Britain's fertility crisis -we need to get serious before it's too late Thoughts on the scale of the problem and possible solutions MATT GOODWIN NOV 26

Here are two shocking facts about Britain’s population that you might have missed in recent weeks.

The first is that deaths now outnumber births. For the first time in half a century, there are more funerals than baby celebrations.

The second is that our nation’s fertility rate has now plunged to 1.44, which is the lowest since records began, in 1938.

A fertility rate of 1.44 is well below what is called the ‘replacement rate’, of 2.1, which is needed for a population to replace itself.

And this decline, unless we change direction, will only accelerate. One study forecasts that the fertility rate will slump to 1.3 by the end of this century. Our population is ageing and shrinking.

Although the UK does not gather fertility rate by ethnicity, we also know that women born in the UK have ‘half a child’ less than those born outside.

Our majority community could be close to halving every generation, which will radically transform our country.

This isn’t just a problem for the UK.

Too few children are being born in countries as different as Jamaica and China, Germany and Thailand.

But in Britain, our hapless political leaders on both the Left and Right have long lulled people into a sense of false security, claiming that we can continue underproducing the next generation and resolve the shortage of people through mass immigration.

But as demographer Paul Morland points out in his recent book No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children, this is a hiding to nothing. Why?

Because, firstly, immigrants grow old and their fertility rate declines, so we need more and more people to support an ever ageing society, creating a vast Ponzi scheme.

This approach is pushing many Western states into a ‘population trap’, whereby the sheer scale and size of their population change is now outpacing the capacity of the state to provide basic public services, like healthcare, housing, safe streets, and so on.

Second, countries that have traditionally been poorer than the UK and with higher fertility rates – such as Ireland and Poland – have got rapidly richer and seen their fertility rates plunge, so there’s no longer an available surplus population for them to send, nor much of an economic motive for them to come.

The remaining countries which do have high birth rates, meanwhile, are increasingly places which have lower levels of education, lower rates of economic productivity, and completely different cultures which have not produced prosperous and cohesive nations. Quite the opposite.

Which is why bringing people from these nations to Britain in ever-growing numbers not only risks eroding our social cohesion, which we see reflected in the worrying rise of sectarianism, segregation along religious and racial lines, Islamist terror, and record low levels of public trust, but is also economically counterproductive.

As I’ve pointed out, contrary to what you’re told by the elite class mass immigration is not driving prosperity -it’s undermining prosperity by flooding our economy with low-skill, low-wage migrants from outside Europe who are not only take more out of the collective pot than they put in but come from entirely different cultures, pushing us into a low-trust, segregated, conflict-ridden society.

If mass immigration is so good for the economy then ask yourself a question: why has our ‘GDP-per-capita’, which measures the average value of output per person in an economy, more than halved since 2008, falling to the lowest levels since the 1990s?

And if mass immigration is so beneficial then why, two decades on from when it started, are we still locked in a low-growth, high debt, unproductive economy?

To top it all, most people coming to this country are not coming because we have decided we need them to plug a gap in the labour force. Most are asylum seekers, relatives of immigrants, or people claiming to be students.