Rishi Sunak has announced that a future Conservative government would bring back mandatory national service, as he attempted to reignite his election campaign after an error-strewn start.

Under the plan, which appeared to be his latest attempt to reduce Tory losses by winning over voters drifting to Reform UK, the prime minister late Saturday said that every 18-year-old would have to spend time in a competitive, full-time military commission or spend one weekend a month volunteering in “civil resilience”.

The party said that the country needed to be “open and honest” about the long-term challenges it is facing, adding the scheme would ensure young people had “the opportunities they deserve”.

The proposals would see a “bold new model of national service” for 18-year-olds that could see them opt to spend one weekend per month volunteering in roles such as special constable, RNLI volunteer, or NHS responder. Officials claimed it would give young people “real world skills, while contributing to their country and community”.

In practice, a royal commission would be set up to design the new national service programme, leading to a pilot programme to open for applications in September 2025. However, it would be backed in law by a National Service Act.

The Tories insisted the scheme did not amount to conscription, stating that the Covid pandemic had shown the importance of civic service. The party said that a new scheme was “completely essential”.

“Only by nurturing our shared culture and fostering a sense of duty can we preserve our nation and values for decades to come. This is an investment in both the character of young people and our security,” it said.

It insisted a similar scheme was successful in Sweden, claiming 80% of young people completing national service said they would recommend it to their peers.

Labour lambasted the idea as another uncosted policy from the Tories, who have already raised the prospect of tax cuts they have yet to fund. “This is another desperate, £2.5bn unfunded commitment from a Tory party which already crashed the economy, sending mortgages rocketing, and now they’re spoiling for more,” said a spokesperson.

“This is not a plan – it’s a review which could cost billions and is only needed because the Tories hollowed out the armed forces to their smallest size since Napoleon. Britain has had enough of the Conservatives, who are bankrupt of ideas, and have no plans to end 14 years of chaos. It’s time to …rebuild Britain with Labour.”

The Tories said the scheme would be part-funded through a £1bn tax avoidance clampdown and £1.5bn currently spent on the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. A similar scheme was outlined in 2010 by David Cameron. Under his proposals, a special youth programme for 16-year-olds would be established to end a “pointless waste of potential” among teenagers. The plans never came to fruition.

Sunak was accused of hypocrisy over his scheme. In January, the prime minister rebuked the chief of the general staff, Sir Patrick Sanders, following his suggestion the UK might need a citizen army to fight Putin. The prime minister’s spokesman said at the time that Sunak did not agree with his comments and insisted there would be no return to national service, which was abolished in 1960.

Labour figures also privately accused the Tories of making 18-year-olds fix the problems the government had created, by boosting numbers in the military, helping the NHS and repairing infrastructure.

Erik ten Hag says he will join another club and keep winning trophies if Manchester United press ahead with plans to sack him after their shock 2-1 triumph over Manchester City in the FA Cup final.

Along with delivering what may be viewed as a final parting shot before he learns of his fate, Ten Hag was unable to offer any clarity on what the future holds for him. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the minority owner who controls United’s football policy, had earlier refused to say whether the victory over City would be enough for the Dutchman to stay.

United have already identified candidates to replace Ten Hag, who won the Carabao Cup final last season, and are ready to make a change after finishing eighth in the Premier League, despite the FA Cup triumph delivering European football next season.

“I don’t think about this,” Ten Hag said. “I am in a project. We are exactly where we want to be. We are constructing a team. When I took over it was a mess. The team is developing and winning. It is about winning trophies. The team plays to an identity. You need a strong squad.

“You need players available and there is a lot of work to do. The team is progressing and we are winning trophies. Two trophies in two years is not bad. I am not satisfied. If they don’t want me any more I will go [somewhere else] to win trophies because that is what I do in my whole career.”

United, who implemented Ten Hag’s tactics to perfection and won thanks to first-half goals from the teenagers Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo, secured Europa League qualification after ending City’s hopes of completing a double Double.

Yet the conversation was dominated by Ten Hag’s position. Before the final he had said to Dutch media that the club told him they want him to stay. But the 54-year‑old was evasive when pressed on whether that message was relayed to him during a review with the United hierarchy last week.

“How many times do I have to tell you this?” Ten Hag said. “Do I have to repeat myself 10 times? Twenty times? They don’t have to tell me every week. I was in some clubs where every day they tell you: ‘You are the best.’ If they tell me they don’t want me any more then I will hear it.”

Notably, Ratcliffe did not single Ten Hag out for praise. “It is a glorious feeling to win the FA Cup final at Wembley,” the Ineos magnate said. “Manchester United clearly were not the favourites to win today but they played with total commitment and skill and overcame one of the great teams in football. We are all very proud of the players and the staff who work tirelessly to support them.”

Ten Hag, who has repeatedly claimed his team’s poor form is down to injuries, was asked if United need stability. “I don’t have to think about this,” he said. “When you see the last decade, there were not so many finals for this club, not so many trophies, not so many young talents coming through. We strengthened the squad by our coaching. We also need transfer windows to bring players in and players who are always available.”

United are monitoring Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, Graham Potter, Kieran McKenna, Thomas Frank and Gareth Southgate. Ten Hag was asked if it was disrespectful that the club have been speaking to candidates. “I don’t know if they did this,” he said. “I can’t answer this question.”

Responding to Ten Hag’s claim that “we are exactly where we want to be”, it was suggested that the injury crisis did not excuse United finishing eighth and ending with a negative goal difference. “When you make it like this you don’t have any knowledge about managing a football team,” Ten Hag replied. “If that is the opinion I will go anywhere else. I will stay winning trophies.”

Pep Guardiola admitted his tactics were wrong after City, who looked jaded after winning the league title last Sunday, failed to defend their trophy. They improved when Jérémy Doku came on at half-time but the winger’s goal came too late. “We were not in the right position,” Guardiola said. “It was my mistake. The gameplan was not good.”

“Energy efficient”, “carbon neutral” and “net zero” are buzzwords we hear more and more as we face the impact of climate change. But do we think about them enough in building?

Globally, a move towards sustainable housing is growing. In Europe, efforts to move to greener homes hope to combat rising energy costs and be better for the planet. But 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions still come from the real estate sector.

In Australia, off-grid electric homes are becoming more common. A recent report by the University of New South Wales is pushing the built environment industry to reach net zero by 2040, and according to a 2024 study by Domain, energy-efficient real estate is attracting more interest than conventional homes.

But even if net zero housing – which means your home releases no net carbon – is not yet the norm, many architects are beginning to champion sustainable design, aiming for high energy ratings and future-proofing homes to adapt with the changing climate.

By reducing their carbon footprint, and using passive design – which focuses on conditions like sunlight and layout instead of artificial climate control – these net zero homes make it clear that going back to basics is key to making the switch.

Huff’n’Puff Haus, Strathbogie ranges, Victoria

Once upon a time a big bad wolf could huff, puff, and blow the straw house down. But not any more – in rural Victoria, Envirotecture’s Huff’n’Puff Haus is here to stay.

Asked to create an off-grid, all-electric, energy-efficient home, architect and director Talina Edwards set out to build a house that would let two empty nesters age in place for years to come.

Huff’n’Puff house is made from prefabricated, structurally insulated straw bale panels about 300-350mm thick and has “passivhaus premium certification”, which means it generates more renewable energy than it uses.

As a waste product, straw not only sequesters CO2 – reducing the embodied carbon of the project – but is an under-utilised material in building. Edwards says the amount of straw burned in paddocks annually would be enough to insulate 40,000 homes in Australia every year.

Envirotecture also aimed to use sustainably sourced timber, reduce use of plastic during building and focused on good ventilation strategy for healthy air quality. The house needs hardly any heating and cooling, instead relying on orientation, cross ventilation, passive shading and natural light.

“The cost of building anything is expensive, but not the cost of building well,” says Edwards.

“If you reduce the size and maybe you don’t have so many built-in pieces of joinery … you can choose how to prioritise.”

Despite Australia’s “obsession” with large homes, the 200 sq metre house is flexible and functional – a corridor opens out into spaces instead of whole rooms. A breakfast bar can become a study space; a window seat, a place to look at the view.

“On a regional site it always looks a bit odd if you’ve just got this tiny little house, but we did keep it a modest size,” says Edwards. “I think that’s the first tip for anyone building no matter where.”

The project has won many awards since its completion and is shortlisted in the sustainability category in the House awards. But for Edwards, it is not about accolades.

“Everyone kept saying, it’s so beautiful … but it’s not about what it looks like,” she says.

“… The beauty of it is beyond skin deep. What’s hidden behind? What’s the true heart of what this is doing?… It’s honest beauty, not just considering the aesthetics.”

39S House, Brisbane, Queensland

On a 240 sq metre block in Brisbane, architect Andrew Noonan has breathed new life into a dilapidated Victorian-era timber cottage, giving the five bedroom family home a net zero future.

Aiming for a “whole-of-life net zero” home – one that takes as much carbon out of the system through energy production and materials as it takes to build – Noonan went back to basics, applying passive-design principles to literally turn the house around.

“The house originally ran north-south. It had a very long west-facing facade,” says Noonan.

“100m away there is Suncorp stadium … and a main road, so quite noisy on that same western side … it became quite an opportunity to do one big move to solve a couple of problems.”

Noonan removed a 1930s extension at the rear of the home and added a new extension to achieve east-west orientation. It’s a five bedroom home, with four of them occupied, but Noonan says necessity must be questioned when building.

“Do we all need media rooms? Do we all need three, four or five bathrooms?” he says, adding that key to the net zero approach is letting the climate dictate material choice to ensure a lifespan beyond the 55-year average for a home.

If you have high-quality doors and windows “they’ll very much last beyond the life of the building,” Noonan says.

“If they’re made in a way that’s designed to be thermally efficient – not cheap, single piece aluminium frames with very thin glazing in them … but something that is thinking about performance – that will have an ongoing value.”

39S House also has no heating or cooling, instead relying on heavily insulated timber framing and orientation to cater to Brisbane’s humidity.

And while Noonan recommends electrifying everything by switching to induction appliances, air source heat pumps and getting photovoltaic panels– which are slightly different to solar – he says gadgets “won’t solve the problem if it’s not worked out in a more simple way first”.

Green space occupies 50% of the site, reducing external heat. The air temperature directly outside the doors and windows is 15 degrees cooler than it would be if the area was paved with no trees.

And the home also considers Brisbane’s propensity to flood, lifting the house above ground and aiming to absorb flood waters into the soil, slowing the run-off rate downstream.

“Just because it’s doing some really interesting sustainability things doesn’t mean it has to look like a tree house,” says Noonan.

“It can look like it can look like any house … the aesthetic doesn’t really tie into the performance.”

Farrier Lane House, Perth, Western Australia

Architect Matt Delroy-Carr set out to build an affordable, high performing family home. But when a lifecycle assessment partway through the project came back carbon neutral, he added net zero status to the list.

His home, Farrier Lane House, now acts as a demonstration project on how to build sustainably for his practice MDC Architects.

“A 180 sq metre-house might have exactly the same things in it as an 140 sq metre-house like mine,” says Delroy-Carr. “It’s just got 40 sq metres of wasted area that’s inefficiently designed.”

Farrier Lane House has large windows to open up the space. Its house-to-garden ratio heavily favours green space, filling 60% of the site to extend the liveability of a smaller-footprint home.

Inside, it has a double brick ground floor, providing a solid thermal mass, a hybrid upper floor with reverse brick veneer and timber-framed floors throughout.

But Delroy-Carr says often the more you focus on carbon neutrality through material use, the harder it is to get a high NatHERS star rating.

“The rating system heavily favours masonry construction … it loves brick and concrete, because they’re high thermal mass materials,” he says.

In 1993 I was working as a young criminal lawyer for Aboriginal Legal Aid in the Northern Territory. One day I was sent to the remote community of Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land to pay our respects at the funeral of Roy Dadaynga Marika, “the father of land rights”.

Overwhelmed by the beauty and richness of the ceremony and the shock of seeing my first dead body, I staggered out of the funeral shelter and turned back for a moment to take a photo of the pomp and colour of the scene, including the beautiful woman sitting right in front of me.

The moment I pointed the camera at her she turned towards me with a look of disgust that seemed to say, “Who is this ignorant tourist?” I later found out she was Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr, Marika’s adopted daughter.

Some months later I was back in Yirrkala, fishing at the local beach. An old lady had shown my dad a foolproof secret fishing spot on my previous trip. Merrkiyawuy was on the beach with her friends, assuring them I would never catch anything. Just then, to everyone’s surprise, I caught a massive cod.

Merrkiyawuy and her friends rushed over to congratulate me and offered to help me cook it but I was so shy in front of this beautiful woman that I grabbed the fish and took off.

A couple of months later we ended up at the same party in Darwin where everyone was dancing on the lawn. When the music slowed down Merrkiyawuy asked me to dance but I told her I didn’t know how. She dragged me to the centre of the lawn as the song changed to Anne Murray singing “Could I have this dance for the rest of my life?” I slumped on her, the way we did at primary school socials, as that was the only step I knew.

I asked her on a date the next night and took her to the best restaurant I knew. I made a big deal about rejecting the waiter’s suggested wine choice and insisted on the most expensive bottle for $50.

As we began to share our stories she told me she had been a backup singer with the band Yothu Yindi and was now working as a schoolteacher. She said she had two children but could not have any more. From somewhere outside my body I heard myself say, as if to contradict her, “I have a strong totem!” I still have no idea where that humiliating statement came from.

As we were leaving I asked the waiter for another bottle of the $50 wine and he explained we could take BYO wine that we hadn’t finished but we couldn’t buy wine from the restaurant. I gave him a nod and a wink and he opened a bottle for me and we took it away.

The emotions of the evening and the expensive wine took a toll on me. When Merrkiyawuy told me she was going to “sing” me (a form of love spell), I spewed on her! All I remember after that was her walking me up and down the street to sober me up.

At the time I was living under someone’s house in central Darwin with only shade cloth for walls. But it was just next to the offices of Legal Aid. And that is where I snuck off to the next morning, leaving her asleep. Mine was a true walk of shame. She was heading to a conference in New Zealand that morning and I knew I had blown my chances with this most graceful, clever, funny, beautiful woman.

After a day in court and beating myself up over my stupidity, I came home to find a handmade card on my bed. Merrkiyawuy had cut out a photo of herself and stuck it to the front. Inside was a $50 note and the words: “Buy yourself another bottle of wine.”

Her compassionate humour and the fact she could forgive me convinced me I was still in with a chance.

Fourteen months after our first date, we married. Our daughter, Siena, was born eight years after that. We will celebrate our 30-year wedding anniversary in December.

Merrkiyawuy is now an award-winning author, the co-principal of Yirrkala school and the true Mary Poppins of the north, loved by the many children she has taught over three decades. Her eyes are always on the needs of the community. My eyes are generally on her. I am in constant awe of her grace, beauty and big brain.

Ten years after we married someone returned a pile of items from an old house I’d lived in. Included in the pile was the photo of my wife I had taken at the exact moment I first saw her. She was scowling at me. With good reason.

In the 18th century an enslaved mixed race woman named Quasheba escaped from a sugar plantation where she was held captive on Barbados.

There are no records of Quasheba’s fate, but the horrific conditions from which she fled in 1783 are well-documented. She is simply recorded in official papers as “run away”.

Other enslaved people on the same plantations killed themselves in the face of violence, punishment and tyranny. People transported from west Africa were forced “under the whip” to harvest canes and carry them to the mills to be crushed and boiled. Many were branded with hot irons.

The sugar estate, known as the Codrington plantations, generated an estimated £5m a year in today’s money and covered 763 acres. It was owned and overseen by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), the missionary arm of the Church of England.

The Codrington estate is now one of the focal points in a public debate about the Church of England’s links to chattel slavery, in which people were traded as personal property.

The Observer this weekend reveals evidence found in the archives of Lambeth Palace library of how an archbishop of Canterbury in the 18th century approved funds to buy enslaved people.

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, this weekend said it was “particularly painful” to read that a predecessor was involved in buying enslaved people. He said: “While nothing can fully atone for these crimes, we are committed to finding out more, realising this will take many years.”

Robert Beckford, professor of social justice at the University of Winchester, said: “I think there is a lot more in the archives that will reveal the extent to which the Church of England was involved in transatlantic chattel slavery and this was probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

Beckford said a more thorough review was required to quantify the extent of the church’s links. He claimed the Church had previously “distanced” itself from its activities in the SPG, and needed to acknowledge “this difficult part of its history”.

In 1710 Christopher Codrington, a colonial administrator and plantation owner, left on his death a bequest to the SPG of the two plantations in the east of Barbados. His will stipulated they should be maintained and “continued entire with three hundred negros at least kept always thereon” and that the estate should be used for education, with “a convenient number of professors and scholars … all of them to be under the vows of poverty and chastity and obedience.”

Codrington, a former fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, also left a £10,000 bequest to All Souls for a new library. The college has put a memorial plaque at the entrance to the library in memory of those who worked in slavery on the plantations.

Enslaved people on the estate left to the SPG were until at least 1732 branded “society” on the chest with hot irons, to show they were the property of the Church’s missionary arm. One plantation manager was a “particularly vicious” individual, according to a source cited by historian Travis Glasson in his book Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World.

Death rates among enslaved people were high. From 1710 to 1838, it is estimated that between 600 and 1,200 lived and died on the plantations. From 1712 to 1761 the SPG purchased at least 450 enslaved Africans.

Rewards were paid for the return of escapees. In August 1725, the plantation paid twelve pounds and six shillings for the return of five “runaway negroes”, according to documents seen by the Observer.

The SPG was overseen by Church of England leaders and the incumbent archbishop of Canterbury would typically serve as its president. On 17 November 1758 Thomas Secker, the then archbishop, chaired a meeting of the SPG and agreed to reimburse funds to the society accounts for “the purchase of new negroes [from Africa] and for the hire of enslaved labour from a third party”.

Secker was told the measures were “calculated for the future lasting advantage of the estates”. It was agreed that £1,093 be paid. Two years later Secker approved another payment of £264 for new enslaved people. A meeting, chaired by Secker on 15 August 1760, recorded the funds were for “the purchase of nine negroes in the beginning of the year”.

Secker’s personal correspondence that year indicates an awareness that the need for new purchases of enslaved people from Africa was connected to the high death rate. He also reflected on their desperate plight. In a 1760 letter to a bishop he wrote: “I have long wondered and lamented that the negroes in our plantations decrease and new supplies become necessary, continuously. Surely this proceeds from some defect, both of humanity and good policy. But we must take things as they are at present.”

Research shows that by 1781 there were 162 enslaved persons who were field workers at Codrington, 73 of them children. Another 60 enslaved persons worked as stock keepers or in other jobs. A list of English manufactured goods shipped to the plantations in 1756 includes four dozen agricultural hoes “very small for children”.

A school for white boys was opened on the estate in 1745, housed in an imposing building with thick limestone walls, and in 1830 Codrington College opened to train candidates for the ministry. It remains there today and is the oldest Anglican college in the Americas. It is managed by the Codrington Trust, established in 1983 and now the estate’s governing body.

The SPG was united in 1965 with the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, forming what is now known as the United Society Partners in the Gospel (USPG). Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, is the USPG president, but it is now governed by an independent trustee board.

The church apologised in 2006 for its “involvement in the slave trade” and the operation of the Codrington estate, but faces calls to acknowledge the extent of its role in the plantations in Barbados and agree reparations.

The Church Commissioners, which manages Church assets, has done extensive work on its links to chattel slavery. It published a report last year showing how its £10bn endowment fund was partly linked to Queen Anne’s Bounty, a financial scheme established in 1704 which invested funds in transatlantic chattel slavery.

The USPG apologised for its historic role at the Codrington estate in September last year. In a statement to the Observer, it said it pledged £7m in response to proposals from the Codrington Trust for a renewal and reconciliation project. The apology and investment was criticised for being announced without dialogue and agreement with the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations.

The Church Commissioners has said that questions on the work to address the history of the Codrington plantations are a matter for the USPG. An exhibition on historic links to chattel slavery last year only briefly touched on the plantations, but the Church states on its website there are further documents in the Lambeth Palace library and “we anticipate having more information and artefacts to share in due course”. Officials said the exhibition had been staged in the context of the work on the Queen Anne’s Bounty.

Trevor Prescod, a Barbados MP and chair of the Barbados National Task Force on Reparations, said: “The church was one of the main bodies that justified enslavement of Africans. They can’t escape that responsibility and must right the wrongs.”

The Church Commissioners said: “The Church Commissioners is committed to researching its history and sharing our findings transparently. Some historians contacted us with feedback on the Lambeth Palace library exhibition last year – we are grateful for their feedback and will continue to welcome constructive engagement as we seek to learn and understand more.”

Making reparations

In November 2023, insurance market Lloyd’s of London agreed to invest £52m to promote racial equality in recognition of its “significant role” in the transatlantic slave trade. An independent review by Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, found the insurance market was part of “a sophisticated network of financial interests and activities” that made transatlantic slavery possible.

The Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian and Observer, apologised in March last year for the role the founders of the Guardian had in transatlantic slavery. Research commissioned in 2020 found John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821, and at least nine of his 11 backers had links to chattel slavery. The trust said it expected to invest more than £10m during a decade of restorative justice. The Guardian’s journalistic series, Cotton Capital, explores the history of transatlantic slavery and its legacy.

The Bank of England presented new research in an exhibition in 2022 that it had owned 599 enslaved people in the 1770s, after taking possession of two plantations in Grenada.

The National Trust published a report in September 2020 which found that up to a third of its properties had links to colonialism or slavery. It found 29 properties had links to successful claims for compensation after the abolition of slavery. The Slavery Abolition Act (1833) provided for £20m compensation to be paid to the owners of “slave property”.

The brewery and pub chain Greene King, founded in 1799, apologised in June 2020 for its links to chattel slavery. Founder Benjamin Greene owned sugar plantations in the West Indies, where he enslaved people.

Joe Biden has called newly graduating US military officers the “guardians of American democracy” at a commencement speech at the elite West Point military academy in New York state, where the US president, without mentioning Donald Trump by name, gave strong warnings of unprecedented threats to US freedom.

Biden, speaking in front of about 1,000 graduating cadets at the US army training academy on Saturday, urged the newly minted officers to “hold fast” to their military oath “not to a political party, not to a president but to the constitution of the United States of America, against all enemies, foreign and domestic”.

In remarks that could be seen as a thinly veiled reference to the threat to democracy Biden believes Trump poses to the US as the two candidates battle for the White House in this November’s election, the president said that the oath taken by the military is “as important to your nation now as it ever has been”.

“From the very beginning, nothing is guaranteed about democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, protect it, preserve it – now it is your turn,” said Biden, who cited the right to vote, the right to worship and the right to protest as key freedoms that require “constant vigilance”.

The president said that the US was founded on an idea of equality but that “ideas need defenders to make them real and that’s what you, the class of 2024, are all about. The defenders of freedom, champions of liberty, guardians – and I mean this – guardians of American democracy. You must keep us free at this time, like none before.”

Biden outlined a global situation that he said had placed unprecedented challenges upon the US military, warning that the cadets are “graduating into a world like none before … There’s never been a time in history when we’ve asked our military to do so many many different things in so many different places around the world, all at the same time.”

The president reaffirmed that the US will continue “standing strong” with Ukraine in the face of a “brutal tyrant” in the form of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, although again reiterated no US troops will be sent to the conflict.

Biden said that the Nato alliance was “stronger than ever”, praised the US military for its efforts in erecting a pier and delivering air drops to provide aid to Palestinians suffering amid Israel’s war in Gaza, and said that the US was “standing up for peace and stability” regarding the threat posed by China to Taiwan.

“The upshot of all of this, across vastly different regions and very different challenges, our men and women in uniform are hard at work strengthening our alliances,” Biden said, adding that the military was “standing up to tyrants and safeguarding the peace and protecting freedom and openness. We are doing what only America can do, as the indispensable nation.”

Biden is scheduled to participate in Memorial Day services at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on Monday. A week later, he will travel to Normandy, France, to participate in ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the D-day invasion.

Biden is expected to give a major speech about the heroism of Allied forces in the second world war and the continuing threats to democracy today.

On Saturday, he made his first address at West Point as president, having twice addressed a graduating class of cadets when he was vice-president. The elite training academy is about 40 miles (65km) north of New York City.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee to run against Biden in the 2024 election, was the last president to speak at a West Point commencement, in 2020.

College campuses nationwide have erupted in sometimes-violent protests over Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas following the militant group’s 7 October attack on southern Israel. Students have used commencement speeches at colleges such as Harvard, Duke and Yale universities to protest Biden’s actions, but no such demonstrations were expected at West Point and the commencement passed without incident.

The West Point military academy was founded in 1802 by then president Thomas Jefferson to train army officers, and it has produced some of the US’s greatest generals, including two who went on to become president.

Trump, meanwhile, has seen some of his support from the military community erode. In 2016, he won 60% of voters who said at the time that they served in the military, according to exit polls conducted by NBC News.

That figure dropped to 54% in 2020, according to NBC News. In 2020, Biden won 44% of voters who said they served in the military, according to the data.

Reuters contributed reporting

Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop golden rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue.

The Philippines had become the first country – in 2021 – to approve the commercial cultivation of golden rice, which was developed to combat vitamin-A deficiency, a major cause of disability and death among children in many parts of the world.

But campaigns by Greenpeace and local farmers last month persuaded the country’s court of appeal to overturn that approval and to revoke this. The groups had argued that golden rice had not been shown to be safe and the claim was backed by the court, a decision that was hailed as “a monumental win” by Greenpeace.

Many scientists, however, say there is no evidence that golden rice is in any way dangerous. More to the point, they argue that it is a lifesaver.

“The court’s decision is a catastrophe,” said Professor Matin Qaim, of Bonn University, and a member of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board, which promotes the introduction of the crop. “It goes completely against the science, which has found no evidence of any risk associated with golden rice, and will result in thousands and thousands of children dying.”

The decision is to be challenged by the Philippines government and agriculture experts say it is likely it will be overturned sometime in the near future. But the setback is still likely to have profound impacts. Other countries such as India and Bangladesh – where vitamin A deficiency is also widespread – have been considering planting golden rice but are now likely to be deterred.

“The situation is extremely alarming,” said Adrian Dubock, another board member. “Planting golden rice was not being done for profit. Nobody was trying to control what farmers grow or control what people eat. It was being done to save lives.”

Vitamin A is found in most foods in the west but in developing countries it is conspicuously lacking in diets, a deficiency that “is associated with significant morbidity and mortality from common childhood infections, and is the world’s leading preventable cause of childhood blindness,” according to the World Health Organization. Estimates suggest it causes the deaths of more than 100,000 children a year.

As a solution, Peter Beyer, professor of cell biology at Freiburg University in Germany, and Ingo Potrykus of the Institute of Plant Sciences in Switzerland, began work in the 1990s using the new technology of genetic manipulation. They inserted genes into the DNA of normal rice to create a variant that could make beta-carotene, a rich orange-coloured pigment that is also a key precursor chemical used by the body to make vitamin A.

This is golden rice, which has since been shown to be an effective source of vitamin A in humans. Countries, including America, Australia and New Zealand, have ruled golden rice is safe. Yet three decades after its development it has still to be grown commercially – thanks to the green movement’s vociferous opposition to the growing of any GM crop, regardless of any potential benefit it might possess.

“Golden rice was the first transgenic crop to be created that benefited people not companies or farmers, yet its use has been blocked from the start,” Potrykus told the Observer last week. “I am extremely worried about the decision of the Philippines court, not just for its impact on the take-up of golden rice but its effect on the growing of other transgenic crops.”

This view is shared by many scientists. In 2016, more than 150 Nobel laureates signed an open letter that attacked Greenpeace for campaigning against golden rice and other GM crops. Greenpeace had “misrepresented the risks, benefits and impacts” of genetically altered food plants, they said. “There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption.”

Greenpeace remains adamant, however. “There are specific problems with golden rice,” said Wilhelmina Pelegrina, head of Greenpeace Philippines, last week. “Farmers who brought this case with us – along with local scientists – currently grow different varieties of rice, including high-value seeds they have worked with for generations and have control over. They’re rightly concerned that if their organic or heirloom varieties get mixed up with patented, genetically engineered rice, that could sabotage their certifications, reducing their market appeal and ultimately threatening their livelihoods.”

Pelegrina added that relying on a single-crop system to alleviate malnutrition reduced resilience and increased vulnerability to climate impacts – a serious problem in one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. “If things don’t work out, it’s the farmer and the consumers who pick up the tab.”

There are also more practical, tried-and-tested solutions to tackle vitamin-A deficiency such as food supplementation programmes and supporting people to grow a range of crops including those rich in vitamin A, she claimed. “That should be where attention and investment is focused.”

What are PFAS used for?

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS are a group of chemicals that have been used in manufacturing and added to consumer products since the 1950s. They allow grease and dirt to slide off carpets and textiles, protect industrial equipment from heat damage and corrosion, and help to smooth and condition the skin.

They are also used in jet engines, medical devices, refrigeration systems, the construction industry and electrical devices.

However, they can take hundreds or even thousands of years to degrade after the products they have been used in are thrown away. This means that if they leak into the soil or water, which they often do, they could remain there for centuries.

They can also move around, meaning you don’t need to live close to a chemical factory or landfill site to be exposed to them. And they can accumulate in the tissues of living things, including humans, over time. This is concerning because at least some PFAS have been linked to health issues such as high cholesterol, impaired immunity and various cancers.

However, there are thousands of these chemicals, and while the toxicity of some of them is well established, others are potentially less toxic, or they haven’t been studied, so we don’t know if they are harmful.

Do we really need them?

Often there are alternatives. For instance, consumer products such as frying pans or school uniforms don’t need nonstick or stain-resistant coatings to be effective. Cast-iron or stainless-steel pans also work, while a wet sponge quickly removes most stains.

Manufacturers can also develop chemical substitutes, such as PFAS-free firefighting foams that are now being used at many commercial airports, including London’s Heathrow. However, creating them takes time, and there are some chemicals with important industrial applications for which substitutes don’t currently exist.

Transitioning to alternatives too quickly could also create further problems. “There are some things that we will still need to be waterproof or stain-proof, and if we ban PFAS too fast there’s a chance that we could end up using a different product that is also persistent and bioaccumulative,” says Stephanie Metzger, a policy adviser on sustainable chemicals at the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry. “We need investment and research into alternatives that are both effective and verified as being better for us.”

What are the main ones to look out for?

There are three main types of forever chemicals: fluorosurfactants – soap-like molecules that are widely used in industry and are also added to some paints, varnishes and firefighting foams; fluoropolymers – long, plastic-like chains of carbon and fluorine with wide-ranging consumer applications (the most famous being the nonstick chemical coating Teflon); and fluorocarbons – small-molecule gases or liquids, used in refrigerators and air-conditioning systems.

Neither fluoropolymers nor fluorocarbons have been proven to cause direct harm to consumers, but they may cause problems once their useful lives end and they start breaking down into other PFAS.

The most notorious fluorosurfactants are perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). When news articles talk about the toxicity of PFAS, they are often referring to these substances, because there is convincing evidence that they are harmful. One study, which included data from about 69,000 people, concluded that there was a probable link between PFOA exposure and diagnosed high cholesterol, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular and kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension (high blood pressure).

Because of this, the use of PFOA and PFOS is banned or severely restricted under a global treaty called the Stockholm convention. However, this has led to their replacement with different chemicals, some of which may also be harmful.

Do I need to worry about exposure from everyday items?

PFAS are everywhere, from rainwater and Arctic ice to the sewage sludge farmers spread on their fields. They have also been detected in the blood of up to 99% of Americans. While many scientists are concerned about these chemicals, they stress that the direct risk posed by many of the PFAS-containing products in our homes is likely to be low.

“The biggest risk is not from household products,” says Metzger. “The bigger potential route for harm is through drinking contaminated water and potentially through food; there are movements to phase out the use of PFAS in food packaging because that comes into contact with what we eat. It is a more direct link to our bodies than, say, a carpet that’s been treated to be stain-resistant.”

The environmental charity Fidra found PFAS in food packaging collected from eight out of nine major UK supermarkets and 100% of the takeaways that it tested – with significant levels detected in cookie and bakery bags, microwave popcorn packaging, pizza boxes, takeaway bags and compostable moulded fibre takeaway boxes.

In theory, PFAS could also get into your body through cosmetics or personal care products, particularly those applied to the eyes or lips.

Despite these concerns, the strongest predictor of having high levels of PFAS in your body appears to be living in an area with a heavily contaminated water supply. PFAS can get into drinking water through discharge from manufacturing plants, the use of certain firefighting foams at, for example, airports or military bases near water sources, or runoff from landfill sites. Last year, the Guardian reported on the legal discharge of large amounts of PFAS into the River Wyre by a chemical plant in Lancashire.

Since July 2022, the Drinking Water Inspectorate (DWI), which oversees the safe supply of drinking water in England and Wales, has required water companies to monitor levels of 47 individual PFAS in drinking water and notify consumers if they breach certain levels. If they do, they must also treat the water – for example by diluting it with water from other sources.

Some scientists and campaigners would like to see the introduction of stricter limits. The Royal Society of Chemistry has suggested a maximum acceptable concentration of 10ng/L (0.01 micrograms a litre) for individual PFAS – 10 times lower than the current guidelines.

Research is also urgently needed into new ways of removing PFAS from the environment and breaking them down into harmless molecules.

Can we rid our lives of PFAS?

Tempting as it may be to strip your house of all PFAS-containing items and take them to the dump, experts agree that, from an environmental perspective, this is probably the worst thing that you could do.

Metzger recommends considering the lifecycle of the products we buy: “Your nonstick pan might not hurt you today, as long as you use it properly. But if it goes into landfill and contaminates the environment, the PFAS in it could be around for tens or hundreds of years, polluting the soil and water systems for you and your children or grandchildren.”

Thames Water has sent samples of water for lab testing after dozens of people reported becoming unwell with stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea in south-east London.

Earlier this month, unsafe drinking water led to more than 100 cases of a waterborne disease in Devon, with people asked to boil their water because of contamination fears.

After cryptosporidium, a disease that can cause symptoms such as diarrhoea and vomiting, was detected in the water supply in the Brixham area of Devon 10 days ago, 17,000 households and businesses were told by South West Water not to use their tap water for drinking without boiling and cooling it first.

Now residents in Beckenham have reported being struck by a stomach bug which is causing days of vomiting and diarrhoea. They include a four-year-old boy suffering days of vomiting, and an adult woman who was so unwell she went to hospital with stomach pain, vomiting and dehydration.

Katie Cox, a TV producer who lives in the area, said: “I was unwell two weeks ago with what I thought was a stomach bug.

It was a good week before I was able to eat again properly. Since then, the South West Water contamination has come to light and I became concerned that maybe there is something in our water.”

Whole families have reported becoming unwell, and fear it may be caused by a bug in the water. After reporting the issue to Thames Water, people who have been unwell said technicians came to take samples of their tap water. Thames Water confirmed its technicians collected samples, which have been sent for laboratory analysis.

A spokesperson said: “We take the quality of our water extremely seriously – it is the highest quality drinking water in the world – and since 2010 more than 99.95% of tests taken from customers’ taps met the standard required by UK and European legislation. Every year, we carry out more than 500,000 tests, taking samples from source to tap. Customers can find information about their water supply by inputting their postcode on our website.”

Thames Water has not carried out specific testing on any treatment works nearby, but a source at the company said it carries out general monitoring from the wider water supply zone as part of a statutory monitoring programme, and there are no recent failures from the Central Sydenham water zone.

Labour’s shadow environment secretary, Steve Reed, said: “Our water industry is broken. Just days ago, a parasite outbreak was making people sick in Devon, now [Beckenham’s] drinking water may not be safe to drink.”

In Devon, South West Water said on 14 May that the water was safe to drink before reversing this advice a day later. The business said data from tests showed treated water leaving its treatment works was not contaminated, but further tests overnight found small traces of cryptosporidium.

In Brixham, 2,500 properties remain under boil tap water notices as the system continues to be flushed, and there has been no date given to those properties for when the water will be safe to drink again.

David Harris, South West Water’s drought and resilience director, said: “We will not lift that boil water notice until it is safe to do so.”

The Collinses didn’t tell me Simone was eight months pregnant when we were making plans for me to spend a Saturday with them at home in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, but I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. They are the poster children of the pronatalist movement, on a mission to save humanity by having as many babies as possible.

Malcolm, 37, answers the door of their 18th-century farmhouse with four-year-old Octavian George, who is thrilled to have a visitor, bringing toy after toy to show me like an overexcited golden retriever. His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins, turns out to be only the first in a string of surprises – and one really shocking thing – that I will encounter during my day with the pronatalists.

We begin talking in Malcolm’s office, which is also the kids’ bedroom, with a desk and a stack of bunk beds three storeys high from floor to ceiling. “Children use the room at night, I use it during the day,” Malcolm shrugs. “Why have two separate rooms?” Simone and Malcolm work together – in separate rooms – as what Simone describes as “CEOs and non-profit entrepreneurs”: they acquire businesses with investor money that they improve and eventually sell “or turn into a cash cow”, as she puts it, ploughing their earnings into their charitable foundation, which encourages people to reproduce. They plan on having a minimum of seven children.

This is not Quiverfull, the fundamentalist Christian belief that large families are a blessing from God. The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement – most recently made notorious by Sam Bankman-Fried – which uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth. This is a numbers game, focused on producing the maximum number of heirs – not to inherit assets, but genes, outlook and worldview. And it’s being advocated by some the most successful names in tech.

The world’s most famous pronatalist is father-of-11 Elon Musk. “Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming. (And I do think global warming is a major risk),” he warned in 2022. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has invested in several reproductive technology startups, one aiming to engineer human eggs out of stem cells, another screening embryos for health outcomes. “Of course I’m going to have a big family,” Altman said the same year. “I think having a lot of kids is great.” The Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn (father of five) donated just under half a million dollars to the Collins’s pronatalist foundation in 2022.

The data, pronatalists fear, points to a looming crisis. As societies become more prosperous, people are having fewer children; after 200 years of overwhelming population growth, birthrates are plummeting. An average of 2.1 babies needs to be born per woman for populations to remain stable; in England and Wales the birthrate is currently 1.49, in the US it is 1.6, in China it’s 1.2. Politicians in South Korea have referred to their birthrate as a national emergency: at 0.72 (with 0.55 in the capital, Seoul) it is the lowest in the world. According to a paper published in the Lancet in March, 97% of the planet – 198 out of 204 countries – will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain their population by the end of this century. In the short term, this is creating a pension timebomb, with not enough young people to support an ageing population. If current trends continue, human civilisation itself may be at risk.

“There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,” Malcolm says simply, as Octavian climbs the bunk bed ladder. “The average Catholic majority country in Europe has a 1.3 fertility rate. You see this in some Latin American countries. That’s basically halving the population every generation. For anyone who’s familiar with compounding numbers, that’s huge.” Malcolm sees South Korea as a vision of our near future: the problem is most acute in countries that are “technophilic, pluralistic, educated, where women have rights”.

The only places where the birthrate is not falling to unsustainable levels are countries where the average citizen earns less than $5,000 (£4,000) a year, he continues. “The only way countries like ours can survive is through immigration from those very poor countries where birthrates continue to be high. You’re outsourcing the labour of childrearing to a separate group,” he says. “And importing people from Africa to support a mostly non-working white population – because you didn’t put in labour to support non-working white people – has really horrible optics.”

Since setting up the Pronatalist Foundation in 2021, Simone and Malcolm have become the movement’s spokespeople. “We don’t mind being human clickbait – that’s kind of our job – so long as we get the message out before things get too bad,” Malcolm tells me.

They are being taken increasingly seriously. Together they delivered a keynote speech at the first Natal conference in Austin, Texas in December and pronatalism is beginning to be accepted as a core conservative value. “Babies are good, and a country that has children is a healthy country,” Republican senator JD Vance said in a 2021 speech to a conservative thinktank. Donald Trump agrees. “I want a baby boom!” he declared at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, adding, “You men are so lucky out there.” Malcolm describes their politics as “the new right – the iteration of conservative thought that Simone and I represent will come to dominate once Trump is gone.”

The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly. “Usually, they will be running a tech company or be in venture capital.” There is a wider perception that pronatalists are also largely white; Malcolm staunchly denies this, but he is aware that, in promoting the idea that our culture faces existential crisis unless we reproduce, the aims of pronatalists overlap with those of racist conspiracists who believe in the “great replacement theory” – the conviction that people of white European heritage are being demographically taken over by non-whites who have children at a faster rate.

Malcolm insists pronatalism is about pluralism. “Humanity improves through cultural evolution. For that you need cultural diversity.” But in this numbers game, the Collinses need only a few people to join them to save humanity; those who remain unconvinced will simply die out. “I don’t care if environmentalists don’t want to have kids. The point of the movement is to help those that do.”

Simone and Malcolm want to show me that you can raise a family according to entirely rational, data-driven principles designed to alter the course of human civilisation for the better; that you can make large families work; that you can promote pronatalism without being racist. I am the first British journalist to see what pronatalism in action looks like by visiting the Collinses in their home. When I leave them, I will be utterly lost for words.

Every decision the Collinses make is backed by data. “Nominative determinism is a heavily studied field,” Malcolm tells me, when I ask about his children’s names. “Girls that have gender neutral names are more likely to have higher paying careers and get Stem degrees.” Names like Titan and Industry are much more than gender neutral, I say. “We wanted to give our kids strong names. We want our kids to have a strong internal locus of control,” he continues, as Octavian waves a plastic rubbish truck in front of my face.

Their home is set apart from the nearest town, down a track from a main road, near a creek. When deciding where to live, they weighed metrics on a spreadsheet, ranging from LGBTQ+ rights (which they support) to the density of Nobel laureates produced in a given area to levels of homelessness to major weather events. Then, they looked at cost. They bought this house and the one next door for $575,000; they allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare.

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. This explains Simone’s clothing: her normal winterwear is cheap, high-quality snowsuits she buys online from Russia, but she can’t fit into them now, so she’s currently dressing in the clothes pregnant women wore in a time before central heating: a drawstring-necked chemise on top of warm underlayers, a thick black apron, and a modified corset she found on Etsy. She assures me she is not a tradwife. “I’m not dressing trad now because we’re into trad, because before I was dressing like a Russian Bond villain. We do what’s practical.”

If their definition of “pointless indulgences” extends to warming a home filled with small children, how come there are so many toys? “Almost all the toys are gifts,” Malcolm says, almost apologetically. “We don’t throw out anything that gets sent to us.” Both boys have their own iPads fitted with a strap so they can wear them around their necks. Two-year-old Torsten is alone somewhere with his.

They take me upstairs. As well as having separate offices, Simone and Malcolm sleep in different bedrooms. Her office has a playpen in it, an elliptical exercise machine, and a standup desk across a treadmill, where Simone walks while she works. Does she ever stop? She smiles. “I am autistic, and I really feel uncomfortable sitting still.” Simone was diagnosed fairly recently, after Octavian was diagnosed. She and Malcolm see her autism as an asset. At the recent Natal conference in Austin, Malcolm says, “one of the big jokes was how autistic the movement was. Like a third of the people there had autism.”

There is an AR-15 assault rifle mounted on the wall of Simone’s office. She has a Beretta shotgun above the mantelpiece in her bedroom, plus bear spray, and a bow and arrow. “It’s for home defence,” Malcolm tells me. They never used to have all these weapons. “Most of that is since we started the movement – because of all the death threats.” He shrugs. “That’s just the nature of the internet these days. I’m sure Greta Thunberg gets death threats all the time, too.”

This, he says, is why they are reluctant to connect me with the many other pronatalist families he says they are in touch with, who have nothing to gain from seeking publicity. “One of our roles within the movement is to be a shield for other people,” he declares. “The vast majority of right-leaning people in Silicon Valley are pronatalist. You’re probably looking at 100,000 people or something that subscribe to our specific vision.” For a data-obsessed couple, the basis for this figure is notably woolly: he says it comes from “the size of various communities and the number of views specific things get”. But the movement doesn’t need to be huge to be effective, and it’s still relatively young; over half of the couple of hundred or so attenders at the Natal conference didn’t have children yet. “They are young, radical thinkers who are working to have children.”

Malcolm tells me about Bryan Caplan, author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, a treatise against helicopter parenting that argues that upbringing matters less than genetics in childhood development. The Collinses have embraced these ideas. “Pronatalist parenting is intrinsically low-effort parenting,” Malcolm says.

We come back downstairs to the living room to find Octavian distraught: he has been looking for us. Malcolm tells him to take a deep breath.

Simone shows me some decorations in the living room; they relate to the “intentionally constructed religion, technically atheist” that they have developed to provide a moral framework promoting their values for pronatalist families. Instead of Christmas, they have Future Day. “The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back with some gifts and stuff. They get more gifts when they do whatever they said they were going to do. What does Christmas teach them? Get random toys if you’re vaguely good?”

Simone suggests we go back to Malcolm’s office. She brings in a huge basket of laundry, and sets about folding the clothes on the desk, her 16-month-old still strapped to her back. I feel an urge to take Titan from her so she can sit down, but she bats me away. “Sitting down would drive me nuts,” she says.

Malcolm beams at her. “That’s why I want to have kids with this lady.”

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Simone never wanted children. “I was going to get sterilised,” she declares. “I really wanted to make sure that I never had kids because I wanted to have a career. I wanted to run my own business – in Silicon Valley, that’s what everyone wants to do.”

Simone was a “mistake baby”, the child of hippies (she has two half siblings from her father’s previous polyamorous marriage; her mother was their babysitter, she says). “I was always the black sheep in the family. They were very, ‘Go out, experiment.’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m going to stay home and do my homework.’ I did not drink until I met Malcolm when I was 24. I had only kissed one other person.”

She never wanted to get married, either, and only met Malcolm as part of another numbers game, a “very systematic campaign” to fall in love and get her heart broken so she could cross that life experience off her list. She wrote a “keyword-stuffed” dating profile on OKCupid, went on multiple dates a week – often several on the same day – and had a scoring system to determine whether anyone she met was worth a second date. Malcolm was doing something very similar, but with a different goal: he was looking for a wife.

Malcolm had a turbulent childhood that he clearly doesn’t want to talk about. He comes from a wealthy family and grew up in Dallas, but was sent to a “troubled teen” residential facility when he was 11. The only reason he can give me for being sent there was that his parents were getting divorced and were locked in a bitter custody dispute, and the judge “thought I shouldn’t be with either parent”. After that, he lived at a private boarding school, with his fees and expenses covered by a family trust. “I have no beef with my parents. My childhood was hard, but my adulthood has been easy. Can I say a parent did a bad job if I’m happy with my life today? I don’t think so.”

They dated that summer, on the condition that Malcolm would break up with Simone when he went to do his MBA at Stanford. They broke up for four months, got back together, and a little over a year after that, Malcolm proposed.

Malcolm always wanted a large family. Multiple generations of his family had as many as 15 children. He has two siblings; his younger brother, also a pronatalist, is “in a competition” with him to have as many children as possible. He told Simone about his plans on their second date, and she replied that she didn’t want to have kids ever, because she didn’t want to give up on her career. He told her she didn’t have to.

“From that point on, the agreement between us was, if we were to ever have kids, I would never have to give up anything I didn’t want to give up. And it turns out I actually like spending time with them. But Malcolm takes the kids to the doctor. Malcolm gets up in the middle of the night when the kids are crying. Malcolm puts the kids to bed at night. Our agreement is, I get infants until they are 18 months old. As soon as the next baby comes, he’s on everyone else. And he literally does everything for them. Men don’t do that.” She gazes at her husband, dreamily. “He’s so unusual.”

“Other men would, if we built new cultural standards,” says Malcolm, magnanimously.

Simone is about to have her fourth caesarean (they have to reluctantly leave about 18 months between babies so her uterus can heal). “Eventually, I’m going to go in for surgery and I’m going to start haemorrhaging, and they’re going to take it [her womb] out,” Simone sighs. “If at that point we’ve already had seven kids, that will be it.” If necessary, they will look into surrogacy, but they aren’t keen: it’s expensive and “inegalitarian”, Malcolm says.

The “number one pronatalist policy position,” he tells me, is for governments to make it easier for women to work from home and have flexible hours. The Collinses believe in childcare, but not maternity leave: Simone has never taken any. She will have the day of her C-section off “because of the drugs”, but will take work calls from hospital the day after. She tells me it’s because she’s “bored out of my mind” when she’s stuck with a newborn. In what they hope will be the beginning of political careers for both of them, Simone is running for Pennsylvania state government as a Republican. The primary is two weeks after she’s due to give birth.

The Collinses say women’s rights will suffer unless the birthrate improves. “The only cultural groups that survive will be the ones that don’t give women a choice. And that’s a terrifying world for us,” says Malcolm, wide eyed. “People are like, ‘You’re bringing a Handmaid’s Tale into the world!’ – that’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent.”

“In China, they’ve already restricted access to vasectomies and abortions,” Simone adds.

They have “quite a beef with anti-abortion people”, says Malcolm, because it turns out that restricting abortion is actually bad for birthrates. “Romania tried this. They had a spike in fertility rates and then a quick fall.” Banning abortion gives pregnancy an image problem, he says: it makes everyone assume parents who had children young only did it because they messed up. “It makes being a parent lower-class, in the eyes of society. This is a very bad way to motivate high fertility.”

Their brand of pronatalism isn’t about trapping people into having children, or coercing the unwilling, Simone says. “Our movement is, if you want to have more kids, or you want to have kids, let’s take away all the stuff that makes it hard.”

I had thought the main thing that made it hard was that it’s now so incredibly expensive to raise children.

“No,” Malcolm says. “Not at all.”

Cash handouts and subsidies haven’t worked in South Korea: the government there has spent the equivalent of £226bn on incentives to improve the birthrate over 20 years. Couples have been offered everything from subsidised taxis to free housing and IVF; Korean parents of babies born this year will receive 29.6 million won – more than £17,000 – over eight years in cash payments. “It’s not about money,” Simone says.

“Within and between countries, the less money somebody has, the more kids they have. This is a very well-studied phenomenon,” adds Malcolm. “When you look at the high-fertility families in the US, they’re not particularly wealthy.”

Surely that’s because the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be in control of your fertility, I say. One of the reasons why I chose to have only have two children is because I couldn’t afford to give more kids a good life; the bigger home, the holidays, the large car and everything else they would need.

A generous smile spreads across Malcolm’s face. “People say this to themselves. But – speaking as someone who has a lot of wealthy friends – people just upgrade their lifestyle as they earn more money. We want to have tons of kids, but as a result of that, we’re not going to be able to send them to private school. We’re not going to be able to pay for them to go to college.” The Collinses plan to home school all their  children.

“We also don’t raise them like they’re retired millionaires, which is what many Americans do: driving them like private chauffeurs to soccer, to juggling and robotics class. We’re just not going to do that,” says Simone, still folding vests.

“When people say, ‘I can’t afford kids,’ what they mean is, ‘I cannot afford to have kids at the standards that I find to be culturally normative,” Malcolm continues.

The Collinses have had child protective services called on them before, Malcolm tells me, “because our kids were wearing used clothes, because they were sick too frequently – this was when we had them in daycare; of course they were sick all the time – and because they were seen playing outside without us being outside. It’s a locked-in, gated area that you can see from the house.” He throws his hands up. Nothing came of the visit, but it has clearly rattled them. “Pretty much all high-fertility families have had it happen to them. The government says, if you raise your kids in a cultural context that’s different from ours, that’s child abuse.”

Simone has a history of eating disorders that have affected her fertility; she can only get pregnant through IVF. They’ve had the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and are selecting which ones to implant according to how well they score on intelligence and future health. They don’t just want a big family: they want an optimal one.

Preimplantation genetic screening is unregulated in the US. There are several companies that will test embryos for the risks of certain conditions, including the Sam Altman-backed Genomic Prediction, which the Collinses used for health scores. For what they call “the controversial stuff” they took Genomic Prediction’s data and gave it to another team of scientists who claim to be able to predict everything from how likely it is that one embryo will be happier than another one to its future predicted income. (The geneticist Adam Rutherford recently said there might be “an IQ point or two” of benefit in doing this, “the type of thing you can change by having a decent night’s sleep or a cup of coffee before doing an IQ test”.)

“Obviously, we looked at IQ,” says Malcolm. They discounted embryos with high risk factors for cancer and what Simone calls “mental health-related stuff where there’s just no good known treatments” including schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, depression and anxiety. They didn’t select against autism, which they consider part of a person’s identity. They have 34 embryos left, and plan to give away the ones they don’t use; three have already gone to a lesbian couple in California.

“People do trait selection all the time when they prioritise certain kinds of spouses,” says Simone, airily. But this level of discrimination goes way beyond selecting partners, or even sperm and egg donors: they are genetically screening their descendants, and trying to ensure there will be enough of them to have a real impact on the trajectory of human evolution within several generations. How is this different from eugenics?

“It’s completely different,” says Malcolm, delighted to be asked. Eugenics is state-sponsored selective breeding to influence the dominance of certain genes, he argues. What he and Simone are doing is polygenics, using technology to give parents the choice over which traits they value most. “Different cultural groups will choose different things to optimise around. Eventually, that will lead to genuine human diversity.”

I find it hard to imagine that any parent with access to this technology wouldn’t select for intelligence or a decent future income. The Collinses tell me I couldn’t be more wrong.

“Have you talked to parents these days?” Malcolm exclaims. “‘I just want a child that’s happy and self-expressive.’”

“‘Funny and kind,’” Simone chips in. “The most common average is happiness and kindness.”

The Collinses are campaigning to make this technology free for everyone to use. Screening for health outcomes is a “no brainer” in countries like the UK where healthcare is free at the point of delivery, Simone says. “You’re producing healthier people – less expensive.” Then she breaks off, staring in horror at something she’s seen on the stairs. “Oh no! Toastie did that thing where he poops and then he takes his diaper off! Now he has poop on his hands.” She runs off to attend to Torsten.

Malcolm wants to impress upon me that pronatalists care about ethnic diversity: east Asians and Muslim communities have seen their fertility rates plummet in the face of growing prosperity. Still, the Collinses are very happy to share a platform with white racists. Last year’s big pronatalist conference was organised by Kevin Dolan, who “used to be much more on the ethnonationalist side of things,” Malcolm concedes. Proponents of the great replacement theory attended, but they were outnumbered by the “autistic, nerdy” pronatalists, he says. “People are like, ‘Why do you allow the racists to come to your events?’ and I’m like, ‘Because we convert them.’ It’s actually really easy when you show them the data.”

We have been talking for hours now. We all need something to eat. Malcolm offers to take me and the boys out; Simone wants to stay home with Titan.

“Are you open to Thai food?” he asks. “There’s a place called Tai Me Up, which is fantastic.” Will Octavian and Torsten like Thai food? Malcolm scoffs. “I will give them a white rice, stick ’em with their iPads, they’ll be fine.”

In the car on the way to the restaurant, Malcolm tells me how much he doesn’t like babies. “Objectively, they are trying and they are aggravating. They are gross. This little bomb that goes off crying in this big explosion of poo and mucus every 30, 40 minutes. And it doesn’t have a personality, really. But once the kid enters the goof patrol, as we call it, I love them to death. They’re amazing. They’re so happy. They’re so full of life.”

Large families mean short-term sacrifices, Malcolm says. They will soon have to sell this Ford Explorer and buy a bus. Holidays will be pretty much impossible. “But if someone was to ask me, which of your kids would you trade for more vacations …” He shakes his head. “The kids who I haven’t had yet, they are just as precious to me as the kids I already have.”

We arrive at Tai Me Up. The boys don’t want to be on their iPads; they are excited to be sitting on a banquette, at a table with a plastic orchid, drinking water through a straw. Malcolm tries to load some YouTube videos as the waitress takes our order.

How useful has Elon Musk been to their movement? “Fantastic,” Malcolm replies. “I mean – the most powerful, most wealthy person in the world advocating for your cause helps a lot. Within this time period, he’s our version of being the king, or something. He’s to an extent disconnected from –”

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

Torsten whimpers. “In a restaurant, you gotta be nice,” Malcolm says. “I love you but you gotta be nice in restaurants. No, Toastie. You’re going to get bopped if you do that.”

“Hey. Can you help me with the iPad?” Octavian says, handing it to his father. None of this is remarkable to any of them. Torsten soon stops whimpering.

Smacking is not illegal in Pennsylvania. But the way Malcolm has done it – so casually, so openly, and to such a young child – leaves me speechless.

Malcolm picks up where he left off. “What Elon stands for, largely, I wholly support,” he continues. “Our politics are very aligned.” Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children, follows Simone on X.

The meal passes in a bit of a blur. Malcolm tells me about how pronatalism and space travel are intricately linked (“we don’t just want to create a sustainable civilisation here, we want it to expand outwards to the stars”); how his branch of effective altruism considers the suffering of humans today to be “pretty irrelevant” because the suffering of billions of future humans could be eliminated if they succeed in creating a “technophilic, interplanetary” species. Torsten and Octavian climb down from the banquette and run around the restaurant, and every so often, Malcolm threatens them – “If you go to the door again, Torsten, you’re getting bopped” – before loading new cartoons.

For someone dedicated to helping people have as many babies as possible, Malcolm doesn’t seem to like children very much.

Maybe he noticed how appalled I was when he hit Torsten. On the way back to the farmhouse, Malcolm tells me that he and Simone have developed a parenting style based on something she observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment, which they find very effective with their own kids. “I was just giving you the context so you don’t think I’m abusive or something,” he says.

For the Collinses, humanity will survive if we all decide to be a little less precious about our children; if we are prepared to take a financial hit and change our lifestyles to accommodate more of them; if we all adjust our expectations and attitudes. They insist they are prepared to accept everyone willing to make those adjustments into their movement – even self-proclaimed white nationalists – in order to save human civilisation.

Unlike the Collinses, my thoughts aren’t focused on generations far into the future. I’m thinking only as far as the next one, and how Malcolm’s children are going to feel about his project when they are old enough to realise what they are part of.

What does he think they will make of it? “What a failure I would be if my kids hold my exact value system!” he replies. “My kids are going to be like me, but better. They would probably think that I was well-meaning, saw some real issues, probably exaggerated some of the consequences, but that it was necessary in the moment, to make the right political changes.”

Before I leave them, I ask Simone the same question. “If we are wrong, we want someone to be right,” she says. Then she smiles. “The more kids you have, the more likely you are to have kids that get it right somewhere.”