The End of ‘Normal’: Why the System Can’t Be Fixed

What We Think of as ‘Normal’ Cannot Be Either Reformed or Restored. Here’s Why.

The birth rate in England, Wales, and Scotland has collapsed to record lows, with total fertility rates (TFRs) drastically below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population.

The latest figures (2023–2024) are truly terrifying. In England and Wales there were 594,677 live births. The TFR fell to a record low of 1.41 children per woman. This marks the third consecutive year at the lowest level since records began in 1938.

The situation in Scotland is even worse: In 2024, there were 45,763 live births (down 172 from 2023). This is the lowest since records began in 1855. This puts the TFR down to a mere 1.25, the lowest since 1951.

Even taken by themselves, these figures tell us that our nations are in deep, deep trouble. The last time we were actually at replacement level was nearly sixty years ago. Since a human ‘breeding generation’ (generally termed a ‘cohort’ by demographers) is about 25 years, that means that we have already had two whole cohorts which have shrunk. That leaves the third, the current breeding generation, much smaller than its immediate predecessors. And, to compound the damage, its TFR is collapsing before our very eyes.

But the overall figures hide an even more shocking reality: While our birth rate crashes, the proportion of births to foreign-born mothers has risen to record levels. 31.8% of live births in England and Wales in 2023 were to non-UK-born mothers (up from 30.3% the previous year). When including cases where one or both parents were foreign-born, this figure rises to 37.3%.

There are large regional variations in the figures. The highest is in London, where between 57–67% of all births have one/both parents foreign-born. It is still much lower in North East England and Wales, where the figures are 17% and 11% respectively.

In Scotland, non-UK-born mothers accounted for 17.5% of births by 2019 (up from 14% in 2010), with higher figures of around 36% in cities like Edinburgh and Aberdeen.

In all cases, however, the figures understate the rate of demographic replacement of the native population, since immigrant communities which arrived in the successive waves of immigration since the 1948 Nationality Act now have significant second and third generation populations who were born in Britain, but are not ethnically British.

Where does this really leave us? In 2024 the overall proportion of babies born to foreign-born mothers reached a record high of 33.9%. Working with a rounded-up figure of 600,000 live births in England and Wales, that cuts the number of babies born to British mothers to 400,000.

That brings the indigenous English and Welsh TFR down from the overall 1.41 to a mere 0.93. Except, of course, that it’s even worse than that, because from this figure we need to subtract the babies born to non-indigenous but British-born parents.

Working with figures from the already outdated 2021 census, the Office of National Statistics tells us that 81.7% of the population of England and Wales identified as White, while 18.3% belonged to Black, Asian, Mixed, or other ethnic groups. Since we’ve had five more years of massive immigration, and significant emigration (mainly by indigenous Brits getting out of a country which is increasingly foreign), we can round the non-White figure to 20% without fear of exaggeration.

Migrants are disproportionately of childbearing age, amplifying their contribution to births, but to avoid having to plough through even more demographic statistics, let us ignore this too. We will pretend that the non-White communities have birth-rates only in line with the average. Subtracting their understated 20% from the overall TFR of the British-born population, we unearth the fact that even the drastically low 0.93 figure hides the fact that the indigenous birth rate is a catastrophically low 0.74.

Remember too, that we have ignored factors which mean that, in reality it is even worse than that. Even 0.7% may well be an over-estimate.

Even a higher TFR of 1.0 means that the next generation is half the size of the current one. The impact on the overall population size takes around 70 years to show up, but in terms of demographic cohorts it means that, just 25 years down the line, the number of females of breeding age in the next generation halves. Keep that up for another 25 years, and it halves again, to a quarter of the original figure.

This, roughly speaking, is where the English and Welsh are right now, because the first two post sixties breeding generations weren’t quite as bad as the figures reveal now.

In just three breeding generations – a mere 75 years – and the next cohort is a mere 12.5% of the original. We will be there by about 2045. This is the real driver of the Great Replacement; not a crazily high birthrate among immigrants, but a suicidally low one among our own people. And it is why the idea that ‘remigration’ can stop the rot and return things to ‘normal’ is impossible nonsense.

To return things to ‘normal’ would mean every single one of ‘our’ young women having four children, and each of the daughters and grand-daughters doing the same. That would mean multiplying our existing birth rate by a factor of five – and keeping it up there for 75 years.

While theoretically entirely physically possible, it would only happen in reality if contraception and abortion were banned, women were paid a full wage to stay at home and have children, if the elderly and childless were compelled to work and pay taxes until they drop, and if emigration was made illegal for indigenous Brits.

In other words, it is impossible. Not even a dictatorship could make it happen, let alone a pseudo-democracy run by people who hate us, and whose voters are overwhelmingly elderly and thus extremely unlikely to support a party which priorities babies over pensioners.

2024 also saw 568,613 deaths registered in England and Wales. Ignoring immigration and emigration, this means that there was a population drop of 168,000. Thus the Demographic Winter is not something decades in the future, the first frosts are already here.

Nor do the figures ‘only’ doom the ethno-nationalist aim of a stable indigenous Britain. Even for the liberal capitalist elite (and Nigel Farage), who see all featherless bipeds living here as perfectly normal Brits, the current 1.41 figure spells unsustainable disaster.

With a TFR of 1.4, each generation is roughly 30–40% smaller than the previous one. Without sustained high net migration, the population will shrink so rapidly that debt-based finance capitalism will implode. A total revolution against the fiat money banking swindle could deal with this issue, but when did you ever hear of a revolution run against the banksters, rather than funded by the banksters?

But even if that hurdle were to be overcome, and if large-scale robotisation meant that material productivity could be maintained, and if we are defended by drones, it still begs many questions:

Who is going to consume what the robots produce? Who is going to look after all the dribbling old ones? More robots? Where will the pubs get their drinkers? The schools their pupils? The churches their congregations? The charities and heritage operations their volunteers? Who will even go to the funerals? How can a society dominated by such intractable problems function, let alone be happy?

The answer, the history of all the previous dead civilisations tells us, is that it does not. Such a worn-out civilisation simply dies, as all old things must die.

That does not, however, mean that the people die, that their bloodline dies. Sometimes they do but, more often, some of them survive. From the Bronze Age collapse through the Fall of Rome, the collapse of the Incas and the end of various empires, the society generations thought was going to last forever collapses into the dust. Populations often crash as well, but some of them – and aspects of their culture and faith – survive.

How many of them make it and how much of their culture and old identity they salvage from the wreckage varies, because it depends on the actions of individuals and how many people listen to their warnings and do the things which increase their chances of having children, and of those children surviving and doing the same.

All civilisations resemble giant ships, with their passengers and crews far out to sea. For each and every one of them, times come when only a complete change of those in charge on the bridge can save them from hitting icebergs or rocks. If the change is not made in time, then once the ship has hit the danger and ripped a huge hole in its hull, it is simply too late to change the captain and officers.

At that stage, continuing to try to storm the bridge is a suicidal distraction from the only thing left to be done: Getting away the inadequate number of lifeboats, and building makeshift rafts for some of the passengers for whom there just isn’t room.

That’s where we are. Not just in Britain, or even in the ‘White world’ but in every advanced, industrial nation on Earth. Where there are new political parties which are attracting people angered by the crew’s incompetence, or frightened by the sight of water pouring through the bulkheads, then they are good places to go in search of volunteers to build rafts and to shepherd the women and children towards the life boats.

But that is as good as it can possibly get, because a civilisation-sinking demographic disaster on this scale cannot be undone, only endured. It is way too late to save the old West, but it is still not too late to save the people who built it and who, one day, will build a new version of it, above the ruins.

https://nickgriffin544956.substack.com/p/the-end-of-normal-why-the-system