Boris Johnson has sparked a fierce backlash by welcoming declining birth rates as “the best bit of global news in a long time,” arguing that a smaller global population will ease pressure on the planet — and dismissing concerns about workforce shortages as problems that artificial intelligence can solve.
Writing in the Daily Mail, the former Prime Minister made a characteristically contrarian case against what he called “doom-mongering” about falling fertility, framing the global baby bust not as a crisis to be managed but as a welcome correction after decades of rapid population growth. Since his own birth, Johnson noted, the world’s population had ballooned from roughly three billion to more than eight billion — a transformation he linked directly to environmental degradation, resource pressure and the disappearance of the emptier, quieter landscapes he remembered from his youth.
On the question of labour shortages, Johnson was dismissive of the conventional political response. Using migration to plug workforce gaps was “rubbish,” he wrote, arguing instead that productivity gains and advances in artificial intelligence made the case for demographic panic largely redundant. Smart policy, not endless population growth, was the answer to ageing societies and pension pressures.
The column cited sobering UK statistics to make his point. Fertility in Britain has fallen to approximately 1.42 children per woman — well below the 2.1 replacement rate — and official projections show deaths are on course to outnumber births by mid-2026 for the first time.
The response from the right was swift and, in some quarters, withering. Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf described Johnson as a “deranged sociopath” — a reaction that captured the sharp divide his column exposed between those who see sub-replacement fertility as an existential threat to national identity and economic sustainability, and those who view it through the lens of environmental pragmatism.
Critics also pointed to the obvious tensions in Johnson’s position. His own premiership oversaw some of the highest levels of net migration in British history, and the former Prime Minister is himself the father of a notably large number of children across multiple relationships — hardly the profile of a man leading by demographic example.
The column reflects a genuine fault line running through contemporary conservatism. Pro-natalists on the right argue that falling native birth rates, if left unaddressed, risk long-term economic stagnation, a hollowed-out welfare state and a fundamental shift in the country’s cultural character. Supporters of Johnson’s position counter that environmental sustainability, technological adaptation and quality of life matter more than raw population numbers, and that economic models built on the assumption of perpetual growth are themselves the problem.
The Daily Mail column is characteristic Johnson — deliberately provocative, intellectually playful and guaranteed to generate argument. Whether it represents pragmatic realism or dangerous complacency, as his critics put it, is a debate that is only going to intensify as Britain’s demographic trajectory becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
