‘The Children of Men’ is starting to look utopian

The reality of a low fertility society

An audio version of this piece is below the paywall (narrated by me).

The two most influential dystopian novels of the late twentieth century are both concerned with the same scenario: a sudden drop in fertility. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale – set in America in the early 2000s – imagines a world in which all but a small number of women are made infertile by some disaster. P. D. James’ 1996 The Children of Men – set in Britain in 2021 – imagines a world in which all men are made infertile by some other disaster. 

Both were written by women of British descent, both of them mothers, and both novels are preoccupied with Christian themes. Neither novelist could have known at the time of writing that birth rates in the rich world had begun their steady and seemingly inexorable decline. They both deserve credit for realising that it would be low fertility – rather than the feared ‘population bomb’ that had been the source of such anxiety in the 1960s and 1970s – that would come to dominate the politics of the near future. 

But, of the two, James’ vision has proved to be the more prescient, most likely because Atwood was not really thinking of the West when she invented her dystopia, but rather of the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9. Although the costumes from the TV adaptation have since become a favourite aesthetic theme among the anti-Trump ‘resistance’ in America, their overwrought warnings against Neo-Puritanism are hard to square with the impiousness of Donald Trump, and indeed an ever-growing proportion of the American population. Perhaps America could yet respond to falling fertility with a theocratic revolution, but thus far it shows no signs of doing so. 

Of course, our own fertility problems are a long way from the scenarios imagined by either Atwood or James. But we are also a long way from replacement fertility. The total fertility rate (TFR) in England and Wales dropped to 1.49 in 2022, the lowest on record, and some of our sub-populations have a TFR to rival South Korea’s. With the world’s lowest national TFR, South Korea is currently on track to produce between 4 and 7 great grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today, constituting a 93-96% reduction in population over the course of a century. No plague or war has ever achieved as much. The scenario in The Children of Men is not actually happening, but we’re not that far off. 

And many of the social phenomena that we are now seeing in low fertility cultures and sub-cultures are phenomena that James foresaw almost three decades ago. A detail that anyone who has read the novel will surely remember is the bizarre obsession that many of the people of 2020s Britain develop with their pets. Just as the dogs and cats of childless (or grandchildless) people today are given prams, clothes, and Instagram accounts, James’ characters treat animals – particularly kittens – as baby replacements. 

Some pets are even christened by half-mad Anglican vicars. The church’s rejection of orthodoxy in the face of a fertility disaster is another point on which James got it right. “During the mid-1990s,” the narrator tells us, “the recognised churches, particularly the Church of England, moved away from the theology of sin and redemption to a less uncompromising doctrine: corporate social responsibility coupled with a sentimental humanism.” Does that sound familiar? 

Like Mary Harrington, James also predicts that sex without the possibility of reproduction has a tendency to lose its attraction. Despite their attempts at adventure and innovation, her characters eventually lose interest in sex of any kind. A bit like our own sex recession.  

Where James gets it wrong, it is only because she ends up describing a course that Britain didn’t take (or hasn’t yet taken) in response to the political and economic problems presented by a drop in fertility. Her imagined future isn’t an implausible one, and there are certainly some similarities with the real Britain of 2021. But, just as Margaret Atwood was really thinking of Iran when she designed her dystopia, I wonder if James was really thinking (perhaps inadvertently) of rich north-east Asian countries like Japan and South Korea – countries that have managed to be low fertility, and yet stave off economic decline far more successfully than their European counterparts (at least so far). 

Anyone who has seen the 2006 film adaptation Children of Men (no ‘The’), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, will remember the aesthetic of third world-ification he employs to portray British decline. In the film, the Britain of 2027 (i.e. a slightly later date than in the novel) is squalid, violent, and struggling to maintain basic infrastructure. The omnipresence of tuktuks in London is used as a visual shorthand for the city’s new third world status: tuktuks are a favourite mode of transport in poor countries, not only because they’re cheaper to manufacture than cars, but also because they don’t rely on infrastructure like sealed roads in order to operate. 

But Cuarón’s vision is quite unlike that of the novel. James imagines a declining Britain that is actually much safer and more comfortable – at least in urban centres – than the Britain of today. The authoritarian government, led by the Warden of England, has decided that its purpose is to guarantee “the good order of Britain,” “ensuring that the race dies with some dignity.” 

Thus a harsh, low-cost criminal justice system relies on a penal colony on the Isle of Man in which the prisoners are left to govern themselves. This is described several times as the Warden’s most popular policy, as it has effectively suppressed crime in the cities. 

Meanwhile, tight border control ensures that only a small number of guest workers are permitted into the country – a response, it seems, to a period of high immigration and ethnic conflict in the 1990s and 2000s (“race riots of 2002” are mentioned in passing). 

Low levels of immigration, combined with zero births, have led to a sharp drop in the population size, which means that property is plentiful and cheap. And although rural infrastructure is gradually collapsing, the Warden has guaranteed that utilities will be maintained in the cities until the end. 

Much of the novel is set in Oxford – James’ birthplace – and her apparently dystopian vision of the city makes for odd reading, given its current state. The protagonist, Theo, a middle aged academic, lives alone in a five storey house on St John’s Street (pictured), in a property that would now be worth several million pounds. The city’s residents while away their time at state-subsidised golf courses and take evening courses in Victorian literature. Their Oxford is increasingly empty and melancholy, but it is also affordable and free of crime. 

Whereas in the real Oxford of the 2020s – a city I lived in until recently – the ratio between local earnings and property prices is frequently ranked as the worst in the country, while the city is blighted by homelessness and petty crime (particularly bike theft). For twenty years, a child sex abuse ring operated in East Oxford: a gang of Pakistani men sexually exploited dozens of adolescent and teenage girls (overwhelmingly white British), while the authorities failed to act. Similar gangs have operated nearby, for instance in Banbury and Aylesbury, and it’s highly likely that other grooming gangs are still operating in the region. 

Some months ago, a friend of mine was walking in University Parks, right in the centre of the city, when a homeless man with a thick foreign accent became convinced that my friend’s one-year-old had stolen something from him, and chased a terrified mother and baby through the park. Thankfully, she was able to find help from passersby, and they were left shaken but unhurt. But of course the police did nothing, and the man is still at large, meaning that my friend is now afraid to return to the park alone. Why is this man not in a psychiatric institution, or in prison? Why is he even in Britain? 

Both Atwood and James make the same mistake in their predictions for a low fertility society: they assume that, faced with such a challenge, the government would turn sharply to the Right. 

In fact that is precisely the opposite of what we have seen in Britain. Although their critics on the Left like to claim that the current Conservative government is somewhere to the Right of the Nazis, Ed West details the plentiful counter-evidence: 

Immigration is the most obvious area where the government of Boris Johnson and his successors has been notably liberal, indeed radical. But they’ve also liberalised British society in lots of ways that didn’t really get noticed, such as no-fault divorce, legalised abortion pills for use at home, and even anti-praying measures outside family planning clinics.

There are also so-called ‘nanny state’ policies traditionally associated with the Left, such as the ban on plastic straws, calorie counts on restaurant menus or more recently anti-vaping laws. Again, you might agree or disagree with these sorts of policies, but they are not traditionally right-wing.

This is combined with the highest level of taxation since the Second World War, a culture of DEI embedded within Whitehall, and a criminal justice system that is far softer than the public realise. As I wrote for the Spectator back in January: 

Earlier this month, the Telegraph obtained data under Freedom of Information laws revealing the truth of these frontline reports. We can see from this data that offenders can rack up a stunning number of convictions before they ever see the inside of a prison cell: some have 50 theft convictions, 25 convictions for common assault, 20 for drug offences, and up to eight repeat convictions for carrying a knife. Over the last three years, 10,400 ‘super-prolific’ offenders, who had been convicted of more than 50 previous offences each, were spared jail. In other words, many criminals have to try really hard to end up in prison for anything at all.  

These policy decisions are intertwined with the falling birth rates phenomenon in various ways. Some are straightforwardly causal: taxes are high because we have a lot of elderly dependents and not enough working age people, and immigration is high because the government is eager to import care and NHS workers from the third world in order to undercut the wages of local workers and so reduce the costs of those services. Similarly, a country with an increasingly dysfunctional dependency ratio has less money available to spend on the criminal justice system, among much else. 

Other reasons for Britain’s turn to the Left are linked to our fertility problem in more complex ways. In The Children of Men, James describes the nation’s efforts to preserve its heritage, even as they approach the very end of human history: 

We are storing our books and manuscripts, the great paintings, the musical scores and instruments, the artefacts. 

In the real world, we are doing the opposite: destroying statues, removing artefacts from museum collections, and memory-holing historical figures who were previously revered. 

There are two factors driving this, and the first is simple. An increasingly large proportion of the British population – and indeed the Western population – has no genetic link to the people who created this heritage, and does not have much interest in forging a cultural link. W.E.B. Dubois’ beautiful sentiments in The Souls of Black Folk are now very unfashionable: 

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. 

Post-Great Awokening, most students would now tell Dubois that he needs to “decolonise his mind.”

The second reason for the rejection of Western cultural history is more mysterious. Perhaps because of the loss of religion, or perhaps because we are coming to the end of this particular civilisational cycle, Western people do not much like themselves or their culture. They do not want to reproduce themselves culturally, and nor do they want to reproduce themselves by actually having children. There has been an almighty loss of confidence, and the drop in birth rates, and the turn to the Left, are both expressive of that loss. 

Reading The Children of Men in the Britain of 2024 is painful because James’ characters, even in the face of disaster, do not share that drive to self-annihilation. They want to have children, they want to preserve their culture. Their government is committed to preserving their safety and comfort. Is ours? 

When James describes the unmaking of a rural church, its pews given over to wild animals and its vicar dead, it felt as if she were pressing on a bruise. The National Churches Trust reports that more than 2,000 churches have closed over the past decade. Some of these churches have been converted into private homes, some into mosques. Others have been abandoned entirely. The difference between the scenario imagined by James – and indeed by Atwood – and the scenario we are really facing, is that theirs is extrinsic, whereas ours is intrinsic. We are doing this to ourselves.