BORIS JOHNSON: Falling birth rates AREN’T a disaster

In the hilltop villages of Tuscany, where I was recently, the bells are tolling for far more funerals than weddings.

Across the European continent, from Portugal to the Balkans, bus routes are being cancelled as waves of elderly customers take their last subsidised freedom pass to the sky.

In the kindergartens of Tokyo, the playgrounds are quiet, or even deserted.

In China the population is falling so fast that there are now miles of virtually uninhabited high-rise blocks, built for families that never arrived.

In some provinces of India, the birthrate is so low – by historic standards – that schools are reporting zero intake.

Even in Sub-Saharan Africa where the fertility rate overall is still very high – 4.3 babies per mother – that number has slumped from six or seven a couple of decades ago and continues to fall.

As for the UK, once one of the fastest growing populations in Europe, the latest figures show that deaths this year will now exceed births for the first time since the mid-1970s.

Yes, we on this island are part of the trend. We are also going to peak much earlier than previously expected – by mid-century – with a decline thereafter. Yes, folks, it’s unexpected, unimaginable, and now undeniable. The pessimists are calling it the Great Global Baby Bust, and of course it’s causing some politicians to go into spasm.

In the UK, once one of the fastest-growing populations in Europe, the latest figures show that deaths this year will now exceed births for the first time since the mid-1970s

‘Mamma mia!’ says Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, ‘it’s a national emergency. We need more bambini!’ ‘Allons!’ says Emmanuel Macron of France, ‘we need more enfants pour La Patrie!’ Here in the UK, someone called Bridget Phillipson (I think she’s Education Secretary) says the shortage of children is going to pose considerable, though unspecified, economic problems.

Virtually every day I see a learned article in the FT moaning about the demographic disaster and population crisis looming, and since I know that the FT is a wonderful paper but wrong about almost everything, I say ‘Phooey!’

I say, ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ If we handle this well – as we easily can – this process of demographic stabilisation will be the best piece of global news for a very long time.

Let’s just put it in context. Let’s remember what has happened in our lifetimes; the trajectory we have been on.

When I was born the world had 3.2 billion people. Since then, we have added about five billion people and the environmental impact of those extra human beings has been pretty catastrophic.

Whatever your views on climate change, there is no disputing the cost imposed by humanity on the natural world: the continent-sized losses of forestry and wetlands, the poisoning of rivers and seas with human effluent and plastic detritus.

In my lifetime we have annihilated hundreds of species – animals and plants that took billions of years to evolve; and while the human population has almost trebled, the population of wild vertebrates has fallen by more than 70 per cent.

If you want to see the scale of the continuing damage, take a night flight from Cape Town to Cairo and look down at the fires as slash-and-burn agriculture destroys ancient habitats.

Even if the new and lower global population forecasts are confirmed, they don’t indicate a rapid decline in the human race: nothing like it. We are still set to add another two billion people by 2080 so that the world has a staggering 10.2 billion souls.

So, 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. It will be the first blessed relief of some of the crippling burden we place on nature.

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni says the declining birthrate is a national emergency

French president Emmanuel Macron posing for a photo with a baby last month

What we are seeing is not a crisis, but a sign that the human population is organically self-regulating, seeking a better balance with Nature, a better quality of life; a recognition among other things that per capita productivity matters much more than brute national productivity.

After years of demographic strain, we are in sight of a demographic dividend, a blessing.

The last thing we need, therefore, is a load of tosh from the politicians about having more babies. It’s hectoring, it’s insulting and it never works. Let all families (including mine!) decide what they want to do – whether they want large families or small ones.

It’s up to them, and the State should not be finger-wagging either way. Remember the Chinese one-child policy? Well, they now have a three-child policy. Both are hopeless.

Above all we don’t want to be told by scaremongering politicians that we need more young people – locally born or imported – to ‘do the jobs’.

This is rubbish. We are constantly being told by the doom-mongers that AI will be doing millions of jobs in the future and making human beings redundant. Well, if that is the case, let AI strengthen and streamline the labour market, without the need constantly to add to the numbers in the workforce.

The doom-mongers can’t have it both ways. They can’t simultaneously complain that machines are making human workers unnecessary while also demanding that we import or create more human beings to do the work.

Thanks partly to the so-called ‘hard Brexit’, which gave us back full control of our borders, net legal immigration is now falling very substantially.

What we now need is a prolonged period of assimilation, acculturation – and frankly miscegenation – so that the entire population acquires an equal sense of this country’s language, history and values.

We should continue to use Brexit to control migration, and to stamp out illegal migration – by bringing back the Rwanda Scheme, for instance.

As for reproduction, I’ll say it again: politicians should butt the hell out of it. Their job is not to indulge in ridiculous Mussolini-style baby-boosting rhetoric. Viktor Orban tried that in Hungary, for instance. It didn’t work for him, any more than it worked for Mussolini or indeed the Emperor Augustus.

The job of politicians is to make sure that the country is safe to live in and bring up your kids in – so that, for instance, our streets are not at risk from a wave of odious and shameful antisemitic violence, a job at which this government is lamentably failing.

Government should be sorting out skills, infrastructure, the planning system, the bloated welfare state and outrageous tax rates – and then leaving it to people to get on (or not) with the frankly private business of having babies.

When I was a kid the population time bomb was about as terrifying as the nuclear bomb. We were told that the number of human beings on the planet was on a fast-jet climb to the stratosphere, with appalling and Malthusian consequences for resources and the environment.

Well, the evidence is now growing that our fears were overdone. We are not out of the woods yet; indeed, we are still destroying the woods at a terrible rate.

But the demographic trends offer the world – and Britain – a bright ray of hope. This isn’t a baby bust. That is a huge exaggeration.

It is the first sign that the world’s long, exponential and environmentally disastrous baby boom may be finally drawing to a close. Rather than waste time and money trying to fight this trend, politicians should see – and explain – the vast potential upside.

Dictionary Corner

Miscegenation: Sexual relations between people of different races or the act of producing children from parents of different races

Malthusian: Of or relating to the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus and to his theory that population tends to increase at a faster rate than its means of subsistence and that unless it is checked by moral restraint or disaster (such as disease, famine or war) widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result