We need an honest discussion about which communities gain from lifting the two-child benefit cap - Colin Brazier

It’s true that a disproportionately high number of recipients of benefits paid to parents who have more than one child are single parents.

However, they are not, as the BBC hints, single fathers - the majority are single mothers.

But of more semiotic significance was the BBC’s decision to use a picture of a white dad and three children. If pressed, I imagine whichever callow, fudge-brained media studies graduate in charge of choosing the image would say that he/she chose to illustrate the benefit cap story in the way they/them did as a way of challenging stereotypes.

No self-respecting BBC picture editor wants to be seen as pandering to the prejudice of taxpayers who believe that Labour has scrapped the 2-child cap to curry favour with Muslim voters who don’t work, but do have large families.

We had no expectation of State assistance, even though our six children have either gone on, or will go on, once they finish their schooling, to become exactly the type of citizens the State should welcome: hard-working taxpayers, who never trouble the criminal justice system, Prevent or Benefits Street.

And, for the avoidance of doubt, neither my late wife nor I were born into money. My mother was a single parent who worked long shifts as a nurse to keep her children off welfare. My late wife and I knew that a big brood would be expensive, but that the cost should be borne by us, not taxpayers.

Now, I happen to think this is far from ideal. Britain, in common with much of the developed world, does not - as the Greens still insist - face an overpopulation crisis. Quite the opposite. Some countries recognise the existential threat posed by empty cradles.

Hungarian women, famously, pay no income tax once they have had their fourth child. Such pro-natal incentives should be considered in Britain.

But they must be targeted, with the aim of creating a sustainable demographic future.

What do I mean by that?

Well, take the two-child benefit cap. Though the BBC would never admit it, benefits to big families are massively skewed ethnically.

In 2022, a report for Policy Exchange found that “…the share of families with three or more children varies from 14 per cent in White British families to 41 per cent in Pakistani families and 38 per cent in Bangladeshi families.”

Or, as analysis elsewhere suggests, 28 per cent of the benefit rise will go to Pakistani and Bangladeshi families, who are - coincidentally - the ethnic group paying the least, per capita, in taxes.

All of which might explain why voters see lifting the two-child benefits cap as unfair. Even Reform voters, in spite of Nigel Farage’s previous pledge to lift the cap, are dead set against it.

One poll showed 84 per cent of Reform voters felt that two children was the most the State should be expected to provide extra welfare payments for.

So, how do we square the circle? How do we encourage the millions of young, predominantly white Britons, who have decided they can never have children, to start a family? And how can that be done without unfairly incentivising others?

Put another way, how can we develop pro-natal policies that offer demographic balance? Because that’s what’s needed. Never before have some ethnic groups (white, Indian, Chinese) essentially stopped breeding.

While others, birth-rates buoyed by medical breakthroughs in ante- and post-natal care, are having larger surviving families than ever before.

The BBC would see even putting such a question as carrying the whiff of eugenics. Pitting one ethnic group’s birth rate against another in a population arms race.

But I see it as a matter, first and foremost, of fairness. Why should some groups forswear children, while being compelled by the State, through taxes, to provide for those who do not?

There is not one single or simple answer to this. But a start would involve sending out a strong signal of intent; an exemplary measure through the tax and benefits system that makes clear what is in the national demographic interest.

It would not benefit fecund Pakistani or Bangladeshi parents who, with our help, are having all the children they want. But it would help the group which has seen the largest (unprecedented in fact) falls in their birth-rate: white graduates.

Culturally, these are the Britons least likely to favour reproducing themselves. Even though parents have persisted in having children in the face of appalling levels of child mortality (the Plague springs to mind), we now have a cohort of young adults - Gen Z - who often tell researchers they cannot countenance bringing children into such a dangerous world.

Others, more reasonably, say the cost of children - not an unwarranted fear of the future - is the real contraceptive. What single policy might change their minds? How about a student debt amnesty for every new parent?

It would benefit that group of people whose fertility has fallen off a cliff with a relatively modest cost to the exchequer.

It would signal that the State was no longer neutral on the question of whether its citizens should have children, and which ones need the most encouragement.

And, as a side benefit not to be sniffed at, it’s a policy the BBC, and its ideological fellow travellers, would absolutely detest.