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.
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Can’t she be like a Caretaker Manager in the UK until all our traitorous Barsteward MP,s are in jail ! If Only !! 🥹
This has huge economic impacts on all of us, particularly the less well off who will be dependent on the state pension when they retire.
The UK does not have a sovereign wealth fund, our pension contributions are not saved on our behalf for a rainy day. They are spent immediately paying pensions to the current state pension claimants.
This was a fantastic system when the baby boomer generation were at work as there were more people working and paying tax than those claiming pensions. The boomers are now retired and because they had fewer children, there are fewer people now contributing tax to pay for their pensions. Pensions will eventually become unaffordable for the state or they will consume all public spending.
The state will need to make up the shortfall form somewhere, so expect increases in inheritance tax thresholds.
Having children is vital for securing long term care. Being childless in your thirties may seem idyllic, but being childless in your eighties will mean a sad, lonely and poorly cared for old age.
The jabs are clearly intended to significantly reduce the life expectancy of the masses.
There aren’t planned to be be many state pensioners in their 80s.
Six downticks (so far) and no debate. Tell me why I’m wrong, or forever hold your tongue.
(Spelling pedants need not apply – I know there’s a form / from typo!)
You’re not wrong. Merely an unpopular perspective.
I haven’t downticked because I almost never do so but your case is weak and largely assumes everything will move along as per pre March 2020 which was effectively when the Davos Deviants declared war on the people of this country. It won’t.
The agenda being played out is depopulation and as Nearhorburuan makes clear the injections are intended to reduce life expectancy or as I usually put it – kill and maim.
Everything occurring nowadays is aimed at a massive depopulation – why are babies being injected with a poisonous injection which they don’t need – contradictory I know? Attacks on farms and farmers will lead to hunger and starvation, the immolation of the Health service has begun and will get worse. I have laid out my arguments many times on DS and I see no need to repeat in full here.
Your argument is best summarised as naiive.
I hope that helps.
Well said Huxley..
That’s a very black-pilled set of assumptions.
Switch it around, maybe ‘they’ genuinely believe that eating a largely herbivorous diet with a smattering of bugs whilst banning all forms of transportation except bicycles will save the planet from overheating due to atmospheric ’carbon’.
Maybe the vaccines were simply introduced hastily with the sole intention of maximising pharma profits rather than with the dark agenda of population decimation.
There is hope. Grass roots political parties are overthrowing the status-quo eschewing, transnational-corporate affiliated uniparties throughout the globe.
We just need to all get behind the SDP.
They could just print the money, you know. It doesn’t have to be a Ponzi scheme.
Comedy gold.
The “welfare state” is what we call a Ponzi scheme
At least, she’s a refreshing difference from all the politicians whose only topic is the imminent apocalypse and whose only recipe to prevent it is mindless destruction of anything they can lay their hands on. If you really want to do something for the benefit of children and grandchildren, help their parents of today and their grandparents of tomorrow.
I do not claim to know a great deal about Georgia Meloni but across Europe she is Minerva amongst barbarians. She deserves our admiration.
On the subject of population, while she clearly talks sense, and for the sake of Italy their birth rate needs to increase, in the current climate this is wishful thinking. The onslaught endured by Western populations these last three years has undoubtedly contributed to a decline in births and also in the desire for the young to have children, and who can blame them? The harsh reality is that large and increasing numbers of foreign migrants washing up on our shores is decidedly having a negative impact on the desire to procreate and I mean that in both the physical and mental senses. It’s not as if the future is looking particularly bright is it?
Unless a complete full stop is placed on immigration in to Western Europe immediately our countries will effectively cease to exist by 2050 – there’s that date again. Of course most on here would accept that actively encouraging migrants is deliberate and expressly intended to undermine our nations.
I would go further – no heads of state allowed unless their lineage within a country can be traced back at least three generations.
And as the downtickers pile in let us acknowledge the god awful state the UK is in with foreign heads in 3 out 4 of our nations. Hasn’t turned out well has it?
Our countries are being ripped apart and stolen from us and unless there is fight back the situation will become worse – the numbers of immigrant soldiers flooding the UK are growing by the day.
Desperate times require desperate measures and there is no point in hiding from this.
“at least three generations”
I’d be much stricter: at least 75% of your ancestors living in this archipelago 300 years ago. That would exclude pretty much all non-indigenes.
I will readily concede. Three hundred years – not unreasonable.
Maybe somewhat silly, but we could do with something like MEGA for Make Europe Great Again. Bonus: It’s even a word. And Europe does not end at the French border, strictly speaking, it ends with the Ural mountains and both its area and its population are larger than that of the USA.
Ha!
Is see Millie-no-mates (Millie Tant) down-ticker has been busy again.
Momentum Employee of the Month for April beckons.
Result!
Nice one.😀👍
Do you have anything tangible to say?
‘GroundhogDayAgain’ is a witty, profound and uniquely-observed ironic statement. Well done.
Is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?
Apologies, only just noticed the house posting rule
“Profanity, abuse and content that Groundhog considers ‘intangible’ will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban”.
The future doesn’t look bright as we see tyrants running the West into the ground with seemingly no way to stop them. Would you really want to bring a child or hope your own children bring a child into this world? So, it’d be great if my neighbors and countrymen had children but from a personal standpoint, it would be heartbreaking to see the lives my descendants would endure. Too melodramatic?
That’s what the people you’re referring to as tyrants want: One of their imaginary horrors is overpopulation. ie, a state of the world where – oversimplification – nitrogen fertiliser and agriculture in general cannot be prohibited because the hungry masses will sri-lanka their palaces otherwise. Hence, everybody who’s at all listening to them must be talked into not getting children, in the vain hope that this will have an effect (the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet are not listening). They prefer climate change as mock reason for that, but the general argument is the same.
Yes, I want OTHER people to have kids but I can see them making the same calculation about what their kids’ lives would be like. Are these tyrants scaring the left with climate change and scaring the right with total loss of freedom and economic deprivation, all to the same effect: reducing the population?
At the moment, I think so. But that’s just my unqualified, present opinion.
Not too melodramatic. Sadly.
I hope my kids bring children into this world because that’s what humans are meant to do, and my kids are good people, will make good parents and will make the world a better place.
What a switch – from one set of politicians telling everyone to stay two metres apart to one politician telling everyone to get it on.
Georgia is saying the right things, but the opposing tide is both fierce and stupendously illogical. I keep my fingers crossed she makes progress.
I’m all for breeding vs importing. We need to be harsh on migrancy. We interview native job applicants more harshly than this.
The truth is.. we don’t need them.. and the majority that are coming are young men anyway.. and that majority is pretty low IQ.. what’s the point?? there’s another agenda, and it ain’t for our benefit!
How about neither? Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. And the logic of a Ponzi scheme.
Where is she advocating “growth for the sake of growth”? It’s hugely unlikely that rich world native populations will start reproducing at significantly higher than replacement rate – not something we need to worry about.
It is implied in the false choice presented between increasing birthrates vs mass immigration.
Not to me it isn’t
Birthrate for native ethnic Italians is well below replacement
Anyway it’s uncomfortable being so grossly outnumbered
I agree.
I’m afraid increasing the Italian birthrate (or ours) isn’t going to stop the migrant invasion.
The only thing that is going to stop it is sinking the boats and/or forcible return.
Minefields can play a part.
Apparently Japan gives tax relief to encourage their citizens to have babies, because they had an ageing population. ———But how many immigrants do Japan take? I suggest NONE, or pretty close to NONE. Yet I never hear claims that Japan should be more “diverse” or should be taking millions of immigrants. Why is that? I never hear about that “racist” country Japan that takes no migrants.
Its because there’s a plan that the West should/will be destroyed.. dreamed up by those you’re not allowed to criticise.. the most evil bar-stewards on earth in other words..
May I suggest that all of Daily Sceptic followers spend 14 minutes listening to Giorgia Meloni in her 2019 speech? It is brilliant and delivered with such passion that it puts our own pathetic politicians to shame. Everything she says should be the model for the West and particularly for the UK.
I hope Rishi listens to this woman – he could learn a lot.
Its called the Kalergi Plan.. the great replacement.. but you’re not allowed to mention either or you’ll be be labelled an extreme right racist and a lot more besides..
Blame feminism and women entering the workforce
But don’t immigrants tend to have bigger families and hence wouldn’t pay any tax? Won’t that make Italy more attractive to immigrants?