Robert Jenrick has suggested that instead of granting visas to overseas workers to fill the gaping hole in our care system, British parents should be encouraged to have more children to provide the workforce to look after our growing population of elderly people (Report, 2 October). This has to be one of the most stupid things I’ve heard coming out of the mouth of a Tory minister.
For a start, with a world population of 8 billion and rising, that already pushes available resources to the limit, it’s not a good plan to encourage a faster increase. And even if it were to happen, it’s going to be at least 20 years before it makes a difference to the workforce, which is no good for those who are elderly now.
Second, many working families experiencing the cost of living crisis can’t afford to properly feed, clothe and generally provide for the children they have already got, without even considering the extra childcare costs.
Instead, we could continue to use the resources we have – the people who want to come here and work in areas where we have thousands of vacancies, and who will pay taxes and boost local economies.
And if there is a problem with insufficient housing, maybe the levelling up that the Tories keep going on about (despite there being very little evidence of it happening here in the north-east) could include some investment in the hundreds of empty properties in our towns and villages, including converting empty office blocks.
Barbara Hastings
Murton, County Durham
• Robert Jenrick’s contribution to baby-bust hysteria is straight out of the Viktor Orbán playbook. Ageing is a challenge we can meet with sensible, pragmatic measures, but combining demographic doom-mongering with anti-immigration sentiment turns a rational policy debate into a branch of the culture wars. For the pronatalists of eastern Europe, more babies is inextricably bound with a nativist agenda and a patriarchal worldview that asserts motherhood as a woman’s highest aspiration and value. Have no doubt that some in this country have sympathies with that.
Meanwhile, Jenrick proposes we build more houses to encourage more babies, who will in turn need more houses. Where does he imagine this pyramid scheme ending?
The solution to demographic change isn’t more people to get old and, in turn, demand more infrastructure, more food, more energy and create more emissions. It is embracing the value of fewer people in improving our quality of life and, critically, reducing our environmental impact, giving hope of a better future to young and old alike.
Alistair Currie
Population Matters
• Robert Jenrick reveals how low the moral standards of our growth-obsessed society have become. Children are nothing more than resources to care for us in our old age. They are expected to be able to work for us in this way, despite the escalating climate breakdown and ecosystems collapse that they have inherited because of our addiction to an ecocidal economic model.
Is having children to look after us in our old age really a moral reason for having children, especially when we are introducing them into an overspent environment? We are already exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet by 300%.
Barbara Williams
Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire
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