Nativism: The real reason behind the right’s newfound concern for child poverty

Nigel Farage’s recent declaration that he would support an end to the two-child benefit cap came as a surprise to many, including myself. Understanding what is going on begins with a provocative headline in the Telegraph this week, declaring that white British people will be a minority within 40 years. The claim is based on projections of migration, birth, and death rates suggesting the white British population, currently 73 percent, will fall to 57 percent by 2050 and below 50 percent by 2063.

The research came from Professor Matt Goodwin, a right-wing commentator, GB News presenter, and author critical of what he calls Britain’s “woke elite.” In his report, Goodwin said the findings are bound to spark “anxiety, concern and political opposition” among voters who want to reduce immigration and preserve “the symbols, traditions, culture and ways of life” of the traditional majority. He even referenced Keir Starmer’s recent warning that Britain risks becoming “an island of strangers.”

Amid a climate of racial anxiety stoked by right-wing academics, politicians, and media circles, and with Labour drifting ever more rightward, Reform is pushing even further, paradoxically adopting policies historically linked to the left. Most notably, it supports scrapping the two-child benefit cap, a move that could lift 350,000 children out of poverty and ease hardship for 700,000 more. It also proposes increased tax breaks for married couples, aimed at supporting family growth.

But this isn’t about endorsing a “benefits culture,” as Nigel Farage made clear at a recent event. Rather, he framed it as a response to the financial pressures faced by low-income families.

Fair enough, perhaps. After all, research shows nearly a third of UK women aged 25 – 45 who want children haven’t had them due to financial constraints. Birth rates are indeed plummeting. In 2023, the fertility rate in England and Wales hit its lowest point since records began in 1939.

But financial strain isn’t the only factor. Research also shows that a lack of flexible working options has pushed more than half of women to leave, or consider leaving, their jobs. If Farage was genuinely committed to supporting working families and encouraging people to start families, he might reconsider his opposition to policies that materially benefit women, like remote work, flexible hours, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Instead, these are the very policies he routinely dismisses, even though they address the structural barriers that stop many from having children in the first place.

As always, Farage’s apparent gestures of generosity come with ideological strings attached. The benefits that Reform champions are largely reserved for those who conform to the right’s ideal of the ‘traditional family,’ that is married, heterosexual, and supportive of conservative values. It recalls JD Vance’s infamous 2021 proposal: give votes to children, but let their parents cast them, on the premise that childless adults have less stake in the nation’s future.

And those who don’t conform to this narrow vision, i.e., single parents, LGBTQ+ families, or those embracing what Farage has dismissed as “poisonous trans ideology,” are more likely excluded.

The rescinding of abortion rights

This narrow vision of ‘family values’ also manifests in the right’s renewed attacks on abortion rights. In the same speech when he pledged to scrap the two-child benefit policy, the Reform leader, who claims to be ‘pro-choice,’ dismissed plans to decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks as “utterly ludicrous.”

His rhetoric echoes the regressive tide sweeping across the US, where abortion rights are being stripped away. Just this week, the Trump administration rescinded Biden-era guidance clarifying that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients facing medical emergencies.

The guidance, grounded in the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), requires hospitals to stabilise patients in crisis. But states like Idaho and Texas claim the Biden administration guidance interpreted Emtala incorrectly. Abortion rights supporters warn that revoking the guidance will sow confusion in hospitals and put pregnant patients’ lives at risk.

And the American right’s hostility to reproductive rights doesn’t stop at its borders.

JD Vance (yes him again) appears increasingly fixated on Britain’s abortion laws. During a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, the US Vice President criticised the UK and Scottish governments for restricting protests outside abortion clinics. According to an investigation by the dark money and hidden influence investigators Democracy for Sale, US anti-abortion activists are backing up this rebuke with financial donations in the UK.

Among the recipients is none other than the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by Tory peer Toby Young. The FSU, which opposes buffer zone legislation around UK abortion clinics, received $97,930 from a US-based charity run by anti-abortion lawyer Zachary Kester.

Kester is general counsel to Students for Life, a campus organisation whose mission is to “recruit, train and mobilise the pro-life generation to abolish abortion.” Its president recently declared that “with President Trump back in office, pro-life Americans can rest easier.”

Democracy for Sale notes that, in response to its findings, British politicians and campaigners have warned of the “obvious danger” of importing “America’s toxic far-right politics” into the UK.

Reeks of nationalism

But then intervening into the reproductive rights of women is perhaps not even the worse part. Reform’s proposal to lift the two-child benefit cap reeks of nationalism. It’s designed specifically to help British families, not, as Farage put it, those who come to the UK and “suddenly decide to have a lot of children.”
Behind a thinly disguised veil of compassion, it’s about demonising migrants, implying that they are opportunists gaming the system. It’s a tactic Farage and his far-right counterparts have relied on time and again: stoking fear of the ‘other’ while cloaking their agenda in concern for ‘ordinary people.’

There’s a disturbing echo of Nazi ideology in all this. Hitler famously promoted the idea of a stable, traditional family as a tool to grow a ‘racially pure’ population. Historian Richard Evans noted in The Third Reich in Power, the Nazis believed the “strong and the racially pure had to be encouraged to have more children, the weak and the racially impure had to be neutralised by one means or another.”

In 1933, the Nazis launched a “marriage loan” programme. It offered interest-free loans to couples who could prove their Aryan heritage, on the condition that the wife left her job. A quarter of the loan was forgiven for each child they had, effectively rewarding reproduction among “racially suitable” families while pushing women out of the workforce.

If politicians today tie family support to rigid definitions of marriage, heritage, or traditional roles, while rejecting inclusive policies for women and minorities, the Nazi resonance is hard to ignore.

The belief that society should encourage large families, known as ‘natalism’, is a defining feature of far-right movements around the world.

In the US, the Trump administration is reportedly considering various pronatalist policies to persuade more Americans to get married and have children, including giving a $5,000 cash ‘baby bonus’ to every American mother after delivery. And, disturbingly, there are calls for the government to fund programmes that educate women on their menstrual cycles, so they can better understand when they are ovulating and are able to conceive.

‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory

Trump has also cited the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which suggests elites are deliberately replacing native, white Europeans, with immigrants. There is, unsurprisingly, no evidence supporting the claim. The Southern Poverty Law Centre has described it as “racist” and “inherently white supremacist.”

In Italy, the far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has promised to defend her country’s Christian identity by increasing the birth rate, has often invoked the Great Replacement theory. Meloni even appointed an anti-abortion minister for family and has attended at rallies promoting the national goals of 500,000 births per year. 

Unsurprisingly, it’s the same in Hungary, where Viktor Orban’s far-right, increasingly undemocratic government, grants lifetime tax exemptions to women who have four or more children.

In February, Nigel Farage spread the same far-right conspiracy theory at a farmers’ rally. Speaking at the event, he claimed the Labour government had a “sinister agenda” to obtain “lots of land because they’re planning for another five million people to come into the country.”

The remarks echoed those of television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who wrote in the Sun that he was “convinced” that Labour had “a sinister plan” to “ethnically cleanse the countryside of farmers” to make room for “immigrants and net-zero wind farms.” 

Author Sian Norris, who investigates the UK’s anti-abortion movement, recently went undercover to a Reform rally in Birmingham to observe the party’s messaging firsthand.  “Benefits themselves aren’t really a motivating issue for Reform voters,” she noted. Norris described how Farage’s primary concern being demographical is a “classic tactic” from the far right when it comes to natalist policies.

“Orbán is the European politician that really normalised great replacement conspiracy theory. He was the one that would go to conferences and talk about replacement, talk about demographics. He would say that if you wanted a Christian Hungary and a Christian Europe, the way to do this was to incentivise ethnic Hungarian married women to have more children,” she said. “And, we know that Farage is really influenced by the kind of Orban, US conservatism movement.”

What masquerades as compassion is really a politics of exclusion, rooted in fear, not solidarity. There are snippets of hope, however. Pope Leo XIV is the first modern immigrant pope. And he’s not afraid to affirm his identity. “My own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who in turn chose to emigrate,” Leo said in his first address to world diplomats. 

Pope Leo’s immigrant identity makes him a “timely symbol,” as described by Mexican journalist Leon Krauze in the Washington Post. “In an era marked by the rise of nativism, racism and contempt for migrants, encouraged at the highest levels of power by such figures as Trump,” continued Krauze, “the election of a pope who has consistently defended the dignity of migrants is no small matter.”

Overall, then, what we have just witnessed is a classic piece of Faragism: take a piece of right-wing pseudo-scientific nonsense generated in a social context utterly unlike our own, usually the US; render it respectable by dressing it in different clothes; present it as common sense; and deliver it in a ‘aren’t I a cheeky chappie’ style. Despite the opinion polls, there might just be the faintest scent on the wind that it’s a schtick that some voters are beginning to tire of. Or perhaps that is just wishful thinking.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

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