WHY IS BRITAIN DYING AND HOW CAN IT BE SAVED?

by Colin Liddell

The main problem with the health and survival of Britain is obviously dropping fertility.

This is a problem that also effects many other nations and even the groups that migrate into the UK and assimilate to its dysgenic ways, so it is both a general and a specific problem. But Britain, as a developed country is at the very forefront of this particular problem. 

The main obvious reasons for Britain's poor fertility are: 

(1) Career Prioritization: This effects men as well as women, but it is mainly a female problem, as women find "greater meaning" and an alternative form of "self-fulfilment" in careers rather than motherhood. This is sometimes called "Changing Gender Roles." 

(2) Delaying Parenthood: Many couples believe in delaying parenthood until the other parts of their family life -- career, home, etc. -- are in place. But the inevitable result is less kids and often no kids. 

(3) Smaller Families: Even those who successfully reproduce are reluctant to go beyond 2 or 3, as more than that starts to evoke "negative social connotations" while also increasing the time-window of extremely stressful rearing of young children. This limitation of demographic success thus serves to drag down the national fertility average.

(4) Urbanization: People are too urbanised today, leading to high rents, which prioritise the "career from a cupboard" lifestyle. Urban living also creates additional, non-familial means of "social fulfilment." 

(5) Economic Uncertainty: Although the UK has almost never been richer than it is now, recently it has had a lot of economic uncertainty -- Brexit, Covid, Boriswave, the Ukraine War, and the Green Crisis/Revolution.

(6) Alternative Forms of Sexuality: Promiscuity, virtual sex, masturbation, etc. Contraception is obviously a big part of this.

(7) Health Issues: Things like obesity, damage from drink and drugs, STDs.

These primary factors are then reinforced by various secondary factors.

(1) Aging Population: This by itself reduces average fertility and creates a culture where childrearing is not the norm and is therefore relatively marginalised. The growing number of childless people then reinforces this, creating a culture that prioritizes things like travel, hobbies, and personal freedom over raising children.

(2) Immigration: This is the quick fix for a falling fertility rate, bit it also pushes down wages and opportunities for any young person, thus reducing the economic demand for them to be born, while also undermining the "family wage" for a man attempting to support a wife having kids.

(3) Demoralisation: As a society loses its identity through increasing immigration, several complex, negative factors also kick in - lower social trust, a loss of a sense of racial continuity, a feeling of "being replaced," and a sense of demographic defeatism, etc. 

I will ignore the decline of religion as a factor, as religion is a dead letter and is not the sort of thing that can be revived on command, even by a dictator.

So, if we accept the above factors as fairly comprehensive, how can we stop Britain from dying? The most obvious approach is to promote policies that counteract all of these negative factors.

How would this look? Let's see:

(1) Discouraging Women from Careers: This would involve a reversal of feminism and would have to be explained as such with the reasons given, utilising the right kind (and amounts) of propaganda ("refeminism" instead of "anti-feminism"). No simple task!

(2) Encouraging Younger Childbirth: This could be done by providing tax, borrowing, and financial incentives to people starting their families before the man is, say, 30 and the woman 25. Scaling down tertiary education could be a big part of this.

(3) Encouraging Bigger Families: This could be done by a major cash reward for each subsequent child and by propaganda and marks of social distinction: Once it became socially venerated the cash incentives could be scaled down.

(4) Deurbanisation: This would require a total overhaul of planning permission, allowing much more building in rural areas, combined with taxes and grants to incentivise the move to the country as well as infrastructure upgrades. 

(5) Creating Economic Certainty: This is difficult but could be assisted by developing a real long-term economic strategy that made sense.

(6) Moral Crackdown: Banning porn or at least making it less available, while also reducing contraception and easy abortion could help reduce the amount of "sterile sex," and thus boost the amount of fertile sex. The downside could be more unwanted pregnancies and one-parent families, but this is hardly the social stigma it once was.

(7) Reducing Obesity and Damage from Drink and Drugs: Policies along these lines are already being developed for simple health reasons.

Is a deurbanised Britain possible and what would it look like?

All of these are measures that would help in some way, but the next "thought level" we have to ascend through is the political cost of these various measures.

Some of these would have a very high political cost, i.e. they would upset a lot of people and provoke a lot of opposition from voters and vested interests. Others, by contrast, would have a much lower political cost and may even be supported by other factors. An approximate political cost ranking would be as follows:

(1) Discouraging Women from Careers: Extremely high political cost due to the "success" of the feminist revolution and individualist ideas of freedom and self-fulfilment that have become engrained in our culture.

(2) Deurbanisation: Cities are simply efficient nodes in the economic matrix. Changing this would have a high financial cost, although I suspect that it would be popular, as the aspiration of "escaping to the country" is a popular one in the UK.

(3) Moral Crackdown: Banning porn and contraception, etc., would see the state taking a much bigger hand in issues of individual liberty. Even with strong propaganda this would be heavily resisted by many people.

(4) Creating Economic Certainty: To do this seriously would have high political costs, as it would require a radical reshaping of the UK economy along lines that would cut across various vested interests (a degree of autarky, etc.). 

(5) Encouraging younger childbirth and bigger families, while reducing negative health factors would have less of a political cost and be less of a burden on propaganda, for which reason I will now bundle these three together. 

Now, having considered the various factors of infertility, the obvious solutions, and the political costs, the next "thought level" we have to ascend through is a cost-benefit analysis, that is, we have to bear in mind that some causal factors and their solutions are probably a lot more powerful than others. The ideal, therefore, is to have a high causal impact with the lowest political cost. Ranking the measures in order of effectiveness would probably give us a list like the following:

(1) Discouraging Women from Having Careers 

(2) Deurbanisation

(3) Encouraging Younger Childbirth and Bigger Families (while Reducing Negative Health Factors)

(4) Moral Crackdown

(5) Creating Economic Certainty

Although the details are debatable, generally speaking, the most effective measures have the biggest political cost. This means there is no obvious easy option revealed by our cost-benefit analysis. We are therefore, back in the realm of hard choices.

As we have seen in various cases in different parts of the world, positive inducements to have children (number 3 in the list above), have generally had limited success on their own. So, either we have to focus on more politically expensive measures, like (1) or (2), or else a combination of measures. 

This brief study, I hope, gives us some basis for a rational approach to a problem that is set to affect not only Britain but the rest of the World. We may also wish to consider how it interacts with future global trends, like the ecological crisis, the likelihood of future pandemics, and economies that will be based on AI and automation.

Will AI finally be our saviour by making more and more female careers, except that of motherhood, redundant? Let's hope so.

The goal

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.