Our good friends at The Economist recently took a trip up north and - lo and behold - they found him!
In Cramlington, Richard, who works in sales, earns around £28,000 a year and his partner, a part-time administrative assistant, earns £12,000. That is enough for a four-bed house and two cars. “If I’d moved to London and got a graduate job, I’d probably be renting a shitty flat and I doubt I’d have two kids,” he says.
At Unwise Sight, we are delighted to see first-class journalists from top publications building on our groundbreaking work in this field. We trust that now that the ground has been broken in the emerging field of Deano Studies, others will pour in to study The Most Important Man in Britain.
As pioneers, however, we will move onto pastures yet untilled and offer a few remarks on Deano’s beloved, Mrs Fiat 500. She is a tougher nut for any viable right-wing politics to crack. Unlike Deano, she is instinctively more left-wing, not because of any particular ideological attachment, but for the simple reason that she values kindness, and Tories all too often delight in emitting an “I’m a complete fucking cunt” vibe.
Although the archetypical Mrs Fiat 500 lady works in a call centre, or perhaps in real estate, she is more likely than Deano to work in the public sector, perhaps as a teaching assistant or as an NHS administrator. She is also much more likely to work part-time. Her Instagram became a black square for George Floyd, but a week later she was back to posting tastefully edited selfies.
In an age of low fertility, the most distinguishing feature of Mrs Fiat 500 is not the car she drives, but her motherhood. Giving birth is still a brutal, visceral experience, the closest brush with death that any young woman is likely to encounter, and the most poignant reminder of the reality of biological constraints. The Mumsnet TERF phenomenon should tell us that motherhood is a powerful remedy against wokeness. Polling suggests that it is older women with multiple children who are much more likely to have correct views on the relative importance of nature and nurture, presumably because they can see how differently their kids turned out despite a near-identical shared environment.
Motherhood is not just a deradicalizing experience, but comes with a whole new set of concerns. Mothers want good schools for their children, cash to buy some nice things for them, and - as much as possible - a pleasant birth experience. Notably these are very different concerns from environmental issues, gender pay gaps, and LGBT rights - which are typically feminine-coded politics. Yet I think it might be more correct to understand the traditional culture war topics as the domain of childless women and their partners.
It’s not complicated stuff, but it matters, and this is where Andrea Leadsom was cruel but not entirely wrong to suggest that childless women setting policy is a problem. Carrie Symonds has, of course, very recently become a mother, but it is too early to detect any notably pro-maternity policy changes coming out of No.10.
Nevertheless, there is some obvious low-hanging fruit for any government with the wit to pluck it. A fantastic headline policy would be a pledge to convert all maternity wards to single rooms. No one, I am quite convinced, wants to spend some of the most precious hours of their life, in the time immediately after birth, separated by a mere screen from a horde of other women and their crying babies, those women’s partners, their mothers, aunts, uncles, children - not to mention all the medical staff wandering around. If there’s any time you desperately want privacy, it’s this time. All maternity wards should be rebuilt so each mother can be given her own individual room, complete with a pull-out bed attached to the wall for Deano to sleep on.
Of course this will be expensive, but you’ve got to do something with all the money you’re printing. As a great philosopher once said, “GIVE OUR PEOPLE THE MONEY”, and in that spirit all the mothers should receive a one-off check of £1000 on the birth of each child, a simple, easy-to-administer policy that would buy enormous goodwill and cost a trivial £640 million per annum at current birth rates. Naturally we would expect the birth rate to rise, but even should the number of babies born per year double, the cost would hardly be exorbitant. Conveniently, a thousand pounds is roughly the cost these days of a high-quality “travel system” (a pram and a car seat). Mrs Fiat 500 may well have inherited lots of fine baby clothes from her mother, but no one wants to still be using a 1990s pram.
Lastly, I propose abolishing the two-child cap on child tax credit, and setting a five-year target for all mothers to be able to spend at least three days in hospital recuperating after birth. Convalescence of a week or more was very common in the 1970s, and the move to outpatient postnatal care has almost entirely been for financial reasons rather than clinical. When you’re exhausted and flooded with hormones and the baby is crying at 3am and won’t latch, there’s nothing like a calm reassuring midwife on hand to help out.
Any one of these policies taken in isolation would be electorally powerful; together, they’d be almost irresistible. Imagine the optics of the Chancellor of the Exchequer arriving on a ward to present room after room of mothers with their cheque for £1000. In the background, the distant noise of construction can be heard, as the planned extension for the maternity facilities gets under way, in expectation of the Boris Bucks Baby Boom. Deep inside the Treasury, the unit in charge of planning for Britain’s long-term demographic decline find itself quietly reassigned to forecasting startup costs for the launch of His Majesty’s Mars Colony. Deano and Mrs Fiat 500, meanwhile, are moving south. He’s just landed a job in Felixstowe, where the SpacePort is under construction.