AFTER I wrote in TCW recently about the BBC’s refusal to discuss Britain’s collapsing fertility rate, a reader challenged me: the real problem, they said, is not the baby bust itself but who is and isn’t having the babies. They were right – though not in the way they meant.
What follows is not a criticism of Islam or of Muslim communities. I am a Christian, and I have substantial disagreements with Islamic theology and with practices within Islamic culture that I believe cause real harm – but those are for another day. This article is about what the data show.
It is an observation about what happens when a majority stops valuing marriage and family, and about the community in its midst that hasn’t. Muslim families are the control group that proves the baby bust is a marriage crisis. The question is not ‘why are they having children?’ It is ‘why have others stopped?’
Two trajectories, one country
Britain’s total fertility rate – the average number of children per woman – fell to 1.41 in 2024, a record low for the third consecutive year. Replacement level is 2.1. Read that again: a fertility rate of 1.41 means each generation is roughly a third smaller than the one before it.
Meanwhile, the Muslim population grew by 1.2 million between the 2011 and 2021 censuses – a 44 per cent increase accounting for a third of England and Wales’s total population growth. And before anyone says ‘that’s because of the boats’, half of British Muslims are now UK-born and 46 per cent are under 24, with a median age of 27 compared with 40 for the general population. An estimated one in ten births is now to a Muslim family. This is not primarily a story about immigration. It is a story about who is and is not having children among people already living here.
The marriage gap is the fertility gap
In most Western countries studied, marriage is one of the strongest predictors of fertility. A 2025 analysis of the US National Survey of Family Growth found that 75 per cent of the total fertility decline since 2007 is explained by fewer people being married. This pattern has grown stronger since the 1980s.
Muslim communities in Britain marry younger and marry more. The 2021 Census found that Muslims had the lowest proportion of never-married adults of any religious group, despite having the youngest age profile. This is not unique to Islam: religious commitment generally correlates with higher marriage and birth rates across faiths. But Muslim communities demonstrate the pattern most visibly. The mean age at first birth in England and Wales is now 29.2; if you do not begin until your thirties, you simply do not have time for a third or fourth child. The fertility gap is, at root, a marriage gap – and the marriage gap is, in part, a timing gap.
What this already means at the ballot box
Under Britain’s first-past-the-post system, a geographically concentrated community exercises electoral power far beyond its national share. The Henry Jackson Society found that Islam is the largest minority religion in 129 of the 220 most marginal seats. In the 21 seats where more than 30 per cent of the population is Muslim, Labour’s vote share collapsed by 29 percentage points at the 2024 election. Just weeks ago in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the Muslim Vote backed a Green candidate who beat Reform UK and pushed Labour into third. Muslim voters are not a monolith – their concerns range from Gaza to the NHS to housing – but their geographic concentration makes them electorally decisive. Nobody is doing anything wrong. The question is why the other side of the ledger is shrinking.
The next two to three elections are already locked in, because the people who will be voting are already alive. The government’s votes-at-16 plan will enfranchise an estimated 156,000 young Muslims before 2029 – 10.7 per cent of all new voters – concentrated in the same seats where independents performed strongest. No pro-natalist policy can change this before 2040 at the earliest. Even Hungary’s programme – the most intensive in Europe – has raised fertility only from 1.23 to 1.59, and its gains appear to have worked through encouraging marriage rather than incentivising births. There is no quick fix. But that is precisely why the urgency is now.
The lamp posts are available to everyone
In my home city of Cardiff last year, a Christian group paid to put banners on council lamp posts reading ‘Trust in Jesus, He is Alive, Come to Church!’ Humanists UK complained. Cardiff Council refused to take them down: the space is available to anyone who pays for it, just as it had been when Ramadan banners appeared without objection. The lamp posts are available to everyone. So is marriage. So are maternity wards. Muslim communities have not taken something from us. We have let it go.
So what does ‘using the lamp posts’ mean? It means more young women empowered to choose having children in their twenties rather than being told motherhood must wait until their thirties. It means get married. Have children. Support the people around you who are trying to do the same. Build a culture that treats family formation as something to champion, not a private lifestyle choice. Houses are not cheaper for Muslim families – they face the same economy as the rest of us. The variable that differs is not the economy. It is the culture. The commentators who complain most loudly about demographic change are, too often, not themselves married with children.
Muslim families in Britain are not the cause of the baby bust. They are the proof of its cure. They show what happens in the same country, the same housing market, the same economy, when a community retains a culture of marriage and family. The consequences of our failure to do the same are already at the ballot box. They will deepen at every subsequent election. And nobody in power is willing to say so.
Mark Steyn once observed that the future belongs to those who show up (America Alone, 2006). I speak as a man who has been married for 30 years with four children: just do it – the effort is a lot of fun!
