Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190803 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 2/8/2019 17:43 cYanmaGentaYellowblac

• The Guardian Sat urday 3 Aug ust 2019

2

policymakers decades to adapt (and has led

to a welcome fall in teenage pregnancies

in the UK to boot). Yet falling fertility rates

are becoming a dangerously hot political potato, as

legitimate questions about how a shrinking pool of

younger workers can support an expanding cloud of

older ones start to become dangerously entangled with

white supremacist hysteria about the supposed failure

of Christian communities to breed fast enough, or with

the perennial rightwing anxiety about what women

might seek to do with their bodies if they had complete

freedom to choose. For some men, it seems the only

thing scarier than the prospect of a broody woman

trying to trap them into pregnancy is the idea of one

wilfully refusing to get into all that.

For years, conventional wisdom has been that

policymakers could bump up the birthrate by investing

in cheap childcare and fl exible working, so that women

didn’t face such agonising choices between work and

motherhood. (For that is what “leaving it too late”

so often boils down to in practice; not couples clean

forgetting to have a baby, but women seeing what

happens to other mothers in the offi ce and not daring

to risk a pregnancy until they feel more professionally

established, by which time it’s often harder to get

pregnant.) But now birthrates are tapering off even in

Sweden, with its world-beating parental leave , heavily

subsidised nurseries and an egalitarian culture that

fi rmly encourage s men to share the load with their

exhausted partners. Neighbouring Norway’s prime

minister, too, recently declared that the country “needs

more children”, amid warnings that its welfare state

model would otherwise be in jeopardy. Either the world

of work still hasn’t evolved far and fast enough to meet

millennial parents’ expectations, or something more

fundamental is shifting.

N

ext week Channel 4 screens the

fi ctional drama I Am Hannah, part

of a series exploring female lives,

which centres on a 30-something

lawyer being nagged by all and

sundry to get on with having

children before it’s too late. So far,

so wearily familiar, but what makes

this one stand out from all the other stories set in an egg-

freezing clinic is its central character’s struggle to work

out how far she desperately wants to be a mother, and

how far it’s simply what everyone else wants for her.

As Gemma Chan , the actress who both plays Hannah

and contributed to the storyline, put it in a recent

interview: “I feel like we have more freedom these

days, but we don’t necessarily feel as free as we should

to make diff erent choices for ourselves.” And that’s

where the policy debate starts scratching at the surface

of dark feelings many parents can’t admit even to

themselves: not regret, exactly, so much as suppressed

resentment about the inevitable sacrifi ces demanded by

children and the occasional guilty daydream about what

otherwise might have been.

The more motherhood comes to be seen as a choice,

rather than an unavoidable fact of female existence or

some kind of great romantic destiny, the greater the

anxiety both about making the wrong choice and about

living with the ghost of the life not chosen. Trying to

counter all that by nagging young women to knuckle

down to it in order to avoid a future global pensions

defi cit is destined for the failure such emotionally tin-

eared tactics deserve.

Better, perhaps, to treat a shrinking population less

like an annoying economic aberration to be corrected,

and more like a riddle of human happiness. Where people

are struggling to have the family lives they want, then of

course government’s role is to step in: to create the stable

jobs, aff ordable homes and family-friendly working

conditions that make it possible. But if millennials are

simply thinking harder than previous generations did

before having children – or if some people who would in

generations past have felt railroaded into an unwanted

family life are now fi nding the courage to remain

childfree – well, that’s very diff erent. Sometimes good

governance, much like good parenting, is a question of

knowing when it’s really none of your business.

It is a mark of the recent reversals of expectation among

Britain’s political parties that anything other than a

Liberal Democrat victory in the Brecon and Radnorshire

byelection would have been a major surprise. It would

also have been a devastating blow to the Liberal

Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, who took over less than

three weeks ago and promptly announced that she was

not merely now the party leader but “a candidate to be

prime minister ”. That ambitious claim would have been

dead in the water without Jane Dodds’ win on Thursday.

This widely anticipated result should do nothing

to lessen the Lib Dem s’ achievement. Brecon and

Radnorshire was a target seat; the Lib Dems have now

won seven of the last 10 parliamentary contests there,

as well as holding the Welsh assembly seat with the

same boundaries. But Chris Davies had won the seat

by a thumping 8,000 majority for the Conservatives

as recently as 2017, which was otherwise generally a

bad election for the Tories in Wales. Moreover, the area

voted to leave the EU and the Lib Dems are an explicitly

remain party. The Tories had also just chosen a new and

stridently pro-leave leader who was enjoying a modest

boost in the polls. So it was no pushover for Ms Dodds

to take the seat with a 1,425 majority over Mr Davies.

However, the Lib Dems enjoyed two unusual

advantages in this contest. The fi rst was the candidacy

of Mr Davies. In March the now former MP pleaded guilty

to two counts of forging his parliamentary expenses.

In June, he was recalled as an MP by a petition. His local

party nevertheless reselected him for this contest.

Though he was well known, he was clearly also damaged

goods. It will therefore be easy for the Conservatives

to blame him for their defeat rather than looking more

widely, including at Boris Johnson, for the explanation.

The second advantage was the electoral pact with

Plaid Cymru and the Greens , giving the Lib Dems

To every thing there is a season; a time to bowl, a time

to bat, a time to sweep, a time to block, a time to dribble,

a time to pass, a time to shoot, a time to knock it over

to the big lad in the middle and hope for the best. Or

at least that used to be the case, until the cricket and

football seasons blended into one and we reached the

current sorry situation where the fi rst Ashes Test and

the football season started in the same week. Denis

Compton, who in an age when the seasons were happily

compartmentalised played 78 Tests for England and won

the FA Cup with Arsenal, must be spinning in his grave.

The opening salvo in the Ashes battle was fi red

at Edgbaston on Thursday. More bathetically, the

English football season began yesterday evening with a

championship match between Luton and Middlesbrough.

No disrespect to Eric Morecambe’s beloved club, but this

is a joke: who wants to spend a balmy evening in early

August at Kenilworth Road? There is a full programme of

Football League fi xtures today, and tomorrow sees the

fi rst showpiece match of the season when Manchester

City and Liverpool play for the Community Shield.

Why? Who decrees that the football season has to start

so ridiculously early, just two months after the end of

the previous one? Would football fans really mind if it

a clear run at the seat as the explicitly anti-Brexit,

pro-remain party. Both the Lib Dem victory and its

relative narrowness seem to vindicate that approach,

and there will sensibly be similar pressures now in

other elections. However, the success of the pact

should not be overstated. The Greens did not stand

in Brecon and Radnorshire in 2017, and Plaid Cymru

took only just over a thousand votes. In addition, the

Lib Dems did not highlight Brexit in the campaign,

preferring to run on local issues. Some caution is thus

needed before claiming the result as a full-throated

remain triumph. But the Lib Dem recovery continues,

and a prospective byelection in Nick Clegg’s old seat

of Sheffi eld Hallam may give it further momentum.

It is clear, however, that many Labour voters also

helped to send Ms Dodds to Westminster. It bears

repeating that until 1979 this was a Labour seat. In the

1985 byelection, Labour fi nished a very close second.

Even in 2015 and 2017, Labour’s vote share was still

in the mid-teens. But on Thursday, Labour was down

12 points to 5.3%. The Lib Dem vote, by contrast,

rose by 14. Tactical voting by Labour supporters in

Tory–Lib Dem seats is always a factor, but this was

tactical voting by core Labour voters. The message

for both the leave-supporting Jeremy Corbyn and for

remain-supporting Welsh Labour is very stark.

Perversely, the Conservatives are likely to take

some comfort from this byelection. Mr Davies was

not blown away. Their vote, though down by nine

points, held up far better than when the Liberals won

the 1985 byelection. Most Tory defectors this time

seem to have gone to the Brexit party, but with only

11% support, this byelection was no triumph for the

Faragistes and, in contrast to the European elections,

the bulk of the leave vote stayed with the Tories.

Ultimately, though, the Tories have lost votes,

lost another seat, their Commons majority is even

more razor-thin, and any Johnson bounce – which is

unlikely to get bigger – has been modest. The fanciful

idea that the new prime minister is an election winner

remains dubious and unproved. Above all, there is

now one more vote at Westminster against no-deal. If

there is a big message from Brecon and Radnorshire,

it is not that the country embraces his no-deal

lunacy – which it does not – but that Brexit can still be

softened, and perhaps even stopped.

started in early September as the schools went back

and temperatures started to drop? And wouldn’t the

players benefi t from a shorter season, rather than the

current bloated, virtually year-round one?

The end of August used to mark the change of the

sporting seasons, with cricket giving way to football

and an overlap of at most a couple of weeks. Now, the

overlap is almost two months, with fi rst-class cricket

• thanks to a combination of global heating and the
  proliferation of identikit midsummer Twenty20
  matches – carrying on until 26 September. The fi nal
  Test at the Oval, which always used to be played at
  August bank holiday, is not scheduled to end until
  16 September – fi ve Ashes Tests crammed into less
  than seven weeks at the tailend of the summer.
  The main reason for this odd scheduling is that the
  Cricket World Cup took up most of June and July, but
  surely that long-drawn-out event could have been a
  little shorter. The fi rst, unforgettable tournament in
  1975 was done and dusted in a fortnight.
  This trend towards gargantuanism, fuelled
  by television’s pursuit of product and sports
  administrators’ desire for dosh, must be resisted as
  much as possible. Ease the sporting bombardment
  and let spectators and players enjoy both sports,
  ideally in their traditional seasons. Who knows,
  perhaps then we will see a successor to CB Fry , who
  at the turn of the 20th century played both cricket
  and football for England and still had time to equal
  the world long jump record. He could also leap from
  a standing start on to a mantelpiece , which is not a
  feat that Joe Root or Harry Kane would have time to
  perfect in this over-specialised, over-stuff ed sporting
  age of ours.



 Continued from front

Give spectators and players

a break: these unceasing

seasons are just not cricket

Sport

Brecon and Radnorshire byelection

This Lib Dem win can help

to stop the no-deal lunacy

of the Conservatives

Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 53 ,790

‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott

Falling fertility rates are not

the business of government

Gaby Hinsliff

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