The problem isn't the birth rate, it's inequality

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It has been calculated that the population of Earth is currently consuming natural resources at a rate which requires 1.7 planets to sustain it; that if everyone lived like the average European we’d need three planets; and that a US lifestyle for all would require the resources of five planets. Now there are many problems with such calculations, because they inevitably depend on a lot of assumptions and estimates. They also hide a multitude of differences within countries as well – not all US citizens live a five-planet lifestyle, and some are probably living a ten planet or more lifestyle.

For the purposes of debate, it’s reasonable to ignore the arithmetical detail of the calculations and concentrate on the key message which is that, given that the natural resources of the Earth are finite, there is an unavoidable relationship between two factors: the size of the population and the lifestyle which that population can sustainably live. To the extent that that circle is currently being squared, the ‘solution’ is in two parts: inequality of access to resources, both between and within countries: some must live in poverty so that others can enjoy a wealthy life; and a willingness to use resources at an excessive rate, thereby denying them to future generations. A situation where many live in poverty isn’t some divinely ordained outcome, it’s a necessary condition for the few to be wealthy. It is inequality of access to resources which largely drives those euphemistically referred to as ‘economic migrants’ to seek to escape poverty by going to where the wealth is or, to use a corollary, the desire of some to hold on to their unfair share of the Earth’s resources is a major driver of population movements.

At a global level, it appears likely that the birth rate will stabilise by the end of the century. It is likely that longer lifespans will mean that the total population continues to grow, albeit slowly, even if the birth rate falls below the replacement level, but that growth will not be universal. Europe’s population, for instance, is projected to start falling by then. Looked at globally, a falling population is probably a good thing overall; whilst a stable, or even falling, population does not in itself address the inequality of access to resources, it does create a better opportunity to adopt a fairer approach. The question, in political terms, is how to respond to a situation where the population of a country is stable or falling but in which the age profile is changing, with the average age increasing. It’s an issue which needs a great deal more discussion than it's currently receiving.

The one thing that we definitely do not need is the sort of response put forward yesterday by Robert Jenrick at the Tory conference, which is to encourage more people to have more children so that there are more younger people to support the continuation of the giant Ponzi scheme which passes for the UK systems for care and pensions. Predicating the whole economic structure on an assumption that if more people live to be older we need to grow the population to support them, and do so indefinitely, may be viable for one country in the short term (although even that viability depends on a willingness to invest in homes, schools, hospitals to support an increasing population, something which his government is noticeably unwilling to do, preferring to blame immigrants for any deficiencies), but is, in global terms and in the long term, utterly irresponsible. The alternative necessarily involves looking at total available resources and how they are shared, both within and between countries. It’s easy to understand why those (like Jenrick and his colleagues) keen to defend and maintain huge disparities in wealth will recoil from such a suggestion. It challenges their whole outlook, to say nothing of their privilege and wealth. But it’s the only way forward in a resource-constrained world, even if it’s going to take some time before enough of us realise that fact.

Maintaining the human stock?

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Population size is one of the hardest questions for politicians to tackle. But using the simple and obvious truth that it is impossible to make unlimited use of limited resources, the relationship between an ever-increasing human population and the impact of humanity of the planet is inescapable. Malthus may have been wrong with his specific prediction two centuries ago that rising population would necessarily lead to famine, but he had a point with the underlying principle.

Just a few days ago, Jake (or ‘Sirjake’ as we should probably now call him) was telling us that the UK needed more babies, and he had done his bit by producing six. It was now time, he said, for younger people to take over and produce more children. We should perhaps be grateful for small mercies – it’s hard to think of much that the world needs less than a few more Rees-Moggs. He probably thinks Boris Johnson has also done his bit by producing eight children (other numbers are, apparently, available). Given his support for the two-child cap on Child Benefit, he presumably wants to limit large families to the wealthiest in society, rather than encourage just anyone to have more children, echoing the concerns of the late Keith Joseph about the breeding proclivities of social classes four and five, which, as a later acolyte put it in even blunter terms, threatens the quality of the ‘human stock’. Quite apart from the racist and exceptionalist undertones, I can’t help thinking that they haven’t really thought this through. Coupled with their aversion to immigration, a population growth imbalance between the poor and the rich means that either the children of the rich have to do the jobs which the poorest are usually expected to do (Sixtus Rees-Mogg and Wilf Johnson flipping burgers or sweeping the roads together for the rest of their lives makes an unlikely picture) or see such jobs go undone. But then, people living very comfortable lives and measuring everything in terms only of its cash value have never been able to understand the real worth of the myriad of tasks performed by ‘the little people’ which are necessary to sustain their comfort.

What we do know is that the wealthiest countries in the world sustain their life style by using more than their fair share of the planet’s resources – and we find the same imbalance within the populations of those countries as well. Whilst there are arguments to be had about the methodology and assumptions used to arrive at the detail of such conclusions, there is no real argument about the basic message: if everyone lived the lifestyle of the richest, the earth’s resources would be depleted instead of sustained for the use of future generations. For those of us who can see that obvious truth, it is clear that continued population growth – particularly amongst the ‘most entitled’ demographic groups – depends on maintaining and increasing inequality and inequity (and that is, of course, core to the political philosophy of the Sirjakes of this world). From their perspective, human aspiration in the many is to be resisted at all costs; people should know their place, and stay there. Comfort and wealth for the few, drudgery and poverty for the many, is the golden thread of their political philosophy – it underpins their attitude to refugees, wages, cost of living pressures, public services and much more. They get away with it by persuading the slightly less poor that the even poorer are the problem, and the extent of their success in doing that was underlined by this article in the Guardian on Tuesday. It should be shocking to realise how many believe that the poorer should not be allowed any luxuries, hobbies, or leisure, as though poverty is entirely their own fault and sufficient to deny them any sort of life outside of their existence as workers. But it actually merely underlines how easy it is for those who control the levers to manipulate opinion and turn us against each other.

Aberration or just extreme example?

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A few days ago, the press carried a picture of a small child in tears wearing a lifejacket wading ashore from a small boat in the Channel. It was graphic, but different people will have seen different things as they interpreted the picture to fit their own views. I saw a small and vulnerable human who was absolutely terrified and in desperate need of care and protection. I don’t know what horrors that child had suffered or witnessed, and struggle to imagine the desperation that parents must have felt to have undertaken such a perilous journey with children. I know, though, that others will have seen something quite different. They will have seen a threat to ‘our’ way of life; potential future competition for housing, jobs or health services; someone who is not ‘one of us’ and should be immediately returned to the country of origin; or even maybe a potential future terrorist.

The gulf between those two views is enormous, and it cannot be bridged by rational argument or mere fact, because it is based, ultimately, on deep-seated prejudices and attitudes. To be fair, there is a natural human tendency to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘not us’, and none of us are immune from it; trying to pretend that it is not so is futile. The best we can hope for is to reduce it to a question of which team to support on the field of play, rather than a basis for treating large groups of our fellow humans. Over time, the group considered to be ‘us’ has grown in size: from tribe to town to nation. There is a sense in which the EU can be seen as part of that process – an attempt to create a common feeling of being ‘European’ whilst continuing to host and nurture a diversity of cultures and languages. It’s an aspect of the EU from which the UK has always been semi-detached, and which it has noticeably tried to reverse over the past five years, retreating to a smaller and more insular definition of ‘us’. But even the EU’s best efforts still leave plenty of scope for the rest of the world to be considered as ‘not us’.

However, all the world’s really big challenges can only be solved when we start to recognise that ‘us’ is the whole of humanity; that it is only by working together that we can address climate change, war, hunger and poverty. It’s no coincidence that that list matches pretty well the list of causes which lead to people becoming migrants and refugees. If we choose instead to keep part of the world in poverty so that the other part can enjoy an unfair share of wealth or, to put it another way, to look after ‘us’ and leave ‘not us’ to their own devices, those problems will never be resolved. And for the remainder of the shortened lifespan of humanity which will result from such a decision, all of those problems will still be with us.

Taking a wider view of ‘us’ doesn’t mean an end to diversity or difference, but it is the key to our collective future. Whether it’s achievable or not is an open question. If the UK can’t even manage to accommodate a few desperate refugees, I doubt that it can adapt sufficiently in the time available. When I see the sort of hatred of ‘not us’ which is evidenced by the recent incident in which people attempted to prevent the launch of a lifeboat, and the PM doubling down on his unlawful and immoral plan to push boats back into French waters, I can only take a pessimistic view. Our best hope is that the UK under its current regime is simply an aberration. Whether the UK is indeed just an aberration, rather than a particularly egregious example, only time will tell.

Is the question valid in the first place?

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An article on Nation.Cymru this morning suggests that Wales should impose a tax on water transferred from reservoirs in Wales to consumers over the border.  It’s an idea which, in one form or another, has been around for many decades, and it’s difficult to argue with the proposition that, in a market-driven economic system, a country which has a wealth of a particular resource (in this case, water) should be able to capitalise on that resource for the benefit of its citizens.  Whether ‘market forces’ are the right mechanism for determining how essentials should be shared is a wider question, but as long as it remains the case, then Wales should be able to benefit.

There are complications, of course: there are questions about the ownership of the assets and infrastructure involved; and imposing a unilateral tax on one commodity going in one direction leaves open the possibility of unilateral taxes being imposed by the other party (in this case, England) on one or more commodities going in the opposite direction.  These are details which don’t detract from the principle but which do need to be thought through and resolved before acting.

My bigger concern about the proposition is that there is a danger of falling into the conventional economic narrative about the wealth of a country being determined by its natural resources.  One of the criticisms often thrown at independentistas is that Wales cannot afford to be independent because we have no natural resources.  ‘Water’ is a partial and useful answer to that, as is the fact that Wales has become a net exporter of electricity.  The ability to generate more electricity than we use (and to do so from renewable sources if we put our minds to it) in a world increasingly dependent on the availability of energy in that form is no small matter.  I wonder, though, whether in trying to find a ready response to the question we are not legitimising a question which is based on an essentially invalid assumption that the wealth of a country depends on what natural resources it possesses.  That is not to say that possession of a resource which is in great demand (oil, for instance) doesn’t help the economic viability of a country, but it’s a big leap from saying that to creating a dependency.  (I’ve often wondered whether the way in which Scotland’s oil has been used to answer the same question might have been counter-productive overall).

Where is the evidence that possession of ‘natural resources’ determines the wealth of a country?  One of the ‘wealthiest’ countries in the world is Luxembourg – can anyone list the ‘natural resources’ which make it so?  Sometimes, we need to do more than find an answer to a question – we also need to challenge the whole basis of the question.