We need to talk about posterity

Stop worrying about the news and election cycles: worry about your great-grandchildren

In Tomorrow’s People, Paul Morland observed that ageing countries faced ‘the trilemma of the three Es: ethnic continuity, economic growth, and egotism’. By egotism he meant — and he was explicitly clear that this was not a moral judgement — a comfortable existence often incompatible with family life.  

Morland cited three examples of first-world countries making different choices. Japan wanted ethnic continuity, so they paid the price with economic stagnation; Israel, for historical reasons, had a pro-natal culture even among the secular, so they collectively lost their nights to crying babies. Britain, determined to keep the economy going, chose the other path. 

Under Tony Blair and his Labour and Conservative successors a country with historically low levels of immigration, and with a population ‘very homogenous by conventional measures’, experienced unprecedented inflows of people, on a scale that dwarfs anything that has come before. Aside from the moral imperative to oppose racism, one of the main justifications for this great upheaval was always that the economy needed it. Immigrants would keep things going, possessing the vim and dynamism we lacked.

Yet what we were actually doing was artificially fixing the age pyramid to provide more people in the 18-40 age bracket, the crucial element of an economy. Life is a valley of tears and immigrants, unfortunately, also get old like the rest of us; and just as many warned at the time, using immigration as a means to keep the economy artificially dynamic was a Ponzi scheme on a grand scale.