As with any party leader not in power, Nigel Farage believes he holds all the remedies to the ills of British society. According to a recent YouGov poll, roughly 87% of Britons agree with the Reform leader that the running of the country would improve under a Farage-led government.
If Farage ever finds his way to Number 10, his first port of call would be immigration, wasting no time enacting the policies that he has centred his campaign around.
So far, he has promised to freeze non-essential immigration, secure the borders, and more recently, pledged to abolish the main route for immigrants to claim citizenship. The latter would leave an estimated 800,000 at risk of deportation.
The Reform leader, however, neglects to address how an immigration crackdown will affect the declining UK birth rate. An area of concern not just for him, but for the Western world at large.
The birth rate is a curious issue, as its worst effects have not been realised. Even so, it is widely established that a declining birth rate could significantly reduce the working population, access to public services, and the provision of informal care.
In his party’s manifesto, Farage outlines pro-natalist policies similar to those used by Prime Minister Orban in Hungary and President Macron in France. For Reform, these include abolishing the two-child benefit cap and allowing the first £25,000 earned by either spouse to be tax-free for married couples.
Despite the intentions of these policies, their results have been negligible when used elsewhere. The sole solution that appears to have provided a payoff to date is increased immigration, this would obviously remain off-limits for Farage.
The increased levels of immigration in the UK over the last ten years have masked a considerable decline in the birth rate of the non-immigrant population. In 2024, 33.9% of births were to mothers not born in the UK.
According to the latest available data from the Office for National Statistics in 2021, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for foreign-born women was 2.03, compared to 1.5 for UK-born women. The TFR measures how many children a woman of child-bearing age would expect to have in her lifetime.
This figure reached a record low for all of England and Wales in 2024 at 1.41, well below the 2.1 figure required to keep a population stable.
The Reform leader should look to Japan for an analysis on the birth rate issue.
As of 2023, Japan’s TFR had reached a low of 1.2. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the country was on the brink of being unable to function as a society if the birth rate problem was not addressed. In the same year, the think tank Recruit Works Institute estimated that Japan would face a shortage of more than 11 million workers by 2040 if the birth rate remained at the current level.
This declaration of the gravity of the situation was promptly followed by the relaxation of certain visa and work-permit requirements, reforms that have seen Japan’s immigrant population surge. However, the country is still far from the 7 million foreign workers needed by 2040.
Multiple Japanese governments have attempted a myriad of methods to increase the birth rate. These included birth bonuses, subsidising healthcare, and entitling both mothers and fathers to paid leave, yet nothing could halt the decline. The government were left with one option, increase immigration.
Reform and their line of proposed immigration policies would collide head-on with the demographic changes facing the UK and other developed nations. If the country envisioned by Reform were to follow the path of Japan in the years leading up to 2023, it could face a future of labour shortages and worsening economic stagnation. The low birth rate could develop into a critical problem, one which it appears only high levels of controlled immigration can mitigate.