Convenience Big Store: Who can afford to have children these days?

14 October, 2021

In the headlines

The government is throwing £250m at GPs to force them to see more patients face to face. Name-and shame league tables and "hit squads" will target doctors who don't, says the Daily Mail – before the pandemic the average GP earned £100,000 for just over three days a week. GP Jess Harvey told the BBC she didn't know "anyone in general practice who isn't working their knuckles to the bone". A 37-year-old Muslim convert has been arrested for killing five people with a bow and arrow and "other weapons" in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg. The Rolling Stones have dropped Brown Sugar from their touring set list after criticism of the song's references to slavery. "I'm trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is," bemused guitarist Keith Richards told the LA Times.

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Who can afford to have children these days?

As teenagers, women are endlessly warned that getting pregnant is "a tragic mistake that will ruin your life", says Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Then comes the "emotional whiplash". In your twenties the message changes almost overnight: your motherhood potential "is about to fall off a cliff", and if you don't have a family by your mid-thirties you'll end up childless. That's what female Cambridge students were told at recent "fertility seminars". With the birth rate in England and Wales at just 1.53 children per woman, the implication seems to be: "They must be educated, to avert the looming population crisis!"

But women are not stupid. Modern society "feels purpose-built" to put us off parenting. Britain's "extortionate" childcare costs are the third highest in the developed world. Graduates face a marginal tax rate of 42.25% on a salary below the median wage. If you're spending almost 40% of your income on renting in London and you don't have a hope in hell of ever owning a home, would you feel secure enough to have children? A few seminars won't change the odds – what we need is "adequate childcare provision, a functioning housing market, and an acknowledgement from men that they are half of the whole child-rearing endeavour".

Insulate Britain is led by a hypocrite

Insulate Britain's founder has some nerve, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. Roger Hallam happily shuttles between his partner's south London flat and his 10-acre farm in Wales – five diesel-powered vehicles have been seen parked there, though he insists they aren't his. But he says that if he were attending a protest, he would refuse to move for an ambulance carrying a dying person. A year ago he gave this advice to his followers about those running society: "Maybe you should put a bullet through their head."

I am on his list too. After I wrote a column referring to him as "just a nasty piece of work", he uploaded a YouTube video entitled "Dominic Lawson will be hanged for climate crimes". He carefully told lawyers he was "merely predicting", not advocating, my execution. Meanwhile, Hallam has been ostracised from Extinction Rebellion, which he helped build, for telling a German newspaper that the Holocaust was "just another f***ery in human history", and "almost a normal event" compared to climate change. And despite his noble M25 warriors comparing themselves to the suffragettes, he isn't a vote-winner. His Burning Pink party candidate came 20th out of 20 in this year's London mayoral election – lower than Count Binface. The man's a joke and makes his cause one too.

Inside politics

Two drug dealers have been arrested in Parliament, reports Jonathan Reilly in The Sun. The arrests occurred in the 12 months up to March, despite the Commons being in Covid lockdown for much of the year. In the same period, police also arrested eight people in Parliament for possession of cannabis and a further five for unspecified drugs.

Gone viral

North Korean state media footage shows bare-chested soldiers putting on a show of toughness: smashing stone blocks with their heads and bare hands, bursting out of chains and bending iron rods with their necks. The full video of their macho display, watched approvingly by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, can be viewed here.

Noted

A letter to The Daily Telegraph from Captain Colin Cummings of Northamptonshire: "Sir – Tim Stanley is concerned that British Airways staff will stop addressing their passengers as 'Ladies and Gentlemen'. He would be even more distressed to learn that most aircrew already refer to them as 'self-loading freight'."

Snapshot

Staying young

The Kent village of Detling has the highest life expectancy in England, says The Times. Women typically live until 95, well above the national average of 83, and men until 86. Margaret Cooke, 89, says it's all thanks to the tap water, which comes from a local reservoir. The village is on a steep hill – "a challenge for legs of any age" – and banned smoking in 2002, five years before the rest of England.

Snapshot answer

It's the Romantika, one of two Estonian cruise ships hired as emergency hotels for next month's Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. Demand for accommodation from the 25,000 delegates is so high that Airbnbs normally listed at £42 a night are going for £1,400. It's not the ideal fix, says The Independent: an overnight stay on a cruise vessel requires about 12 times more energy than a night in a hotel.