Europe's plummeting birth rate timebomb: To keep a stable population countries need a birth rate of 2.1 babies per woman. The continent faces 'staggering social change', writes SUE REID

The rights and wrongs of mass immigration, net zero and the traditional family are hot issues in both Britain and Europe.

They are high on the political agenda in the run-up to our General Election and provoked deep splits of opinion at polls in the EU’s 27 nations earlier this month.

But there is another topic on the horizon that is arguably more important than these for all our futures.

It is babymaking — or the lack of it. The rate at which children are born in the West is plummeting, which will provoke ‘staggering social change’ warn demographic experts — and change that will not be for the better.

The problem is concentrating the minds of political leaders, Christian churches and social scientists as well as fertility doctors. But none of them has yet found a way of solving what is called the ‘baby gap’.

Earlier this year it was the Pope who entered the fray: ‘Without children,’ he warned, ‘a country loses its desire for the future’.

He was speaking after it became clear that births in Italy — where thousands of primary schools have closed because there are no children to go to them —— dipped to a record low of 379,000 last year after 15 years of relentless decline.

The Catholic country’s Right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has now mounted a family-first campaign, with papal backing.

Ms Meloni says her plan to boost the number of births to half a million annually within a decade is essential to prevent Italian society from collapsing as a result of the elderly outnumbering younger workers in the population.

Italy is not a freakish outlier. Spain, another Catholic country, is facing a steeper decline in new arrivals.

The facts are devastating and simple. To maintain a stable national population, every woman must have 2.1 babies. This is called the fertility replacement rate. Any lower than that and the number of young people — whose taxes fund the welfare and health services vital for the care of the elderly — will drop like a stone.

Yet there is not one country in the EU that has a fertility rate above this threshold. And, as yet, no nation in history facing a collapsing population has ever turned the situation around and pushed it back above the fertility replacement rate.

In a ground-breaking report in March, The Lancet medical journal predicted the trend would result in ‘staggering social change’. It said the ‘implications of falling fertility trends are immense’, and will lead to the complete reshaping of the world we live in today.

‘There will only be six countries, Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan where the replacement rate will be above 2.1 by the end of the century,’ said the report.

In the UK, 2022 figures showed that women were having an average of 1.49 babies, much lower than the 2.6 rate achieved in the 1960s — for the first time ever, half of women now reach their 30th birthday without having a child. The 1.3 rate projected for 2100 is lower still.

Across Western Europe, it will drop slightly less, from 1.53 in 2021 to 1.37, by this century’s close.

The EU’s statistics and data service Eurostat indicates that the population of the bloc will fall by 6 per cent by 2100. It might not sound excessive but the implications are deeply alarming.

For by 2100, those aged 65 and over are predicted to account for 32 per cent of the population compared to 22 per cent today.

And we in the West face a dilemma over who will foot the escalating bill for their pensions and welfare.

The Lancet — which is Left-leaning — declared that an obvious solution is to allow more people to come to the EU and Britain from countries with younger populations. Natalia V Bhattacharjee, one of the authors, pointed out: ‘Reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth.’

This, of course, would be anathema to Right-wing parties within the EU which gained popularity at the recent elections by fighting against open borders and, like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, champion the need to boost the indigenous birth rate.

Intriguingly, the bloc’s populist parties have broad appeal, not just among the conservative elderly but also the young.

Both groups, say pollsters, are tired of immigration and, above all, the resulting shortage of affordable housing. According to the website Politico, ‘the taboo of voting for populist, anti-migration parties, is fading’.

Which means the problem of the baby shortage will become an ever more fractious issue on the political agenda.

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter) and the father of 11 children by three mothers, is a fanatic about ‘population collapse’ which he believes is a bigger risk to the world than global warming.

This was apparent in a recent exchange on X between Musk and the Netherlands’ hard-Right leader, Geert Wilders, in which the Dutch politician warned of a collapse of Western values in his country thanks to open borders, a stance shared by other EU populists.

‘Agreed,’ responded Musk. ‘But if the birth rate stays as low as it is [1.6] your Dutch nation will die out by its own hand.’

After months of tortuous political negotiations, Wilders has finally pulled together a coalition government which vows to take a much stronger stance on immigration. It did well in the EU- wide elections.

A major confrontation with Brussels is now likely because the coalition has applied to the EU to opt out of its asylum policies and is demanding the right to ‘forcibly’ deport those who are refused asylum ‘as much as possible’.

Meanwhile, Viktor Orban, leader of Hungary’s conservative and Christian governing party Fidesz who has also clashed with the EU on immigration levels, is so worried about the falling birth rates that he has introduced a pioneering ‘traditional family first’ policy to encourage babymaking.

When his party came to power in 2010, the birth rate was at an all-time low of 1.25. Through cash handouts, tax incentives, interest-free loans, subsidised nursery places and the nationalisation of IVF clinics, young couples have been successfully encouraged to have more children.

Maternity leave has been raised to 24 weeks, mothers are encouraged to stay at home to have as many babies as possible, while fathers work as the main breadwinner (paternity leave is curtailed at just ten days). By 2021, the birth rate was up to 1.59, the number of marriages had doubled and abortions had fallen too.

But there was a caveat. Incentives for couples to have babies were tied to strict rules concerning previous employment and regular tax returns, effectively ruling out huge numbers of immigrants, the Roma, and others who were working in the black economy.

The Hungarian model has been hailed by both Italy’s Ms Meloni and the Pope as a ‘perfect example’ of how to tackle the crisis.

‘A great battle is needed to defend families, God and all the things that built our civilisation,’ said Meloni at a Demographic Summit in Hungary earlier this year. ‘Fewer children are being born in richer nations and we need to mobilise resources to support the family.’

Her words chimed with the view of the Italian public — 74 per cent say the descending birth rate is an urgent problem.

La Stampa, an Italian newspaper, has said that ‘for every child under six years old, there are now five elderly people’, pointing out that this is unsustainable given that ‘three workers [are needed to] support every pensioner’. The paper added a chilling prediction: that by 2050, Italy’s worker-pensioner ratio will fall to 1:1. At which point Italy’s welfare state will collapse completely.

Yet some refuse to accept we face an impending crisis. The issue of the ‘baby gap’ has been weaponised by those who bizarrely claim it is a conspiracy theory cooked up predominantly by the so-called Far Right.

Even the moderate Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been targeted for engaging in debate about the ‘baby gap’. She was forced to pull out of a cross-party Westminster panel discussion on the UK’s dwindling births in December last year following an avalanche of online threats condemning her planned appearance.

Students at Cambridge University have also boycotted a showing of a compelling documentary called Birthgap — Childless World which was produced by the British data scientist Stephen J. Shaw who has warned that ‘no nation is known to have emerged from the grip of long-term low birth rates’. The YouTube film highlights the perils of population collapse and to an extent blames childlessness on women delaying childbirth and or failing to find a partner during their most fertile years.

The students condemned the film as ‘anti-feminist and misogynistic’, with one saying the documentary’s ideas were ‘categorically untrue’. Another critic pronounced that women should not be coerced by the state into how many babies they bear, even though Mr Shaw’s film gives exactly that same warning.

There is, however, no doubt that the UK’s demographic forecast is a cause for concern. Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator magazine who chaired the Westminster debate which Rosie Duffield pulled out of, said recently: ‘My own view is we are living a lie by assuming that there will be a massive workforce around to generate tax to support the pensions and related NHS expenditure in the future.’

The evidence is overwhelming. In May, it emerged that the number of babies being born in London has fallen by a fifth in a decade as experts warn that people are delaying or deciding against having children.

So dramatic is the effect that the NHS is consulting on plans to close the maternity units at one of two north London hospitals — the Royal Free in Hampstead or the Whittington in Archway. Pupil numbers in our state schools are expected to drop by 500,000 in the next three years.

Already some primaries in London have been forced to close or merge as there are not enough parents needing places.

Would state intervention help? Perhaps. But Sweden’s famously generous paternity leave policy hasn’t boosted births.

A decade ago, Sweden registered a fertility rate of 1.9, but since then it has drifted downwards with no sign of stopping. Meanwhile, a ‘Do it for Denmark’ campaign to improve their birth rate was a flop.

A survey by London University earlier this year revealed that 31 per cent of Gen Z Britons (born between 1997 and 2010) are not interested in having babies. Among the most commonly cited reasons were ‘wanting time for themselves’ and ‘finding children a nuisance’.

Only time, perhaps, will make them question this stance and realise that, far from being a nuisance, children are the lifeblood of their own futures.