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.

The benefit cap, which prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for more than two children, has become a totemic image of evil Tory policy, symbolising a simultaneous attack on poor people and women’s bodies. For Labour MP Rosie Duffield, it has a Handmaid’s Tale cruelty, as “women are subjugated according to their social class”. Others may be less feminist in their objections, but they still think the policy is too harsh. “It’s pushing more children and families into relative poverty,” said Braverman, adding that “it is time for it to go”.

During a punishing cost-of-living crisis, and following the brutal pandemic years in which the government spent an estimated £96.9 billion on paying people not to work, it seems perverse that the Labour administration should cling onto such an unpopular, mean-spirited policy as the two-child cap: scrapping it, by contrast, would cost £3.4 billion a year. This is even stranger in the context of anxieties about the UK’s falling birth rate and the realisation that the days in which migration could provide extra workers are numbered. We seem to swing from one anguished policy debate about how to encourage people to have more children back to the defensive position of cajoling them to have fewer. Where’s the logic?

After all these years of headless policymaking, it would be tempting to argue that there is, in fact, no logic; that policies are rushed in and reversed with little thought about their contradictions or unintended consequences. Unfortunately, policies relating to fertility decisions generally follow one, neoliberal line of thought: that questions of who should have children and how many should be framed by the state and the market.

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Duffield is right to argue that, while the obvious target of the two-child benefit cap is “the caricature of the ‘feckless’, ‘irresponsible’ people who drop children every few minutes without being able to pay for them”, the subtext is “an attack on women’s right to choose how many children they have”. Throughout the 20th century, family-planning policies sought to limit how many children were born to poor or unmarried women, while boosting the more “desirable” fertility of the middle classes. On the global stage, international organisations and NGOs have spent years trying to reduce the number of children born in poorer parts of the world, couching population-control policies in progressive-sounding language about the environment and women’s reproductive rights.

In the late Nineties, Tony Blair’s New Labour government continued this approach with gusto. One flagship initiative was the 10-year Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, launched in 1999 with the aim of halving the under-18 conception rate. This involved providing young people with better access to effective contraception and abortion; strenuous efforts to warn them not to get pregnant, via sex education and a communications campaign; and interventions with young parents to “support” them not to get pregnant again. The strategy achieved its target, and was described by social commentators as “the success story of our time”.

Other initiatives took a less explicit tack. Those such as the New Deal for Lone Parents, the National Childcare Strategy and Sure Start sought a solution to the problem of mothers on benefits by cajoling them into work and their children into nurseries. The New Deal for Lone Parents, as social policy professor Jane Millar has noted, was particularly significant — throughout the post-war period, policy was largely based on the assumption that single mothers would stay at home to care for their children, and thus ”one parenthood was a marker that indicated legitimate withdrawal from the labour market”. But under New Labour, being a single mum was no longer an excuse for not having a job: in fact, it made employment even more important, to reduce “social exclusion”.

As the BBC reported in 1998, all of New Labour’s “welfare to work” strategies hinged on one “single idea”, that: “Work is good for you. Those who can, should work. More people in work means fewer on benefit which means reduced social security costs, which in turn means more for health and education. It is apparently the ultimate win-win policy.”

There were certainly some good things that came out of New Labour’s obsession with work. For those people who can work, it is better to have a job than it is to languish on benefits. Women need access to contraception, abortion and childcare if they are to have careers and, above all, freedom and equality. But, as the ensuing years have shown, work is not the solution to all welfare problems. In tying the compulsion to work so closely to new motherhood, something important did get lost: the idea of children as a personal and social good.

When the key priority for everybody, including mothers of young children, became to earn their way through paid work, the social value of having and raising children diminished. Aspirational young people were to go to university, and others into work: those who chose parenthood were othered as “socially excluded”, outside of the norm. The emphasis on getting children particularly from poorer families into childcare compounded the idea that parents were ill-equipped to care for and socialise children in their all-important “early years”. The decision to have children was framed as an individualised act of careful self-actualisation, to be done only when one’s career and finances allowed it; and when the reality of “juggling” work and home could plausibly act as its own contraceptive. Childbearing became more of a choice than ever before, but one that was heavily hedged by the weight of that decision.

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The policy mentality that prevailed through the New Labour years is summed up by David Blunkett, the former home secretary who is one of the few voices still defending the spirit of the two-child benefit cap. Referring to an article he wrote in 2001, in which he cautioned people not to “see the Government as an ATM machine”, Lord Blunkett recently told The Telegraph:

“It’s a combination of government support and personal responsibility. So if things go wrong, and you have more than two children, then we need to help. But we also need people to think seriously — can I, at this moment, afford a third, fourth or fifth child? We need to help, but we need people to also accept some level of responsibility themselves.”

When New Labour finally left the building, the coalition and Conservative governments picked up the reins of the individualised family policy logic: only with less cash to go round. Mothers on benefits weren’t just “supported” into work: they were explicitly “unsupported” if they had more than two children. Middle-class parents had their own version of the cap, with the (equally misguided) introduction of means-testing to Child Benefit. If one parent earned more than £50,000 per year, the once-universal child benefit payment would be reduced: so while a dual-earning couple could bring home just under £100,000 and have the full benefit, a breadwinner earning £51,000 would receive less. Any pretensions the Conservatives might have had to be the party of the traditional family quickly withered.

What we are left with now is a policy framework that, whether explicitly or implicitly, penalises people of all social classes for having children. This is deeply ironic given the economic anxieties about the affordability of welfare provision in a time of sustained low birthrates, where it has been suggested that Britons may need to work until their early seventies in order for anybody to be able to retire. But a bigger problem is what this says about the value society places on its own reproduction and renewal.

As pronatalists have learned over history, policy cannot directly encourage people to have more children than they want — and nor should it try. But policy can help families with some of the practical, material pressures that come with procreation, and transmit a positive message about why kids are good for us all. If we don’t support people to have the children they want, we can scarcely blame them for not having the children we need.