Poland and Fertility: A false sunset
Economic incentives can still work
The grim social realism of the Britpopper generation comes to the fore moreso with an “Ageing Population” than with “Climate”. While Climate can be addressed with sufficient recycling and taxes on Carbon, there is a total helplessness in the face of Britain greying. This is revealed most tellingly in the popular film “Children of Men” – this author’s favourite depiction of the London of tomorrow (on account of the stern militarism). Here we see the excellent Clive Owen navigate a world in which the fertility rate has dropped to zero, one in which women can no longer give birth. Tuk-tuks criss cross Leicester Square. The wealthy have given up on posterity, cordoning off St James’s park to indulge in idle amusements until extinction. The only active solution that the film offers, politically, for the demographic challenge is assisted suicide.
Revealingly, the society depicted in Children of Men tackles its demographic problems through restrictions of immigration, with vivid depictions of non-citizens who have attempted to arrive in the country being held in cages. At the darker end of the Monbiot and Whittingsdale worldview, these Climate fanatics, there is often an argument advanced that Climate change will instigate fascistic government in Western Europe, as the White populations of these countries will seek to protect their limited resource from Africans and Arabs who suffer geological catastrophe.
This is a distinctly non centre-right perspective to hold on the question of immigration. It is foreign to Fraser Nelson. It openly accepts that immigrants from these parts of the country are a burden, not a Driver of Growth. The stunning A-Level results of the Kenyan Indians seem remote in a harsher world of crude resource distribution. Hijabs made of poppies and curries in Brick Lane count for very little in a dystopia as imagined even by leftists such as Alfonso Cuaron.
This dark insight does seem to have factored in to ‘An Ageing Population’ as a political talking point. An ageing population – that is, the fact that medical advances have enabled people to live longer, does not capture the principal political question that it transposes – that there is an increasing number of dependants in most Western Societies. This is sometimes referred to as the dependency ratio; how many taxpayers/contributors are there compared to ‘receivers’. In Western Europe, anybody who has read the below chart will know that the ‘dependency ratio’ is a problem that must be considered holistically.
The insanity of the Blair period comes together once you realise that the same people who were wringing hands over the Growth of the Grey were encouraging the mass movement of peoples from countries where the median immigrant is a net burden.