"An insult, not a solution"

The fallout continues from British demographer Paul Morland's opinion piece in the Sunday Times: "Should we tax the childless?"  (His answer was (naturally!) an enthusiastic yes.)  I flagged this article in my #MicroblogMondays/Odds & ends post yesterday. 

Thankfully, the response to his proposals has been overwhelmingly negative -- and not just from childless & childfree people. Here's a sample of things I've been reading and listening to over the past 24 hours: 

• Jody Day of Gateway Women appeared on LBC Radio in London on Monday, July 4th, to chat about the proposed childless tax with Sangita Myska (who is also childless not by choice).  Jody appears shortly after the one-hour mark of the program (11 p.m. program time).  
• If you have time, you may want to continue listening after her segment ends, because Sangita continued to take listener calls on the issue for the remaining two hours of the program! (Just think -- a solid TWO HOURS of talking about childlessness!)(Most listeners were, thankfully, in agreement that it's a very bad idea.)  
• The program will remain available online for six days (the rest of this week). 
• Jody was also on the BBC (Radio Bristol) with James Hanson on July 5th, discussing the declining numbers of babies and the complex reasons why women aren't having (more) children. (Jody's segment begins at about 1:37 into the program.) The program will remain available online for about a month. 
• Kat Brown (whose Instagram post alerted me to the controversial Times article), responded in Stylist magazine: "Paul Morland’s viral Sunday Times piece shows it’s easier to blame women than to make meaningful change." 
• The London Economic ran an article about the backlash to the Times piece. 
• The UK organization Ageing Without Children responded with this post on its blog. 
• On Medium:  Clair Woodward mused about "Taxing the childless, and other ways to kick us when we’re down." 
• Also on Medium: Berenice Smith, one-third of the team that brings us the wonderful podcast The Full Stop every month, penned a response to Morland's piece in the Times. 
• "Tax the childless! Encourage ‘our own’ to breed! What an asinine, inhumane way to tackle a population crisis" (Zoe Williams in The Guardian) 
• "Welcome To Gilead" (Rachel Moss, Huffington Post UK) 
• "Taxing the childless would be an insult, not a solution" (Rachel Cunliffe, The New Statesman) 
• "Proposing To ‘Tax The Childless’ Isn’t Just Ludicrous, It’s Offensive" (Polly Dunbar, Grazia) 

I'll keep my eye out for more. 

And if you think you don't need to pay attention to this issue because you don't live in the U.K., think again. Consider that in July 2021, would-be Republican candidate for congress J.D. Vance proposed that parents should have more voting power than childless people -- which some took further, proposing that childless people should be banned from voting all together (!). (I wrote about this here and here.) No doubt there are politicians in North America and elsewhere who will think Morland's ideas are worth implementing here too.