Reform wants women barefoot and pregnant

Didn’t Reform vote against lifting the 2 child benefit cap? But want people to have kids.

That's not a real interview is it?

On behalf of Reform

i don’t believe the benefits system is an incentive for people to have children. If it was, we wouldn’t have a declining birth rate, would we? Yes there’s the odd person, but we can all find a singular example to prove any point.

I don’t see how this furthers your argument for tax breaks at all. All evidence from other countries shows it has minimal effect.

Exactly but for those who would want one now & can’t afford it because they’re trying to be responsible & for those who may want another. However, it’s not enough to encourage women who don’t want to have a baby to have one they tax break would only make things slightly financially better. I think it’s really telling that this incentive has caused some outage in some people whilst the biggest incentive to whack out kids you don’t want is already in play. Benefits of non working parents. I grew up on an estate where my peer group who have multiple kids and they have never worked a day in their life. If that’s not a policy that shackles women to the patriarchy and promotes dependency and lack of options. My old school friends have openly admitted that child 3 onwards have been a financial decision opposed to wanting one. Yet a policy to encourage those who don’t choose to work and want a family, that’s somehow akin to a handsmaid dystopian system.

I think that its "you lot/people like you" (as you put it to me & others) are the very people who put a "Value/Worth" on people in the 1920s, that led to such atrocities in Nazi Germany.

You may be well meaning, but placing a value on people, is how the Nazi's began, they didn't begin with a Gas Chamber.

it’s a worry there may not be enough people around

Why do we need to pay more to get women here to give birth when we can welcome a fully grown healthy adult?

There is going to be a plentiful supply of people on the planet for a long, long time yet while life expectancy continues to rise in poorer countries.

There doesn't look like any end to the number of people fleeing war coming any time soon, before we even start on the displacements that will be caused by climate change.

I think we’re agreeing. Under NL there was massive investment in children and families. Much of which was cut during austerity and much more has fallen away since the theoretical end of austerity. Bring it back, is my point.

Where is this evidence. Child poverty fell with the introduction of free nursery hours, working family tax credits and sure start under the Blair government of the noughties. You know what those children still have better outcomes today and the birth rate climbed. Please show me the evidence these pro family policies made no difference.

I’ve repeated numerous times I didn’t mean the value of a physical life. We were talking about the perceived unfairness of parents getting a tax break. Which I said there isn’t one because being a parent is neither easy or cheap. That if there is a future problem then the value of working parents is of more importance. In this SPECIFIC scenario. as we were talking about this specific tax break and why it’s being discussed.

people thinking it unfair because either they don’t kids or can’t have them. Either way that’s not a reason to not try & encourage those that can and will have children

the whole disabled discussion was used as a whataboutery. Which I debunked straightaway by those saying it. And people like you devaluing the atrocities of what happened by the nazis. I actually said these future kids will be needed to take care of vulnerable people & it’s a worry there may not be enough people around to do so. So straight back all of you who think me saying potential parents are inportant because if I apply the same logic you lot do, you must by default think it’s acceptable for the vulnerable to be left to fend for themselves when there’s not enough people to either pay or care for them. Not every vulnerable person is cared for by a loving family member.

Generally speaking, there’s a strong correlation between an educated female population and a decline in the number of births per woman. That’s why campaigns in developing countries often focus on educating girls. So how do you reverse that in OECD countries? Well reduce the level of education accessible to women, make contraception a dirty word, make it so women who don’t have children or have a small number feel inadequate. Essentially, remove women’s choice. That’s what you’re advocating? Are you sure?

I agree, the personal cost of having children is difficult for the rest of us to mitigate. Which is why people who don’t want them, won’t have them, no matter what financial incentives are offered. And the small group that do have them just for the financial incentives will be rubbish parents, because they didn’t want kids, and the rest of us will have to pick up the pieces.

What financial incentives would encourage you to have a child you didn’t want?

We're globally going towards a population collapse. Politics is waking up to that, in many countries. The current system isn't sustainable.

Either healthcare and retirement funds collapse because there aren't enough workers to feed money into the system, or we get people to have more kids. (Doesn't work that way, pressure of any kind is what makes women have fewer kids, but anyway they're going to try pressuring people anyways because pressuring people into doing anything really is what we've been doing for a few decades now.)

You said this about women who have children.

Because your value is more. I’m sorry but it is. You’re providing the future workforce who will be paying your state pension, potentially your additional care. Paying for the NHS

Thats putting monitory value on women and children, more kids = more value & its the children who will pay for these things you mention via taxes, so the more you earn, the more tax, the higher the value on the individual.

Conversely, the carer & the disabled child have limited or no monitory value, in fact both can, under you definition, be considered "takers".

This is exactly what the Nazi's started with, the Insane, the Disabled, these were the first to be killed, they were treated as worthless.

People should not be monetised like this.

No I didn’t. I did not say that.

Accept this is anecdotal but the people i know who don't want children are those who are quite well off.

It is the restrictions they feel children will cause & the world they are bringing them into which is the block.

TBH i only had one for these reasons too.

The less well off, seem to still want children, probably because children or not, they still wont be buying a house, having city breaks and 3 week foreign holidays.

You do that by making housing and childcare affordable.

Most of the contributors to the latter stage of this discussion write as if they are completely unaware of the millions of adults who will willingly come here to make good any population decrease caused by women choosing not to have children.

The only good reason to have children is if you want them.

The only reason to encourage women already here to have more children if they don't have a strong desire to have them, but are essentially bribed to have them, is to protect the current cultural mix, which is very strongly Nationalist if not outright racist.

Thats exactly what you've insinuated, in fact you stated it!

Children, in your opinion, carry economic worth, the accountant, paying more tax, is worth more, the disabled child, is worth nothing.

What you’re missing here is this is not about improving outcomes for children, which is obviously a great thing.

It’s about getting more children to be born in the first place. The key to that is not improving outcomes for parents.

Why would someone choose to have children, potentially tank their career, have to take a lifelong lower salary, work through pregnancy, then have to put their children in full time nursery to be looked after by someone else, go back into work they probably aren’t as motivated to that just takes away from time with the children they’ve just had?

Why would anyone do that?
What does improving outcomes for children have to do with someone deciding whether they want to be a new mother struggling to cope with sleep, a baby, potentially breastfeeding or then also being in work, pumping, watching someone else raise their children and all the risks that entails.

Where on the flip side you can enjoy a higher disposable income, none of the sleep issues, none of the separation anxiety, none of the childcare costs, none of the need for bigger houses or cars and go out whenever you feel like it, on holiday for a fraction of the cost if you just don’t have children.

These are the individual decisions we need to incentivise more in favour of people choosing to have children.

But having better public services doesn’t incentivise people to have more children. There are already astronomically better public services now than there were 100 years ago. And yet people are having fewer children.

You need to incentivise having children.

’The left’, is characterised economically by higher taxes and wealth redistribution yes, but not by random measures like how many live births you’ve had.

Personally I think we should all pay more tax and that the state should invest in better public services for all. The evidence on giving families tax breaks is that poorer families still don’t do much better, whereas better public services - eg education, green space, healthcare - improves outcomes for children in all income brackets (which is good for us all). So if we really care about children, and future proofing the nation, let’s lobby for better investment in public services, rather than tax breaks for big families.

This is bang on the money and encapsulates why as a sick/disabled person I'm finding the current trajectory extremely concerning and frightening. And I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

I don't think those that see merit in discussing future fertility imagine there to be a "worth" to a particular child and their future tax revenue. That will happen the same as it does today, some earn more and contribute more tax. Members of society will contribute different amounts of tax and everyone contributes in their own way, but it isn't all financial - it is family, freindships, communities, support, inventions, music, literature etc etc.

We are talking about future society.

I find it odd that people on the left are so determined they wouldn't pay potentially more tax (in fact for the purpose of this discussion it's a benefit really) as being supportive of society. Surely that is what the left is meant to be about in theory, maybe not reality as is apparent from some of the input on this thread.

I also find this Labour's government extreme push for the suicide bill extremely concerning and would expect there to have been a push for better palliative state suported care. Labour seem to in fact be everything they accuse others of.

Rewarding people having children with lower income tax is not the same as penalising people who don’t. Our entire society is rewards based.

You get a better paying job, you get better pay. Is you getting a better paying job penalising other people on lower paying jobs because they didn’t also get that pay?

I don’t think so, but if you wanted to you could see everything in that way.

Offering lower income tax to people having and raising children is not the same as penalising people for not having children. It’s an incentive.