Nigel Farage’s cynical pronatalism His benefits U-turn is shameless

Nigel Farage stands alone in British politics for his tenacity, his ruthlessness — and his sheer neck. Last week, in a speech outlining Reform’s prospectus for government, he committed the party to lifting the two-child cap on benefits. “Not because we support a ‘benefits culture’,” he said, “but because we believe for lower-paid workers, this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them.”

George Osborne was the one to implement the two-child cap, but he didn’t invent it. Nor did Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of austerity-era welfare reforms. In fact, the two-child benefits cap was originally a Ukip policy. The Tories adopted it, and then a cowed Labour opposition declined to oppose it, but Farage the arch-Thatcherite truly believed in it (or at least, he seemed to at the time). Benefits, he argued in his 2011 autobiography, Flying Free, infantilised the nation: “Every welfare payment, grant, regulation, intervention of government in health, parenting and other individual responsibility increases dependence and makes change harder.”

If Farage now accepts that removing the cap would make having children easier for low-paid workers, that’s a tacit admission that the aim of his previous party’s policy was always to make it harder for low-income families to have children. His reversal is an enormous act of chutzpah, and few besides Farage could get away with it. In the most cynical terms, it’s an attack on Labour where it’s most vulnerable: the two-child cap is unpopular in the Northern “red wall” seats, where Reform is already running Labour close on support.

But it’s also an astute reaction to the changing politics of demography. Today, everyone knows we have a population crisis: collapsing birth rates, an ageing population, and a fractious reliance on immigration to make up the difference. Framing the removal of the two-child cap as a pro-natalist policy sits very comfortably with Reform’s radical Right-wing populism. In theory, there’d be no need to import people from overseas if the UK was capable of growing its own.

Back at the beginning of the 21st century, when the two-child benefit cap was conceived, anxieties about baby-making had a very different shape. The birth rate was in decline already, but politicians rarely referred to this as a problem. Instead, the big concern was that the wrong kinds of babies were being born. The 2000s and 2010s were terrorised by “pramface” teen mums and grotesquely supersized families living at the state’s expense.

All this fit very neatly with the Conservative opposition’s thesis of Broken Britain — a state of social decay caused, according to the Tories, by a decade of Labour government. In 2009, The Sun introduced the world to 13-year-old Alfie Patten, who was supposedly “Britain’s youngest dad” having conceived a daughter with 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman. A later DNA test showed the father was actually a (marginally less shocking) 15-year-old boy and not Patten, but by then his angelic face had already harrowed a nation.

Tory leader David Cameron wrote a column for the paper, bemoaning the fact that this was “not a one-off”, and praising a “landmark report” by Iain Duncan Smith “that helped bring these issues on to the political agenda”. That “landmark report” had plenty to say about family breakdown, the rise in lone parents and the alarming spectre of teen pregnancy — but nothing about supporting families to have more children. If anything, the popular belief was that some families should be very much discouraged from having them at all.

Like the Smiths, who became notorious in 2010. A story about them in the Mail was headlined: “£95,000-a-year benefits family of 12 re-homed in a £1,000-a-week house… ‘after they trashed the last one’.” The article prodded the reader to envious comparison: “The money — five times the starting salary of a teacher — goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rent-free four-bedroom house.” And then, making explicit the logic of the two-child benefits cap: “Critics said it was disgraceful that the family pocketed huge amounts of taxpayers’ money and called for urgent reform to the benefits system.”

Thirteen-year-old fathers and families of 12 were extreme outliers who probably said more about their own problems than society in general, but they tapped into a mass anxiety about excess reproduction. The emblem of this was the character Vicky Pollard from the sketch show Little Britain, which ran from 2003 to 2006 — a chavvy schoolgirl who says she’s had “six kids by seven different blokes” and is constantly hoping for a council house, because she believes someone else should pick up the tab for her promiscuity. The snobbery and the misogyny were undiluted. That was pop culture’s idea of a mother (played by a gay man in drag).

There was discourse around childlessness too, but this was very much focused on the idea that middle-class women were delaying reproduction for the sake of their careers, and then being punished for their hubris. “Women want to ‘have it all’,” declared an editorial in the BMJ, “but biology is unchanged; deferring defies nature and risks heartbreak.” Lord Steel, who had piloted the 1967 Abortion Act through parliament, declared regretfully that the law had contributed to an “irresponsible” mood, with women turning to abortion “if things go wrong”. (Exactly, one might imagine, when abortion would be appropriate.)

Given that both birth rates and maternal age continued on the same trajectories (respectively, down and up) it seems that women were not going to be bullied into maternity by rhetoric like this. More successful were the efforts to frighten those who did get pregnant. In 1999, the phrase “too posh to push” was coined in a Mail article about Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) giving birth by caesarean. The moral intent was obvious: women who didn’t have a “natural” labour — which is to say, vaginal and with minimal pain relief — were spoiled, unnatural creatures.

The increase in C-sections was treated as a national disgrace. In 2009 a senior (male) midwife told The Observer: “More women should be prepared to withstand pain.” Without suffering, you could never become a real mother. There was no evidence that maternal demand drove the rise in caesareans, and no evidence that women had become contraction-shirking cowards; but there was evidence that women absorbed these attitudes then felt shame and failure for the interventions they needed anyway. In 2022, the Ockenden review found that targets to avoid caesareans left 300 babies dead or brain damaged, and contributed to the deaths of 12 women.

Given all this, perhaps you could say it’s unsurprising that during this period women started opting out of motherhood. Judged for being too young, judged for being too old, given to understand that both having children and being unable to have children should be experienced as punishments. Add that to the obvious economic pressures caused by dropping out of the workforce, and how could fertility have gone any way other than down?

But all these pressures only added to the general trend of population decline, which is a global phenomenon with two dominant causes. The first of these is female education: the longer girls stay in school, the fewer children they will go on to have (male education doesn’t have the same effect). The second is urbanisation: for farmers, every extra child is an extra field hand; for a family with factory or office jobs, more children are just more mouths to feed.

Children are expensive — not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time. Only one of those can be subsidised by the government. In theory, modern families should be able to share the load as fathers become more active carers. In practice, some research shows that the more paternity leave fathers take, the fewer children they go on to have. One plausible explanation is that once men experience childrearing as work, they decide they would rather do less of it.

Reversing the two-child benefits cap is the right thing to do for the sake of the children currently in poverty because of it, but doesn’t undo any of those things. No state-level intervention tried in any country ever has. Nordic-style family friendly policies don’t work, but nor does the Right-wing approach of loading families with cash. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán implemented a system of family subsidies that makes the amounts drawn down by the 12-member Smith family look family puny — spending on the programme is equivalent to over 5% of the country’s GDP.

All that Hungary appears to have achieved is to encourage families, at very great expense, to have babies slightly earlier than they would have done anyway. The initial fertility boost has now faded to near-nothing. Farage is enough of a student of Orbán’s Hungary to know that his own, comparatively trivial, giveaway will do little for birth rates (though it will lift some children out of poverty). This policy’s chances of success on its terms are negligible.

More significant is what it says about Farage’s judgement of public feeling. He is an arch-populist, and right now he has judged that birth-boosting is more popular than Noughties-style benefits-bashing. Pay attention, too, to what Farage said after his speech. Asked about abortion, he described himself as pro-choice but called the current 24-week time limit “utterly ludicrous” when hospitals will “move heaven and earth” to help a premature baby survive.

It is a push on the door to see what’s permissible: the logic he uses here could easily be extended to hospitals “moving heaven and earth” to prevent a miscarriage, or implant a foetus during IVF. Abortion has been a settled issue in the UK for decades, but Farage can surely sense some profit to himself in unsettling it. If Reform come to power and manage to reverse the Abortion Act, it might even lead to more babies: in the US, states that have enacted abortion bans since the fall of Roe v Wade have seen an increase in the birth rate.

But those same states have also seen a rise in infant mortality, not only from congenital disorders which would once have been reason for termination, but from all causes. The largest differences, concluded researchers, were in “states with among the worst maternal and child health and well-being outcomes”. Being pro-birth is not the same thing at all as being pro-mother and baby, and only by being pro-mother and baby can any country hope to ameliorate (though probably not to reverse) the fertility slump.

What would being pro-mother and baby look like? It would mean evidence-led, woman-centred care in pregnancy and labour, not moralising targets. It would mean treating childbearing as a normal thing a woman might do in the course of her life — not her singular purpose, and not a strange indulgence on her part to be grudgingly tolerated. Women who have children are performing a social good, and neither the state nor her employers should penalise her for it. It would mean private homes and public spaces that are fit for purpose and accessible for everyone.

Without those things, all any country has to look forward to is becoming an older, poorer place. The population problem will affect every part of politics in the decades to come, and governments have no choice but to contend with it, however difficult that may be. Farage’s benefits U-turn is the first stirring of natalism as a serious issue in the UK. What never seems to change is the disdain and cruelty aimed at the people — the women — who are expected to have the babies.

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