Nigel Farage wants you to have more babies – and that’s sinister

This change is not occurring in isolation. Across the populist right, demographic anxiety has defined the political mood. Birth rates across the West have fallen to historic lows. In England and Wales, the fertility rate fell to 1.49 children per woman in 2022. Across Europe, it has more than halved since the 1960s.

For most policymakers, falling birth rates raise concerns about ageing populations and shrinking tax bases. For parts of the right, they’re the beginning of civilisational decline. Across Europe, hard right leaders increasingly frame fertility as a cultural battleground.

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Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has championed “procreation, not immigration”, backing the slogan with tax breaks and housing subsidies for large families. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni has cast motherhood as an act of patriotism and evoked the Great Replacement theory, while appointing an anti-abortion minister for family policy and cutting VAT on baby products. Meanwhile, Poland has paired generous child benefits with some of the strictest abortion restrictions in Europe.

Journalist Harry Shukman, who has researched the resurgence of pronatalism on the far right, tells The New World that its appeal lies in its simplicity: “It’s a way of discussing a range of their fears: falling birth rates, changing gender roles, and rising immigration.

“Typically, when parties suggest pronatalist policy, it is not just about ensuring parents can afford to have children,” he says. “It’s more about which parents are having children.”

Reform appears to be following a similar playbook. Matt Goodwin, the failed Reform candidate in the Gorton & Denton by-election, has been a vocal proponent of pronatalist policy, positioning falling UK birth rates as a “cultural crisis”, leaving us dependent on migration from countries with “completely different cultural values and way of life…  undermining our social cohesion.” 

Goodwin has called for a “wholesale culture change” in which the state redistributes “social status” toward parents: “We need to make it crystal clear that the state gives high status and respect to mothers, fathers and families,” he says. Quite how the state might legislate for “status” is left unclear.

For Jameen Kaur, director of advocacy and influence at think tank Population Matters, the rhetoric circulating on the right borrows from the same ideological playbook. “[It’s] cut and paste — the same soundbites and ideologies, particularly around replacement theory and ethno-nationalism, travelling across different countries,” she says. “A lot of the current debate is driven by fear and anxiety.”

There is, of course, a stubborn complication to these easy answers: advanced economies have found it extraordinarily difficult to raise fertility rates in any sustained way. In Hungary, Orbán has spent billions encouraging larger families, yet the policy produced only a modest uptick in births, and no durable return to replacement levels. 

Poland’s expensive “Family 500+” child benefit scheme briefly boosted fertility before the trend resumed its downward march. In Italy, Meloni’s government continues to record some of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

Globally, the pattern is remarkably clear. As women gain education, employment and access to reliable contraception, fertility declines. Across the world, greater autonomy correlates with smaller families. And, increasingly, some choose none.

“Lower fertility often correlates with the very conditions that enable women to make choices for themselves and their families… Birth rates going down when they’re based on choice and consent is something that should be celebrated,” says Kaur. 

Here lies the dilemma for serious pronatalism. If generous incentives barely move the dial, and fertility falls as women gain autonomy, restoring high birth rates may well require something darker. The anxiety driving pronatalism is inseparable from both immigration and the policing of women’s bodies.

“There’s a real tension between reproductive autonomy and toxic pronatalist rhetoric,” Kaur warns. “Reproductive rights are about individuals having the freedom to decide if and when they want children and the timing and spacing of children — free from coercion.”

That is why pronatalism on the right so often sits alongside efforts to limit women’s autonomy. European policies have frequently been paired with attempts to restrict abortion or reinforce traditional family roles. In Poland, severe abortion limits were justified partly through the language of demographic survival. In Hungary, subsidies have been wrapped in campaigns of “righteous motherhood” and national renewal.

In Britain, Reform’s own rhetoric points in a similar direction. The party is filled with anti-abortion hardliners, including head of policy James Orr, while Danny Kruger MP, who is leading Reform UK’s preparation for government, has argued for the state to take an interventionist role in reshaping Britain’s sexual culture, telling The House magazine: “Marriage traditionally was the means by which sexual relations between men and women were regulated… I think we are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy.” 

At the same time, the party has said little about the structural barriers that drive falling birth rates: expensive housing, unaffordable childcare, inflexible work and weak parental pay. Indeed, Reform supports restoring the two-child benefit cap — a policy widely criticised for pushing families into poverty and discouraging them from having larger families.

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This is a politics less concerned with supporting parenthood than with moralising it. When Goodwin speaks of redistributing “social status” toward parents, he gestures toward something subtler: prestige drifting away from traditional family formation and the men who once anchored it.

In a stagnant economy of delayed home ownership and insecure work, the old markers of adulthood feel increasingly out of reach. In that landscape, the family offers clarity. Elevating traditional gender roles is not simply about encouraging children, but about restoring hierarchy and a sense of purpose. 

There are signs that this message resonates with some younger men. A global survey of 23,000 people found that almost a third of Gen Z men believe a wife should obey her husband. Gen Z men were twice as likely as baby boomer men to hold such traditional views about marriage and decision-making. These men are a core target voter group for Reform UK.

Farage himself appears particularly sympathetic to that milieu. He has previously defended controversial “manosphere” figures, including Andrew Tate, as an “important role model” for young men. When pressed on policy by Bloomberg presenter Mishal Husain, Farage responded by calling her “love” on air. At subsequent press conferences, he dismissed a female reporter’s question as a “silly little game” and told a Financial Times journalist to “just write some silly story”.

Farage’s irritation often seems directed less at the questioning and more at the women who challenge his authority in public. It is a telling signal of a broader ideological tension within Reform’s worldview: a politics that presents itself as libertarian and anti-establishment, yet often appears more comfortable with traditional hierarchies, particularly between men and women.

Pronatalism, in this reading, is less serious a population policy than a statement about who belongs and who reproduces. It offers a reassuring story to those unsettled by social change: a promise that stability can be restored if society returns to clearer roles: men as providers, women as mothers, the family as the anchor. 

For Lois Shearing, author of Pinkpilled: women and the far-right, that duality is key to understanding pronatalism’s appeal. “It’s really hard to detangle that from young men’s anxieties around sexual liberation and women’s bodily autonomy,” they tell The New World. “The way to control demographics is by controlling women’s reproductive rights.” 

Reform still lacks the institutional depth to translate mood into machinery. There is no detailed blueprint for reconciling higher birth rates with the party’s small-state instincts. But rhetoric shapes horizons: Poland, Hungary and the US show just how arguments about “family values” and moral decay precede the legal erosion of reproductive rights.

Some proposals hint at how that shift might begin. Goodwin floated the idea of taxing the childless through a “negative child benefit”, while Kruger has argued for rescinding no-fault divorce. Reform will also abolish equality laws, a move that would weaken workplace protections for minorities. 

Right now, Reform’s pronatalism is largely cultural anxiety. It gestures toward a nostalgic social order without the economic foundations to sustain it. 

But moods can harden into policy – and the politics of fertility is rarely just about babies. 

Zoe Grunewald co-hosts Politics Uncensored on FUBAR Radio