The Scottish Fiscal Commission recently published their long term analysis of Scottish demographics and it's an authoritative and far more complex account of the issue I highlighted in this blog on the falling Scottish fertility rate.
This report however looked at things from both ends of the spectrum, babies not being born is bad enough, but when you combine it with our mortality rate you can see the harsh reality...
Scotland is very slowly and relentlessly dying off.
Over the next 50 years the UK population is expected to decline by 1.2M, 900,000 of which is due to a reduction of those of us in Scotland. Scotland will fall to 7% of the UK.
I won't dwell on immigration in this blog, I've covered that elsewhere (in short Scotland need lots, and lots and lots of bit but Scots don't see it that way), however as the paper clearly notes immigration isn't the issue here. Even upping the assumed levels of net immigration into Scotland won't make any kind of dent into the issue that we are facing.
With deaths being as inevitable as taxes the problem becomes... babies. Whilst the UK (and many Western societies) have a similar problem, it's much worse in Scotland as figure 2.1 shows. 
Figure 2.5 is the horror show for me. That decaying orange line of births is the slow drip, drip, drip of the Scottish population declining. Furthermore as our population declines the volume of reduction gets bigger and bigger, as less children means less Scots to grow up and have children themselves. This is a nasty and vicious cycle, indeed I would go further this is a black hole and we're on the event horizon, if not past it.
It might not seem much of a current problem, some people might think I'm exaggerating this issue, but this is going to have real and painful consequences for Scotland. Furthermore unlike economic projections demographic projections have much greater certainty and reliability, largely because the changes are so slow to manifest themselves. It's like predicting the flight of a tennis ball when everything is V E R Y slow.
For a start as the Fiscal Commission note that our falling labour market will sharply reduce our relative economic growth rate and we can expect to lag the UK by 0.5% a year. That means that our growth rate will be around 50% lower. You can talk independence and levers and tailored policies to gain stronger growth etc, but none of that, none of it, is going to make a shadow of a difference given the demographics.
With more old people and less younger people we are facing a terrible squeeze at both ends, it means that we're facing the prospect of our participation rate falling to as close to 50% as makes no difference.
Let me put that another way, that means for every Scottish worker (full time or part time or gig economy) there will be one other person not working and probably relying on the state. That's a hell of a burden and will strain the welfare state until the pips, the rind and the stock all squeak.
The rot has already set in
The report inspired me to look a little deeper. If Scotland is slowly dying off, where is it happening locally?
The report inspired me to look a little deeper. If Scotland is slowly dying off, where is it happening locally?
To do this I looked at the data on the National Records of Scotland for each local authority by births and deaths. To try and ensure the data wasn't too affected by COVID I looked at the average of the last three years and compared deaths to births.
Where this share was positive it meant that the number of deaths was higher than the number of births in the LA. Where the number was negative it would mean that there were more births than deaths. This only happened in two local authorities, Edinburgh and Midlothian, the main commuter belt for Edinburgh.
The Scottish average was 29%, that is there were 29% more deaths than births in Scotland each year over the three years. That in itself is a disturbing number, with 63,587 deaths and only 48,153 births on average each year you can hear the quiet drip, drip, drip of our population ebbing away.
Outside of the main metropolis of Scotland the position is much more concerning. The Highland and Islands (Shetland excepted), the borders Dumfries and Galloway and South Ayrshire are all experiencing levels of population decline that will eventually lead to a serious local imbalance.
People are dying off in these communities and they are not even being fractionally replaced by new babies in these communities.
If this continues these areas are going to get older, less productive and ghettos of economic activity. Schooling is going to be almost impossible to deliver at a local level and I just don't want to think about how care for the elderly is going to be remotely feasible.
Is anyone listening?
The Fiscal Commission report should a huge wake up call to politicians of all stripes. Forget your flags, forget the union, forget Boris and Nicola for just a minute. Your nation is slowly dying off and no one wants to talk about it.
Worse, politicians seem to think that this is a problem for the next 50 years so nothing to get too worried about for now.
But I'm not sure how to say this without saying it in capitals. This problem is already here, at a national level we're just starting to see the ground slipping out from under us but in some of our local communities we're already a few feet under.
THIS ISN'T GOING AWAY. THIS ISN'T GOING TO JUST SOMEHOW RESOLVE ITSELF. YOU CAN'T JUST MUDDLE YOUR WAY THROUGH THIS.
We need to wake up Scotland, we need to talk about babies, but we really really really need to start doing something about it.
Interesting delve down into the regional stats. I wonder if this drift in population from the more rural communities you mention such as Ayrshire, Borders, Dumfries & Galloway is common throughout European nations. It's certainly the case in Spain where more and more younger people are moving to the cities.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering, too, about the nature of the high share of deaths over births in places like Inverclyde (and no doubt in the deprived areas of Glasgow, not given here) and how they may affect the economy in years to come.
The death rates in some of these areas of population are higher due to deprivation and I suspect that many of these poor people were economically inactive. Of course, it's desperately sad as it means grandchildren will have lost a dearly loved gran or grandad, sisters have lost brothers and mums and dads have lost sons and daughters.
But given this blog is about the future economic viability of Scotland, the "non-replacement" of these poor souls is perhaps less of an issue?
This blog prompted me to read your previous blog on Fertility and you raised some pertinent issues in it. I liked the notion of immigration being a devolved power for Scotland. However the English would not like it if they felt that increased immigration to Scotland could be a back door into England. There's also the issue that Scotland doesn't seem to be the destination of choice for immigrants. However, I do think that if the Scottish government worked at it, immigration could represent a potent way forward. But it would involve substantial planning - working closely, and providing education and training funding to countries we'd like to attract immigrants from. South Africa would be a suggestion of mine. Do we have the will and resource to do this?
I'm not much one for persuading women to lie back and think of Scotland by having more babies. They, no doubt in conjunction with their partners if appropriate, have decided to restrict the number of children they have and who can blame them? If I were in my thirties, I'd like to think I'd consider the wisdom of bringing children into this world at present, even if by not doing so it does screw up the economy. Global warming, diminishing resources, the Russian and Chinese threat, not to mention a bonkers USA are enough to give us all pause for thought.
As a sidebar here, maybe global warming which means much of Europe could become almost desert, might even help Scotland attract immigrants with our cooler and wetter climate!?
And lifting the cap on child benefits? Isn't that nimbyism? For those who might fall into the trap of having large families (the ones the Sun and the Express readers love to castigate) will not be the middle classes.
Perhaps rather than we should shift the focus away from increasing the number of births in Scotland and the UK, for this will eventually lead to a vicious cycle of these babies growing old and requiring even more new babies to look after them in old age - the planet can't sustain this.
Instead, focus on building decent jobs for our population. This will lead to more people in Scotland being economically activite, greater wealth, greater health and fewer deaths, thus reducing the imbalance.