Senior politicians give up in British marriages. We won’t.

The Office for National Statistics has just confirmed that from mid-2026, more people will die in the United Kingdom than are born. The natural deficit will reach around 450,000 over the decade to mid-2034, and future population growth will depend on net migration. Our country is starting to shrink.

Some may hear this news and think: surely fewer people is good news for the planet. But Greenpeace UK itself rejects that: “the idea that overpopulation is causing climate change is inaccurate”. The fiscal frame is harder to set aside. The Office for Budget Responsibility projects state pension spending rising from 5 to 7.7 per cent of GDP over the next 50 years. British children will carry that bill.

But the problem is more than mere arithmetic. Britain’s fertility rate was 1.41 in 2024. The Institute of Economic Affairs reports that women have wanted around 2.2 children since 1979. For every three children British couples wanted, only two were born. The country is not turning down children. It has built a society in which wanted children did not arrive. It is a structural failure, and the reason for it is the neglect and side-lining of marriage.

UK marriages have fallen from 400,000 in 1973 to 224,402 in 2023. In 1970, 62 per cent of men had married by 25; today the figure is 2 per cent. The average age at first marriage has risen, but the biological window for childbearing has not moved with it. Over 600,000 women alive today may miss out on motherhood compared with earlier generations. Most young people still want to marry – but the conditions that encourage it are dismantled.

Married couples have more children than unmarried couples – and three-quarters of the recent fall in fertility is attributable to the decline in marriage rates.

Senior voices are walking away from the problem. Last week, Boris Johnson called falling birth rates “the best bit of global news in a long time”, while Nigel Farage told Radio 4 listeners that his pro-family policy was a “mistake” and “impossible in modern Britain”. Both are wrong. Pro-family politics is not impossible. It has been abandoned.

Please write to your MP and ask them what is being done to make marriage possible in modern Britain?

C4M was founded to champion marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, the gold standard for families, societies and strong nations. Britain is facing the consequences of walking away from that. We can – we must – choose to recover it.