GEORGE KEREVAN: How Scotland can beat the demographic time bomb

I WAS in denial last week, trying to forget my birthday. This is always a two-edged affair. The more I successfully bury it, the fewer cards I get and so the more depressed I feel at being forgotten. But if there is one thing that makes me more depressed about ageing it is the spectre of only having old folk to talk to. New data from the 2001 census shows that, for the first time in British history, children under the age of 16 are now outnumbered by the over-sixties.

There are advantages to this trend, I suppose. In theory there will be less crime (primarily a preoccupation of teenage males) and an agreeable accumulation of wisdom. For instance, I for one have not the slightest intention of viewing Ken Loach’s new, highly-subsidised movie, Sweet Sixteen, as experience has taught me that the lives of teenage, foul-mouthed drug peddlers in sink housing estates are of minimal artistic interest.

However, that aside, I am not convinced of the benefits of living in a giant old folk’s home. North of the Border, we are not only getting more aged, there are increasingly fewer of us. In the last 20 years, the number of people living in England has risen by 5 per cent.

Even in Wales - with the same kind of economic regeneration problem that Scotland has had to face - the population rose by 3 per cent. But here there was a decline of 2 per cent compared with 1981.

The causes are self-inflicted. Our success in beating England to having over 50 per cent of young people going to university has created a conveyor belt out of the country. Throughout the Nineties, the official estimate for the number of people emigrating from Scotland - mostly in their twenties and thirties - was around 5,000 per annum. Actually, it was about 7,500. As many as 150,000 Scots emigrated over the past 20 years, 50,000 more than researchers had previously calculated.

What does this tell you? It tells you that the young are voting with their feet. That the country is a closed shop for opportunity. Now that Holyrood has reversed the trend of the Tory years and taken the share of national spending in Scotland controlled by the state and local authorities back to 50 per cent, the bulk of decision-making in this country is determined by the grey men from the ministry or the toon cooncil.

Start your own business? Why, you must be one of those nasty "private sector" people constantly denounced by the STUC for daring to offer to build new schools under PFI.

Send your children to a private school? Why, Edinburgh and St Andrews universities have just been lent on to introduce quotas to positively discriminate in favour of those from state schools with lower grades.

Does no-one in our political class draw any conclusion from the fact we have this huge aspirational youth in Scotland (the majority Mr Loach does not make movies about) but that we are one of the few nations in Europe where the dynamic bit of the population is leaving on the first available flight?

Actually, they don’t, even though this is a vastly more important problem for Scotland than drug-taking among the underclass. The politicians are as much in denial as I am over my age. Instead, the population problem is passed off as having to do with declining fertility. This is usually interpreted as an irrevocable social phenomenon resulting from the fact that young women simply don’t want large families.

True, very large family sizes are a thing of the past. However, Scotland only needs the average family size to be a whisker under 2.1 children to maintain a stable population. Instead, it has dipped to 1.8 for the cohort of women born after 1975. There is a swathe of educated women putting off childbirth because: (1) a lot of the eligible boys have gone south; (2) family-sized houses are expensive because the council planning authorities won’t release greenfield sites to build the detached homes people want to live in; and (3) who would want to bring kids into the world in dour, macho, non-achieving Scotland?

The SNP’s Alex Neil (the only MSP to worry about this problem) has proposed paying women to have more babies. But his solution is daft. First, the reason why Scots women with degrees are not having kids will not be reversed by throwing subsidy at the problem - the knee-jerk response of any Scots politician. Such a policy will only encourage more single teenage lassies in Mr Loach’s favourite housing schemes to procreate.

The reality is that the same disastrous lack of opportunity - the same corporatist assault on aspiration - which drives young graduates out of Scotland is the very cultural baggage that reduces fertility rates. Solve one and you solve the other. For proof, look at the United States. The US census in 2000 contained a shock. The American population turned out to be rising faster than anyone had expected. This was the result of two things - a big jump in the fertility rate and lots of immigrants (11 million of them).

In the Nineties, American fertility rose to just below the 2.1 population replacement mark. Why? It is not down to race - fertility is rising just as fast among middle-class whites as blacks or new Asian immigrants. The explanation is that more babies are a product of the economic boom of the Nineties, combined with the fact that Americans think America is a great place to have a family. Call this the aspirational effect.

Meanwhile, in economically depressed and over-regimented Europe, fertility has gone the other way. Having averaged just below 1.9 in the mid-Eighties, the rate is now less than 1.4 and it is projected to continue declining for at least another ten years. As a result, by 2040, Europe’s population will be 360 million and falling, while America’s will be over 550 million and rising. But America will have a more dynamic society and economy because of its youthful population. Therefore, it will be able to support its old generation better than will Europe. By 2050, the number of people in Europe over retirement age will be equivalent to 60 per cent of the working-age population (more in Scotland), compared with only 40 per cent in America.

Scotland in particular faces a demographic time bomb. An ageing population, with fewer workers around in absolute terms, will require bigger relative public spending bills than the rest of the UK but lack the means to pay them. A declining Scotland makes the future of the Barnett Formula look bleak - why should England pay for Scotland’s mismanagement if even the Scots won’t live in Scotland?

What is the solution? Answer: make Scotland interesting and rewarding to live in, and people will stay and raise families. Make movies about our heroes, not our failures. Open the doors to immigrants. Let people build their own homes in the countryside. Give foreign students a green card so that they can stay here and work. Demand that our universities only ever take the best students, regardless of background.

Make Scotland somewhere to dream in - and they will come. I might even start having birthday parties again.