TOM UTLEY: My message to the lady who snubbed me at a dinner party for having four children: go forth and multiply!

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This was the week Nigel Farage put his finger on one of the most serious long-term problems facing our country, with deeply worrying implications for the economy and everything my generation was brought up to hold dear.

The fact is that those of my fellow Britons who were born here are not having nearly enough babies themselves.

I know many will disagree, and tell me that this would be a richer and happier land if only there were fewer folk around, crowding our towns and cities, jamming the roads, gobbling up the Earth’s resources and generally polluting the environment.

Indeed, people were advancing much the same argument back in the 18th century, when Thomas Malthus wrote his influential treatise, An Essay On The Principle Of Population, in which he contended that population growth was an obstacle to progress and would inevitably lead to famine and want.

But hasn’t history proved him emphatically wrong?

When he wrote that alarmist essay in 1798, the world’s population stood at roughly one billion, and famine and want were rife. Today, there are eight times as many of us on the planet – and our species as a whole has never been better fed, clothed and housed or longer-lived.Yet to this day, some still adopt the Malthusian line.

Alarmist 

Take the Sage of Montecito, Prince Harry, who has vowed that he will have no more than two children, out of respect for the environment and Mother Earth. 

‘I’ve always thought this place is borrowed,’ he said, in one of the innumerable media interviews he has given since fleeing to California to escape publicity.

'This was the week Nigel Farage (pictured) put his finger on one of the most serious long-term problems facing our country', writes Tom Utley

Prince Harry (pictured) has vowed that he will have no more than two children out of respect for the environment and Mother Earth

‘And surely, being as intelligent as we all are,’ – all of us, your Grace? – ‘or as evolved as we are all supposed to be, we should be able to leave something better behind for the next generation.’

I’m sure he wouldn’t approve of me. Over the years I’ve been on the receiving end of a fair bit of stick for fathering more than double the average Briton’s number of children. That’s by today’s miserable standards, at least.

As I may have recounted before, I well recall a conversation I had some time ago, when I had the misfortune to find myself sitting next to an exceptionally snooty woman at a dinner party.

She opened with the familiar question so many of us ask when we want to break the ice with someone on our first meeting: ‘Do you have any children?’

When I replied that, yes, my wife and I had four sons, she looked at me with disdain and snapped: ‘Isn’t that rather selfish of you?’

She then turned to the man sitting on her other side and didn’t address another word to me for the duration of the meal.

If only I’d been able to continue our conversation, I would have told her that, actually, adding four British citizens to the national total was about the most public-spirited thing I’d ever done.

Just look at the figures. According to the Office for National Statistics, the country is ageing so rapidly that by 2045, the number of us aged over 85 will reach 3.1 million – almost double the 1.7 million recorded only five years ago.

Labour must stop being so 'miserable' and 'declinist' to get the UK birth rate booming again, Nigel Farage (pictured) urged yesterday 

He suggested both Labour and the previous Tory government are at fault for ensuring the fertility rate in England and Wales dropped to its lowest level on record last year

Yet at the same time, the number of people of working age, available to support the old, is projected to fall from 3.7 per pensioner in 2020 to only 2.9 in 2045.

If this trend continues, as the leading demographer Dr Paul Morland has observed, there will come a time when that number shrinks to just one.

‘We have never had a country before that has got a reliance ratio of 1:1 – one worker to one retiree,’ he said on Radio 4 last month. ‘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.’

Of course, the point has been made forcefully in the past by the likes of the American Vice President, J. D. Vance, and Donald Trump’s current favourite (but for how long?), Elon Musk.

Decline 

‘There’s a terrible morality to those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age,’ says the eccentric multi-billionaire (who is believed to have fathered as many as 13 children himself).

But it’s a viewpoint that gets far too little attention on this side of the Atlantic, where the birth-rate in England and Wales fell to the lowest on record between 2022 and 2023, at only 1.44 children per woman – well below the replacement rate.

If we relied on British-born women and their partners alone, our population would be in sharp decline, making the reliance ratio more alarming still. So, yes, Mr Farage deserves praise for highlighting this crisis-in-the-making at this week’s international conference in London of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which brings together Right-leaning figures from around the world.

Tip-toeing around the elephant in the room – the mass immigration of people from foreign cultures, allowed in by successive governments in order to fill the gaps in our workshy workforce – he said: ‘What underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that’s where we need to start.’

Only higher birthrates will enable us to preserve that culture, he seemed to be saying, but we’re not going to get them until we revive a ‘sense of optimism’. That’s why Labour should stop being so ‘miserable’ and ‘declinist’.

‘Frankly, being led as we are – doesn’t Rachel Reeves just make you want to reach for the cry tissues?’ he said.

Opulent 

But I wonder. Does the Chancellor’s gloominess explain why so many British women limit the size of their families, or put off having babies until it’s too late?

Does Mr Farage seriously believe that if only Ms Reeves smiled a little more naturally, cracked the odd joke and indulged in a bit of Johnsonian boosterism, more young men and women would bin the contraceptives and get busy between the sheets?

If you ask me, there are more obvious reasons why today’s young couples hesitate to breed. These include the acute difficulty of finding an affordable, family-sized home, the crippling cost of childcare and the emergence of a relatively new breed of career woman, who worries that maternity leave will damage her chances of promotion.

Meanwhile, Child Benefit dips sharply after the first-born, and the tax system offers sweet Fanny Adams to reward marriage and the family. That’s even after 14 years under a Tory government that paid constant lip-service to both.

No wonder so many British-born couples hold back. Nor is it much of a surprise, perhaps, that almost a third of babies born in England and Wales today have mothers who were born overseas – many of them in poor countries where even the lowest living standards on offer here are seen as opulent.

How much longer must we rely on them to maintain the balance of the generations, before ministers encourage those who were born in Britain to do their bit?

I’m happy to report that my own boys and their other halves are answering the call, having produced four children between them so far, with a fifth on the way. But what about the rest of their generation?

Come on, you slackers! For the sake of your country, go forth and multiply!