Now he is retired from active politics, Nick Griffin has emerged as one of the most prolific and interesting essayists on the nationalist right. For the avoidance of doubt – though this is an irritating disclaimer to make, but a necessary one in a country where speech is constrained by legal and quasi-legal perils – admiring a writer is not the same as agreeing with him. But, if making the disclaimer irritates me, it brings me to my reason for writing about him now. On the 9th September 2026, Mr Griffin published an essay, “Demographics, Black Death 2.0, and the Future,” on his Substack page. As ever, it is an interesting essay. On this occasion, I disagree with it strongly enough to feel a need to reply.

The plain rule of honest debate is to begin by explaining an opponent’s case as clearly as possible, without omission or distortion. Anything else ranges between virtue signalling and character assassination. It also enables a reader to know if the case attacked has really been answered. Mr Griffin’s argument has three parts. First, fertility throughout most of the developed world is far below the replacement level. A total fertility rate of about 1.3, continued for a generation, leaves a much smaller generation of potential parents. Continue it for another generation, and the contraction compounds. Second, the falling number of workers must support a rising number of pensioners, while shrinking markets and an ageing labour force undermine production, public finance and a monetary order built on growth. Third, this process is now too far advanced to reverse by democratic means. Therefore, he concludes, the industrial civilisation we have known is finished. He adds that its ending may in the long run be welcome, though the transition will be severe.

That is a stronger statement of his case than the one I first intended to answer. It has been a benefit from avoiding my usual rush to publication and spending time on rereading Mr Griffin’s essay and rewriting my own response. In particular, I can now include two arguments I had passed over: the fiscal burden of the transition and the possibility that automation merely enables one shrinking country to sell into markets that must themselves eventually shrink. It also separates an economic claim from Mr Griffin’s concern for the fate of a people and its culture. I will answer all three. My conclusion is not that low fertility is imaginary, or that an ageing population will cause no difficulty. It is that Mr Griffin has mistaken a difficult adjustment for the end of civilisation, and has treated assumptions about technology, institutions and human behaviour as if they were contained in the multiplication table.

Let us begin with what he gets right. The official figure for England and Wales in 2024 was 1.41 children per woman, the lowest on record for a third successive year. The OECD average was about 1.5 in 2022. Italy and Spain were around 1.2, and South Korea was lower still. Nor is replacement fertility a magic switch. If the number of women entering their childbearing years has already fallen, a return to 2.1 births per woman will not restore the earlier population, but only stop the next generation from being smaller in the same proportion. An old population also imposes real demands for pensions and various kinds of care. Mr Griffin is right to reject the lazy belief that every labour shortage can be filled forever by immigration. If the whole developed world is ageing, the countries that want immigrants will compete for them; and, in our own country, replacing the nation to preserve the Treasury’s cash flow is neither a moral nor a political solution.

These admissions matter. A reply that denied them would be dishonest. But they do not establish what Mr Griffin says they establish.

His first overstatement is contained in the phrase “mathematical certainty.” A total fertility rate is not a census of the children a real generation of women will finally have. It applies the fertility rates observed at different ages in one year to an imaginary woman passing through all those ages. It can fall when births are postponed and rise when some of those births later take place. It tells us something important about the present. It does not tell us with certainty how many children today’s twenty-year-olds will have, still less what fertility will be in 2045 or 2070. Mr Griffin may be right that present rates will persist. He cannot derive their persistence from the present rate itself.

Nor does multiplying 1.3 by itself describe the future population without further assumptions. It assumes a constant fertility rate, a particular balance of male and female births, no material change in mortality, no migration and no change in the timing of births. This is useful arithmetic for showing what would happen under stated conditions. It is not a prophecy. In the 1970s, equally simple arithmetic proved that exponential population growth would overwhelm the world. The arithmetic was sound. The behavioural assumption that its inputs would remain unchanged was not. Fertility fell, first in rich countries and then across much of the world. It may remain low. It may rise. It may change for reasons that no demographic model has included. The future has never been known to hold everything else equal.

I therefore accept the direction of the official projections, while rejecting the confidence attached to their outer years. Eurostat’s current central projection does not, incidentally, show the European Union falling into a mediaeval abyss by 2100. It shows a population rising slightly to the end of this decade and then declining from about 452 million in 2025 to about 399 million in 2100. The composition changes more dramatically than the total: the population becomes older, and the old-age dependency ratio rises. This is a serious problem of adjustment. It is not another Black Death. Still less is it a future in which care homes burst with drooling and unattended Alzheimer patients while the padlocks rust on the gates of bankrupt perambulator factories.

The Black Death comparison that Mr Griffin makes is vivid, but economically misleading. The plague killed perhaps a third or more of the population within a few years. It struck people of working age as well as children and the old. Fields, houses and tools survived, while the labour needed to use them disappeared almost at once. Low fertility works slowly. It first removes infants who would have consumed for many years before they produced. It gives everyone decades of warning. Its most difficult legacy is not a sudden absence of hands, but a temporary imbalance between older dependants and workers. To call both processes a fall in population is like calling both a train crash and the gradual shortening of a timetable a transport contraction. The common noun conceals the critical difference.

Indeed, even the aftermath of the real Black Death does not prove Mr Griffin’s conclusion. Aggregate output fell because there were fewer people. Output per head and the bargaining power of labour often rose. Land became cheaper relative to labour; diets improved; wages rose despite attempts by governments to hold them down. There was dislocation and suffering, but not the end of European civilisation. The comparison therefore does less work for him than he supposes.

This brings us to the distinction between the size of an economy and the welfare of those who live in it. If the population falls by a fifth and total output falls by a tenth, the economy has contracted, while output per head has risen. There will be fewer houses built, fewer school uniforms sold and fewer packets of nappies carried through supermarket checkouts. This does not mean the survivors are poorer. National power may depend partly on the number of bodies and the absolute size of production. Human welfare does not. Mr Griffin moves too easily from fewer people to a “contraction of the productive economy,” and from there to collapse. The first may be true in the aggregate. The second does not follow.

The central economic question is whether production per worker can rise faster than the ratio of dependants to workers. Here we are not living in 1348, where a shortage of hands meant a collapse of output. The entire history of industrial civilisation is the substitution of capital, energy and knowledge for human muscle and routine thought. A shortage of labour raises its price and increases the reward from replacing it. This is already visible in Japanese factories, automated warehouses, self-service shops, agricultural robots and the use of artificial intelligence in offices. Mr Griffin notices that Japan, South Korea and China have used automation. He treats this as a temporary device for selling to foreigners. But before machines produce exports, they produce output. A robot that allows one worker to do the work of five has answered four-fifths of the alleged labour shortage whether the resulting goods are sold in Osaka or Birmingham.

I will not make the opposite mistake of turning technological possibility into mathematical certainty. Artificial intelligence consumes electricity. Robots require capital, materials, maintenance and complementary human skills. Some work is resistant to automation, and the benefits of new machinery can be delayed by bad management and regulation. The International Monetary Fund is right that healthy ageing and automation can counterbalance part of the demographic drag, not that they are guaranteed to cancel every part of it. But this measured claim is enough. Mr Griffin’s conclusion requires the drag to be irresistible. Once productivity, participation and adaptation are allowed to change, inevitability disappears.

The same applies to older workers. When I was a boy, people in their sixties were old. They had walking sticks and bad hearts. I am now in my sixties and neither look nor feel particularly old. This personal observation is not a demographic model, but it points to a measurable change. Longer life need not mean an equal extension of decrepitude. Better health among people over fifty is associated with more work and higher earnings. Governments are already raising pension ages. They do this partly because politicians have grander uses for the taxpayers’ money than giving it to those to whom it was promised. They can also do it because many older people remain capable of work.

This does not mean that cancer and dementia will be cured next Thursday. It would be foolish to rest an economic argument on that hope. It means only that the boundary between worker and dependant is neither fixed by nature nor accurately drawn at the sixty-fifth birthday. A society in which people live and remain healthy for longer can have more years of work without anyone “working until they drop.” It can also make work less arduous and more flexible. The conventional dependency ratio counts every person of sixty-five as dependent and every person of twenty-five as productive. Anyone who has encountered a retired engineer and a sociology student should see the limitations of that accounting.

Mr Griffin is on firmer ground when he turns to public finance. Pay-as-you-go pensions transfer part of current production from workers to pensioners. If there are fewer workers for every pensioner, some combination of higher contributions, later retirement and lower relative benefits is unavoidable unless productivity rises enough to carry the burden. Calling the system a Ponzi scheme is an amusing insult, but it is not an analysis. A Ponzi scheme fails because its promised assets do not exist. A state pension is an openly political claim on future taxpayers. Its terms can be altered, as they repeatedly have been. The alteration may be unjust. It may reveal that the politicians spent forty years buying votes with promises they expected other people to honour. This would be a familiar political fraud, not the collapse of industrial society.

There are many possible adjustments: linking retirement more closely to healthy life expectancy; allowing and encouraging longer participation; replacing universal promises to the prosperous old with more limited provision; shifting part of retirement saving towards funded assets; and, above all, raising productivity. None is painless. All are more plausible than Mr Griffin’s claim that stability would require abolishing pensions and compelling every young woman to bear eight or nine children. Those heroic fertility numbers answer a question no sensible person need ask: how to restore the old population total almost immediately. A smaller population can stabilise at a lower level. There is no economic commandment requiring Britain in 2100 to contain the same number of people as Britain in 2026.

His monetary argument is weaker. Fiat currencies and interest-bearing debt do not logically require a growing population. A debt burden is sustainable when the income available to service it is sufficient in relation to the interest charged and the other claims on that income. Population growth can help by enlarging total output. Productivity growth can do the same. Inflation can reduce the real value of nominal debt, though usually by theft and with many destructive side effects. Governments can run primary surpluses. Debts can be restructured or repudiated. A stationary population with rising output per head can support more debt; a rapidly growing population governed by fools can go bankrupt. Demography influences the arithmetic. It does not operate the printing press.

What of markets? In his discussion of Japan and South Korea, Mr Griffin insists that they can compensate for shrinking domestic workforces only by selling robot-made goods to the rest of the world, and asks who will buy when everyone is shrinking. His question assumes that demand is a fixed number of mouths rather than the expression of income and preference. Fewer people will demand fewer primary school desks, plastic water pistols and Peppa Pig Annuals. They will demand more hip replacements, medical machinery, domestic robots, travel, education and entertainment. They may buy fewer mountains of cheap cotton underclothes, but more goods of higher quality and greater capital intensity. We buy fewer gas mantles and less collar starch than our ancestors. This has not left us with warehouses of unsaleable production.

Nor is international trade a zero-sum game. Countries do not all need to run export surpluses. They exchange different things because relative costs and preferences differ. The gain from a machine is not conditional on finding a foreigner foolish enough to absorb a surplus. If it reduces the cost of food, care, transport or legal advice at home, domestic consumers gain directly. If all countries become more productive while their populations fall, total world output may grow more slowly, or even decline for a time; but real income per person can still rise. The economic object is not to keep every factory turning at its old scale. It is to satisfy human wants with less effort.

There is, of course, a problem of distribution. If a handful of corporations own every productive machine and the rest of mankind owns nothing, technical abundance will not automatically become general abundance. The state may use artificial intelligence for surveillance, censorship and selective impoverishment. A ruling class may preserve scarcity by law long after technology has made it unnecessary. These are serious political dangers. They are not consequences of low fertility, and they do not support a retreat from industrial civilisation. They support wider ownership, freer entry, resistance to monopoly and a government prevented from turning productive machinery into an apparatus of control.

Mr Griffin’s question about foreign demand therefore has an answer. The people who own or earn claims on production will buy what they want, as they do now. If conventional employment shrinks faster than prices, ownership and income arrangements adjust – through dispersed capital ownership, household production, transfers, new forms of work or some combination. I have elsewhere imagined a world of increasingly independent households using cheap artificial intelligence and second-hand automation to satisfy most of their wants. That future is not certain. But its possibility is enough to refute the assertion that fewer conventional wage-earners must leave machines with no customers.

Natural resources present no separate reason for despair. I sometimes point to the seabed and the Asteroid Belt. The point is true in the long run, but unnecessary to the present argument. We need not mine Psyche to survive a fall in European fertility. A smaller population places less pressure on land, housing, water and many raw materials. Rising prices encourage substitution, recycling and new extraction. Energy and material bottlenecks will remain, and governments can make them much worse by forbidding reliable power while demanding universal electrification. But scarcity is a condition to be managed by prices and invention, not evidence that industrial civilisation requires an ever-growing number of consumers.

I have so far answered Mr Griffin as an economist. He is not writing only as an economist. His conclusion turns from the size of markets to “the fate of our genes and our culture.” Here he raises a concern that cannot be dissolved in a calculation of output per head. A people may reasonably want descendants. It may regard its language, inherited memory and physical continuity as goods in themselves. If the English cease to have children while the Government imports another population, the fact that gross domestic product has held up will not answer the objection. On this point I agree with him. Mass immigration is not a cure for low fertility. It is a change of subject disguised as a solution.

But the cultural concern and the collapse thesis must be kept separate. The English can remain a recognisable people at forty million or twenty million. Iceland has sustained a culture with a population smaller than many London boroughs. Greece remained Greek through centuries in which its numbers and political fortunes rose and fell. Numbers affect military and political power, and a very small people can be absorbed by a larger one. But there is no threshold at which a fall from seventy million to fifty million abolishes Shakespeare, common law or the memory of Alfred. Culture is transmitted by families and institutions, not by a requirement that every generation be larger than the last.

Indeed, a smaller population might remove some of the excuses for policies that have made family life difficult. Housing need not be treated as an investment token in a perpetual shortage. Wages need not be held down by a continuous inflow of labour. Schools, roads and hospitals need not run simply to stand still against population growth. Towns may shrink, and some villages may disappear; others may become cheaper and more habitable. Whether the result is decay or recovery will depend on ownership, taxation, planning and the freedom to adapt. Empty buildings are not necessarily ruins. They can also be inexpensive buildings waiting for new uses.

The fair conclusion is therefore mixed. Mr Griffin is right that fertility has fallen to historically low levels across most advanced countries. He is right that population momentum makes a quick restoration of former numbers implausible. He is right that pensions and health systems will come under pressure, and that immigration cannot preserve a nation by replacing it. He is even right that some institutions built during two centuries of population growth will break or be remade.

He is wrong to call the rest a mathematical certainty. Present fertility is not completed fertility. A gradual absence of births is not a plague. Falling aggregate output is not falling output per head. A pension promise can be revised without abolishing civilisation. Debt does not require an expanding number of debtors. Demand changes with income, prices and taste. Automation is not an export trick, but a direct answer to scarce labour. Healthy ageing, later retirement and greater productivity cannot make the transition painless, but they can make it manageable. Once these moving parts are admitted, “our civilisation is over” ceases to be a conclusion and becomes a preference.

Mr Griffin more or less acknowledges the preference. He promises to argue that the death of industrial urbanism may be welcome. That is a respectable subject for another essay. Perhaps he will persuade me that a poorer, smaller and more local society would recover virtues that abundance has weakened. But he cannot reach that preferred future by declaring the present one demographically impossible. If he wants the Industrial Revolution to end, he must argue that it ought to end, not that women who had 1.41 children in 2024 have already killed it.

Libertarians and nationalists have some common concerns. We are concerned about unaccountable power in the hands of hostile ruling classes. We are concerned about the possibility of a great war fought for interests wholly at variance with those of the young men who will do the fighting and dying. We agree on distrusting almost everything we read in the regime media. We can also agree that the British State has used mass immigration to conceal problems it has no intention of solving.

The great divide is temperamental. Nationalists look to the future of the world as it is and see dissolution. They naturally hope for a reaction into something older and, as they believe, better. We libertarians look to the future with broad optimism. Only let it be supposed that the politicians can be kept from blowing us all up, or from stealing what we produce faster than we can produce it, and we are headed in the right direction. Population may fall. Some pension promises will be broken. Towns will change. Machines will do more of the work. None of this is the end of civilisation. It is one more change within it.

I will send an advance copy of this reply to Mr Griffin. If he wishes to reply, we will publish his reply. If he replies on his Substack, we will ask permission to republish. It is our policy to offer an open right of reply. Peter Tatchell took advantage of this last year. It is only fair, since we are criticising him, that the same courtesy should be offered to Nick Griffin.

Sources

Nick Griffin. Demographics, Black Death 2.0, and the Future. 9 September 2026.

Office for National Statistics. Births in England and Wales 2024. 2025.

OECD. Society at a Glance 2024 Fertility trends across the OECD. 2024.

Eurostat. Population projections in the EU EUROPOP2025. 2026.

International Monetary Fund. G20 Background Note on the Implications of Aging and Migration on Growth and Productivity. 2025.