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It’s one of the great, unspoken ironies of modern British politics: the very people howling the loudest about immigration are the ones whose cherished economic ideology made it absolutely necessary.

If you’re furious that the UK “has to import foreign labour,” don’t blame migrants — blame neoliberalism.

This isn’t about some sudden loss of cultural values or personal “lifestyle choices.”

The reason people aren’t having kids isn’t because they’ve all decided to spend their lives on TikTok, nor because women have all turned into career-obsessed “cat ladies.”

The truth is far more structural and far more damning.

According to a July 2025 study from the Institute of Labour Economics entitled An Economic Theory of Sexual Exchanges and Human Capital, declining fertility isn’t random — it’s the predictable result of economic conditions that make stable relationships, intimacy, and childbearing harder, riskier, and less rewarding.

And what’s the biggest driver? Economic insecurity — the kind that has been deliberately manufactured by four decades of neoliberal economic policy.

You can’t have babies if you can’t afford a flat

The UK’s birth rate is collapsing, and it’s no wonder.

Decades of privatisation, deregulation, austerity, and wage suppression have made life unliveable for millions.

Real wages are stagnant.

Housing is unaffordable.

Energy bills are extortionate.

Childcare costs rival a second rent.

The NHS is drowning, with more than seven million people on waiting lists.

What kind of psychopath would look at this situation and say, “Yes, now’s the perfect time to bring a child into the world”?

If you don’t know where you’ll be living next year; if your employment contract ends in six months; if you can’t get a GP appointment or afford a dental check-up, it’s not just parenthood that feels out of reach — it’s intimacy itself.

Stress, anxiety, and economic pressure kill relationships.

They kill libido.

They literally make it difficult for people to have sex.

Let’s get a little more involved…

According to the research, sex, intimacy, and fertility are shaped by rational economic decisions.

It suggests that sexual behaviour and fertility as outcomes of time allocation between:

• Paid work (including sex work),

• Paid sex,

• Unpaid sex (e.g., in stable relationships),

• and consumption.

These decisions depend on:

• • Income and wealth,

  • Wage opportunities,

  • Gender norms,

  • Relational (social/emotional) skills,

  • Technological shifts (e.g., digital sex),

  • and social stigma.

Digital platforms have lowered the cost (emotional, logistical, reputational) of accessing sexual gratification through virtual means.

This leads to less investment in unpaid intimacy – meaning less sex in stable relationships, and this in turn means fewer children

These changes are not biological or moral — they’re economic reallocations of time and effort.

Moving on from this, we find that income and job security determine whether people seek or sell sex.

People with low income or unstable jobs are more likely to sell sex (especially women in gendered labour markets).

Those with higher income are more likely to buy sex, especially in places with lower prices (e.g. sex tourism).

This implies that inequality, job precarity, and economic shocks reshape sexual markets.

So relational skills — essential for what the research calls unpaid intimacy — are eroding.

Economic and technological conditions (social media, working from home, pandemic effects) have reduced opportunities to develop “relational skills”.

This reduces people’s ability to form and maintain relationships, especially unpaid ones like marriage.

Result: even when people want stable relationships, they’re less able to find and keep them — leading to declining fertility.

People aren’t choosing not to have kids — they’ve been economically cornered

This new research confirms what many have suspected: fertility rates are dropping not because people won’t, but because they can’t.

And what little sexual activity does happen often doesn’t lead to babies — because it’s casual, unstable, or fully decoupled from long-term plans.

Why? Because those plans no longer feel viable.

The same economic squeeze that turns people into overworked, underpaid renters has made traditional family structures harder to achieve.

Neoliberalism devalued human stability and rewarded financial speculation.

It’s no surprise that fewer people want, or can afford, to build families in such a climate.

The great replacement… by market forces

Here’s the kicker: the very system that destroyed the birth rate now depends on immigrants to keep the economy running.

The Right loves to push paranoid fantasies about a “great replacement,” but the reality is far simpler and more damning: the UK is importing labour because successive neoliberal governments gutted the conditions that once made domestic population growth possible.

You want fruit picked, care homes staffed, lorries driven, NHS wards run?

Someone has to do it — and since the country has made it nearly impossible for native-born Brits to afford kids, that someone increasingly comes from abroad.

And what do the right-wing press blame for this?

Not the policies that created a precarious, over-financialised economy.

Not the parties that underfunded the NHS, gutted housing, and slashed social safety nets.

No — they blame migrant workers.

They blame the very people who are propping up the system that neoliberalism broke.

Neoliberalism’s dead end

This is the final absurdity of the neoliberal project: it dismantled the social contract, drove birth rates into the floor, made stable families a luxury, and now blames outsiders for the predictable consequences of its own success.

It’s a death spiral of hypocrisy.

The solution is not more racism, more nationalism, or more “incentives” to get people breeding.

The solution is to undo the economic model that’s brought us here.

• Guarantee secure, affordable housing.

• Fund public services properly.

• Provide free or low-cost childcare.

• Raise wages.

• Give people enough certainty and hope that the future seems worth investing in.

If we don’t, the UK will continue to rely on immigration — and frankly, that’s not a bad thing.

What is bad is demonising the very people we need, while refusing to fix the system that made them necessary.

So the next time you hear a right-wing pundit complain about immigrants “taking over,” remind them who hollowed out this country in the first place.

It wasn’t immigrants.

It was neoliberalism.

And if they still don’t get it, perhaps they should ask themselves why the economy is bursting with zero-hours contracts — but not with babies.

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