Robert Henderson
Security is what the vast majority of humans want. It is part of our evolved nature. If you offer a man or woman a guaranteed income of £25,000 pa or a ten percent chance of gaining an income of £100,000 pa most will choose the certainty of £25,000.
When it comes to having and raising a family in a country which has readily available contraception and safe abortion practices a sense of security becomes vitally important. Without those two hindrances to producing children birthrates will normally look after themselves by at least maintaining a population and in all probability increasing it if the availability of the essentials of life – food, clothing, heat and shelter – is sufficient to maintain increasing numbers of people.
Where contraception and abortion are readily available individuals can and frequently do refrain from having many children. That is the case in rich industrialised countries where the number of children a couple have is to a very large extent a matter of choice. Because of this birthrates in the West are currently either below replacement levels (which require 2.1 children per woman) or are only just meeting the replacement level . Moreover, the Western countries which do meet the replacement level often do so only because of the higher fertility rates of black and Asian immigrants and their descendants , who at least for several generations after the initial act of migration maintain a higher rate of breeding than the native white populations of the West.
Why are the native populations of the West failing to reproduce in sufficient quantities? The fact that abortion and contraception are readily available is part of the explanation, but the reduction in children is also the consequence of changes in general social circumstances and the mentality of people rather than an immediate cause. Infant mortality is low so having a large family to guarantee that enough children survive to adulthood is no longer necessary. In addition, the creation of full blown welfare states means that people are no longer necessarily dependent upon their children for help in their old age so they do not see their children as an essential insurance policy for their future.
There are attempts to explain the decline in births in the West by claiming that fertility is falling. This does not meet the facts. Take abortions. 185,824 were undertaken in England and Wales in 2015. The birthrate for England and Wales in 2015 was 1.83 with 697,852 live births. Had no abortions been performed in 2015 the England and Wales birthrate would have been comfortably over the 2.1 replacement rate. In short, the UK (and the West generally) does not have a fertility problem but an abortion problem.
But none of this explains why reproduction has become so depressed that it has dipped below replacement level. Contraception and abortion together with the changes in social organisation mentioned above might explain if most people were stopping at, say, three children. A proportion of the population will simply decide for whatever reason that they do not want children, most people still want to have children and most people actually have children. The problem is they frequently do not have enough children to replace themselves. So what is going on? The missing element is insecurity.
Cultural insecurity
The huge numbers of unassimilable immigrants which have been allowed to settle in the West have not only depressed the material conditions of the Western native populations (especially the poorer parts of those populations) through competition for jobs, housing, welfare, health and education. They have also by their failure to assimilate created a constant and growing anxiety amongst the native population, especially those parts of the population which have found themselves living in areas heavily settled by racial and ethnic minorities.
Allied to the changes wrought by unassimilated immigrants is the grip political correctness has on Western societies. This is an ideology which covers an ever wider range of subjects in which “discrimination” is zealously detected by its adherents , but at its core lies the idea of multiculturalism. This asserts that all cultures are equal and results in the pretence that the native culture and native population have no greater status than that of the immigrant derived communities and that consequently all immigrant cultures should retain their ancestral ways. The result of this is the creation of ghettos in which the larger immigrant groups live lives that are separate from the rest of the population and to all intents and purposes the ghetto represents a colonisation of the areas affected All of this is dangerous for both the native population and the immigrant because it promotes anger amongst the native populations and unreasonable expectations amongst the minorities created by immigration.
The politically correct internationalist elites have gone to great lengths to suppress resistance by the native population to mass immigration and its consequences. The culture and ethnic interests of the minority populations are relentlessly promoted while the culture and ethnic interests of the native populations are suppressed. Any criticism of immigration or its consequences is met with accusations of racism which both the mainstream media and politicians promote routinely. Punishments are exacted such as hate-filled media witch hunts, the loss of a job and, increasingly, criminal charges for saying politically incorrect things about immigration and/or its consequences. The fact that similar though generally lesser punishments are meted out to anyone who it is claimed has breached other aspects of political correctness – most commonly accusations of homophobia and sexism – intensifies the sense of claustrophobia which the imposition of strict limits to what may and may not be said naturally creates.
To the suppression of complaint about mass immigration Western elites have added the denigration of the native cultures from which they have sprung. The history of countries such as the UK and USA are constantly portrayed as something to be ashamed. Collective guilt is laid upon the shoulders of the current native white populations for the existence of colonialism and the slave trade. Anything which is praiseworthy in white history is suppressed or diluted by ahistorical claims that it was not really the work of the whites or that if it was whites who were responsible they were only able to produce the praiseworthy thing because of white oppression of non-white peoples. Any expression of national feeling by the native white populations is immediately decried as nationalism at best and racism at worst.
The constant brainwashing has its effects, for example, in 2112 a substantial minority of English people said when questioned that the St George’s flag is racist, , but it is by no means wholly successful in obliterating the non-pc feelings of much of the population. The politically correct find in particular the resistance of the native poor to eagerly assume the politically correct agenda tiresome at best and unforgiveable at worst. As a consequence the white working class have gone from being the salt of the earth in the 1950s and 1960s to being seen as irredeemable now.
There is also another cultural aspect. It has become fashionable in the West to say that large families are antisocial, that breeding freely is a form of selfishness for it both takes up resources and endangers the planet because Western countries use per capita much more of the Earth’s resources (especially energy from fossil fuels) than the developing world. This has given those who could afford to have as many children as they wanted, or at least many more than they do have, a pseudo-moral “green” reason for not breeding freely, something they can readily ensure with reliable and easy to get contraception and abortion. This pseudo-moral reason is bolstered by people in the media peddling the same idea and by the social circle of each individual doing the same. It is all part of the Western guilt trip so assiduously developed and tended by the politically correct.
Material insecurity
The feeling that a person is not culturally secure in the place where they live is the most fundamental and corrosive cause of insecurity, but even without that there are plenty of material circumstances which can rob people of their security, for example, a lack of affordable and secure housing, the absence of a secure job which pays enough to raise a family and inadequate schools and medical services.
The wealthier people are the more security they both have and feel they have. For the rich having as many children as they want is purely a social and personal choice because affordability does not come into it. But the truly rich are by definition very limited in any society and the creation of ever increasing differences in wealth stemming from the combination of globalisation and laissez faire economics has led to the shrinking of the proportion of Western populations which can really feel economically secure. Today what were once the comfortable middle classes are feeling the pinch, especially those who have not got on the property ladder. In most parts of the UK the only way a mortgage can be afforded by those getting on the property ladder today is for both the man and woman in a relationship to work full time, something which inevitably reduces the enthusiasm for and opportunity to have children. But even the dual income property purchase is increasingly a pipe dream as property prices have reach absurd levels with the average UK price in 2017 being £317,000. In fact purchasing a property is becoming impossible even for those with what would be regarded as very comfortable incomes. To the horrendous price of property can be added the insecurity generated by the fact that jobs are no longer secure even for the highly educated and skilled. Consequently, the middle classes are feeling more and more insecure and less and less likely to have more than two children.
But if the middleclass are struggling to keep up appearances the poor in the West are really in the mire. They suffer from the same problems as the middle classes, the cost of housing and the insecurity of jobs, but in an amplified form, not least because they rely much more on state provision than the middle classes and state provision is being squeezed by the legacy the 2008 crash, the continued extravagance of an Aid regime which currently costs around £13 billion pa, the cost of being in the EU, the offshoring of jobs to the developing world, and most obviously and painfully to the ordinary Briton by the huge numbers of immigrants arriving in the West who compete for healthcare, school places, social housing and jobs, especially those which have traditionally been done by the native Western poor.
Historically a sense of security for the poor has largely come from them providing aid to one another, either individually or through organisations which helped and protected the poor such as churches, trade unions, friendly societies and the co-operative movement. Such mutual help is almost gone now amongst the native poor in the UK (and most of the West). This is partly because state-provided welfare has substituted for the help from churches, trade unions, charities and suchlike and partly it is down to the fact that the native poor have had their social circles fractured either by being shifted from the areas they used to dominate to places where they are not in the majority or they still live in their original areas but these have been subject to mass immigration of those who cannot or will not assimilate. Either way this has produced the same end of the native poor living in areas which they do not dominate.
The particular problem of housing
At first when the native British poor were moved from the slums after WW2 there was a plentiful supply of what is now called social housing and was called council housing then. These were let on lifelong tenancies, tenancies which could also be passed down the generations. This provided a secure base to raise a family. Private rents were also controlled. This situation remained until the 1980s.
In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher did two things to greatly reduce the social housing stock. She created a Right-to-Buy for those in council housing which steadily reduced the existing stock of publicly owned properties to let at rents which those on low wages could afford and came close to killing off the building of new council housing. Controls on private rents were also removed.
The shrinking of housing at reasonable rents was temporarily ameliorated by the relaxing of the rules controlling mortgages so that those on even modest wages could afford to buy a property. This together with Right-To-Buy initially swelled the number of owner occupier but d that id not last for UK owner occupation rose to a high of 71% in 2003 but has since sunk to 64%.
Had pre-1980 levels of house building been maintained with immigration at per-1997 levels there would have been something of a housing shortage but nothing like the crisis we now have. The problem is that immigration did not stay at re 1997 levels but skyrocketed under Blair and has remained huge ever since . In 1997 the estimated UK population was 58 million, today it is 66 million. Most of this huge increase is down to immigration.
In recent years the UK has been building less than 200,000 new build homes pa. Immigration in the year to September 2016 was 273,000. The idea that the UK can somehow build itself out of the current chronic shortages is clearly nonsense as things stand.
Work
The absence of a secure affordable home is surely the biggest material barrier to starting a family, but insecurity of work runs it a not too far distant second and of course bleeds into the question of whether a secure home can be afforded. Margaret Thatcher came to power with a mission to reduce state ownership through the privatisation of all the large nationalised industries and a desire to see market forces produce what was blithely called “creative destruction” of our manufacturing industry (much of which was off shored) while the British coal industry was wilfully destroyed. This resulted in a huge loss of jobs of the sort which had been the staple of the native working class.
The increase in immigration has led to competition not just for skilled jobs but also the unskilled and semi-skilled work. Wages have been suppressed by this competition and cemented into place by the payment of in-work benefits which have become an excuse for employers to keep wages low and to generally degrade conditions of employment. For example, there is the growth of self-employment from necessity rather than inclination and the rise of the zero-hours contract which does not guarantee any work but supplies work only when it suits the employer. A person might work 40 hours one week and 15 hours the next and zero hours the week after. This may suit a student or a couple where the person who is on a zero hours contract is working not provide the basis for a couple to start a family.
Finally, there is the threat posed by robotics and AI systems to employment. This has not reached the point where most jobs can be done by robots and/or AI systems. Nonetheless the technology has already devoured many jobs, especially manual ones, and the thought of what may happen as robots and AI systems get ever more powerful and intelligent will play on the fears of people especially if they have been made redundant through the introduction of such technology.
This is one case where the overwhelming majority are ultimately “all in it together”
All of these sources of insecurity come together to suppress Western reproduction. This is unsurprising. If couples cannot get a secure home and are constantly uncertain about whether they will be employed the next week; if they can only get low paid work; if they are constantly fighting with immigrants over public goods such as healthcare and education; if they have no social support as once the poor had; if they are constantly told they should be ashamed of their country and that it is selfish to have many children is it any wonder that with ready contraception and abortion that Western countries have birthrates below replacement level?
If insecurity is the answer to low birthrates then the answer must be to increase the sense of security within Western populations by raising morale by ending mass immigration, improving security of employment and engaging in massive house building programmes to dramatically increase the available property which is either within the scope of people to buy or allows them to rent at a reasonable price with the type of security of tenure found in the best publicly owned rental property. There also needs to be a clear understanding that the native populations of Western countries have priority over foreigners and an end to multiculturalism .
The perilous demographic position of Britain (and Western nations generally) can be seen in the fact that whereas it was the native British poor who were at risk of experiencing crippling insecurity fifteen or twenty years ago, today it is virtually anyone who is either not unreservedly rich or is old enough to have bought a property before prices rocketed is living in a seriously insecure world . No longer can the better off think that they are safe. Moreover, even the rich must wonder now and then if they are secure as the number of stable and prosperous countries in the world diminishes through a combination of mass immigration and terrorism.
Living In A Madhouse 