When Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met Rishi Sunak this week, on her agenda were two issues that she believes threaten Europe most: the illegal migrant boat crisis and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate. Nicholas Farrell in the Spectator says the conservative PM knows these two issues are linked. Here’s an excerpt.
On the first of these, the small boat migrants, Italy is in deep trouble. Already this year, nearly as many illegal migrants have arrived there by sea as arrived in Britain from France in the whole of 2022. Earlier this month, Meloni declared Italy’s migrant crisis a national emergency. The talk is of up to 900,000 migrant sea arrivals from Tunisia if its crisis-torn dictatorship collapses, and a further 685,000 in Libya ready to cross. That would be a catastrophe, not just for Italy but for Europe and for Britain.
On the second, what Meloni calls the slow suicide of Europe, Italy is in even deeper trouble. Italy was once world-famous for the phrase ‘Mamma mia!’ and for the women who until the 1970s produced huge numbers of bambini even though they were poor. Now it has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at 1.2 births per woman. In 2022, it recorded a new historic low – only 392,600 births, down from 400,249 the previous year, the 14th consecutive yearly fall. Since 2014 Italy’s population has fallen by about 1.4 million. Demographers predict that it will collapse from 59 million to 47.7 million by 2070. Britain’s fertility at 1.6 is far healthier than Italy’s, but it’s not great either and still well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Nearly all economists agree that a declining population is fatal economically.
These two issues, boats and births, are inextricably intertwined. The liberal Left in Italy, as everywhere, insists that we have not just an ethical duty to allow in migrants, legal or not, but an economic duty. We need them to pay our pensions, they say. But this, says Meloni, is nonsense – and she has a point.
Youth unemployment in Italy is nearly 25% and one-third of Italians of working age do not work, the highest number in Europe. So the only work for illegal migrants is either slave labour at less than €5 an hour or crime. More than half of all thefts and robberies in Italy are committed by illegal migrants.
And this is where Meloni’s big idea comes in, though who knows what Sunak will make of it. Instead of importing a new population, she says, let’s reignite the traditional enthusiasm of Italian women to have babies. And her finance minister Giancarlo Giorgetti has just announced his intention to abolish tax for families that have two or more children, though the media has been more fixated on Meloni’s ‘homophobia’ because of government moves to limit same-sex couples from being registered as parents.
Farrell notes that “as so often, it is the down-to-earth poor girl, Meloni, who is Right-wing and pro-family, and the head-in-the-clouds posh girl, [opposition leader Elly] Schlein, who is Left-wing and pro-migrant”. In the terminology popularised by David Goodhart, “Meloni is somewhere, while Schlein is anywhere”.
Farrell closes by quoting a 2019 speech that helped catapult Meloni to power:
Now they’re talking about getting rid of the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ on documents. Because the family is an enemy, national identity is an enemy, sexual identity is an enemy… It’s the old groupthink game: they’ve got to get rid of everything that we are, because when we no longer have an identity and we no longer have any roots, we will be deprived of awareness and incapable of defending our rights.
‘That’s their game. They want us to be Parent 1, Parent 2, gender LGBT, Citizen X: code numbers. But we are not code numbers, we are people and we will defend our identity. I am Giorgia! I am a woman! I am a mother! I am Italian! I am Christian! You will not take that away from me! You will not take that away from me!
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
They must have put the figures through a Neil Ferguson / Imperial College model.
My brother once said to me “Why would people say there is global warming if it isn’t true”? ——-This really is the most important question to answer. Why does anyone tell you something that isn’t true?—- They are trying to deceive you. They want you to believe something for a purpose. But the problem with climate change is that it isn’t a black and white issue. It isn’t the case that (a) there is global warming or (b) there isn’t any global warming. So when climate activists say something silly like “climate change is real and happening now”, they are making a statement that doesn’t really mean very much. Infact it means NOTHING. It is a bit like saying elephants dying is real and happening now. Which says nothing about the amount of elephants dying or whether this is unusual or what is causing them to die. Infact there may be nothing at all unusual about the amount of elephants dying, but the statement “elephants are dying ” is still true. It is just that it is totally misleading and deliberately so.—– You find this everywhere on the climate change issue with claims of certainty where there are NONE, and exaggerated and misleading claims, backed up by little in the way of evidence or context.—-Having no proof or evidence does not seem to matter so long as you stand at a podium in front of the worlds press and simply declare things. It all has this air of authority and the backing of “all the worlds scientists”. —–But I can name 20 scientists and experts in their field right now who will say the opposite and I can find another 50 very quickly in books I have read who will tear strips of the phony consensus. There has long been a symbiotic relationship between government and their scientists. They need each other. Government know that if they can convince people “all scientists agree” that people are likely to accept something, because most of them don’t dare question science. But we do not live in a scientific dictatorship where truth is simply pronounced. —–So my answer to my brother is this. Government are making claims about a dangerous climate crisis for political purposes and it is not that there isn’t any human influence on the world at all, it is just that global warming is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency with ZERO EVIDENCE for political purposes.
Agreed! As Einstein is supposed to have said (correctly in any event)
’No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong’
It is irrelevant how many scientists support a hypothesis / theory to make it true when one experiment can invalidate it. This is how the field of science progresses. It is a dynamic field of enquiry which invites rigorous review, otherwise it’s not science. You don’t have to be an expert in any scientific discipline to spot this!
Bullseye! If you can pick on an area which is very hard to actually define being so broad in its meaning and then tell people that it is doing something that is detrimental to their well-being, regardless of the reality, and have all sorts of ‘important’ people and important sounding organisations backing up these assertions plus a very compliant media, you have the recipe for total control of a narrative. Climate, as most of us on here would agree, is always changing and is almost impossible to truly understand. There are so many factors that affect it that we are still discovering. To think that humans can alter a global temperature through draconian measures that in actuality just limit freedoms, is the height of hubris. The people that sell these lies need to be arrested and tried before they spew any more of their garbage.
Yes —Climate is poorly understood. But most of the funding does not go to understanding it. It goes to looking for human influences on climate while ignoring natural variability. It is agenda driven science.
Excellent comment, varmint.
But I think we have to take it a step further if we are to be able to persuade (or at least sow a seed of doubt in) the propagandised people (like your brother). We need to postulate what these political purposes might be. And the argument that evil globalists want to impoverish and increase control over the masses is difficult to make since it requires complicity from our democratically-elected Parliament. Why would our Parliament deliberately impoverish the electorate and damage jobs?
I would be interested in thoughts…
Therein lies the problem, Michael. To even mention a global coup d’etat by a bunch of psychopathically-inclined globalists is to fall at the first fence even though Agenda 2030 is out in the open and accepted as a ‘thing’. We have to be very clever in how we frame these arguments and join all the dots because most people are still under the illusion that we live in a democracy and that the government works for them.
Well put, Aethelred. And even the oil and gas companies, like Shell and BP, go along with the narrative, seemingly penning their own obituaries.
I suggest western governments are all signed up to the Net Zero and Sustainable Development Agenda of reducing emissions and taking away affordable reliable energy because at UN level it has been decided that the wealthy west has used up more than its fair share of the fossil fuels in the ground in becoming prosperous and are to STOP doing that. All our politicians are fully onboard with this political agenda, as we saw in 2019 when no questions were asked as the NET ZERO Amendment to the Climate Change act was simply waved through. Not one question regarding the cost of this or its practicality was asked by any MP. ————-Yet the cost is estimated in the trillions and even Tony Blair whose government gave us the Climate Change act in 2008 has said that what we do here in the UK will not make the slightest difference to global climate. So why are we doing something at tremendous cost that will have no effect? ———–Because it isn’t and never was about the climate. The climate is simply the plausible excuse for the political Agenda called Sustainable Development.
“Sustainable development” is merely another way of describing the real Agenda, which as Maurice Strong, Chtistina Figueres and Otmar Edenhoffer all have admitted, is to destroy the economies of the West in the hope that this might somehow benefit the World’s poor. (Incidentally ignoring the obscene wealth of those actually governing the World’s poorest nations.)
Pielke Jnr. has a very good blog post called The Honest Broker. Recommended.
He is absolutely a genuine expert (something of a rarity today) in his field. He accepts the certainly unproven hypothesis that human CO2 emissions have, are and will change the climate.
It is likely that this acceptance by him is essential if he wishes to retain his appointment and the ability to publish his findings on the costs and consequences of his field, which he bestrides as a colossus.
As an old, long retired Engineer, I have no such restraint in expressing my view on “Climate Change”, which is that it has been going on since long before Homo Sapiens arrived and will contine to do so, probably within natural limits detectable in the Geology, long after we disappear. But I refuse to give any credence whatever to those who are so idiotic or so dishonest that they will never admit (despite clear evidence) of any benefit whatever, of a trivially warmer planet and a trivially more CO2 rich atmosphere.
There has never been a global climate utopia where earth’s climate has been stable and perfect for humans. It has been extremely worse in the past and never better. Earth’s climate has always changed. This really makes you wonder what is their goal? It can’t be to improve earth’s climate.