One of Britain’s most influential think tanks rang in the new year with a dreary look at what lies ahead in 2026. Cheerfully subtitled “Early and encouraging signs of a mild zombie apocalypse”, a Resolution Foundation update predicted that UK growth would be anaemic this coming year.

Tucked away at the end of the document was a section speculating that 2026 could be the first year in modern times when deaths outnumber births in Britain. The authors noted that any population growth would come from immigration rather than natural increase.

Until recently, the orthodox view among mainstream economists held that immigration could offset the decline in the working-age population — an expectation hardly surprising from a left-of-centre source like the Resolution Foundation. Something as alarming as overall population decline would have been met with a clamour to attract more arrivals from around the world. However, the backlash to high levels of low-skilled and dependent migration which made up the “Boriswave” following the pandemic has caused many to reassess.

Alan Manning, a former head of the Government’s Migration Advisory Committee, has explained how Britain’s habit of tying solutions for short-term worker shortages to pathways toward permanent citizenship is unsustainable. As soon as migrant workers gain indefinite leave to remain, many will simply quit the jobs they were brought in to do for the same reasons that make those jobs unattractive to British workers — mainly, low pay.

This is part of the same self-defeating pattern whereby Britain brings in workers from the developing world in order to hold down wages in certain sectors, especially health and social care. It might save money in the short term, but it also loads long-term costs onto the Treasury, which has to cover those people’s own care throughout their lives. Workers who arrive with limited skills to do jobs at low pay are exceptionally unlikely ever to come close to being net fiscal contributors, especially given that their prime working years are often already behind them. This is immigration as a sort of Ponzi scheme, as the UK sucks in ever more migrants to cover the costs of previous cohorts.

The cold fact that underscores all of this is that Britain will not be the only place in the world experiencing sub-replacement birth rates. The same is true all across the rich and middle-income world; even in poorer countries that are continuing to grow, birth rates are trending sharply downward. An obvious solution to this is encouraging people to have more children, but that is not as easy as it sounds. Despite over a decade of imaginative and proactive pro-natalist policies and taxation, Hungary’s fertility rate is still lower than Britain’s.

South Korea and Japan have particularly bleak outlooks for population decline. The South Koreans have skewed their labour market in favour of those of childbearing age, with large firms encouraged by the government to pressure those in their fifties to take early retirement so that younger generations can take promotions. In Japan, housing costs are far lower in relation to salary than any of the wealthy Anglophone countries, which is seen as a major obstacle to people starting families. Yet in neither case have these interventions worked.

The truth is that we are going to have to get used to contracting populations, and cut our cloth accordingly. Across Europe, this will mean a fundamental reordering of the way people think about social security. In the short to medium term, Britain needs to find the money to offer more attractive rates of pay for social care workers. In the longer term, it may well require a reordering of family relationships and expectations about inheritance, as we make decisions about how to pay for care in old age.

Until recently, it was fashionable to worry about the problems of a world population that was growing too quickly, with Malthusian nightmares about competition for resources and human impact on the planet. A declining population seems a bleaker prospect, but it should put an end to the idea in Britain and other rich countries that the rest of the world represents an infinite source of cheap labour for short-term economic fixes.

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Chris Bayliss is an independent consultant who works on energy infrastructure in the Middle East.

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