BORIS JOHNSON: Falling birth rates AREN’T a disaster, they’re the best bit of global news in a long time

In the hill villages of Tuscany, where I was recently, bells ring for funerals rather than weddings.

Across continental Europe, from Portugal to the Balkans, bus routes are being canceled as elderly customers take to the skies their last subsidized freedom passes.

Playgrounds in kindergartens in Tokyo are quiet, even deserted.

In China, the population is falling so fast that kilometers of almost uninhabited high-rise blocks have been built for families that never come.

In some states in India, the birth rate is so low by historical standards that schools are reporting zero intake.

Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the overall fertility rate is still very high (4.3 babies per mother), the number has fallen from six or seven a few decades ago and continues to fall.

As for Britain, once one of Europe’s fastest-growing populations, the latest figures show this year’s deaths will exceed births for the first time since the mid-1970s.

Yes, we are part of this trend on this island. We will also peak much earlier than previously expected (mid-century) and then decline. Yes friends, this is unexpected, unimaginable and now undeniable. Pessimists call it the Great Global Baby Bust, and of course it’s causing some politicians to spasm.

‘Mama mia!’ Giorgia Meloni from Italy says ‘this is a national emergency’. We need more bambinis!’ ‘Well done!’ Emmanuel Macron from France: ‘We need more children for La Patrie!’ he says. Here in the UK, someone called Bridget Phillipson (I believe she is the Minister for Education) says that child scarcity will create significant economic problems, although they are not stated.

Almost every day I see an erudite article in the FT whining about the impending demographic catastrophe and population crisis, and knowing that the FT is a great newspaper but wrong on just about everything, I go ‘Phooey!’ I say.

‘Crisis, what crisis?’ I say. If we handle this well (and we easily can), this period of demographic stabilization will be the best news globally for a very long time.

Let’s put this in context. Let’s remember what happened in our lives; the way we go.

When I was born, there were 3.2 billion people in the world. Since then, we’ve added nearly five billion people, and the environmental impact of those extra humans has been pretty catastrophic.

Whatever your views on climate change, the toll humanity is imposing on the natural world is indisputable: the continent-wide loss of forests and wetlands, the poisoning of rivers and seas with human waste and plastic waste.

We have wiped out hundreds of species in my lifetime; Animals and plants that took billions of years to evolve; The human population has nearly tripled, while the population of wild vertebrates has declined by more than 70 percent.

If you want to see the extent of the damage going on, take an overnight flight from Cape Town to Cairo and look at the fires where slash-and-burn agriculture is destroying ancient habitats.

Even if the new, lower global population estimates are confirmed, they do not indicate a rapid decline in the human race; There is nothing like it. We’re still poised to add another two billion people by 2080, so the world will have a staggering 10.2 billion souls.

So let’s be honest: If these new and encouraging trends lead to a real decline in global population, that decline will not be a disaster. This will be the first blessed way to get rid of some of the paralyzing burden we impose on nature.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni says falling birth rate is a national emergency

French President Emmanuel Macron took a photo with the baby last month

What we see is not a crisis, but a sign that the human population is organically self-regulating, seeking a better balance with Nature, a better quality of life; among other things, the recognition that per capita productivity is much more important than crude national productivity.

After years of demographic pressure, we are faced with a demographic dividend, a blessing.

So the last thing we need is politicians talking nonsense about having more babies. It’s challenging, it’s humiliating, and it never works. Let all families (mine included!) decide what they want to do; Whether big families or small families.

It’s up to them and the State shouldn’t be wagging their fingers either way. Remember China’s one-child policy? They now have a three child policy. Both are hopeless.

First of all, we don’t want fear-mongering politicians saying we need more young people, whether locally born or imported, to ‘get the job done’.

This is nonsense. Doomsayers constantly tell us that AI will do millions of jobs in the future and make humans redundant. If this is the case, let AI strengthen and streamline the labor market without the need to constantly increase numbers in the workforce.

Doomsayers can’t have it both ways. They can’t complain that machines make human workers redundant while at the same time demanding that we import or create more humans to do the job.

Net legal migration is now falling dramatically, thanks in part to the so-called ‘hard Brexit’ that returns us full control of our borders.

What we need now is a long period of assimilation, acculturation and frankly miscegenation so that the entire population can have an equal understanding of the language, history and values ​​of this country.

We must continue to use Brexit to control immigration and eliminate illegal immigration; for example, we should bring back the Rwanda Plan.

As for reproduction, I’ll say it again: politicians shouldn’t let this go. Their job is not to indulge in ridiculous baby-promoting rhetoric à la Mussolini. Viktor Orban tried this in Hungary, for example. It didn’t work for him any more than it did for Mussolini, or indeed for Emperor Augustus.

Politicians’ job is to make sure the country is a safe place to live and raise your children; so that, for example, our streets are not at risk from a disgusting and shameful wave of antisemitic violence; This is something that the government has unfortunately failed in this regard.

The government should sort out skills, infrastructure, the planning system, the bloated welfare state and exorbitant tax rates, and then leave it to people to do (or not do) a private job like having a baby.

When I was a kid, the population time bomb was as scary as a nuclear bomb. We are told that the number of people on the planet is rapidly climbing into the stratosphere, with dire and Malthusian consequences for resources and the environment.

There is now mounting evidence that our fears are exaggerated. We’re not out of the woods yet; Indeed, we are still destroying forests at an alarming rate.

But demographic trends offer the world, and Britain, a bright beacon of hope. This is not a baby raid. This is a huge exaggeration.

This is the first sign that the world’s long, exponentially increasing and environmentally damaging baby boom is finally coming to an end. Instead of wasting time and money fighting this trend, politicians should see and explain the huge potential.

Dictionary Corner

mixed generation: Sexual relations between people of different races or the act of having children with parents of different races

Malthusian: Of or pertaining to the theory of English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus that population tends to increase faster than its means of subsistence, and unless checked by moral constraints or disasters (such as disease, famine, or war), widespread poverty and degradation inevitably ensue