“The one critical outcome that liberal individualism has failed to deliver: babies.” This remark, made by the British Conservative MP Miriam Cates at the National Conservative Conference in London in May, typifies a pronatalist turn that much of the European right has embraced. In the UK, the birth rate has fallen from 2.6 in 1960 to 1.6 today. For conservatives this is “the one overarching threat to Western society.”

Cates grew up in Sheffield, a former steel city in the north of England. She was elected in 2019. She is one of the new Conservative MPs who have broken through the “red wall”: the line on the electoral map of England where the Tory blue of the South and the Midlands gave way to the reliable Labour votes of the postindustrial North. These were also areas that voted “leave” in Britain’s referendum on EU membership in 2016, as Cates’s constituency did with a 60 percent majority.

Unable to transform the right-wing populism that led to Boris Johnson’s 2019 victory into a coherent electoral program, Britain’s Tories are likely to lose at the next election. This has created opportunities for figures like Cates.