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- [00:00]
Dr. Paul Morland
A nation is to a large extent a continuity of an ethnic group. Will we hold together as a country if we don't have a sufficiently common story that we are prepared to fight and potentially die for our country?
- [00:15]
Host of New Culture Forum
Is it inherently wrong for a people to fear becoming a minority in their ancestral homeland?
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Dr. Paul Morland
No, I think it would be inherently crazy for them not to. The president of Tunisia has said he doesn't want his country flooded with sub Saharan Africans. People are arriving from countries and cultures in very large numbers which are significantly less tolerant towards women. The Pakistani Muslim rape gangs and associates, I don't think they have any place in this country. Goodwin forecasts which look reasonably sensible to me based on our honest views on migration and so on, would be that the Islamic community would be 20%. I think it could be significantly higher. However.
- [00:55]
Host of New Culture Forum
Hello, welcome to the show. Now, before we begin, just a Note that our second annual literary festival is taking place Friday, June 5th to June 6th. It's a great platform where we basically champion all those speakers and writers who can't get platformed by other literary festivals. We have some great people coming. We have Professor David Betts, we have Alison Pearson from the Telegraph, Lord David Frost, chief negotiator for Brexit, Lord Nigel Bigger, very big, as you know, with me on imperialism and colonialism and reparations. A huge number of people coming. Do attend. It's a great event. You can go to our website, newcultureforum.org.uk or click on the link below and I hope to see see you there. Now, our guest today is Dr. Paul Morland, who's a friend of our channel. Britain obviously faces a demographic time bomb with falling fertility rates and mass immigration. It seems as if our population is only growing because of outsiders coming in. But what is the truth behind all of that? We're going to take a deep dive into Britain's demographic future and see whether demographics really are destiny or whether things can be changed and reversed. Welcome, Paul.
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Dr. Paul Morland
Hello.
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Host of New Culture Forum
So, yes, leading demographers have forecast that by the 2000 and 60s, the white British will become a minority in this country. In fact, others have said, you know, by 2079, foreign born people and their descendants will make up the majority. And that in fact, by 2100, the white British will be only one third of the British population. So my first question is, what is a nation and will Britain still be Britain if only 40% of the country is white British?
- [02:35]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, perhaps we'll come on to talk about the numbers, but I don't think anything is totally baked in. I Think there's much more choice in the system. The people are informed and are able to make democratic decisions about immigration, about emigration and personally about fertility rates. Things could be different and perhaps we'll come to talk about that. I think that's important. So what is a nation? I'm not going to give you my personal philosophical response to that, but I will say this. A nation is to a large extent a continuity of an ethnic group. A friend of mine, the late Anthony Smith, wrote the Ethnic Origins of Nations, essentially arguing with his own supervisor, Ernest Gellner, who more or less said nations are just. They're just convenient inventions of modernity to push people into a single identity whereby they can effectively operate in a mass consumer production, industrial society. And Anthony's response, and Gellner was his own supervis and they had a few clashes. Anthony's response was no, nations are yes, and the modern nation is a different sort of construct to the ancient nation. But nevertheless, nations can't be cobbled together from anything. There has to be some real material there and that material is ethnic. Now, he used to speak, I don't know if it was his original term of the myth of common ancestry, by which he didn't mean it wasn't true, he simply meant people believed it. And that had an effect on how people operated and how people identified today with genetic tests and so on. No longer a myth, it's a fact so we can find out where our ancestors came from. Now, that doesn't make me a hardline ethnic nationalist, but what it does say is that nations have ethnic origins and that a large part of the idea of a nation is a continuity from parents to children, children to grandchildren over the generations, and that people can accrete to that nation. They can join it, I would say, in relatively small numbers over a reasonable period of time, ideally from contiguous cultures, people who fit in more easily. And people can leave it, of course. I mean, the nations of Australia and Canada and many others were formed by British people ceasing to be British by moving. So these are not absolutely cut and dry terms, but I think there is a significant ethnic element to what a nation is and that to imagine it can all be boiled down to half a dozen bullet points on a PowerPoint sheet, that if you broadly subscribe to your part of the nation, even if they bullet points, lots of people don't subscribe to historically, they never have, and lots of people overseas would subscribe to them, then that certainly is no basis of a nation.
- [05:23]
Host of New Culture Forum
Yes, certainly. If you look at values, I Mean someone like Billy Bragg or Sid Vicious and Jacob Rees Mogg would both say that they're English, but certainly have subscribed to different values and beliefs, I would say. So that does beg the question, then, will Britain still be Britain if only 40% of the nation is white British?
- [05:41]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, legally it may be Britain. Whether it can hold together as a country and as a people, I don't know. It won't be a Britain, I would recognize. I think there's another important point which is very little discussed, which is that if you have a majority population who are told their history is an embarrassment, their heritage is something they shouldn't be proud of, and you have various fragmented minorities who are praising who you are putting at the center of the national story, whose culture you laud, and more or less say, we have no culture till you came. I don't think that's a basis for a country that can defend itself. Now, we've been very lucky. We haven't really had to defend ourselves much in the period since we've had all this ethnic change. But what I hear is that, for example, when the army gets more money and wishes to recruit more people, it's very, very difficult. And a country that can't pull together a significant sense of commonality, whether that's through ethnicity or something else, won't be able to defend itself. Now, at the moment, I don't see any immediate threats to this country. People can argue about Russia, but will we hold together as a country if we don't have a sufficiently common story that we are prepared to fight and potentially die for our country?
- [06:58]
Host of New Culture Forum
Yes. Well, if you use the term we, the first person plural pronoun, which Sir Roger Scruton and others say is that collective sense of we. And what will the common denominator be? It's already getting more difficult because we don't have any common television habits, don't have any common music, the things that naturally bind people together. And the point you make is very true, because one of the disadvantages of having been top dog for so long is we never needed to fight for our freedoms and for our identity. And it's telling that the countries within Europe that are most concerned about preserving their identity and culture are those who actually lost their freedoms. Look at the Poles, the Hungarians, those that lived under the totalitarian jackboot. And also look at the Irish. The Irish have been revolting over mass migration because they've had to fight for their freedom. And it seems as if we are like that frog in the pot of water that's increasingly boiling, unaware of what's happening.
- [07:47]
Dr. Paul Morland
I think it's also the case that as an island people, we haven't really rubbed up against other nationalities in the same kind of way. Now, of course, there's a debate about what is a Scot, what is a Welsh man or woman who is Irish. And so. But the intra British Isles identities have been the focus. We haven't been like the French with the Germans on one side and the Spaniards on the other and the Italian. So the island status also makes a difference. I mean, the Irish are of course, an interesting case. We know that Welsh and Scots can move to the uk. Well, move to England and within the uk. Move to England and be considered within. It's a non issue, really. But the interesting thing about the Irish, I was growing up in the 1970s when the IRA bombs were going off in all sorts of places on the mainland, not just in Ulster. And I thought it was very telling at the time. We had a Prime Minister called Callaghan and a Chancellor of the Exchequer called Healy. And nobody, I'm the only person I know who's even mentioned that. So I think the peoples of these islands, I like that term, friends of mine who are of largely Irish or Scottish or Welsh extraction, or partly, I think, making those distinct. Those are cultural distinctions. They have got some genetic basis and now they, perhaps since 1922, they have a political basis. But I think from an ethnic point of view, there's really very little point in drawing lines between these peoples.
- [09:12]
Host of New Culture Forum
No, as Churchill said, this island race. So, you know, now the marginalization of any, let's say indigenous peoples or people who are native to these islands is obviously a cause for alarm for many. I think the British people only have one homeland. It's understandable why they would be alarmed at the idea of losing it. However, of course, if anyone who's progressive has chanced upon this channel, well, you've got a very weird algorithm, first and foremost. But they'd be horrified to hear us speak in those terms about the white people becoming a minority. And yet, of course, these are the same people who of course lament the fact that the Native Americans lost their homeland. Or if they went to Tibet and Tibet happened to be 50% European, they'd be aghast. Is it inherently wrong for a people to fear becoming a minority in their ancestral homeland?
- [10:00]
Dr. Paul Morland
No, I think it would be inherently crazy for them not to. And I often, I give the example of Japan, where if you said in 100 years time the people here will be Africans and Europeans Predominantly Christian and Muslim. They'll have learned Japanese, but you really shouldn't care. They would look at you as if you were crazy. And I picked Japan as an example because it has got fertility issues, it has got aging, significant aging issues, and therefore pressure for immigration. And the Prime Minister of Japan has talked along these lines. Similarly, the President of Tunisia has said he doesn't want his country flooded with sub Saharan Africans. We are Tunisians, whatever that means, in terms of the kind of Islam they follow, in terms of how they look, in terms of who their ancestors were. And historically it's perfectly normal and expected to the point you wouldn't even debate it. So historically normal and geographically today, very widespread across the world. So what we have then to ask the so called progressives is what are the particular peoples at this particular time that you think should not be concerned about their effacement and their disappearance from history? It's not a historical norm norm and it's not a global norm today.
- [11:10]
Host of New Culture Forum
And of course those who opened the gates to mass immigration thought that by creating a multicultural society essentially they would force a new sort of value system on the country. And yet of course, what we see are rising levels of intolerance. I often cite the World Values Survey, which consistently shows Britain is the world's third least racist nation behind only Brazil and Sweden. The EU has said that the black experience in Britain is better than anywhere else. Britain is famously tolerant. But do you see a point coming now where that tolerance has begun to fray?
- [11:45]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, I think it will fray in two ways. The first way is that the British majority, who never have to think or worry or be concerned about their demographic predominance, of course are going to wake up and ask some questions. And they may ask those questions and decide actually they're in with the progressives. They really don't care. They're going to be happy to, to vote Green. That may be the case. It may not be the case. Because the other thing that is reducing tolerance in this country is that people are arriving from countries and cultures in very large numbers which are significantly less tolerant towards women, say, or towards Jews or towards homosexuals than the bulk of the British people. And of course this is a tension at the heart of the progressive project. We see it sort of embodied in the Green Party. Extremely interesting, but extremely alarming. There's a lot of ruin in that kind of political movement. A lot of potential to ruin the rest of the country.
- [12:42]
Host of New Culture Forum
So you're a demographer. So let's get into the stats here. I gave Some stats at the beginning, 2063, I said, that's my Goodwin's statistic. What is the future for this country demographically as we currently are? And what about the Islamic population as well? Because we had a lot of people worrying that Britain is going to suddenly stop being Christian.
- [13:02]
Dr. Paul Morland
So I was involved a little bit with Matt's work and at the same time David Coleman in Oxford was doing some similar work, tried to put them together, but they plowed their own furrow and they came to the same conclusion, interestingly, which was that the early 2000s are the point when the white British will be the minority in this country, will be a minority. We see the biggest minority at about 50% at that point. But as I have pointed out to Matt and others, at that point the game is lost because if you look at the population pyramid of the white British, the population pyramid of the immigrant, at that point already the white British are significantly older and the youth, the young, the school age population and so on is going to be much more than 50% non white British. And that really gives rise to the three things that are driving the fall of white British share of the population. The first thing is obvious and the most important thing is immigration, the balance of immigration. The second thing is the fertility rates. And interestingly, it's theoretically something that could drive the difference and it's not driving it that much. So the best data I've seen is that Hindus and Sikhs have a fertility rate similar to that of the white British. It seems that Afro Caribbeans have a lower fertility rate. And it's very interesting that in the U.S. for example, Latinos and blacks have, have tumbling fertility rates and the white fertility rate has held stable. And that's part of a process, a long historical process whereby those who are first into the demographic transition are kind of through it now. And people like the Mexicans were having five, six children in the 1970s. Today in Mexico they're having two. So Jamaica has a fertility rate similar to Britain. So it's not surprising the great global differences in fertility rates are much lower than they were. And the different the Muslim community, again the data is not great, it's not really collected by ethnic group. But even the Muslim fertility rate is not much above 2 in Britain. And there are all sorts of trends within that community in terms of women's education, women being better educated than men. Very often that where the societies where the women get an education, the men are patriarchal in their attitudes. That doesn't tend to lead to an increase, but rather to A decrease in fertility rates. So I think the migration issue is a really significant one. And that's where I think we have choices, the fertility one. We have individual choices. And I think there's a coming together of different fertility rates among different ethnic groups. And that's a global phenomenon. The third thing is just what the demographic structure looks like today. So even if you stopped all immigration and the average couple had the same number of children, you'd still have what's called demographic momentum. Because among those dying off, they're very, very white, right? I'm a boomer by six weeks. I'm a very young boomer. The boomers are starting to die off and they're overwhelmingly white British. And the young generation of childbearing people is much more ethnically diverse than the population as a whole. So even if they have the same number of children, which they're kind of getting towards doing, and even if there was no immigration, there's some momentum which is going to drive higher the ethnic share of the British population. Very hard to be sure how much that is. But what I would say is that what will really determine this is, number one, the emigration and immigration and emigration policies we have. And those are not baked in at all. Those are things that are highly debated and a matter of different views between the different political parties and at least in theory, open to democratic, democratic system. That's one thing. The other thing is going to be long term fertility rates and whether people who worry about the future of their societies, their communities, their nations, their ethnicities, and this is a global phenomenon, are prepared to have children or not. Now we go through the demographic transition. Countries like Chad and Niger have got four, five, six children per couple. Still, as you progress, as you develop, as you become more urban and wealthy and educated, that goes down, and it usually goes down to two or three. And then you get into this kind of postmodern period where we're all reasonably wealthy, at least we're not living in the Sahel, not knowing where the next mill is coming from. We all can control our fertility. Most people live in towns. Half the population goes to university. Everybody gets years of education. We're through that process. When you come out of it, do you end up like the South Koreans, say, urban, educated and wealthy and having 2/3 of a child per couple? Or do you end up like the Israelis, urban, educated and wealthy and having three children per couple? And that is a choice that individuals have to make. And collectively, any community, society, ethnicity has got to make that choice. And out of that choice will determine whether it lives or dies. Because if it's down to South Korean levels, I mean, they've actually kicked up a tiny bit recently. Well, not from a very, very low base, but at their worst, 100 people of one generation made 40 people of the next generation made 16 people of the next generation. So whatever you do on immigration, obviously that's a big pressure for immigration. Whatever you do on immigration, if you wish your group or community to thrive and survive, whether it's black or white or British or African or Japanese, wherever it is, the sheer demography insists that collectively, en masse, as a group, you have two or three children, you're not going to have that much more if you're through the processes of modernity. But if you choose as a nation, society or ethnicity to have fewer than one, you're going down the plug hole one way or the other.
- [18:49]
Host of New Culture Forum
And we'll get onto pronatalism in a moment and see whether those solutions would fit into a British dynamic. The issue you raise about youth and the inverted pyramid between the white British and the ethnic minorities is very true because, of course, the rate at which the percentage of our youth who are ethnic minorities is, of course, far larger. And you can see it cultural shift already in their attitude towards Britain. They have the lowest levels of pride and patriotism in this country. It's combination of ethnic minorities, but also the indoctrination of our youth, I would say, by mass culture.
- [19:19]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, I do think the education system can instill patriotism, but it's not. Yeah, indeed. So I mean, that, that, that's not. You can have very patriotic minorities if, as I say, they are relatively small, if they come from contiguous cultures, whatever that means, religiously or, or geographically or ethnically and all. But most have a state running an education system that instills those values in people.
- [19:44]
Host of New Culture Forum
Precisely. And that's the point. And we've been very strong on that on our channel. We've written books on education as well. But if we can just dive down into this, because there is a lot of interest in actually how large the Islamic population is and how large it's going to get. And you see all sorts of things permeated around the Internet. So what is the Islamic population today as a percentage? And then how. How big will it get by 2050?
- [20:09]
Dr. Paul Morland
So according to the 2021 census, it was about 6%. We know it must be about 7% now, given the predominance of Muslims, or much higher than 7% among illegal immigration, among unregistered people. I would Be surprised if it weren't 8% today, but that's a guess. Seven or 8%, as I say, much younger, because it is, and therefore it will grow inherently, and it's still got a higher fertility rate. Now, if you stopped immigration tomorrow, I haven't done the calculation as to how large it would get. I doubt it would get much above 10, 11, 12%. And of course, all the time you have some pressures for assimilation. So how big those are depend on the kind of education people get. I also do think it depends on immigration to an extent, because if every generation of men, so say the women go to university, don't want to have large families, want a career, but the men don't want to marry those sorts of women, the women will very often marry into the wider society. Whether the Islam passes from generation to generation is another question. I suspect it probably wouldn't. I mean, obviously there are white converts through, through marriage or other reasons. But if every generation of, of Asian and Somali and other Islamic communities can bring women from the home village, if you like, that not only has an effect on the fertility rate, of course, and on the rate of assimilation, but it also is going to affect the extent to which people want to assimilate culturally. Because if mum is always straight back from the village, as it were, you don't get communities that have generation after generation after generation fitted in just by being here. I mean, the sheer size of some communities can also have an effect. You can go generation to generation without assimilating. A case in point, I think of as the grandmother of a friend of mine who lived in Istanbul, who was a Sephardi Jew and her family had come from Spain at the end of the 15th century and she was still speaking Ladino and French, not Turkish, well into the 20th century, you do. These things can happen. It's not. But in a modern society like Britain's, if you didn't have the constant inflow, you would have a much higher rate of assimilation by the end of this century. The Goodwin forecasts, which look reasonably sensible to me based on Ernest views on migration and so on, would be that the Islamic community would be 20%. I think it could be significantly higher. However, if we see a continuing nosedive of the white British fertility rate, a failure of technology, and I don't think technology is going to take up all the slack. I think we are going to need workers. So that alone creates an enormous pressure for immigration. If, on the other hand, you had a renaissance of pride and patriotism and people were prepared to get married early, with the support of government and form families earlier and have more children, children, then that could be reversed. And although that sounds improbable, going back to the case of where is the highest fertility rate in America, it's in those very white states like the Dakotas. Right. It's not your urban, highly diverse cities are the lowest fertility areas. So we kind of assume that white people will have the lowest fertility rates. But historically that's been the case. But everyone else is catching up. So whilst I think a 20% Muslim population by the end of the century is probably quite conservative, it could be higher, it could be much lower, again, depending on our immigration policies and depending on the preparedness and the consciousness of people of other ethnicities, including the majority one, to say we wish our country to remain as it is, as it has been, we wish the country to be inhabited by our descendants as it was by our ancestors, and we are prepared to take the steps necessary to ensure that's the case. However, on the other hand, you could see a continuing fall in fertility. I'm afraid it's more likely with the young sexes coming apart. I mean, we read more and more about young men and women not finding the ability to have relationships, having more and more divergent political views. You know, if you look at the phenomenon of the young green supporting white British woman, she's very interesting. I mean, if you did a survey of such young women now, my guess is that a very, very large share of them would be childless by their 40s and as a group they're going to have a very, very low fertility rate. Just to have marriage, just have sex with a man is to aspire to have any kind of family life is patriarchal and repellent for many of them. So I think a lot has to be if we want to turn this around, a lot has to be done to change attitudes.
- [25:09]
Host of New Culture Forum
Yes. And actually what unites, I mean, it's interesting you mentioned Americans in Dakota having an increasing fertility rate or birth rate, because three things that unite unite three disparate populations. If you think about young Japanese men who have essentially have on cyber girlfriends who don't actually exist, then you have poll young Poles with a declining birth rate who are very Catholic and then you have, you know, progressive youth in this country who are just childless out of choice. Those are three very different dynamic demographics, but yet all resulting in a very low birth rate.
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Dr. Paul Morland
But let me give you a counterexample. I was walking down my street, I live in a very Jewish area. I was walking down my street Today and the young woman came out of the house who was. I've been there for 30 plus years. She moved in recently and I introduced myself and I said, oh, I've seen you've got a lot of children and that's lovely, it's lovely to see them. Oh, yes. She said, I've got six, but I was one of 11. So I think whilst we don't want all to become part of small minority, highly religious groups, I think there are things we can learn from them. And we're not going to have six or 11, we might have two or three.
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Host of New Culture Forum
And I think Eric Kaufman wrote a book, will the Religious Inherit the Earth? Is it going to be the case that actually only those who do procreate enough, which. So let's look at the solutions then, because it seems to me as if you need various solutions to the issues we're facing. We'll get to the pronatalism in a moment. But what about things like mass deportations, voluntary remigration? Are those. Are those. Is that that toolbox of apparatus? The only way we're going to try to address all of this?
- [26:45]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, it's certainly going to be part of the mix to change our immigration policies. And I would support deporting all illegals, for example. I mean, it's kind of meaningless to say we have a border, you have to be documented, but if you're not documented, you can come in anyway. We'll go through some very long process of seeing whether you are a legitimate asylum seeker and then even if you're not, we're not going to take you, send you back. So we are effectively having open borders today. So, I mean, that would be one thing. But as I always say, there are issues of stocks and flows. Just stopping the flow doesn't change the balance within the country. So I think reversing the Boris wave seems perfectly reasonable to me. And beyond that, personally, I would deport dual national criminals, certainly serious criminals, which would include the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs and associates. I don't think they have any place in this country now. Beyond that, we can debate what you can and can't do and what we should and shouldn't do. I mean, there obviously is a moral angle to this. There's also an economic angle to this. If we are going to make this work, seriously, we are going to have labor shortages. Now, a lot of these people don't work. I mean, huge numbers like Somali's, vast numbers never work, live in council housing, so that actually frees some of this up. But there are going to be labor shortages. So I think we have to think very carefully about the whole welfare system and how we're incentivizing people and particularly getting young people into the workplace. And in the medium term, we have to think about the fertility rate. And perhaps there is a need for a sort of guest worker program to cover particular sectors whereby in a very targeted way, you bring in people to do jobs over a short period of time. They come from countries where they. They're earning in Britain quite a lot and it's worth it for them. And then you say thank you very much and you send them home. That could be done quite strictly. I mean, one of the shocking things is the number of people who come in for every effective worker we bring in. So I think Matt's done some data on this, and I can't remember, but dependents. There are dependents. There are people who come on student visas and then sort of disappear into the system. Large numbers of people don't work. You know, part of the point of bringing immigration is to support our older population. But if they're bringing in all their dependents, you're not even sol that problem. So I think some very, very careful work needs to be done on ensuring that when this actually happens, it doesn't destabilize the economy. Not because I put the economy above all other things, but because we do have a very large debt to pay. We do have bond markets. It's all very well. I think it was Andy Burnham who said we shouldn't be dictated to by the bond markets. The fact is, for the kind of expenditure we have today, we are borrowing and the world doesn't need to lend to us. So I think we need to consider these things very carefully and plan very carefully. But an awful lot of people who would go would be negative liabilities to our country and to the economy rather than the obverse.
- [29:53]
Host of New Culture Forum
And so the other shoe there is pronatalism. So what are the policies that would be best to increase the fertility rate? And really what chance do they have of succeeding in the real world?
- [30:05]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, first of all, I would say they are the only answer for humanity. Because if we all end up at Jamaican or Thai or Chilean or British or Italian or Russian or Chinese levels of fertility, the human race is going down the plug hole one way or the other. Right? If every cohort is a half or two thirds or a third of the last one, eventually all sorts of things will cease to function. In fact, I have a book coming out on this later this year with Philip Pilkington called bust the economics of population decline. So we've got to fix it as a human race, quite apart from any ethnic national peculiarities. I think broadly what we can do is two sets of things, and I would say they're cultural and they're material. So material are the sorts of things I suggested in the Sunday Times some years ago and got lampasted for they chose to use the headline is it time to tax the childless? I was simply saying, like in France, we should have a tax system that give some relief to people who have children to recognize the cost of creating the workers of the future generation and that that has to be paid for somehow and may be paid for by higher taxes for those who don't have them. Childcare, housing, it's a huge issue we need to sort out. But there's also a whole set of cultural things that needs to be addressed. For example, why is sex education in schools overwhelmingly about STDs and not getting pregnant? We largely solved the teenage pregnancy problem problem 20, 30 years ago, and we're still educating youngsters as if that were the main issue, rather than going through their 20s and 30s not having children and thinking all will be well. So explaining the fall in the fertility curve to people reshaping the way we do education. Do we have to do all our education up front and then have families? Could we find some way of helping youngsters to start families while completing their education? Education is going to be lifelong anyway, so it's not really completed in your early 20s, 70s. I was having teeth with some old college friends. I was at university with them in the 80s and they were telling me all these songs I didn't know about which were essentially sending an anti nasal message to the youth of our day. So perhaps there was some kind of agenda behind that, and perhaps we could have some kind of agenda that culturally pushes the family and children as the most fantastic thing you could do. So that's just a few ideas. I think lots of people have other ideas. Nothing will be a silver bullet. Nothing will work forever, nothing will work everywhere. Different things need to be tried out at different times, in different places. But if you set it as a goal, if you have politicians talking about it, if you have it, people have a sense of it as an existential issue for their country and for their people and for the whole of the human race, then we could begin to tilt it. I accept there's no easy answers. People have tried in Hungary and elsewhere, but there is good evidence that there has been some success for Example, Australia had a baby bonus around 2000. There were actually tax changes that were quite advantageous to families under Gordon Brown in his early days. And that seems to have had a modest effect. So I think a whole range of approaches, a trial and error approach needs to be taken because we're pushing against a massive cultural counter pressure which is the kind of the green woke, purple haired, the culture of a lot of young, particularly women, which is very, again, the idea of having children, which should be the most natural and wonderful and beautiful thing and which is needed. Whether you want to build a capitalist society or a socialist society or a liberal, any kind of side, you've got to have people there and not a diminishing number of people. And of course a lot of that is also environmental. This delusion that rather than young people, people solving our environmental problems, they're just another poison in the planet. I mean that kind of anti human approach. There's so much to talk about in terms of culture. So I do, I mean I was a PhD student of Eric actually, and he was a PhD student of Anthony Smith, who I talked about earlier. And I know for Eric thing, Eric, Eric thinks very, very culturally, I'm perhaps a little bit more of an economist than him. But I do think, you know, you'll call the New Culture Forum. And I think we need a new culture and it needs to be a pronatal cult and it needs to be about music, it needs to be about the arts. And that needs to be complemented by a set of economic, fiscal and benefits type approaches to support young families.
- [34:48]
Host of New Culture Forum
Yes, and I mean it is the biggest question of our time, but it requires such an effort to change the mindset. But also you've got to provide them with the housing and the quality of life that they will enjoy. You need to design, I would suppose, a pronatalist feminist theory, a pronatalist secular theory.
- [35:03]
Dr. Paul Morland
And there are other stuff there. I mean, you know, when I wrote my book, I had a short chapter about no one left, why the world needs more children. I had a short chapter on feminism. I wrote a much longer chapter, a lot about, with the help of people like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, who very kindly gave me their ear. There is a legacy of pronatal feminism starting with Mary Wollenstoncraft. Rather than say children get in the way, women need to express themselves in the workplace. And only in the workplace there's a legal, a feminist perinatalism which says, of course women should be out in the world, having an effect on the world, but women Also have this unique ability to give birth. Unique in that way compared to men can't. Women can. And that's something which should be celebrated and cultivated. And I think there's a kind of third wave feminism element which is. So that is also a strand, I think that would be much more successful than trying to go back to the 1950s.
- [35:55]
Host of New Culture Forum
And also it's important to stress to people that it's not the predominantly right wing view to think women should have babies. It was very much the prevailing view on the left. I used to edit Burke's Peerage, co authored a book with him on orders of the orders and decorations of the World. And many of the former Soviet states to this day have orders of motherhood which will come with a pension and a free house if you have eight or more babies in some of these countries.
- [36:19]
Dr. Paul Morland
Yeah, that's something I say very often, which is, you know, I consider myself, myself on the right, but I like to make this a case across the political spectrum. Navarro media invited me to go on and I went on with them. Slightly unusual, but I know Aaron Bastani, for example, gets this and some of his team do as well, some of his colleagues. And I often say if you want the most eloquent and interesting critique of Malthus, it's actually Karl Marx who was definitely pronatalist. Stalin was pronatalist, Mao was pronatalist. I mean all these people killed millions, obviously terrible, but that's a different issue. They nevertheless less believe that the future of their societies required women both to be productive in society and have children, that this was possible. And it's very interesting that the one child policy in China didn't come in until Mao was dead and the Gang of Four were crushed. I'm not saying none of these were good people any more than many of the pronatalists on the right were good people. But their pronatalism was good. And I would like to feel that pronatalism is something that could appeal to all sections of the political spectrum. Because if these policies are going to be successful, they've got to survive party change, they've got to carry on like pensions, for example. If you thought that the next government was going radically to tear up all the pensions regulation, you wouldn't contribute to your pension. So I think it's really important that we appeal across the political divide that everyone understands whatever kind of country you want to see in 20, 30, 50 years time, it's not going to happen unless we have a reasonable, not huge numbers, but enough to keep the population steady.
- [37:54]
Host of New Culture Forum
And do you think we can vote our way out of this? By which I mean I often say on this channel that, you know, right wing voters are dying at a far faster rate than left wing voters. I think 1.4 million will die by 2030 compared to 400,000. Left wing. Ethnic minorities are becoming a larger proportion of the population. If we're going to implement the full raft of policies that need to be done, how long do we have to basically implement those?
- [38:19]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, it's already too late in the sense of the next 20 years. We're going to be be sure to people. But if we start turning it around now, we could at least see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think the secret for politicians is to figure out the policies which will work and make our population recover and our workforce recover in 20 years time, but are popular today. I think if you put things in place today for young families, if you allow people to get on the housing ladder earlier, if you incentivize them to have children, if you make their lives easier, if you give them support with childcare and so on, then whilst that's fixing a long term problem, it can be electorally attractive immediately.
- [38:58]
Host of New Culture Forum
And in terms of, you know, if we want to have a halter immigration, I think we'll have, we'll have a slight disagreement here because I watched a couple of your interviews in which you don't think AI and job automation and robotics will be a great solution to all of this. But certainly if you look In Japan already 30% of the Japanese labor is done by automation. For example, I think the foothills obviously of AI, you know, the industrial revolution was the first great leap forward for 12,000 years. I think we're at the ne that next point in human history where AI is going to revolutionize things. And I think places like Poland and Japan, which are still culturally homogeneous, yes, they're going to go through a tough time over the next say 20 years. But if you think, if you think about how fast the Internet has come within the space of 20 or 30 years, I would think in 20 or 30 years is AI, job automation, robotics would mean actually that we wouldn't need to have immigration and whereas we may have massive layoffs in this country and in the west, Poland and Japan may emerge from this as a smaller population, but nevertheless one that retains its unique culture.
- [40:01]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, we can argue about the AI. I think it's speculative. I wouldn't want to rely on it for our future. I think it will change the workplace. But I'm dubious for a whole range of reasons that it will replace the need for labor. But. But what we don't want, surely, is a diminishing old age home surrounded by lots of great technology. Even if the technology works, I'd quite like there to be people and children. Certainly. Speaking as a father and grandfather, I didn't have my children just to man the British labor force. I had them for all sorts of reasons. I don't regret it, and I don't think people should only consider the question in terms of economics. There is also a question about human values and the joy of being a parent and the joy of bringing new life into the world.
- [40:48]
Host of New Culture Forum
Yes, but the point here is also cultural, if you want to retain your culture. And what do you think? Do you think in 50 years, by 2100, you know, with this talk now about artificial wombs, for example, if we are in a position where actually the global population does have a declining birth rate, even perhaps in Africa and parts of Asia, will we get to the point where actually people. Do you think a society will get to a point where they have artificial means of creating new life?
- [41:13]
Dr. Paul Morland
Well, we have those means. I really hope we don't have to resort to them. We have been created by God or by nature, however you wish to think of it as beings able to reproduce at a perfectly reasonable age for a perfectly reasonable period of time. Perfectly possible for most couples to have two or three children. I think it'd be a great shame if we rely on technology for that entirely.
- [41:39]
Host of New Culture Forum
I agree with you there, definitely. Well, thanks, Paul, very much for coming on. That's all for this week and we'll see you next time. Thanks.
- [41:45]
Dr. Paul Morland
Thank you.
- [41:46]
Ralph Heidel Manku
Hello, I'm Ralph Heidel Manku, and on behalf of the New Culture Forum, I'm delighted to launch a series of free walking tours and historic visits around London and around Britain. If you like your commentary unwoke, positive and upbeat, this is for you. And if you like your history to unabashedly celebrate the very greatest achievements of Britain, its history and its hero is, then I hope you will consider coming along on one of our tours. I'll show you secret corners, hidden treasures and other curiosities that millions of people walk past without noticing, such as these air raid shelter ghost signs on a street near our offices. At the New Culture Forum, we'll celebrate some of Britain's greatest achievements. Behind me is the Buxton Memorial Fountain, erected to commemorate those brave British abolitionists who campaigned successfully for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. And we'll dispel the ridiculous new myths that the left are creating about some of our finest heroes, people like Lawrence of Arabia who lived in the house just behind me. But there's a catch. To join one of our tours, you need to be a signed up member of the New Culture Forum. From as little little as £4amonth, you can receive a range of exclusive perks and benefits. At the lower tiers, this includes exclusive content, discounted tickets to our lectures, our conferences, our literary festival, and much more besides. At the upper tier levels, this includes many things such as invitations to private events, a chance to meet the NCF team, and of course, to attend many events in our studio videos. So please do consider joining either via the link below or our website newcultureforum.org.uk.