George Osborne was the one to implement the two-child cap, but he didn’t invent it. Nor did Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of austerity-era welfare reforms. In fact, the two-child benefits cap was originally a Ukip policy. The Tories adopted it, and then a cowed Labour opposition declined to oppose it, but Farage the arch-Thatcherite truly believed in it (or at least, he seemed to at the time). Benefits, he argued in his 2011 autobiography, Flying Free, infantilized the nation: “Every welfare payment, grant, regulation, intervention of government in health, parenting and other individual responsibility increases dependence and makes change harder.”

If Farage now accepts that removing the cap would make having children easier for low-paid workers, that’s a tacit admission that the aim of his previous party’s policy was always to make it harder for low-income families to have children. His reversal is an enormous act of chutzpah, and few besides Farage could get away with it. In the most cynical terms, it’s an attack on Labour where it’s most vulnerable: the two-child cap is unpopular in the Northern “red wall” seats, where Reform is already running Labour close on support.

But it’s also an astute reaction to the changing politics of demography. Today, everyone knows we have a population crisis: collapsing birth rates, an aging population, and a fractious reliance on immigration to make up the difference. Framing the removal of the two-child cap as a pro-natalist policy sits very comfortably with Reform’s radical Right-wing populism. In theory, there’d be no need to import people from overseas if the UK was capable of growing its own.

Back at the beginning of the 21st century, when the two-child benefit cap was conceived, anxieties about baby-making had a very different shape. The birth rate was in decline already, but politicians rarely referred to this as a problem. Instead, the big concern was that the wrong kinds of babies were being born. The 2000s and 2010s were terrorized by “pramface” teen mums and grotesquely supersized families living at the state’s expense.

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All this fit very neatly with the Conservative opposition’s thesis of Broken Britain — a state of social decay caused, according to the Tories, by a decade of Labour government. In 2009, The Sun introduced the world to 13-year-old Alfie Patten, who was supposedly “Britain’s youngest dad” having conceived a daughter with 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman. A later DNA test showed the father was actually a (marginally less shocking) 15-year-old boy and not Patten, but by then his angelic face had already harrowed a nation.

Tory leader David Cameron wrote a column for the paper, bemoaning the fact that this was “not a one-off”, and praising a “landmark report” by Iain Duncan Smith “that helped bring these issues on to the political agenda”. That “landmark report” had plenty to say about family breakdown, the rise in lone parents and the alarming spectre of teen pregnancy — but nothing about supporting families to have more children. If anything, the popular belief was that some families should be very much discouraged from having them at all.

Like the Smiths, who became notorious in 2010. A story about them in the Mail was headlined: “$95,000-a-year benefits family of 12 re-homed in a $1,000-a-week house… ‘after they trashed the last one’.” The article prodded the reader to envious comparison: “The money — five times the starting salary of a teacher — goes to unemployed Pete and Sam Smith and their ten children, who live in a rent-free four-bedroom house.” And then, making explicit the logic of the two-child benefits cap: “Critics said it was disgraceful that the family pocketed huge amounts of taxpayers’ money and called for urgent reform to the benefits system.”

Thirteen-year-old fathers and families of 12 were extreme outliers who probably said more about their own problems than society in general, but they tapped into a mass anxiety about excess reproduction. The emblem of this was the character Vicky Pollard from the sketch show Little Britain, which ran from 2003 to 2006 — a chavvy schoolgirl who says she’s had “six kids by seven different blokes” and is constantly hoping for a council house, because she believes someone else should pick up the tab for her promiscuity. The snobbery and the misogyny were undiluted. That was pop culture’s idea of a mother (played by a gay man in drag).

There was discourse around childlessness too, but this was very much focused on the idea that middle-class women were delaying reproduction for the sake of their careers, and then being punished for their hubris. “Women want to ‘have it all’,” declared an editorial in the BMJ, “but biology is unchanged; deferring defies nature and risks heartbreak.” Lord Steel, who had piloted the 1967 Abortion Act through parliament, declared regretfully that the law had contributed to an “irresponsible” mood, with women turning to abortion “if things go wrong”. (Exactly, one might imagine, when abortion would be appropriate.)

Given that both birth rates and maternal age continued on the same trajectories (respectively, down and up) it seems that women were not going to be bullied into maternity by rhetoric like this. More successful were the efforts to frighten those who did get pregnant. In 1999, the phrase “too posh to push” was coined in a Mail article about Victoria Beckham (Posh Spice) giving birth by caesarean. The moral intent was obvious: women who didn’t have a “natural” labor — which is to say, vaginal and with minimal pain relief — were spoiled, unnatural creatures.

The increase in C-sections was treated as a national disgrace. In 2009 a senior (male) midwife told The Observer: “More women should be prepared to withstand pain.” Without suffering, you could never become a real mother. There was no evidence that maternal demand drove the rise in caesareans, and no evidence that women had contraction-shirking cowards; but there was evidence that women absorbed these attitudes then felt shame and failure for the interventions they needed anyway. In 2022, the Ockenden review found that targets to avoid caesareans left 300 babies dead or brain damaged, and contributed to the deaths of 12 women.

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Given all this, perhaps you could say it’s unsurprising that during this period women started opting out of motherhood. Judged for being too young, judged for being too old, given to understand that both having children and being unable to have children should be experienced as punishments. Add that to the obvious economic pressures caused by dropping out of the workforce, and how could fertility have gone any way other than down?

But all these pressures only added to the general trend of population decline, which is a global phenomenon with two dominant causes. The first of these is female education: the longer girls stay in school, the fewer children they will go on to have (male education doesn’t have the same effect). The second is urbanization: for farmers, every extra child is an extra field hand; for a family with factory or office jobs, more children are just more mouths to feed.

Children are expensive — not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time. Only one of those can be subsidized by the government. In theory, modern families should be able to share the load as fathers become more active caregivers. In practice, some research shows that the more paternity leave fathers take, the fewer children they go on to have. One plausible explanation is that once men experience childrearing as work, they decide they would rather do less of it.

Reversing the two-child benefits cap is the right thing to do for the sake of the children currently in poverty because of it, but doesn’t reverse any of those things. No state-level intervention tried in any country ever has. Nordic-style family friendly policies don’t work, but nor does the Right-wing approach of loading families with cash. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán implemented a system of family subsidies that makes the amounts drawn down by the 12-member Smith family look family puny — spending on the program is equivalent to over 5% of the country’s GDP.

All that Hungary appears to have achieved is to encourage families, at very great expense, to have babies slightly earlier than they would have done anyway. The initial fertility boost has now faded to near-nothing. Farage is enough of a student of Orbán’s Hungary to know that his own, comparatively trivial, giveaway will do little for birth rates (though it will lift some children out of poverty). This policy’s chances of success on its terms are negligible.

More significant is what it says about Farage’s judgment of public feeling. He is an arch-populist, and right now he has judged that birth-boosting is more popular than Noughties-style benefits-bashing. Pay attention, too, to what Farage said after his speech. Asked about abortion, he described himself as pro-choice but called the current 24-week time limit “utterly ludicrous” when hospitals will “move heaven and earth” to help a premature baby survive.

It is a push on the door to see what’s permissible: the logic he uses here could easily be extended to hospitals “moving heaven and earth” to prevent a miscarriage, or implant a fetus during IVF. Abortion has been a settled issue in the UK for decades, but Farage can surely sense some profit to himself in unsettling it. If Reform come to power and manage to reverse the Abortion Act, it might even lead to more babies: in the US, states that have enacted abortion bans since the fall of Roe v Wade have seen an increase in the birth rate.

But those same states have also seen a rise in infant mortality, not only from congenital disorders which would once have been reason for termination, but from all causes. The largest differences, concluded researchers, were in “states with among the worst maternal and child health and well-being outcomes”. Being pro-birth is not the same thing at all as being pro-mother and baby, and only by being pro-mother and baby can any country hope to ameliorate (though probably not to reverse) the fertility slump.

What would being pro-mother and baby look like? It would mean evidence-led, woman-centered care in pregnancy and labor, not moralizing targets. It would mean treating childbearing as a normal thing a woman might do in the course of her life — not her singular purpose, and not a strange indulgence on her part to be grudgingly tolerated. Women who have children are performing a social good, and neither the state nor her employers should penalize her for it. It would mean private homes and public spaces that are fit for purpose and accessible for everyone.

Without those things, all any country has to look forward to is becoming an older, poorer place. The population problem will affect every part of politics in the decades to come, and governments have no choice but to contend with it, however difficult that may be. Farage’s benefits U-turn is the first stirring of natalism as a serious issue in the US. What never seems to change is the disdain and cruelty aimed at the people — the women — who are expected to have the babies.

My first impression of Simone and Malcolm is that they have walked straight out of Pattern Recognition. Two slender, voluble, dark-haired, medium-height thirty-somethings, they have slicked-back hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and quirky dark clothing. Their children, Torsten, Octavian, and Titan Invictus, are all IVF-conceived, some gene-selected for traits such as IQ or happiness. Simone is pregnant again, she tells me merrily, with Industry Americus Collins, due in April.

The original “‘elite’ couple breeding to save mankind” of countless memes, I sought them out on a recent London visit in the hope of inducing them to say controversial things about biotech. They’re famous (or notorious if you prefer) for their enthusiastic endorsement of a high-tech Bay Area “pro-natalism” that embraces every available reproductive technology. From IVF, through surrogacy, polygenic embryo screening, to potentially gene-editing future offspring, they are what they call “the most talkative iteration” of a “technophilic” movement dedicated to saving the human species from population crash.

There are plenty of conservatives to whom all such technologies are prima facie off-limits. And I have grave concerns about anything that promises to free us from organismic limits — only to demand, in exchange, new kinds of servitude. I’m far from certain whether technophiles are friends or enemies. But what I heard was a message most relevant to the people currently keenest to dismiss them as “terminally online Redditors” or “hipster eugenicists”, or to link them with the far-Right: that the fertility crash is coming, soonest and hardest and most brutally, for liberals. And the Collinses are, in fact, liberals too: just unusually unfiltered and clear-sighted ones.

The Collinses earn a living in financial services, but their passion is education (they run an Institute for the Gifted) and promoting natalist culture. They use email and WhatsApp accounts seemingly interchangeably, and offer opinions as if they’re two interfaces of the same voluble, intelligent and eccentric hive mind. Malcolm proposed marriage to Simone on Reddit. They plan to have seven children.

In the end, we didn’t discuss gene-editing and fertility tech much at all: we converged, instead, on a deeper and arguably more insoluble fear. That is, that the contours of the fertility crisis mean people like the Collinses — subcultures that value intelligence, openness, and technological sophistication — are a critically endangered species.

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In the Collins worldview, what they call the “global monoculture” is the chief antagonist. They mean the largely homogeneous high-tech norms that have emerged in every major developed city in the modern world: Starbucks, tiny families or solo apartments, long working hours. And everywhere this “monoculture” appears, fertility is falling. Human birth rates are now below replacement almost everywhere in the world.

This global monoculture “believes it has a right to other people’s children, because its fertility rates are so low that the only way it can replenish itself is by just taking the children of nearby healthy cultural groups”. In Simone and Malcolm’s view, this dynamic represents “an existential threat to our species”. And as they see it, the motley coalition of interest groups making up the current “conservative movement” is united by hostility to this urban monoculture, and sometimes little else.

And while the Collinses are meticulously Californian in their aversion to offer explicit moral judgement, it would seem that however existential a threat this monoculture is overall, it’s a clear and present danger to people like them. For it poses a long-term threat to intellectual and cultural openness. Malcolm has, Simone tells me, analysed data on the demographic profiles of people having lots of kids — and it turns out that the deciding factor isn’t religiosity at all. It’s the mirror inverse of the high openness exhibited by “terminally online Redditors” and Silicon Valley rationalists.

According to their own studies, Simone tells me, the high-fertility profile comes with “xenophobia and fascism”. That is: people who have lots of kids are authoritarian, hostile to out-groups, and reluctant to consider other viewpoints as valid. And while they assure me, with the typically extravagant tolerance of difference typical of the Bay Area, that they’re “not even antagonistic” to bigotry “so long as they don’t interfere with their neighbours” tacitly the judgement is clear. After all, a defining characteristic of authoritarian outlooks is precisely interfering with your neighbours. Having evidently considered the prognosis for their own way of life, in a future dominated by such cultures, the Collinses show pragmatism and clear-sightedness in doing whatever they can to avert the prospect.

But it’s not just pluralism and openness on the chopping-block if demographic forces continue to select in favour of bigots. It’s also cognitive ability, cultures that value education, and cultures knowledgeable of and engaged with technologies. All these traits are, the Collinses remind me, correlated with low fertility; not that I need reminding, as a bookish, overeducated, and extremely online mother of only one.

Meanwhile, Malcolm continues, the people still having kids are the ones making less money, and wielding less cultural and economic power in the world. In turn, this makes such groups “less good at defending themselves from aggressive forces and less viable as power players on the world stage”. Rather than embracing marginalisation as a condition for survival, the Collinses want to “find and nourish groups that are able to be global economic and technological players while still being high fertility, because that is so rare”.

What’s left unspoken here is that they think failing to support “global economic and technological players” would have very bad effects overall — for it would mean shrugging while the culture selects against clever, bookish, and technologically adept people. They are, in other words, quietly worried that current civilisation is shrinking the future pool of what a Bay Area rationalist is bound to see as the keystone of our genetic heritage: IQ.

They tread carefully around the topic, no doubt mindful of its radioactive connotations. But Malcolm comes close to spelling out the implications when he tells me that, based on research he’s read, “we may see about a one standard deviation drop in IQ in the developed world in the next 75 years, due to genetic reasons”. That is: the smartest people are deleting themselves from the gene pool.

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The Collinses clearly accept that whatever form of human culture makes it to the other side of the current demographic pinch-point will be a brutal survival of the fittest — where “fit” doesn’t necessarily accord with their preferred values. But though they studiously route round any explicit moral statement that might impose coercive obligations on someone else, it’s clear that the Collinses would prefer at least some of the winning demographic subcultures to be high-IQ people with technological capabilities, and a willingness to tolerate different viewpoints. They emphasise that they are firmly against eugenics, where this represents any top-down value-statement about or intervention in the gene pool. But it’s also clear that, albeit in an opt-in, you-do-you Bay Area way, they think there are better and worse ways that gene pool could develop in the future.

To this end, they’re more than happy to collaborate with any group — even those far more authoritarian or anti-tech than they are — if the common goal is reversing what they perceive as the current negative trend. In their view, it’s not for some time — Malcolm suggests, “in 300 or 400 years” — that this coalition might fall to infighting, as pluralistic and technophilic factions such as theirs battle “religious, fundamentalist, xenophobic groups that believe that there can only be one religious group and one ethnic group in the world”. In such a scenario, they accept, “a lot of the conservative pronatalist groups will come into conflict because some are more pluralistic than others”.

In the meantime, though, they see what they’re doing as salvage work, preserving as much of a dying culture as they can. “We have seen this before in the Roman Empire,” they say, “this collapse scenario. Anyone who doesn’t think that we are entering a dark age right now is delusional. We need to begin to round the wagons, to defend as much of our civilisation as we can, so that we can use it going forwards.”

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It’s possible, I put to them, that the rationalistic, high-tech culture they are trying to preserve is too deeply implicated in the “global monoculture” they deplore to be disaggregated — indeed, that it may be driving the problem. Malcolm shrugs. It’s possible, he tells me. But the Collinses are content nonetheless to pursue their bet, and to see who turns out to be right.

Despite our differences on reproductive technologies, I suspect the Collinses and I are more aligned than not — on, if nothing else, devotion to reading the cultural tea-leaves, and extrapolating from the patterns we recognise. Some who do this, such as William Gibson, set out what they see via the written word to sometimes near-prophetic effect. Others, such as the Collinses, work as hard as they can in the real world, to turn the direction of events toward or away from patterns they see on the horizon.

But whatever the longer-term impact of the Collinses’ interventions will be, they’re right to see their beloved culture of logical, rationalistic, high-openness risk-takers as endangered. And there’s a lesson there for liberals of both Right and Left, even a long way from Silicon Valley. For if the traits most immediately at risk are openness, high cognitive ability, and an appreciation for education: those, in a word, commonest in liberals. If the Collinses’ read is right on the larger patterns, and I think it is, those who value intelligence and openness need to be a great deal more deliberate about “rounding the wagons” to protect the values and cultural practices they cherish – including via efforts to inculcate these traits and cultures in the next generation, or indeed to produce a next generation at all.

If this doesn’t happen, all those clever, tolerant, bookish types, many of whom currently leap to denounce voices like the Collinses as at least “far-right” adjacent, may wake up in a generation or so, to find they missed the chance to hand on their own genetic and cultural legacy. And that instead, in a fit of short-sighted self-righteousness, they gifted the world to the only people still having children: their enemies.