British Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has urged more young people to consider starting families amid the demographic crisis facing the United Kingdom.
While young people in the West, particularly young women, have long been pushed towards focus on their careers rather than family formation, there is growing recognition that plummeting birthrates cannot merely be addressed by turning to the importation of millions of foreigners, which hitherto has been the knee-jerk reaction of government in most Western countries.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that in 2023, the British fertility rate fell to 1.44 children per woman, a record low since the government began tracking such figures in 1938 and far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.
This coincided with increased female participation in the workforce, in conjunction with growing difficulties for young adults to get on the housing ladder, which has been exacerbated by the mass migration policies imposed on the country by both Westminster establishment parties.
While Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has previously said that he would not “tell people how to live their lives” in terms of having children, top cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson said this week that the government should seek to help young people have more children.
Writing in The Telegraph, the Education Secretary said: “I want more young people to have children, if they so choose; to realise the ordinary aspiration so many share, to create the moments and memories that make our lives fulfilling: having children, seeing them take their first steps, dropping them off at their first day at school, guiding them on their journey into the world of work or taking them to university for the first time.”
Phillipson continued: “A generation of young people have been thinking twice about starting a family; worried not only about rising mortgage and rent repayments, wary not only of the price of fuel and food but also put off by a childcare system simultaneously lacking in places and ruinously expensive.”
The cabinet minister cited policies supposedly intended to help family formation pushed by the left-wing Labour government, such as increased spending on childcare services, to get women back to work after having children.
Yet rather than advocating for women to be able to stay home to raise their children, Phillipson said that everyone should “welcome” the fact that “over three-quarters of mothers of dependent children are now in paid work”.
Labour has also faced criticism for so far refusing to reverse the Tory-era “two-child benefit cap”, which restricts the ability of parents claiming child tax credits or Universal Credit welfare for more than two children.
In contrast, Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party has vowed to reverse the austerity measures, among others, as it continues to court working-class voters.
Other European nations have gone further, including conservative-run countries like Hungary, which has seen some success in increasing marriage and birth rates through economic incentives, such as affording lifetime tax exemptions for mothers who have a certain number of children.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has previously warned that many Western nations are engaging in “suicide” through “experimenting with the programme of great replacement.”
While long derided as a “conspiracy theory”, the notion that Western elites being content to replace their own populations with migrants was seemingly confirmed this month by a report from Professor Matt Goodwin, which found that the mass migration agenda in Britain will see white Britons become a minority in their own country by 2063.
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