Written by Kat Brown
Suggesting a childless tax and celebratory telegrams rather than proper childcare? Pronatalist schemes don’t help anyone: parent, child, or the adult that child will become.
I’ve done enough editing now to recognise a clickbait headline when I see one, and the story “Should we tax the childless?” that ran in a national broadsheet over the weekend was a classic QTWTAIN (question to which the answer is no). But reader, I bit. As a woman without kids, I wanted to know: what am I doing wrong now?
Dr Paul Morland, a demographer at St Antony’s College, Oxford, wrote a piece in The Sunday Times on how to increase birth rates in the UK that managed the impressive feat of insulting childless people, parents, childfree people, the chronically ill, the LGBTQ+ community, people considering moving to the UK and Hallmark cards. As the cherry on top, he highlighted Boris Johnson as a desirable parenting role model, so actually, we may as well just scribble out the above and write: “he alienated everyone”. “Public figures can lead the way with words and actions,” wrote Morland, cheerfully adding with no apparent irony that “the prime minister, with his seven known offspring, has a track record in this regard”.
While some of his suggestions were laughable (a telegram from the Queen if you have a third child!) this piece got a significant response from Sunday Times readers, and more widely online, because of Morland’s refusal to address the actual problems preventing people from either expanding their families or having one at all – he did at least clarify, “Nobody sensible is suggesting Britain turn back the clock on abortion access or women in the workforce.” Today the government is mooting the idea of raising the number of children who can legally be looked after by nursery workers from four to five, without adjusting either training or investment levels. It is simply not safe. And what the country understands, which Morland and the government apparently do not, is that banging out a load of kids is not “being a parent”.
But some of Morland’s suggestions, however affably phrased, are truly chilling. He proposes a “grow our own” policy, which while ostensibly inclusive – he highlights that his own mother was born in Germany – seems uncomfortably close to beinganti-immigration, despite his saying that ‘there will always be a place for some immigration’ and that his concern is a lack of immigrants of working age. . One of his other ideas, “a ‘negative child benefit tax’ for those who do not have offspring” was not so far away from one implemented by Stalin in the 1940s. The 1941 family law meant that unmarried people, and married women with fewer than three children, were taxed at a higher rate. Do you know who also thought that was a great idea? The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. In 1977, all childless people in Romania were made to pay a monthly tax, part of a suite of pronatalist policies that included banning abortion and contraception.
This is the crux of it: societies that focus on birth without also focusing on, you know, quality of life are of no benefit to anyone. Without implementing social structures to support families, both parents and children suffer. Single people in particular are already under significant financial pressure.
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“This may seem unfair on those who can’t or won’t have children,” wrote Morland, “but it recognises that we all rely on there being a next generation and that everyone should contribute to the cost of creating that generation.” Taxes already help to fund schools, libraries, healthcare and other crucial social provisions, and people without children very often take part in friends’ and relatives’ childcare, quite often because what is provided by the state is simply not enough.
Nowhere in Morland’s plans to build on the green belt to provide more homes (actually quite sensible) or to create a national day honouring parents (spot the man who evidently never sent a Mother’s or Father’s Day card in his life) was there any suggestion of introducing good quality, affordable childcare, flexible working as standard and longer, well-paid paternity leave, all of which the Pregnant Then Screwed campaign has highlighted as key. No helpful things. Only telegrams.
Morland also noted that we should educate people that getting pregnant becomes more difficult with age, “as Dorothy Byrne, the master of the all-female Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, suggested last year, to much outrage,” he huffed. That outrage came because it pushes the blame back onto women, rather than addressing societal inequalities that mean people don’t feel confident in being able to support themselves and a child. Look at stagnant wages and the rocketing cost of rent – actually, don’t do that. Why would you, when it’s so much easier to blame a woman?
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It’s barely a week since Roe v Wade was rolled back in the US, when many of us whispered: that couldn’t happen here, could it? Well, yes it could. This sort of ideology exists. Members of parliament are openly anti-abortion and feel confident to speak about it in the Commons. In fact, access to abortion isn’t even codified in law – we still need signatures from two doctors to certify that health is at risk – and we have Dominic Raab, the justice secretary, telling us it doesn’t need to be included in the forthcoming Bill of Rights? Yes, it flipping well does.
People aren’t stupid: we know what’s needed to raise a family. But with a cost of living crisis and so little in the way of support for parents and children – let alone the adults who they will inconveniently become – you can see why a ridiculous piece of blue-sky thinking is deemed more palatable than an actual plan. The thing to be truly aware of here is that as long as we have people in charge deciding what’s best for us apparently on a whim, without data, without intelligence and without input from the country itself, we are not safe. And we certainly can’t just laugh at a stupid headline.
Kat Brown is the editor of No One Talks About This Stuff: an anthology of lived experiences of infertility, baby loss, and almost-parenthood.
Images: Getty
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