For some, it will be a cause for celebration, for others, a portent of worse to come. The UK’s Office of National Statistics – Britain’s equivalent to the US Census Bureau – revealed this week that, for the first time since records began, a majority of babies were born out of wedlock in England and Wales in 2021. To be clear, the survey does not cover the entirety of the UK. However, as far back as 2008, most Scottish babies were born out wedlock, while in Northern Ireland – whose population is a small proportion of the UK’s – the rate was already 44 per cent in 2015. We can confidently say this milestone probably covers the entire UK, and includes mothers who were unmarried or not in a civil partnership.
Even among Western countries, the UK figures are eye-popping. In the US, the rate is around 40 per cent, where it has been since about 2008. In Germany, the figure was just 32.8 per cent in 2021, although Germany has suffered a long-term decline in fertility, which is only bolstered by its minorities. In France, however, the figure hovers around 60 per cent. This is likely a trend across western Europe and the Anglosphere, countries which have experienced long-term declines in fertility, religiosity, and traditional values, all of which are increasingly propped up by minorities.
Conservatives, particularly catholic ones, should find this alarming. Yet, as Melanie McDonagh writes in the Spectator: “The most troubling aspect about it is that we’re really not troubled. Time was, this situation would have raised uproar in the press. Politicians would have sounded off. And everyone would have asked what the established church was doing about it. Now, well, how many MPs are even talking about it? What about the Archbishop of Canterbury, poor thing? But the situation is the inevitable consequence of the decline of marriage.”
Meanwhile, McDonagh writes, “there remains only the mildest incentive to get married in the tax system”, not to mention the cost of weddings. Yet, “the real problem with how relaxed we are about the decline of marriage is that the outcome isn’t good for the most important players: the children. As the Centre for Social Justice points out in an excellent report by Cristina Odone called ‘Family Structure Still Matters’, even controlling for income and education, there are very different outcomes for children born to married and cohabiting couples; let alone single mothers.”
However, a contradiction exists. In countries like the UK and the US, those most likely to be concerned by this data are also politically conservative, believing in traditional values but also that the state should get the hell out of the way. Yet, this is where the Anglo-Saxon right may be in trouble. Evidence from countries like Hungary and Poland suggests it is the harnessing of the state which has enabled traditional values to flourish and conservative trends to occur. Indeed, according to Boris Kálnoky, writing in Spiked: “Historically, Western conservatives’ main weakness has been that they’re seen as socially insensitive, advocating a small state at the expense of those a larger, more interventionist state might be able to help.”
“This”, warned Kálnoky, “has ceded the ground of socially supportive state intervention to the left.” However, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán broke “with conservatism’s aversion to state intervention”. With a pick-and-mix attitude to the left and right, Hungarian state intervention has ensured that – since 2010 – the marriage rate has doubled, the abortion rate has halved, the fertility rate has risen by a quarter, and the divorce rate has hit a record low. Although, “the Hungarian government has lowered redistribution rates over the past 12 years, cutting unemployment benefits to a mere 90 days (instead of one year) and introducing a very low, flat-rate income tax”, Budapest “has pursued a highly interventionist social and economic policy.” According to Kálnoky: “This means that the Hungarian state is always willing to intervene, in a radical and massive way, to solve specific problems facing people.”
Could the Republicans in the US or the Tories in the UK ever embrace ideas such as Orbán’s “Family Protection Action Plan”, which includes waivers on income tax for women raising at least four children for the rest of their lives, subsidies for large families to buy cars, and loans to help families with at least two children buy homes? Every Hungarian woman under 40 is also eligible for a preferential loan when she gets married. Of course, countries in central and eastern Europe are more homogeneous than countries in western Europe and the English-speaking world, meaning they have more national cohesion, making such policies perhaps more widely accepted. Perhaps though change will come through the young, especially the youthful and Catholic-heavy ‘New Right’, which appear to sympathise with elements of Orbán’s philosophy.
As Sam Adler-Bell wrote in the New Republic: “The New Right wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps. Importantly, most of them are Catholic. The church has always had an allure for conservatives—with its strict rules, hierarchies, and status as an institution bestriding antiquity and modernity.” According to Adler-Bell, some on the New Right “support pro-family welfare policy and reject the GOP’s tax-cutting orthodoxy”, while “others are Roman Catholic integralists, aspiring to a theologically ordered politics”. The New Right flies in the face of mainstream conservatism, which it largely sees as having failed society, and at worst, having enabled social decline.
The news from the UK will alarm many on the right, but would ‘conservatives’ who simultaneously embrace traditional values while accepting the Thatcher-Reagan consensus on the state be willing to countenance the solutions on offer in central and eastern Europe, or among the Catholic-heavy New Right? Would this be practical given the lack of cohesion across the Anglosphere and western Europe? Whatever else, the UK has passed a milestone, quite possibly to be hit by other Western countries in the near future. As Christianity falters, individualism and materialism have filled the void. But perhaps another, more radical, set of ideas will emerge among young conservatives. A Catholic-infused ‘New Right’ could be the solution to the moral decline of a secular West.
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