Children and parents on their way to school. Photo Nicholas T. Ansell/PA Images Alamy Stock Photo.
It’s getting harder and harder to build a family in Britain – and in particular to start one before your thirties. High house prices and low wages mean many are forced to wait longer than they want…
Fewer children are being born in England and Wales and the fertility rate is at its lowest level since records began in 1939. The number born has been falling for the last decade and is at its lowest since 1977, while the average age of first-time mothers is at an all-time high.
Women in Britain would need to have 2.08 children on average to ensure the long-term natural replacement of the population, but it is now 1.44 children. The population – that means the working class – is shrinking.
This is happening around the world, not just in Britain. But we are at the low end of the spectrum, 177th out of 227 countries ranked in the CIA World Factbook.
A recent report published by the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies asked why people who wanted children, or more children, were not trying to conceive. Not feeling ready was linked with financial and work reasons as barriers to having children.
Declining fertility
At age 32, many still intended to have children, just later than previous generations. But their fertility will be declining from that time and conception more likely to be difficult.
Why does this matter for workers? We cannot have as many children as we want because there is not enough time or money. In the lead-up to having babies we struggle to secure a place to live, and to feed our children and ourselves. This is disappointing as it deprives us of a source of satisfaction and connection with the world.
We continue education longer. According to a report in the Financial Times last September, women aged 20 to 25 are three times more likely to be in education than raising a family. But the practice of making students pay tuition fees and their own living expenses puts pressure on them to repay the loans. It prioritises earning over starting a family. The degrees students earn may offer little financial advantage, and often struggle to start careers in their chosen area.
Workers need to provide housing for their families, but rented housing is in short supply and expensive, and buying is out of reach for the majority. Young couples are often pulled into a spiral of maximising their earnings and working for longer before they can afford to have a family, particularly when their income goes above the threshold for repaying student loans. House prices have been pushed up so high that two incomes are required to repay the mortgage.
Importing workers
The resulting reduction in population works to the advantage of the capitalist class. It reinforces the message that the working class cannot have the things it wants, and enables the tentacles of the ruling class to reach into every aspect of workers’ lives, including the home. It gives the ruling class an opportunity to replace the lost workers by immigration, bringing in workers both unskilled and highly qualified.
The scale of immigration tends to diminish British workers’ earnings, and to prevent their enjoying better working conditions, having better job security, being able to withstand manipulation by employers, and increasing their skills.
‘Young couples are often pulled into a spiral of maximising their earnings and working for longer before they can afford to have a family, particularly when their income goes above the threshold for repaying student loans…’
This is fine for capitalists, with the twofold impact of a dwindling indigenous population yet an increasing total population. There are more customers to buy products and a concocted housing crisis which gives the justification to cover the countryside with concrete, and to obliterate brown and green spaces in our cities.
The dream of the ruling class is for landowners and builders to enjoy massive windfall profits.
All this need not be so. If workers took control of immigration, the production of goods for their needs, and housing, they could live however they wanted, in harmony with the world around them, having work and family life, and being part of the community.
Education sufficient to allow the young person to think could be provided without charge until they are prepared to set out into the adult world, without the unnecessary requirement continually to obtain further qualifications.
Those who wish to develop their minds to a high level or prefer a job requiring greater intellectual demands would be able to. But they would be spared getting sucked into the present endless spiral of forever having to acquire additional qualifications. The educational syllabus would be determined by local teachers and lecturers, in consultation with parents – not dumbed down or made ideological.
We pay a heavy price for allowing the present capitalist system to continue. The effect on family life may not be obvious but Marx considered it to be damaging:
“The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.” Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter 2, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, English edition of 1888.
But workers can turn the situation around and create a system adapted to ordinary human existence. We should grasp the opportunity because happy and healthy workers give rise to happy and healthy children.
Young people dream of getting married and having a family. Allowing their dreams to come true would allow us to refresh the population to compensate for the disappearance of those workers who have got older. More than that, it would give weight to the idea that the world should be shaped to meet people’s needs, not vice versa.