RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: White Working Class Children have actually Been Betrayed

Saturday night at 8 o’clock discovered me not at the motion pictures but at the Cinema Museum, a surprise gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, located in a previous workhouse which was briefly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his mom fell on difficult times.

Truth be informed, I seldom endeavor south of the river. As Dave, from the Winchester Club, alerted Arthur Daley: ‘Lot of really wicked people’ in Sarf Lunnon.

Coincidentally, the occasion was a one-man show by my old mate George Layton, star, director, scriptwriter, author, whose finest hour – at least to my mind – was playing Des, the dodgy cars and truck mechanic in Minder.

George read from his collection of narratives embeded in the 1950s, when he was growing up in post-war Bradford. They’re perfectly composed, warm, amusing, evocative, a piece of history, a working-class variation of Richmal Crompton’s Just William adventures.

The storylines are based on the trials and adversities of a young boy being brought up by a single mother – a non-traditional domesticity back then, regretfully only too common today. The Fib And Other Stories has actually remained in print given that 1975 and found its method on to the school curriculum, where it stays today.

I can’t assist wondering, however, how typically these wonderful texts are utilized in class nowadays, in between teachers stuffing their pupils’ little heads with trendy far-Left propaganda about ‘white privilege’, colonialism and, naturally, climate change.

The kids in the monochrome school photo which formed the backdrop to George’s reading were certainly white, however nobody could have described them as privileged. Those were the days when ‘austerity’ suggested living from hand to mouth, not needing to go for a fundamental 50in flat screen TV, instead of a 65in OLED Ultra design, and just having the ability to manage an iPhone 14 rather than the most recent all-singing, all-dancing AI variation.

Child poverty was genuine, bread-and-dripping, holes-in-your-shoes stuff, not dining on Deliveroo and hesitantly using last season’s Nike trainers.

Until the digital/social media transformation, children acquired their knowledge primarily from books, writes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, children experienced genuine challenge, not the poverty of aspiration and imagination which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live via their mobile phones, instead of strolling free and experiencing life to the complete.

Until the digital/social media revolution, children acquired their knowledge mostly from books. Yes, TV played a huge role, as did the movies, but no place near the dominance of TikTok and other apps providing pleasure principle in byte-sized chunks.

And how can squinting at the current CGI produced blockbuster on a cellular phone a couple of inches broad ever compare to the sort of old-school, cinema, Technicolor and Cinemascope, best-out-of-Hollywood experience commemorated at the Cinema Museum?

It can’t. Just as the best photos are stated to be on the radio, even better images can be found in the printed word.

Among the most depressing things I’ve checked out just recently was the author Anthony Horowitz regreting the fact that his 300-page books are far too long to engage the shorter attention periods of today’s kids.

No surprise child, and undoubtedly adult, literacy levels have dropped amazingly. All this has actually contributed to the shocking discovery that white, working class students – young boys in specific – are being left behind. Even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has been forced to admit they have been ‘betrayed’ by the modern schools system.

They suffer from a lack of adult participation and consequent paucity of goal. The white, working class kid in George Layton’s stories certainly didn’t suffer any adult neglect from his domineering mum. Nor did he do not have creativity or goal.

Education was the escape of hardship. It produced significant wordsmiths like George, in post-war Bradford – and our own dear Keith Waterhouse, late of this parish, who matured in poverty in nearby pre-war Leeds.

Literacy is the best gift we can bestow on any child. My grandmas taught me to check out before I went to school, setting me on the early roadway to a fulfilling career at the wordface instead of the relative drudgery of the office.

George Layton is thinking about taking his one-man program on the road, to little provincial theatres. I’ve got a much better concept.

If the Education Secretary wants to reverse the betrayal of white, working class kids she might start by picking up the phone and inviting George to tour schools, reading from his narratives.

I honestly think that if they might be to search for from their mobiles for an hour, they ‘d be enthralled and motivated by the adventures of a young boy not that different to them, despite the range in years.

You never ever know, there might even be another Charlie Chaplin among them.

When they’re not tasering one-legged 92-year-old men or nicking people for publishing hurty words on the internet, the cops are significantly taking 2nd tasks to supplement their earnings.

Some are working as painters and designers, others as scaffolders nand shipment chauffeurs. More intriguingly, sidelines also include a DJ (PC Hammer, anyone?) and a reiki trainer, whatever that is.

My favourites are beekeeper and kickboxing coach, although the copper running a tea shop has to take the biscuit.

It’s likewise reported that some officers are working as grocery store checkout assistants. I don’t expect there’s any threat of them nicking a few thiefs.

Mind how you go.

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Couple in their 70s who purchased a baby from a complete stranger are self-centered in the extreme

First the frogs, now the octopuses
The illegal migrant armada crossing the Channel daily may end up being the least of our issues. We now find out that a fleet of foreign octopuses from the Med is feasting on crab stocks off the coast of Devon and Cornwall and threatening to put regional fishermen out of business.

It’s bad enough French trawlers hoovering up our fish without migrant molluscs assisting themselves to what’s left.

We’re also told that parakeets from India and Pakistan are an ‘unstoppable invasive species’ having actually gotten away into the wild and are colonising cities as far afield as Plymouth and Aberdeen. No doubt we’ll be putting them up in the nearby Holiday Inn in the past long.

And that’s before I get to the buzzard that’s been dive-bombing kids in a school playground in Romford, Essex. Where the hell did that come from?

We’ve got enough difficulty with home-grown Stuka-style pigeons without importing kamikaze buzzards.

Take Labour’s ‘ambition’ to invest a pathetic three percent of GDP on defence by the year 2525 with a shovel-load of Maldon’s finest. The method Rachel From Complaints is taxing the economy to death, there won’t be any GDP left in a couple of years’ time. And three per cent of stuff all is still pack all.

AN NHS cosmetic surgeon who compared Islamist terrorists to the Nazis has actually been struck off. If he ‘d said the exact same about those of us who desire to leave the European yuman rites convention, Surkeir would have made him Chief law officer.

Having recently claimed that the initial ancient Britons were black, the woke revisionists now declare the Vikings were Muslims. Don’t these individuals ever take a day off?