updated 11 January
Proposer: Lauren Wilson
Britain is facing declining birth rates and a shrinking population which we are told will be propped up by mass immigration. Is this beneficial to the working class of Britain?
Declining fertility is symptomatic of many factors: atomisation, finances and career increasingly defer family life. Our food, environment and pharmaceuticals are full of chemicals resulting in fertility decline.
Britain is a society hostile to family life, leading a growing number to opt out as its simply too hard and expensive.
In the decimated NHS, birth has become a traumatic experience for many with increasing medical interventions on mum and baby. When women experience a traumatic birth they often choose not to do it again.
Britain has the worst parental leave provision in Europe. Fathers are only entitled to a miserly two weeks leave paid at around half the minimum wage. Mothers are entitled to 12 months leave however half is either unpaid or less than half the minimum wage. In modern Britain a dual income is required to cover basic necessities, women are therefore forced to return to work early and cannot afford the cost of future maternity leave.
After returning to work, the expense only increases with childcare costs higher than housing. Alternatively returning part-time reduces wages and pension contributions leading to a massive shortfall in women’s retirement savings.
Liberals tell women who complain “don’t have children if you can’t afford them!”. Well, now they aren’t.
Add to this the cost of housing, quality of services, education (and woke curriculums), rising crime, and public hostility to children as either a nuisance or prey for exploitation. The picture is bleak: Britain today is not a great place to raise a family.
We demand a society that puts family first. If a nation is not built to raise happy and healthy children, what is it for? We want a Britain proud to produce the next generation, not an economic zone where private profit dominates all.
Britain must undergo radical change to put family first. Congress therefore instructs:
– The Workers Party of Britain to be the Party of the Family and for our people to produce family focussed material and to highlight the plight of families when speaking publicly
Congress further endorses family friendly policies including but not limited to:
– Statutory maternity pay for 12 months paid at a minimum of the national minimum wage
– Financial support for women who wish to stay at home with children for their first three years of life
– Women to have the right to return to their job for up to three years after giving birth
– Statutory paternity pay for 2 months paid at a minimum of the national minimum wage
– Nurseries to be brought under public ownership or made free at the point of service
Proposer: Lauren Wilson
Amendment
submitted by Gwyddion Williams
Amendment to Motion 8 – the party of family
In addition, we should propose the following:
- A suicide discouragement agency, with a professional core but with many volunteers. This could include people willing to chat on the phone or even by Zoom to the lonely. Also people who came close to suicide or attempted suicide as teenagers to talk using hidden IDs to current teenagers. Explain how they felt life not worth living that now seem bizarre. Were heartbroken over failed relationships that they are now glad they missed. And always being truthful: teenagers are suspicious and there must be enough real cases.
- A secular coming-of-age ceremony, since something similar is found in almost every human society. To have gifts and celebrations. To include the option of the individual affirm their own faith in a polite non-sectarian way, so as not to be in competition with religious equivalents. To be held within a month of their 16th birthday, though not on the birthday itself unless the young person wishes this.
We should seek to pursue these specific aims separately and with anyone who is in agreement, however much they might disagree on other matters.
This is an excellent motion as it directly addresses issues that have already been devastating for other advanced capitalist states such as South Korea and Japan. I fully support and second this motion.
Hello.
I think it is not correct to say the population is shrinking. It is increasing, thanks to immigration. The immigrants and their children who have been resident for a time should be included in the population numbers. It is only the white English population that is not increasing.
Some figures:
Uk pop 68.35 (2023)
Uk pop 59.63 (2003)
Pop has grown by around 8.2 million since the start of the twenty-first century.
There were 6 million non EU citizens not born in uk living in the uk in 2021
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/ukpopulationbycountryofbirthandnationality/yearendingjune2021
plus 3.5 million EU born.
Hi Cathy, Britain is ‘facing’ a shrinking population due to fertility decline. The comment is about the future, not the present.
Hi Lauren,
Britain is not facing fertility decline in the future, it is happening now and has been happening for years. The fertility rate has been below 2 children per woman since 1974 (2.1 is considered the level that permits a society to reproduce itself). Today it is the lowest ever at 1.53 (2021).
Immigrants eventually adopt British reproductive patterns, causing a need for yet more immigration to sustain the population, hence the argument that ‘we need immigration to staff hospitals and care homes’.
This is ‘Throwaway Immigration’: we attract immigrants, but don’t look after them and their children. As you say, there are too many disincentives to having children (cost of housing, cost of living, cost of child care, 2 children cap on child benefit, poor education and health services in many areas and a general atmosphere that children and parents are not valued).
We want this throwaway immigration to stop.
Do you need a seconder? I’d do that.
Add: “As the Party for Families, we would ensure that all children have free nutritious school dinners, opportunities for development not restricted by the narrow National Curriculum and an emphasis on a rounded education for the future that would mean scrapping Ofsted, ending “vaccinations” containing heavy metals and ending exposure to wifi radiation that stunt brain development in many children and have caused a rise in numbers of autistic children “.
Much of this is already in the Manifesto. The Manifesto stands as policy unless added to or corrected by Congress or, subsequently, well within Congress guidelines by the Party’s Political Committee and NMC. This Manifesto is online.
The issues of vaccination and exposure to wifi radiation are not covered by the Manifesto and are perhaps matters for further scientific investigation leading to policy rather than policy. The claims and implications require further research. The link to autism is, in fact, dubious or rather unproven yet possible. The rise in the numbers of autistic diagnoses is more likely to derive from recognition of an issue always present in the community but hithero unrecognised and possibly over-diagnosed in some cases. A degree of neuro-diversity is more likely to be seen as ‘normal’ now, requiring a much more individually-focused educational policy instead of a one-size-fits-all quasi-rote approach to education. Everyone has a different brain as we all have different fingerprints.
I would recommend (although there are processual issues with making amendments where you should consult Party HQ if you want to put forward your own amendment) that this aspect of the case was crafted a little differently: “that the WPB should require fully-funded and open access government research into the health effects and risks of heavy metal contamination in food, water supply and vaccines and of all forms of radio spectrum and wifi and other radiation with special reference to children as well as research into any environmental aspects of neuro-diversity and require that government institute policies to mitigate any scientifically demonstrable harmful effects at the expense of the corporate suppliers of the relevant products and services and that such research should be provenly ring-fenced from corporate or state departmental interference as to the terms of reference or the results.”
Tim Pendry seems to have his finger on the pulse. Well said.