Reform wants women barefoot and pregnant

The reality is that whilst most inhabitants in the UK are having less children than they did a couple of decades ago, immigrants continue to have more children, due in part to not supporting contraception, and also cultural preferences, hence the increasing population figures.

Not if my DDs are forced to breed when they don't want to.

If a candidate talks shite and contradicts the party's stance, they usually don't last long in any party. But something tells me he won't get reprimanded because that IS the agenda.

Degrowth is antihuman and will only lead to mass poverty and death. It will lead to a graveyard for humanity.

I believe we should embrace abundance and prosperity, instead.

Give over. A candidate gives his opinion. It doesn’t represent the policies and manifesto of the Reform party. Just a personal opinion. If we’re going down that road fgs, there’s many in the Labour Party who hold controversial views which don’t align with the Labour party’s published manifesto. That’s why Starmer can’t get many of his proposals through the party vote. Same with most parties.

Well, yes, because if you're going to have a large family, you better start young.

They bloody well should vote themselves out of the gene pool.

Yes Reform want to keep the 2 cap limit so that they can afford a 5p reduction in the price of a pint because beer before children!

I agree. It's a foolish thing to keep chasing. So many other things are missed in chasing (often fake) figures of economic growth and damaging the planet in the process.

It's clear to me that this decade is going to be the decade of "backlash" against women and our rights. Messages like Reform's are happening across the developed world. In the USA Vice President JD Vance said a few years ago that childless couples should not have the right to vote. In South Korea male politicians are extremely hateful towards women for not having children and are publicly making it their political platform to get women out of the workplace.

I fear for the equality of women in the near future. In the USA there are christian groups arguing for school lessons encouraging female students to marry quickly after high school and have babies because they can go to college later (meaning never...), they also argue against women going to college at all now.

It wasn't a coincidence that Trump's Education Department suddenly downgraded the professional status of nursing degrees last year, leading to a reduced cap on student aid and government loans to study nursing. The vast majority of nurses in the USA are women and it's long been recognised as a pathway to female financial independence as nurses can make decent money (some of my friends are earning 6 figures.)

Then there was the SAVE Act that just passed, now women who took their husband's names at marriage have to provide a government federal ID document that matches their married name so birth certificates are no longer valid, if they don't have a passport (less than 50% of Americans do), they have to scramble together a bunch of documents to prove their identity. The Act doesn't make it clear that a wedding certificate suffices to prove change of name, a curious oversight or not perhaps...

The EEOC (Equal Employment and Oppourtunits Commission) has been gutted by Trump so women have an even harder time reporting workplace discrimination. Then we have abortion.... we know what's happening there and now attacks against contraception. To cap it all off, a growing movement to end no-fault divorce.

In the mindset of right-wing religious types, women's equality is a disaster and is the cause of "white genocide." And now they're in power in the USA (and in the Supreme Court). It's going to get rougher for women.

Surely this will mean men who vote Reform are even less attractive to women?

France, Belgium, probably lots of other countries.
It's the same principle Blair had with the working families' tax credits.

I don’t understand how we’re supposed to accommodate all the the new babies and migrants we’ve brought into solve this population crisis. Do we just keep up the pyramid scheme?

Then paying additional taxes is a good way to contribute, is it not?

Like I feel bad if you wanted a family and it’s not on the cards for any number of reasons. But it’s not a reason to hold back on these sorts of policies, imo.

To clarify, do you mean population degrowth or economic degrowth or both?

I feel like it needs to be laid out to the public. Almost referendum style. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle - we now have the ability to keep lots of people alive to their 90s, in varying degrees of health. 1 in 2 babies born in 2020 can expect to live to at least 90. Funding people retiring in their late 60s or early 70s for 20 plus years is a huge financial commitment, even forgetting the cost of additional health and social care requirements on top of that. Assuming we don’t want to go backwards and let the elderly die of treatable conditions or unmet care needs, we need to work out how we fund it. The options seem to be 1) increasing taxation of working age people 2) creating more working people who all pay less tax, either by increasing the birth rate or mass immigration, 3) increase retirement age and/or 4) reduce the state pension. None of those options are perfect and will face lots of backlash, but we are rapidly speeding towards needing to pick at least one.

GDP is a perfidious metric. The billionaire broligarchy is the only demographic that benefits from it while the rest of the biosphere slowly chokes to death.

Yes, that was certainly true of Germany when I lived and worked there in the late 90's/early 2000s.

ETA it was framed more that you paid the same tax but got less of a rebate if you were single, childless and didn't use public transport or a car to get to work!

As I keep saying, if you want to know where that comes from, look up the Heritage Foundations. It's the ideology behind MAGA and it has imperialistic ambitions. It's all about Christian (white supremacist) nationalism. There is a perverse logic to all this: they're anti-immigration (non-white) and think the only way to address the looming demographic crisis is to turn women into breeders whether they like it or not. Can't have them educated (because there's a direct correlation between education levels and number of kids), can't have them vote, certainly can't have them single... Those people disgust me beyond words. I have a 19 yr old DD. I will fight them to my dying breath.

What about the looming climate crisis? We need to be working towards degrowth.

Reform are misogynistic arseholes, they want to peer pressure women (and girls) into having children early rather than giving women who want children the opportunity to have them earlier. Quite frankly one of the reasons I didn't have kids till my mid 30s was because it took till our 30s to buy a house, have a liveable wage in our careers and longer to build up our savings so I could have a year of maternity leave including 3 months unpaid and 3 months stat maternity pay.

Reform have no plans to make housing cheaper, minimum wage to cover cost of living, parental leave to be more generous and early years childcare to be more affordable. These are all things that would probably help those who want children to be able to manage earlier. However their plans are to just subjugate women and make life for women culturally conservative. (Something they claim to dislike in the Muslim community)

These are all Trump’s authoritarian, paternalistic, and misogynist ideas. Women don’t have to do anything we don’t fucking want to do, and that includes taking seriously the pontifications of some headbanger from the Temu Republican party.

The only thing YABU about is expecting Matt Godwin, the Professor (how?!) to have anything but abhorrent views on most subjects. To me, he comes across as rather stupid, aggressive bigot. Happy to listen to anyone who has heard him say anything sensible if anyone has!

i had DS at 24. However he’s disabled and I became a single mum so they’d probably still hate me 🤣

Not that I’d ever consider voting for. Reform candidate. My local MP was bad enough as a Tory and has now defected 🙄

Lovely to have that time with your mum. My mum had me older and I was envious of my friends with younger mums. They all have their mothers still and these mums are active grandmother's. Mine has sadly passed and I miss her . Life has no guarantees but this has spurred me to have my children earlier. Enjoy your time with your lovely mum xx