Fergal Keane Travels Inside Gaza
en
January 28, 2025
TLDR: BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane traveled with first Jordanian helicopter delivering aid inside Gaza since ceasefire; Adam discusses his experience; ONS has projected 7.3% population growth between 2022 and 2032, predominantly due to migration of 4.9 million people. Discussed with Stephanie Hegarty (BBC Population Correspondent) and Professor Sarah Harper (University of Oxford).

In this episode of the BBC’s Newscast, journalist Fergal Keane shares insights from his recent trip inside Gaza, marking a significant moment for international journalism as he was the first foreign correspondent permitted to report from the area after a long period of restricted access.
The Journey to Gaza
- Significance of the Flight: Keane traveled on a Jordanian helicopter, part of a humanitarian aid effort. This marked a pivotal shift in reporting access in the context of the ongoing humanitarian crisis.
- Aid Operations: 16 Blackhawk helicopters were deployed, with each carrying significant loads of aid, including perishable medical supplies that need to be flown due to the risk of spoilage during transit.
- Logistics of Aid Delivery: Unlike conventional truck deliveries being vulnerable to delays, the helicopter operation was framed as a more effective way to ensure that vital aid reached those in need swiftly.
Observations on the Ground
- Conditions in Gaza: On landing, Keane was able to view the extensive destruction firsthand, with ruins and displaced persons visible just beyond the barbed wire at the airstrip. He described the situation as overwhelming, with over two million people affected by the conflict.
- Restricted Reporting: Despite being on the ground, journalists faced restrictions to access and independently report on the situation in Gaza. Keane expressed frustration over not being able to engage directly with individuals affected by the crisis.
Humanitarian Concerns and Responses
- International Allegations: Keane noted ongoing accusations against Israel regarding the obstruction of humanitarian aid and the challenges faced by international organizations in delivering support to the region.
- The Role of Jordan: Keane discussed how Jordan has been pushing for a more comprehensive humanitarian response and questioned why previous aid efforts were hindered despite the Jordanian government’s cooperative stance.
In-depth Societal Discussions
Later in the episode, Adam Fleming speaks with population experts about the Office for National Statistics (ONS) projections regarding future population growth in the UK, revealing a complex narrative surrounding migration, aging, and fertility.
Key Statistics
- ONS Population Projection: A projected increase of 7.3% over the next decade, largely driven by an estimated 4.9 million migrants arriving in the UK. The birth rates are expected to stabilize with deaths, creating a demographic balancing act.
- Demographic Changes: Experts highlighted that societal and economic conditions, rather than numbers alone, shape demographic changes. This includes impacts on labor markets, productivity, and social policies.
Expert Insights
- Migration Dynamics: Migration has been essential to maintaining a balanced population, with experts noting that economic opportunities help retain migrants in the UK long-term.
- Aging Population: The aging demographic highlights increasing demands for healthcare and social support systems, urging policy changes to better integrate older populations into the workforce.
- Global Comparisons: The ongoing discussions referenced global trends in fertility, emphasizing that many high-income countries are experiencing low birth rates, with some looking at policy changes to encourage childbearing.
Tackling Underlying Issues
- Policy Recommendations: Experts argued the importance of adaptable policies addressing fertility and migration issues while emphasizing the need for sustainable strategies in response to a dynamic demographic landscape.
- Technology and Economy: Technological advancements and a changing knowledge-based economy are expected to reshape employment opportunities, impacting productivity, especially among older workers.
Conclusion
The episode offers a compelling look into the pressing humanitarian issues in Gaza and the varying factors influencing population growth in the UK. As the world faces complex demographic challenges, both expert and on-the-ground insights emphasize the importance of proactive policies and dialogue to create informed, compassionate responses to the crises affecting millions globally.
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Hello, now all through the conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, we have said the same thing every day, which is that journalists from outside Gaza have not been allowed in to report by the Israeli government. That is still basically the case, but the situation did change today on Tuesday because my colleague Fergal Keene, the legendary war reporter, managed to get a space on a helicopter
flown in by the Jordanian government, which landed on the edge of the Gaza Strip as part of a big aid effort, which means that Fergal has become one of the first, if not the first, journalists from outside Gaza to actually be able to get there. Now, of course, it came with lots of caveats, but that means the situation has changed a bit. So that is what we will kick off this episode of Newscast with
Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. I like landscape. I don't think I'm being rude. Japping. Unemployed people who are overweight. That is not the agenda. It's a sudden police working overtime. A star is born, Elon! So hurt that America with this hat. Frankly, I think we need a British Trump. Take me down to Downey Street. Let's go have a tour. Blimey.
Well, let's talk to Fergal King right now. Hello. Hey. So you're now back in Jordan and in Amman, the capital.
I'm back in Amanda Capital from the Zarka Air Base, which is about about an hour from here in the desert. We set off early this morning and saw this. It was one of those moments, you know, we're driving through the desert and this incredible round red disk of the sun appeared in front of us.
I'm not a great man for almonds, but it felt like the right thing to see on a day when we were travelling with the Jordanians who were about to do something positive and significant. Yeah, and just talk about the scale of the operation that you're observing.
It was non-stop choppers, basically. It was Blackhawk helicopters loaded with aid, including some aid from Britain. There were also two Italian helicopters that joined the operation. And throughout the day, you had 16 choppers, and each of them carried a ton of aid.
doing this sort of rotation into the Gaza Strip on the ground for about 15 minutes and then back out. And what I noticed as we were filming the loading of the choppers was aid from the UK and some of that medicine. And there's an interesting point to that. You see lots of trucks now, hundreds of trucks going into the Gaza Strip. But the problem with truck journeys is that if you put medicine on them, if you put baby formula, for example,
There's a real chance that if they get delayed, if they get held up, that that will perish. So those sorts of provisions, they keep them in these huge refrigerators on the airbase. And then when the chopper's ready to go, they're taken out, they're loaded, and that's what we brought in today.
Well, yeah, because my first reaction was hang on. A fleet of helicopters doesn't sound like the most efficient delivery method when you could just send in loads and loads of lorries. But you've just explained that. Well, I think the other thing to bear in mind is this. I mean, it's a point well made is that.
We landed on a tiny airstrip. Over the last 40 years in journalism, I've landed on airstrips all over the place. In very remote parts of Africa, for example, this was really small. They can only put two choppers down at a time. You'll have a memory of seeing
images of major-aid crises, humanitarian disasters, and where there are C-130s, these huge big planes fly in with loads of aid, with vehicles, with everything that could be possibly needed. You don't see that in Gaza. You see, if you want to get materials that are in danger of perishing, you'll see two choppers at a time, 16 per day, coming into that landing strip.
And what would be the Israeli explanation for why this couldn't happen when the war against Hamas was happening? Because Israel wasn't at war with Jordan. The Israeli government presumably trusts the Jordanian government when it comes to humanitarian issues. Why couldn't this have happened over the last 18 months?
There was one delivery using helicopters last November. There were also aid flights which used the big transporters that I talked about dropping aid by parachute into Gaza. But they're very inexact methods. You've no idea really who's going to grab it. It could be a criminal gang. It could be Hamas. Anyone who wants to take that aid and run away with it. And the Jordanians have been pushing and pushing and pushing.
And they don't really have a good answer as to why they've been delayed. I mean, certainly a ceasefire makes it easier. I think that in the longer term, and if you look at the kind of comments that have been made by the United Nations, by many of the major NGOs, non-governmental organizations, who have accused Israel of slowing down aid, of refusing to allow aid in only allowing the limited amounts in, don't forget the Americans.
warned Israel to increase the amount of aid that they were letting into the Gaza Strip, or risk losing some of the military aid that they're given, some of the assistance. So this is one of those which will have, I suspect, a sequel in court somehow. If you look at the kind of action which the ICC is investigating, a lot of it circling around the question of aid and
you know, was humanitarian assistance willfully obstructed in reaching the people of Gaza? And what did the Israelis actually say about that?
Well, of course, they contest the allegations that are made by the United Nations and aid agencies. They put the blame on disorganization on the side of those who are delivering aid, particularly at the UN on occasions they've done that. They talk about the criminal situation in Gaza. So it is a real war of words.
But I suspect that, you know, when this is looked at in the long term, the questions that arise over how such a huge tragedy could take place. And so little aid could get in while that was unfolding. These are serious and searching questions that will not go away. And in terms of them, when you landed, how much of a look at the situation in Gaza could you get?
Well, I'll be honest with you, not much. It was quite something. I'm not to take away from the moment. It was quite something to land 2,000 feet into the Gaza Strip. The last time I was anywhere near it was down at the Israeli border crossing of Karem Shalom.
in the south near Rafa, and on that occasion we were shepherded around, kept inside the kind of border area where the trucks were loading. You couldn't really see much. On this occasion we landed on this small airstrip, there was just a bit of barbed wire between us and Gaza, and across the barbed wire we could see the ruined houses.
We could also see them from the air when we were coming in with the helicopter. And you just had a glimpse into this extraordinary devastation that has upended the lives of more than two million people. That's approximately the number of people who've been displaced by this, and vast swathes most of the Gaza Strip in ruins.
And I suppose you want to be able to go and actually go and meet those people and tell their stories and film them as they go back to their homes. I just wonder how likely that prospect kind of is at the moment. That's so frustrating, you know, I'm not standing there on this airstrip. I'm looking through the world where there's a couple of trucks there with guys sitting in it and further on, I can see digging machinery.
It looks like the Israelis doing something and just up the road. And to be able to walk out that gate and just walk in, it's only, you know what? It's around two and a half miles down to Darryl Bala, okay? To be able to walk that and just ask people, what has it been like? What is it like for you now? The basic journalistic questions, just trying to assemble the facts. We're not allowed to do that.
Why are we not allowed to do that? The Israelis will not allow us to go in there and report independently. And that can't be said often enough.
Now, Fergal, can I make a small confession? Over the weekend, I got a BBC news push alert saying Fergal King has discovered the secret to living a happy life. And I didn't click on it because I was going to the cinema to see the brutalist, which is a very, very long film. And I still haven't got around to it. So can you now reveal your tips for a happy life? Oh, dear. I'm sorry, I didn't read the piece.
It's all right. You know, you know, you know, I write books and the number of people who've interviewed me about my books without reading them. It's true. I mean, if I was interviewing about a book, I would have read it. No, but I love, I love the kind of, I don't know, people who just, as I did myself when I was a young reporter at Walt's Inn with a couple of facts and golfers, I'm all in favor of it. It's about finding things out. So anyway, I'll stop raw mashing as we would say in Ireland and get to the point that you asked me about.
You know what the secret to happiness is? There's no secret. It's everywhere around me. And it took me a lot of struggles with depression, with post-traumatic stress disorder, with alcoholism.
to come to a point where I think I was so exhausted, so broken, that I would have grasped anything, you know, to try and get myself out of it. And I was in a psychiatric hospital one night and
I was watching a Netflix documentary and a doctor on it, a psychologist on it said, look, the key to mental health issues, if you struggle with them, is A, except that there's constant pain in life.
A, except this constant change. And C, you've got to work. I've got to work to deal with those things. And it's so self-evident in many ways, but it hit me with a kind of blinding force.
And certainly, I've been really fortunate to have wonderful therapy for PTSD and depression. Medication has helped me, still helps me navigate that frequently dark rose that depression offers up. But more than anything, it is, I think,
trying to live a decent life, trying to be a decent human being, being kind to other people, knowing what my stresses are, you know, so not getting too tired and being led down without walking the dog, doing the dishes. It sounds terribly mundane, you know, but not just doing them as a kind of
as a cameo, waltzing in and then expecting everyone to say, my God, you're wonderful. That's a great job. But doing that stuff, the repetitive stuff of daily life, which can drive many other people up the walls. But for me, it's part of an essential grounding that I avoided for so long.
Oh, that's, oh, that's very powerful actually. And I'm doubly sorry. I didn't read it. I didn't read it at the weekend. And also the amazing thing is that you're so generous with your time and your kind of emotional energy that you're, you're prepared to share that with the world and also here at the BBC as well. I know that you, you spent a lot of your time like kind of helping our colleagues deal with these things as well. So that's, that's so good of you.
Well, you've got to bear in mind, there's a fantastic saying about mental health and sobriety, is that to keep it, you've got to give it away. And I love that. It's only by extending to others. It's only by listening to them and trying to share some of my experience. And not a lot of my experience won't be relevant to other people.
It's me. We are all individuals. That's the beautiful thing about us. But there will be commonalities. There will be points where people can say, and people have been writing to me in the last few days about this. Many, many people saying, describing their own experiences with depression or trauma or addiction and feeling that there was something they picked up on. There's one absolute message in it. And I don't care if this sounds sentimental, but it is to love each other.
Wow. Well, on that note, I'll say Virgo thank you for this war. And I've been looking at it for the last 15 months and many other wars before that. And I still come to the conclusion that there's so much decency and goodness if we can just, as I say, love one another. Oh, Virgo, thank you so much and safe travels. Thank you.
No, in other news, the Office for National Statistics today on Tuesday published their projection for the size of the UK's population in 10 years time. They reckon in mid-2032, the size of the UK population will be, I feel I should have a sort of quiz show side effect here, 72.5 million.
And the main driver of that will actually be net migration. In other words, more people coming to move to the UK than people leaving the UK. And basically, the number of births and deaths will be about equal. So the next decade, when it comes to the shape and size of the population, the big story is going to be migration. Now,
I did an episode of anti-social about this a few months ago, which was focused on one bit of that equation, which was the low birth rate in the UK. And I realized as soon as we made that program, it wasn't really a program about fertility or the number of babies that people were having.
It was a program about literally everything, whether it was education, wealth, housing, jobs, technology, history, the future, social pressures, families, moms, dads, grandparents, it was everything. And I find it absolutely fascinating. So this is a great excuse, this news from the ONS today to dive into some of those issues. And we're going to do it with two world experts, because joining me here in the studio is the BBC's population correspondent, Stephanie Hegrity. Hello, Stephanie.
Hello. And you do a lot of reporting for the world service and our language services around the world. So this is an interesting area for you.
Yeah, absolutely. I look at population in much more global level, but the UK is a really interesting position, not the worst, not the most extreme end of the scale in terms of population dynamics, but really fascinating. And we're also joined by Professor Sarah Harper from Oxford University. Hello, Professor Harper. Hello. What's your area of expertise?
So I'm an anthropologist and demographer by background and I'm interested in falling fertility, falling mortality. In other words, the aging of the population, which is the dominant trend and what that means for society and economies. And you've actually just come from an event where lots of these big themes were being discussed.
I have, I've just been talking at the British Science Association and what was really interesting, so this is science and technology in society, but one of the topics they chose was how does demographic change, in other words, falling birth rate and living longer, how does that impact on things around productivity? So it was interesting that that world had actually sort of brought demography into science, technology and productivity.
Okay, lots to discuss, but Stephanie, doing a whole load of numbers on a podcast doesn't work hugely well in my experience, but what's the story that the Office for National Statistics kind of want us to get today about the UK? So the story today is a projection of where the population will be in, well, from 2022 to 2032.
The main takeaway is that the population is going to increase, but only really because of migration. So the number they've estimated that in the next 10 years, the number of people that die and the number of people that are born is going to be pretty much the same. But we're going to have almost 10 million people come into the country and almost 5 million leaves. So there will be this net migration figure of 4.9 million people. And that will bring our population up to about 72 million.
Before we talk about the implications of that, Sarah, are there some caveats we should have in mind when we hear those projections from the ONS? I think the really important thing is that we have kept our population buoyant through migration since the 1970s. You know, childbearing has been declining the entire time. It's really low at the moment. But we've always been reliant on migrants. The really interesting point to take into account is that migrants come here often because there is work. And when that work finishes,
In the old days, they used to actually return. We now are seeing far more long distance migrants coming in and deciding to settle and stay. And that's why our population is going to particularly grow, we think, over the next 10 years or so. And Stephanie, you might not know the answer to this question, but do the ONS take into account any kind of policy choices future governments could make about migration or things they could do to encourage people to have more babies, for example?
No, basically, they've predicted that the migration level can decrease and then level off at about 344,000 a year. I think it's their prediction. But they were very clear that they didn't take into account any policy, other policy changes. Some things around, you know, they're factored in and their stats about how the number of pensioners will change they've factored in.
changes to a pension age that are already planned, but other than that, no. And these are projections. They're not predictions. Sarah, where is a good place to start about the implications of all of this? Because I remember we did an episode of anti-social and radio for about this a few weeks ago. And once you start pulling the thread, there is demography and the structure of the population, it unravels into lots of different directions.
So I think the way to look at it is the following is that all high-income societies are aging. And there are two big dynamics there. So falling fertility, that's falling childbearing, is reducing the number of young people, i.e. future workers, coming into our population. So there is concern about what we call the dependency ratio, which means there won't be enough workers vis-a-vis people, not in work.
But at the other end, we've got a fall in what we call late life mortality, which means that people over 80 in particular are living longer and longer. And the issue there is that they tend to be in ill health. So that increases the amount of real dependency in the population, the fact that you need to fund health and social care, and also you need carers.
And the really important thing is between that, basically, between, shall we say, 20 and 80, whether or not you're in the workforce or not, is basically policy, because with the current cohort of people coming through, most people, beyond pension age, can and many want to work. They might not want to work full time, but they're very happy to do flexible working and contribution. So that's where policy can make a difference between these two big drivers.
Well, I suppose it comes back to that question I was just putting to Stephanie about what do the ONS take into account that you can do about this situation. And actually, the thing that has happened over the last few decades is as a society sort of being a bit less rigid about what you do at a particular stage of life.
Yes, and of course we are pushing back what we call state pension age. We don't have a retirement age in this country. Some companies or some organisations still have mandatory retirement, but that's very, very rare because of, you know, former regulations. But people tend to think of retiring when the state pension age comes in. It's currently 66 and it soon will be 67.
But when we talk to people in their 50s, many of them actually think, well, we're going to work far longer than that, because in today's flexible digital type world, and remember the old male manual worker, much of that is now gone, and the knowledge economy
and services is really where we are. So there is no reason so long as we have a population that is healthy and well educated that we can't continue working much longer and then the ageing of the population in terms of dependency becomes less important.
What I'm always interested in, and I don't see a huge amount written about, is when you talk about dependency ratio, how much is technology going to change that? You know, we have a country like Japan, which is way more productive than say China. So the dependency ratio has to be very...
Analyze them differently. Yes, you're absolutely right. So we bandy around this idea of total dependency ratio, which is workers to dependence young and old, old age dependency ratio, which is workers to typically people over 65. And yet we know that many of those are staying in work.
So then you bring in things exactly that. You bring in things like what's going to happen with new technology. And you have a whole sort of area of thought, which is looking at AI and robotics and saying, well, where are the jobs going to come from? So we do have to step back and say we are very rapidly moving into a different 21st century where work in the way that we used to see it and the way that we generate income and taxes, et cetera, is actually changing very rapidly.
And in a way, that's almost in line with what's happening to the population. Do you think we have a political system in Britain that can handle those sort of big trends that happen over decades? I mean, I'm just thinking, look how hard we find it to build a railway or an airport. And that's pretty simple compared to managing the entire population.
No, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. There's something called structural lag. And structural lag basically says that quite often attitudes and behaviours will change, but our institutions stay the same. And in many ways, we still have 20th century institutions. We still think of education as something that happens at school and possibly at college and possibly at university. But by the time you get into your mid 20s, education's gone. We really have to change that. And we have to look at lifetime education and constantly for all of us upgrading our skills.
Stephanie, you mentioned Japan. Why did your minds go to Japan when we were chatting? Because it has one of the oldest populations in the world, and it's had below replacement rate and fertility for a long time. As we have here, but they haven't been supplementing that with immigration because Japan is a very proud of its mono culture.
And recently, they've loosened rules around immigration, but it's led to one of the oldest, not the oldest population in the world. But it's interesting because some people see this as a crisis, right? And among those circles, you often hear, oh, Japan, look at Japan. Japan is facing its population crisis. And I look at Japan and see
A place that's still a functioning country and a nice place to live. Certainly, it's seeing this as a problem and trying to address it, but it's not as if society is imploded. I think the really specifically interesting thing is how many governments are now trying to tackle this through boosting childbearing.
And if you look at it in the bigger picture, so yes, in high-income countries, we're all below replacement. And it seems that there isn't much we can do. You know, the French who've been throwing stuff at trying to get women to have more babies and weren't you? Such as, you know, amazing tax breaks, you know, support for third and fourth child, childcare, et cetera. Now, they were keeping their total fertility rate at about two, and it's now down to 1.6. Same in Scandinavia, right? They did have some success in the early 2000s in.
pulling back low fertility levels with, by introducing these things, childcare, maternity leave that was, and paternity leave that were shared between mothers and fathers, and a kind of business culture that helped families or supported families. And then in the past 10 years or so, fertility levels have fallen again. So it's really, seems to be this really difficult,
very social phenomenon that policy so far, the policies we've seen so far are having very little impact on. But is that because the policies themselves are not the right ones for the problem or the problem is not solvable by policies?
I mean, I think it looks as if all the direct financial incentives that have been put towards this simply haven't worked, and you can take, you mentioned Scandinavia, so Sweden in the 1990s, Australia in the 2000s, where they gave these tax bonuses, and they had this little baby boom because people only were going to have one child or two child, and they just had them quickly together to get the tax, and then they had a baby bust. Where we do see some
You mean it squished the number of children into a particular period that they were going to be born anyway? Anyway. It was the timing rather than the number. So the only place, the only kind of policies which have had some effect are things basically around gender equality, gender equality in the workplace, gender equality in the community recognition that there are parents.
But across the world, the same picture is coming out. And if you look at surveys that are happening in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Far East, young women are saying the same things. Well, actually having a child is just one of the things I may want to do with my life. And I think we've just seen this amazing switch in that kind of an attitude. So previously they're parents and grandparents. If you were a woman, you took it for granted that probably you might well get married and have children.
the current generation across the world is saying, no, it's just one of many things I may do. And if we just stand back actually, in Africa, we still have four to nine children, on average, per woman, four to nine children. And we potentially will go from not three billion at the end of this century, but five billion people living in Africa. And when you look at the low consumption of that population, vis-a-vis the high consumption that we see in high-income countries,
In other words, they don't have cars and swimming pools and ready meals. Because swimming pools, white goods, food, still quite low levels of nutrition in many places, definitely they're going to increase their consumption. We live in a finite planet. We've got climate change. And I think it's actually almost irresponsible for high-income countries to say, oh, no, we've got to have more and more children, more children consuming and consuming, rather than saying, actually, we could balance out our population through things like migration, for example.
And yet it's so unpopular, politically, as an idea. Something we've been doing for 50 years has become, supplementing the population through migration has become so politically unpopular.
I think, I remember when I was studying for my geography degree and doing population geography and I could never really quite get my head round it. And so I think I did it for a time as an option and then I was like, oh, I'm not going to do that. What for you has been in both your jobs, a sort of eureka moment for you where you sort of really got it as an issue.
I'm not sure. You've not had it. I mean, it's such a complex issue. Well, that's what I mean about my bad analogy about pulling the thread. It sort of then leads to everything.
Yeah, sometimes I think, oh, yeah, that's it. This idea that once a fertility level goes in one direction, it doesn't move backwards because it's desirable to have smaller families and invest more in children. And once we're given that choice, that's just inevitably where we will go. It's desirable to have opportunities for women and education for women.
But then you see that there is sometimes fertility levels do pick up again when they have declined. And even there's just so many examples, and I'm not explaining it very well, but where some
An assumption you will have about why this is happening is then busted by a completely different scenario in a different part of the world with the same pattern. That's the thing. You have all of these different countries experiencing different social norms, different economic situations, and yet this trend is everywhere. Even in Africa,
Yeah, but my thought about that then is if it's a very dynamic, constantly changing thing, there's an argument then it's not something you need to worry about too much because as a species, we're quite good at just tweaking here and there to respond to dynamic changes. So maybe it's not like a giant iceberg hitting the Titanic, it's just the seas a bit rough some days and it's a bit smoother other days and also we're constantly designing better ships.
I'm full of terrible metaphors. People do apologize. A lot of people talk about fertility falling off a cliff or population falling off a cliff. These things do happen quite slowly, you know?
So I mean, I would actually sort of push back on the idea that we're gonna get any kind of reversal because, so one of the things, there's this wonderful survey, it's called the Demographic and Health Surveys, and almost every country now has them. And one of the things that we had picked up was that when you start going through the fertility transition, which means women get education and health and access to contraception, on the whole, the maximum family size that they want starts to fall.
But we identified that in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, that simply isn't happening. They're beginning the fertility transition. We have very highly educated middle-class university women in urban areas. And unlike in the rest of the world, who on the whole one or two children, and we also have this other growing thing of wanting to be child-free.
in these sub-Saharan African countries, many women were saying, no, no, we still want three, four or five. And so we then went back and we looked at every country over time since the fertility transition. It was a big, big project. And once the fertility transition starts, it is almost impossible for it to go back above replacement. And society settles to the fact that you don't have 10 children or eight children or two children. You have one or no children.
That's not happening in Sub-Saharan Africa at the moment. Could just be a delay. Right. But definitely, there's something about their society in the modern 21st century that means that, of course, what we're trying to do is empower women to make decisions about what is best for them and their family. And most women say, why not you children is best for me and best for my family?
in many sub-Saharan African countries. And also, you know, we looked at different parts of Africa, we looked at different ethnicities, religions, development, etc. What they're saying is, no, the decision we want to make is to have four children. We may want a gap, but we'll have two children to stay at home and two children to migrate and send back remittances. Now, that may change, but that in a way that is
good, because that's women being empowered to make those kind of decisions. But it does mean that maximum world population could well increase more than we think. And when you said that this idea about there being sort of a counterbalance, well, demographically, we do have one, and that is the high fertility growing population should use demographically, should use migration,
as the balancing, but we have nationalities and nations and national policies that are coming in and stopping this naturally happening. Also, when you said about migration being so unpopular, I think we understand that at the national level migration is really good for countries.
It's just that governments need to put in policies that alleviate some of the fears at the local level, fears of competition around jobs and housing, etc. So it's almost like policy needs to come in and reassure a population that migration in the long term is actually very, very good for a country.
and we could do a whole series of podcasts discussing that issue. Just to pick up on what you said about this event you were at and about productivity and technology, what's a big kind of takeaway? That's a good conference phrase, isn't it? What's a good takeaway on that? So the big takeaway is if we have falling childbearing, we're not going to have young workers. So how are we going to solve it? And the two ways to solve it are one, to look at productivity across the population, and particularly among the over 50s,
And secondly, going back to the migration, to make sure that we supplement any of the migration we have with what we call circular short-term local migration, i.e. local from our region, which we happen to live in Europe, because that's much more likely to follow jobs and when those jobs and opportunities are not there to return to the country. But if we look at the other thing I just mentioned, which is really understanding that the over 50s have a huge amount to contribute to our knowledge economy.
We know that productivity increases across our life courses at least till 65 because that's when the service tend at the moment to stop. We know that post-COVID we've done a lot of work or we say a lot of work has been done on understanding productivity by age group and at the moment it's very clear that the over 55s are more productive than the under 25s.
And we also know, because we have things like brain scans, and brain scans really understand what happens to the brain as we age, that the kind of things that a knowledge economy wants, which is things like verbal understanding, communication, problem solving, and also a certain calmness.
when there is some kind of a crisis, we get better and better at that over 50. So we were talking about improving healthcare, improving education across the life course, and therefore improving productivity within the UK, and not being worried about it.
A lot to think about, but I think that to me sounds like a preview of what our politicians will be talking about in maybe five years, ten years. That's not what they're going to be talking about next year, is it? They have to be talking about it next year. I mean, the Phillips report in 1948 or something warned the UK that this was going to happen. So, as you said, this is not something that suddenly happened. We have been talking
For 80 years, you've known. Yes, we've known that fertility was falling and that we were living longer. So in 1976, the total fertility rate for the UK was about 1.76. That's well below replacement rate, 2.1, and that was 50 years ago. If only they'd had podcasts then. Professor, thank you very much. And Stephanie, thanks to you too.
You look like you've wanted to have something else. Yes. Well, I wanted to get into why. Addendum. I want to get into why fertility is so low because I think it's fast. Oh, yeah, true. Yeah, OK. And one of the things I've been looking at recently is how in so many different societies, people are struggling to couple up. So marriages are down in China, in Iran, in Turkey. And those are all countries where marriage is very much linked to having children. But even in some research I was looking at from Finland,
They found that relationships are less stable. Couples are quicker to move in together, but also quicker to move out then. So relationships aren't lasting. And there's lots of different theories as to why, but this has
a profound impact on fertility rate because one of the main reasons why people who don't have children but wanted them, why that happens is because, not because of fertility problems, it's because they didn't find a partner in time. So this seems to be recently many obstacles in the way of people partnering up.
And I think one of them that I've been looking into is this disconnect between men and women when it comes to education levels, for example. There's still a kind of hangover maybe from patriarchy where I think most sociologists have studied this. I'm not making bold assumptions, but that a lot of women, most women look for a partner that they see as equal to them on an education level or
higher. And what we have across the world, a situation where vastly more women are graduating from university than men, women are doing better in high school, primary school, high school than boys are. And so we have this disconnect. So this sociologist at Yale is called, called Marcian Horn, who calls it the mating gap. And it's not a UK or a European or a US phenomenon. It's happening in other countries that have been looking at it, like I mentioned, Turkey, Iran, China. It just seems to be across the board.
And Sarah, as part of your research, are you having to ask people about their Tinder game? How are they getting on on the online apps? Well, so what is interesting is that unlike popular myth, although people under 30 are meeting people more often on social media,
In terms of marriages, I think it's only 10% of these actually leave to marriage. We still tend to connect and trust and marry people that we work with or went to school with or who in our community. So social media is important for meeting people, but maybe we're not quite there yet as it being the main driver of marriage. I'm just looking through the glass in the studio to see the reaction of the newscast team to that news.
Professor, thank you very much. And Stephanie, thanks to you too. Thank you. And that's almost it for this episode of Newscast, apart from to complete the circle on our quest for celebrity political cameos. This was inspired by the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsey Hoyle, apparently going to appear on Emmerdale for its 10,000th episode.
Lots of newscasters got in touch with their versions. Caroline emailed us from Colchester saying, Hello, Adam and team. Hello, Caroline. I was listening to Monday's newscast and wanted to put forward the late Lord Prescott arriving at the wedding of Nessa and Dave Coaches in Gavin and Stacey after a reference earlier in the series that Nessa and Lord Prescott had had a relationship completely unexpected and absolutely hilarious, says Caroline. Hello. Congratulations. Cheers, John. Nice to see you.
Rich Johnson on Discord got in touch to say Boris Johnson when he went for a pint in the Queen Vic. No, it's such an honour to have you here, Mr Mayor. Oh, please call me Boris. Lucky me that your bike got a pint here, isn't it? Now, would you like a topper? No, no, I'm fine, thank you. Unbelievable. So much for giving him what for. You know, I do, so am I a man who devotes his entire life to serving society.
I nearly went into politics myself, you know. Really? Well, if you have any ideas for how I could help Warford, here's my card. Oh, I wouldn't dream of telling the Mayor of London what to do. Thank you so much.
I'm glad that Rich mentioned that clip because for me, my takeaway from that is that actually Boris Johnson was not a very good actor, which meant that the Boris Johnson we all saw actually probably was him because that proves he wasn't very good at faking it. The question is, when did that version of Boris Johnson actually emerge into the real world?
Anyway, there's a whole series about that on BBC Sounds, presented by me. Right, that is definitely it for this episode of Newscast. We will be back with another one very soon. Bye-bye. Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. Well, thank you for making it to the end of another Newscast. You clearly ooze stamina. And I gently encourage you to subscribe to us on BBC Sounds, and then without having to do anything else, our meandering chats will miraculously make its way to your phone.
Yoga is more than just exercise. It's the spiritual practice that millions swear by. And in 2017, Miranda, a university tutor from London, joins a yoga school that promises profound transformation. It felt a really safe and welcoming space. After the yoga classes, I felt amazing.
But soon, that calm, welcoming atmosphere leads to something far darker, a journey that leads to allegations of grooming, trafficking and exploitation across international borders. I don't have my passport, I don't have my phone, I don't have my bank cards, I have nothing. The passport being taken, being in a house and not feeling like they can leave.
World of Secrets is where untold stories are unveiled and hidden realities are exposed. In this new series, we're confronting the dark side of the wellness industry, where the hope of a spiritual breakthrough gives way to disturbing accusations. You just get sucked in so gradually.
and it's done so skillfully that you don't realise. And it's like this, the secret that's there. I wanted to believe that, you know, that
whatever they were doing, even if it seemed gross to me, was for some spiritual reason that I couldn't yet understand. Revealing the hidden secrets of a global yoga network, I feel that I have no other choice. The only thing I can do is to speak about this and to put my reputation and everything else on the line. I want truth and justice.
and further people to not be hurt for things to be different in the future. To bring it into the light and almost alchemise some of that evil stuff that went on and take back the power. World of Secrets Season 6, the Bad Guru. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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