Polly Toynbee
BY Polly Toynbee
People are a good thing, the most precious resource in a rich economy, so the progressive-minded feel. Only misanthropists disagree or the dottier Malthusians who send green-ink tweets deploring any state assistance for child-rearing. So Thursday’s population figures from the Office for National Statistics are unalloyed good news, for young and old, for the economy and wellbeing. But only if we seize the opportunity to plan well.
Last year the UK population grew by 0.7 percent to 63.7 million —another 419,900 people alive and kicking. That’s the biggest population growth in the EU. Germany’s numbers are falling fast to their great consternation. Italy is emptying out. France does better with its strong pro-natalist tradition favouring familles nombreuses. The ONS is calling us “a young country”.
Our birth rate is at its highest for 40 years. That’s mainly due to the bulge cycle as my postwar generation who had our children in the 1970s and early 80s now sprout grandchildren. (I have five, a good friend is about to have her 10th, all under five.) This is all good: New life, new workers, new consumers, defying the gloomier forecasts that the depleted ratio of workers to old folk would sink the young under the weight of pensions and caring duties. A quarter of last year’s babies have mothers who were born abroad, up 6 percent on a decade ago — but, says the ONS, they are not the main reason for the increase in the birth rate.
One reason for population growth is people living longer. The great change is in men’s survival, with those over 75 up by 26 percent in 11 years, compared with 6 percent for women. This comes from less smoking and safer conditions at work, combined with the NHS’s improvement in cancer, stroke and heart survival rates. More old men and fewer widows is good news, with only a small increase in the ratio of workers to retirees.
Migration figures are what hits the headlines, causing the government most anxiety. With only two years left to meet Cameron’s entirely irrational target to reduce net migration to “tens of thousands”, still 165,600 more arrived than departed last year. What can he do — encourage mass migration of Brits to Gibraltar or the Spanish costa del retirement? The idea that curbing immigration depends not only on numbers arriving but on the random numbers leaving makes this one of the government’s more monumentally improbable policies. Whether they stay or go after graduating, why wouldn’t we welcome bright and wealthy foreign students here?
Gavin Barwell, the brave Tory MP who co-founded Migration Matters to support productive immigration, says these valuable students are turned away by the tone of our migration debate: That’s no surprise since at the click of a mouse they see their countries called “bongo bongo land”, with precious little welcome from any other political quarter.
Families are not getting bigger but shrinking: there are more one-child families than a decade ago, fewer with two children, fewer with three, and so on. A very small number of large families are concentrated in a few areas — such as south Asians in Tower Hamlets, but foreign-born mothers now have just 0.4 more children than UK-born mothers and the gap keeps narrowing.
All this looks almost unequivocally good news for the future. I can hear environmentalists’ cries of woe — of course more people means an urgent need to cut each person’s carbon footprint. Indeed, all this is only good news if the country makes the right choices.
Instead of shrinking the state, services — the NHS, rail, universities, libraries, swimming pools and museums — all need to expand to meet demand. These babies will bring more tax wealth, but let it not be greater private riches and public squalor. If their wealth is not to be better shared for the common good, then we shall lose the advantage they promise and a bigger population may feel more of a curse than a blessing.
THE GUARDIAN
BY Polly Toynbee
People are a good thing, the most precious resource in a rich economy, so the progressive-minded feel. Only misanthropists disagree or the dottier Malthusians who send green-ink tweets deploring any state assistance for child-rearing. So Thursday’s population figures from the Office for National Statistics are unalloyed good news, for young and old, for the economy and wellbeing. But only if we seize the opportunity to plan well.
Last year the UK population grew by 0.7 percent to 63.7 million —another 419,900 people alive and kicking. That’s the biggest population growth in the EU. Germany’s numbers are falling fast to their great consternation. Italy is emptying out. France does better with its strong pro-natalist tradition favouring familles nombreuses. The ONS is calling us “a young country”.
Our birth rate is at its highest for 40 years. That’s mainly due to the bulge cycle as my postwar generation who had our children in the 1970s and early 80s now sprout grandchildren. (I have five, a good friend is about to have her 10th, all under five.) This is all good: New life, new workers, new consumers, defying the gloomier forecasts that the depleted ratio of workers to old folk would sink the young under the weight of pensions and caring duties. A quarter of last year’s babies have mothers who were born abroad, up 6 percent on a decade ago — but, says the ONS, they are not the main reason for the increase in the birth rate.
One reason for population growth is people living longer. The great change is in men’s survival, with those over 75 up by 26 percent in 11 years, compared with 6 percent for women. This comes from less smoking and safer conditions at work, combined with the NHS’s improvement in cancer, stroke and heart survival rates. More old men and fewer widows is good news, with only a small increase in the ratio of workers to retirees.
Migration figures are what hits the headlines, causing the government most anxiety. With only two years left to meet Cameron’s entirely irrational target to reduce net migration to “tens of thousands”, still 165,600 more arrived than departed last year. What can he do — encourage mass migration of Brits to Gibraltar or the Spanish costa del retirement? The idea that curbing immigration depends not only on numbers arriving but on the random numbers leaving makes this one of the government’s more monumentally improbable policies. Whether they stay or go after graduating, why wouldn’t we welcome bright and wealthy foreign students here?
Gavin Barwell, the brave Tory MP who co-founded Migration Matters to support productive immigration, says these valuable students are turned away by the tone of our migration debate: That’s no surprise since at the click of a mouse they see their countries called “bongo bongo land”, with precious little welcome from any other political quarter.
Families are not getting bigger but shrinking: there are more one-child families than a decade ago, fewer with two children, fewer with three, and so on. A very small number of large families are concentrated in a few areas — such as south Asians in Tower Hamlets, but foreign-born mothers now have just 0.4 more children than UK-born mothers and the gap keeps narrowing.
All this looks almost unequivocally good news for the future. I can hear environmentalists’ cries of woe — of course more people means an urgent need to cut each person’s carbon footprint. Indeed, all this is only good news if the country makes the right choices.
Instead of shrinking the state, services — the NHS, rail, universities, libraries, swimming pools and museums — all need to expand to meet demand. These babies will bring more tax wealth, but let it not be greater private riches and public squalor. If their wealth is not to be better shared for the common good, then we shall lose the advantage they promise and a bigger population may feel more of a curse than a blessing.
THE GUARDIAN
