Birth rates

Letters: Israel’s attack on Iran was no surprise  

Moral support Sir: All of Tim Shipman’s reasons for the PM’s reluctance to support Israel sound outwardly plausible, though, from my experience, the spook excuse, ‘The CIA wants us to keep the embassy open’, is plainly specious. Mossad is clearly all over Iran and they’re not relying on an embassy (‘Starmer’s war zone’, 21 June). There is concern over what might follow a regime change, but no one is asking what happens if we don’t support Israel and the US. Instead there is some cobbled-together ‘de-escalation’ which leaves a diminished but still viable theocratic terror regime in place, but one now consumed by a desire for existential revenge. Add to

Who’s afraid of population growth?

In ten years’ time, there’s a good chance that the main concern in the western world will be the threat of population collapse. Fertility rates are falling everywhere and no government has found a way of reversing the trend. Plenty have tried. South Korea has so far spent $200 billion on tax breaks and lowering childcare costs and has succeeded only in beating its own record for the world’s lowest birth rate, year after year. In Italy, the situation is close to a crisis, and in France it’s not much better. If this continues, the welfare state model, which depends on a decent worker-to-pensioner ratio, will collapse. There will not