnic, class and age tensions become ever greater as we fight for resources and just to feed the debt.
The only consolation is that in a few decades, woke liberals will be extinct and there will be plenty of room for Jews, Christians and Moslems to spread themselves out in peace and harmony.
Politics is not hereditary.
Nothing is hereditary at this rate.
At risk of stealing your thunder on part two, I think Israel's situation is unique in that it is locked in an existential struggle with it's neighbors that has a clear demographic aspect to it. Also, because of the Holocaust, Israelis unapologetically think in terms of perpetuating the Jewish people while Europeans thinking about perpetuating the ethnic English or French people or what have you will be stigmatized as bigots in many quarters.
Further to other comment as a landlord we’ve tried and failed to rent to young families. They’ve all left London. Our last tenant left when his baby was way. Nomadic families are the future because of high taxation. Especially high always taxation in cities. We can’t find anyone but students anymore so we’re selling. Chinese want to buy and be landlords. Good luck London.
presumably the cost of housing is a big factor too. Not saying you're charging too much, but the market is what it is, and families especially want bigger space and access to nice schools and neighbourhoods, which is hard in London
I'm part of the young families cohort, and it is difficult to see how any of us afford to stay in London without inheritance, free childcare from the grandparents, or one parent having a very high salary. I don't think tax is really the problem: it's high housing costs. If you could own a decent-sized home in London on one reasonable salary I expect most of these people would stay.
Yes and that’s all down to tax. I’d recommend reading Daylight Robbery by Dominic Frisby to fully understand how taxed we are and how it influences choices even without realising. We are utterly constricted by taxes.
We don’t make any profit at all on our let.
I must say London was utterly brilliant for raising under 5s. “Free” (taxed) child care church groups and loads of play space. We worked with one salary. In the end no way we could have afforded to have more kids so I think it was divine intervention. Lower the tax burden and yes we might have.
Piffle in my view. The housing crisis is primarily a mismatch of supply and demand. Everything else is just details.
Rather rude. I wasn’t rude to you. The housing crisis is well outlined by Reform and won’t be solved by building more. Our tax burden is such that we are headed out of the UK. And given my husband arrived from abject Brazilian poverty and worked hard to establish himself here that’s saying something. Tax isn’t piffle. And nomadic tourism is a thing precisely because of it. More and more families are jointing and we can’t wait to do
Likewise. This country is taxed to fuck and all western nations are raising tax because they’re losing revenue from it because of nomadic working lifestyles and corporations profiting from them. The tax burden will rise and rise as a result and families will pay. This isn’t rocket science.
You’d have to be an absolute fucking moron to stay in the UK raise a family here . Housing: all leasehold (ground rent / service charges etc are ALL TAXES) and many millions of families are caught in leasehold traps. And they’re building more. Vistry will also soon be the country’s biggest landlord : building houses to rent them. Council tax will rise to compensate for the governments inability o to raise income tax any higher, because it’s already too high. Debt burden is such that our kids will start their lives on high taxation to service the debt we allowed to rise. Stealth taxes: ulez and similar roll outs. The list is endless and yet people are too stupid to realise it. They want bigger government a larger welfare state and more immigration. I cannot wait to say good riddance to this dump and wish you the very best with it!
At least Korea has the North as a seed bank, with a TFR fluctuating between 1.8-1.9 (vs 0.8 in the South).
Perhaps we should consider establishing a communist dictatorship in Yorkshire, as a contingency plan.
Coincidentally, me and my wife were at one of our sons primary leaving service yesterday morning and we were talking about this issue on the way back. When we sent our eldest to pre-school, the one we wanted was difficult to get into but luckily he got in. This was 10 years ago. Our second and third sons also went to the same pre-school and we saw the class size dwindle each time. We've moved to a different area now so our fourth has gone to another.
However, the original pre-school our other boys went to had it's last ever leaving service yesterday after being around for 60 years as there isn't enough kids to attend. Also, we know someone who works in a school close to the pre-school and she has said that that they are having to merge age groups as again, there isn't enough kids. I wondered if it was a localised issue but after reading this, it may be a national issue.
I think it's everywhere. take any random London council, say islington which is closest to mine. The catchment areas of most schools are expanding at quite a rate https://www.islington.gov.uk/children-and-families/schools/apply-for-a-school-place/school-admissions-information/cut-off-distance-maps
"falling birth rates present a crisis which needs to be addressed by urgent cultural change"
Stipulate a crisis if you must. How is the cultural change to be effected, other than "urgently"? Perhaps this will be covered in Part 2.
I have ten children, so it can't be all that hard. We'll finally have a grandchild late this fall.
congratulations!
Thank you.
Plenty of people can't have that many children. My Mormon niece had to stop after four due to health complications.
Sure, there are various issues regarding health.
Women have voted with their feet against babies and childcare.
Who nowadays has the empathy, frankly, to prefer a squalling brat in soiled diapers to a nice, clean, interesting computer ?
I'm not sure that's how it works tbh
Can you then explain why I’m sat here on a short standard holiday break to Portugal surrounded by British women nursing babies toddlers and with large families comprising several kids. See what this encourages @ed just same old same old woman hatred.
I don't think the argument necessarily encourages women hatred. On this matter at least it does certainly take two to tango