Attention Gen Z: the right is coming for your dating apps. The war over sexual liberation that has ensnared American politics for decades – encompassing abortion, birth control, gay marriage and a regression to purity culture – for the most part was sidestepped by Westminster. The debates rage on social media and polemical podcasts, but in actual political terms we have tended to take a calmer “no sex please, we’re British” approach to turning bedrooms into policy battlegrounds.
Two interventions in the last month suggest this détente may be at an end. First Matt Goodwin, the right-wing pundit and failed Reform candidate, stressed the need to “explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis” – that crisis being women having “children too late in life”. He had previously suggested an extra tax on people who do not have children (he did not specify whether the bereaved or infertile would be exempt). A week later, the Tory-turned-Reform MP Danny Kruger said he believed political parties could have “a limited but important” role in resetting sexual culture. According to him, “we are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy”. And Reform is here to help.
How exactly remains to be seen. Banning Bumble and Hinge? The state assigning people partners? Or just bringing back some good old-fashioned stigma around extra-martial sex? Kruger is against the full decriminalisation of abortion and no-fault divorce. Others in his new party might feel differently. Nigel Farage – divorced from his first wife and separated from his second – has admitted he “may not necessarily be the best advocate for monogamous heterosexuality or stable marriage”. But that doesn’t change the fact that Reform seems a lot more interested in people’s romantic choices than most political parties.
The pretext for this interest is Britain’s falling birth rate – a challenge we share with virtually every other Western country, and which has proved frustratingly resistant to policy interventions from both the left (affordable childcare, better parental leave) and right (tax breaks and restrictions to reproductive healthcare). People are having fewer children and having them later. The Goodwins and Krugers of this world are very worried about this – and they are right to be. Our entire economic system is based on the assumption that as people age and retire there will be new generations of fresh young workers to take their place.
But it’s hard to imagine instructing young girls to forgo their dreams in order to get pregnant or demands to regulate the “sexual economy” having much effect. It all seems a bit, well, judgemental. Invasive. Sanctimonious. Especially when those on the right so invested in families can have quite narrow ideas about what those families might actually look like.
I recall Miriam Cates, once Kruger’s ally in the Conservative Party before she lost her seat, hosting a whole event on the topic, warning of the fertility “cliff edge” women face at 35. She was asked if she’d support 30-something women who want children but can’t find a suitable partner to become parents alone via a sperm donor. Her reaction was pure horror; there was no space for women who had missed their chance in her vision of the future. Kruger has previously argued that the “normative family” – a mother and father staying married however miserable they might make each other– is “the only possible basis for a safe and successful society”. The message to same-sex couples, divorcees and would-be solo parents? Don’t bother.
We should all be concerned by low birth rates, for the sake of economic stability if nothing else. We should care too about the financial pressures which make parenthood so unaffordable for many, and about why young people are coupling up at much lower rates than previous generations. But we should also consider what those who shout the loudest about family values seem to want the future to look like. And as a rule, be wary of politicians itching to meddle in the nation’s sex life.
[Further reading: When did the British right get so unpatriotic?]
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This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
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