Taxing the childless? A demographer’s response to unjust criticism

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article for one of the Sunday broadsheets suggesting that we are already seeing labour shortages across the economy, and that these were related to our low birth rate (if we had had a fertility rate of two to three, rather than one to two, since the early 1970s, there would be plenty of tanker drivers and care home workers, for example). I suggested that the Government should consider taking some steps towards rectifying this situation, even if the benefits would only flow through in twenty years or so.

Among my suggestions was the idea that we could relax green belt restrictions to make housing more affordable for young families and that more money could go into providing IVF for those who want it. The state should signal pro-natalism, I argued, and should tax those without children more than those with them. A child-friendly policy is already present in the benefits system — it is called child benefit — and notionally in the tax system in the form of child tax credits.

But we could go further, as do many countries, as varied as capitalist Germany and socialist Cuba. Rather than just advocate tax cuts for those with offspring, I proposed that the tax rates on the childless should go up. After all, there are plenty of people ahead of me in the queue for more government money (the NHS, defence, transport to and from the North) and the Government already has a large deficit and high levels of debt.

It was this latter idea which seems to have caught the most attention, no doubt because it was captured in the headline (which was not of my choosing, but to which I have no objection): “It’s Time to Think about Taxing the Childless”. When a friend saw the headline early on the Sunday morning the article was published, he described it as “click bait” — a term of which I was barely aware. But I certainly know what it means now. The article seems to have gone viral, triggering hundreds of online responses and many newspaper and blog articles and radio discussions, mostly unsupportive.

On the whole I can hardly complain. People are perfectly entitled to object to my suggestions — their main purpose was to get a debate going. The idea of more people on the planet is not to everyone’s taste, including environmentalists. While tax breaks raise fewer hackles, tax rises are bound to be controversial.

Some suggested that the basic problem was the child care system (I agree it is an issue, and I did discuss it in the article), others that any funding required should be raised by taxing the rich (that, I think, is another debate). Some thought it unfair that those who wanted children but could not have them would be worse off financially, and I am sympathetic to that argument.

But, as I pointed out, nobody objects to child benefit only accruing to those who actually have children, nor on the Continent do I hear those without children objecting vociferously to child tax breaks, regardless of the reason for their childlessness. And it is not as if I have been “cancelled” – with two slots on Radio 5 Live, one on Radio 2 and a couple of regional stations, the BBC was generous in giving me airtime, as have been other channels in the UK and Ireland. Invitations to give a Ted Talk in Vienna were not withdrawn; filming for a TV programme on the Scottish population went ahead. Since the article appeared I have received an invitation to talk in Mumbai.

One line which I took in the article was that, as a country, we should take responsibility for producing our own children. We are now a multi-racial society in which not much less than a third of births are to women born overseas, like my own mother. To call for more of our requirement for new life to be met by the people of this country in all their ethnic variety, rather than through immigration, seems reasonable and hardly racist. We simply cannot manage without some level of immigration.

But it is arrogant as to think that, while we need labour, we are too important or distracted or otherwise engaged to provide it ourselves and that we can forever tap poorer countries. It is arrogant to assume that people in poorer countries can endlessly conceive, bear, bring up and educate children whom we will then sweep up at our convenience. Besides, the fertility rate in many countries of traditional immigration to the UK (such as India and Poland) and to the US (such as Mexico) have also plummeted. With moderating numbers and growing opportunities at home, willing immigrants will not be available to countries like the UK forever. We should be grateful for those who come, but not take them for granted.

Again, I think there are perfectly reasonable arguments against such a line. But one particularly nasty one seems to have emerged — that it is somehow a fascistic suggestion. For me, the last straw was an article in Vogue, of all places, by a writer called Nell Frizzell, who accused me of introducing an “uncomfortable whiff of the Blackshirt”.

I grew up with stories of my mother cowering when the Nazis came to the door on Kristallnacht and my grandmother bravely seeing them off, of my grandfather being taken away (albeit mercifully briefly) to a concentration camp and his father being shot for making sarcastic comments to a Nazi officer when he was trapped in occupied Poland. To compare a regime responsible for invading a continent, starting a world war and killing millions of innocent men, women and children with an article suggesting we encourage new life at home is not just perverse — it is sickening. This is such an obvious point that it is embarrassing that I should need to bring in family history to support it.

One comfort I have in all the controversy is the memory of conversations about this with the late and lamented Jonathan Sacks, the UK’s former Chief Rabbi (pictured above), whom I was privileged to get to know somewhat in his last years. He read one of my books and encouraged me to write. “If you ever go down the path of pro-natalism,” he warned me, “you won’t know what hits you.” How right he was. In the face of unpleasant accusations, it is reassuring to recall that I was only advocating the first commandment in the Bible: be fruitful and multiply. Agree with it, disagree with it, but please don’t associate it with the Nazi death cult which is its very opposite.

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