The Sun called it “Bonk for Britain” and illustrated the story with a couple about to have sex: this is a cabinet minister’s notion, floated at the Conservative party conference last week, that women should get tax cuts to encourage a baby boom. The newspaper declines to name the minister, but reassures us that he or she is “top”, and gives a quote: “Look at the labour shortages we are suffering from. We need to have more children. The rate keeps falling. Look at Hungary – they cut taxes for mothers who have more children.” We need to be “weaned off our addiction to immigration”, apparently.
I have puzzled over the anonymity of this minister: so many utterly horrible views were aired at the Tory party conference, by people who were apparently proud to own them; so much dehumanising language about foreigners, about people in poverty, not to mention blue-on-blue backstabbing out in the open. Why should this be the idea to get coy about? Well, because it’s nastier than it looks.
It is true that in Hungary, if you are a woman who has four or more children, you never have to pay income tax again, though arguably, this isn’t a huge hit to the exchequer since you don’t have time to work anyway. It is also true that the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is clamping down on media freedom, rewriting electoral rules to ensure that only his party can win, waging constant war against minorities, and using Islamophobic and antisemitic rhetoric with impunity – all of which he denies – almost as a device to illustrate how toothless EU censure is.
You get a lot of pushback from the right when you call Orbán a fascist, because British Conservatives, when they run out of road or have too much wine at the conference, like to borrow his policies and his rhetorical flourish. But let’s not kid ourselves about bonking for Britain: this is just “the great replacement theory” with a tax code.
This is a very common drumbeat on the right, and holds that swarms or floods of migrants will ultimately – maybe soon – overwhelm their host nations, so that white people are no longer in the majority. It is the organising principle for a lot of other far-right discourse: if your only chance for racial survival is to breed faster, it becomes necessary to rigidly socially control women in their mate and reproductive choices. On the baby-supply side, migrants must be deterred or, failing that, dehumanised in the plural and oppressed in the singular. Anyone who opposes you, apparently in the Orbán worldview, is a liberal who has probably had their mind poisoned by George Soros.
The Sun’s article came out the same day that Nadhim Zahawi and Suella Braverman discussed a plan to tackle “bad migration” by capping the number of children foreign students can bring to the UK. How does a child become a “bad migrant”? And how come their parents are not welcome when we have such a labour shortage? Our unnamed minister, meanwhile, doesn’t specify whether or not you get an extra tax break if your baby has blue eyes.
When British Tories mimic these postures, it is not with a mind to actually boosting the birthrate. It is actually quite funny to consider just how large a tax break would have to be in order to cover even the first three years of an extra child’s upkeep; shaving some national insurance off one person’s income just wouldn’t cover it. Realistically, you would need to overhaul the entire system, tax wealth over income, enact the largest redistributive event since the postwar era and sort out nursery fees while you are at it. But it’s not funny, because that is not what they mean. The real message, as with Braverman’s plan to make cannabis a class A drug, is: “Suck it up, forces of civilisation. We’re about to be as nasty, in our language and whatever acts we have the competence to perform, as it’s possible to be.”
We don’t have to fun-wash this stuff with Carry On language and dumb, nostalgic innuendo. We’re allowed to call it what it is: dog-whistle white supremacy in a babygrow.
• Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian
