While Labour splits make the headlines, the Tories are divided too – about whether government should be encouraging people to have more children. And when the former PM most personally responsible for increasing the population decided to cheer falling birth rates, the party’s chief natalist took umbrage.
Boris Johnson – currently known children: at least nine – used his Daily Mail column earlier this month to celebrate the news that figures show that deaths this year will now exceed births for the first time since the mid-1970s.
“Let’s be honest: if and when these new and encouraging trends lead to an actual downturn in the global population, that downturn will be no disaster,” he wrote. “It will be the first blessed relief of some of the crippling burden we place on nature.
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“As for reproduction, I’ll say it again: politicians should butt the hell out of it. The job of politicians is not to indulge in ridiculous Mussolini-style baby-boosting rhetoric. Viktor Orbán tried that in Hungary, for instance. It didn’t work for him, any more than it worked for Mussolini or indeed the Emperor Augustus.”
That was grist to the mill of Miriam Cates, former Tory MP and Kinder, Küche, Kirche crackpot, who has regularly urged her party to emulate Orbán and order British couples into the bedroom for the sake of the country.
Under the headline ‘Boris Johnson is very clever and very wrong’, Cates used her Conservative Home column to lambast her former leader, claiming that his “innumeracy struck again, this time leaving him struggling to grasp the implications of falling global birth rates”.
“I am sure that even Johnson himself would admit that maths was never his strong point,” she writes. “The previous government’s woeful response to the Covid pandemic may have been significantly less destructive had our former prime minister’s grasp of statistics been half as good as his knowledge of Greek mythology.
“Most young people still want to become parents, and the average desired family size is a healthy 2.2 children. The task of government and society is to break down the barriers that stop these dreams from becoming reality. If we could devote half as much time and energy into saving humanity as Johnson has devoted to saving the polar bears, perhaps we might have a fighting chance.”
What have the polar bears done to be dragged into this?
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