Last year, the Japanese manufacturer Oji Nepia, which makes everything for the bathroom from toilet rolls to wet wipes, announced it was to cease producing babies’ nappies. Instead, it would concentrate on adult diapers and incontinence pads for the elderly. The decision was prompted by Japan’s falling birth rate but, since so many of us never fully grow up, the news provoked sniggers worldwide. Nappies are funny, after all, unless it’s your turn to change a dirty one. But there’s nothing amusing in the global trends underlying this announcement. Unless a radical demographic change occurs, the world is heading for a crisis, with Britain at the forefront. Bluntly, the UK and Western Europe are running out of babies, and the pattern is echoed across the west, from Australia to South America. By the middle of the century, half the population of Italy will be over 50. For Britain, these trends are predicted to lead to multiple catastrophes for our way of life, first through mass immigration, then the collapse of our health service, and total wipe-out for our pension system.
Dr Paul Morland gave a stark warning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programe ‘We’re either going to have to bring a lot of people into the country or we’re going to have to produce these people ourselves,’ he said. ‘We’ve never had a country before that has got a reliance ratio of 1:1 – one worker to one retiree. That’s where we’re heading. It’s not going to work. Government finances will break down. The private sector will break down. The health service will break down.’ incredibly naively he says there is some hope. Dr Morland, regarded as the country’s leading demographer and the author of No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, believes policies such as increased child benefit and subsidised nursery places can be effective. We have to look East to see the future heading our way. And we have to take it seriously. More than 10 per cent of Japan’s population is now aged over 80, for the first time in the nation’s history, and almost 30 per cent is aged 65 and older. Subsidies, better childcare and welfare boosts have failed to work, and the country’s leaders are at a loss. As the country’s then prime minister Fumio Kishida put it in 2023: ‘It’s now or never. Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.’ Britain is approaching that same cliff edge. According to figures from the Office for National Statistics [ONS] last October, only 591,072 babies were born in the UK in 2023. That’s the lowest figure for almost half a century and a drop of more than 14,000 on the previous year. the slump is because the average age for new mums and dads is rising – 30.9 for women, 33.8 for men. Young people are waiting longer to have kids, with many blaming the cost of living.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, women need to have 2.1 children on average to maintain the population. If the average is more than 2.1, the population increases – fewer and it falls. That’s known as the replacement rate, or ‘R rate’. ‘That’s happening nowhere in Europe,’ says Dr Morland. The country with the lowest reproduction rate is Malta, where live births per woman average 1.08. In the UK, that figure is 1.44, higher than in Albania (1.21), Poland (1.29) and Spain (1.16) but lower than Ireland (1.54), Romania (1.71) and France (1.79). In London, the number of babies born yearly has dropped by a fifth in just ten years, a fall so drastic that the NHS is expected to close the maternity unit at either the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead or the Whittington in Archway. Across the country, the number of children in education is predicted to dwindle by an astonishing half a million pupils. Less than half of women aged 30 in England and Wales, just 44 per cent, have children. That compares to 58 per cent for their mothers’ generation at the same age. And when their grandmothers were that age, the figure was a bouncing 81 per cent. Clearly, this is not solely due to the cost of living, though no one can deny that having children is expensive – perhaps unaffordable for couples who can barely afford their rent, never mind save for a deposit on their own home. Other longer-term factors include the war on, and consequent breakdown of the nuclear family since the 1950s, the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, which has increasingly encouraged many people from traditional gender roles to abandon them. Some women are choosing not to have babies because they are brainwashed / goaded into being afraid of bringing children into an uncertain world less safe than it was during their own childhoods. Other more mentally ill types and whacky conspiracy theorists fear that it is somehow irresponsible or ecologically unsound to have a family. For them, the 2.1 ‘R rate’ is less important than Net Zero. At the same time, we’re all living longer. Once again, this is evident in Japan, which has the highest life expectancy among the G7 countries. OECD data from 2016 showed women there lived on average to be 87, and men to 81. Many were living much longer: by March 2023, there were 90,526 centenarians in Japan. The UK is less long-lived, mostly owing to genetic and dietary reasons. But we’re surviving much longer than the Shakespearean threescore-and-ten, or 70 years: in 2022, life expectancy at birth was just under 79 years for males and more than 82 years for females. But what does it all mean? Where will Britain be in ten years’ time if the population continues ageing and the birth rate plummeting?
Its a man made disaster on a scale no one has ever seen before, almost everyone can agree on that. However its much, much worse than that. None of these figures take into account race. So the actual indigenous figures for each western group are in what’s known as a death spiral, we are in a un recoverable decline, we have crossed the threshold into a extinction level scenario and almost no one including racial nationalist are the least bit interested. So what then ? well Neo-aristocrats might not be able to save western society as we know it but we can save ourselves. Don’t wait.
Found this article alarming / interesting ? Want help ? then share it or better still join us, become a Neo-aristocrat and promote the wider ethos. #TomorrowBelongsToThoseThatShowUp