Breeding for Britain

According to a recent article in the Sun on Sunday, an unnamed Tory minister is of the view that ‘we need to have more children. The rate keeps falling. Look at Hungary – they cut taxes for mothers who have more children.’ As Zoe Williams pointed out in the Guardian, the article appeared on the same day that Nadhim Zahawi (then the Cabinet Office minister, now the Tory party chairman) and Suella Braverman (then and now the home secretary) had discussed a plan to tackle ‘bad migration’ by capping the number of children foreign students can bring to the UK.

The phrase ‘bad immigration’ crops up perennially in Parliament. In 1937, in a debate over the extension of the 1922 Empire Settlement Bill, which aimed to increase the presence of Britons in territories of the British Empire, William Mabane, the Liberal MP for Huddersfield, declared:

I am satisfied that the facts about the Dominions are so good that, if they are told accurately, not fewer but more people would be attracted to migration, and more of the right kind of person...