RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: White Working Class Children have actually Been Betrayed

Saturday night at eight o’clock discovered me not at the films however at the Cinema Museum, a covert gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, located in a previous workhouse which was quickly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his on tough times.

Truth be informed, I seldom venture south of the river. As Dave, from the Winchester Club, warned Arthur Daley: ‘Lot of very wicked individuals’ 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 automobile mechanic in Minder.

George read from his collection of brief stories set in the 1950s, when he was maturing in post-war Bradford. They’re beautifully written, warm, funny, evocative, a slice of history, a working-class variation of Richmal Crompton’s Just William adventures.

The storylines are based on the trials and tribulations of a young boy being raised by a single mom – a non-traditional domesticity back then, unfortunately just too common today. The Fib And Other Stories has actually been in print considering that 1975 and discovered its method on to the school curriculum, where it stays today.

I can’t help questioning, however, how frequently these wonderful texts are used in class nowadays, in between instructors stuffing their pupils’ little heads with fashionable far-Left propaganda about ‘white benefit’, manifest destiny and, of course, climate modification.

The kids in the monochrome school photograph which formed the background to George’s reading were definitely white, but nobody could have explained them as privileged. Those were the days when ‘austerity’ implied living from hand to mouth, not needing to opt for a basic 50in flat screen TV, instead of a 65in OLED Ultra model, and just having the ability to pay for an iPhone 14 instead of the latest all-singing, all-dancing AI version.

Child hardship was real, bread-and-dripping, holes-in-your-shoes things, not dining on Deliveroo and unwillingly wearing last season’s Nike trainers.

Until the digital/social media revolution, kids got their knowledge mainly from books, composes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, kids experienced authentic difficulty, not the hardship of ambition and imagination which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live via their smart phones, rather of roaming free and experiencing life to the complete.

Until the digital/social media transformation, children gained their knowledge mainly from books. Yes, TV played a big function, as did the movies, however nowhere near the supremacy of TikTok and other apps providing pleasure principle in byte-sized pieces.

And how can squinting at the most current CGI generated smash hit on a mobile phone a few inches large ever compare with the type of old-school, cinema, Technicolor and Cinemascope, best-out-of-Hollywood experience commemorated at the Cinema Museum?

It can’t. Just as the finest pictures are said to be on the radio, even much better photos can be found in the printed word.

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

No wonder kid, and indeed adult, literacy levels have actually dropped alarmingly. All this has added to the shocking revelation that white, working class pupils – boys in particular – are being left. Even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has actually been required to admit they have been ‘betrayed’ by the modern-day schools system.

They suffer from an absence of parental involvement and consequent scarceness of goal. The white, working class young boy in George Layton’s stories certainly didn’t suffer any parental neglect from his domineering mum. Nor did he lack imagination or aspiration.

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 hardship in neighboring pre-war Leeds.

Literacy is the best gift we can bestow on any child. My grandmas taught me to read before I went to school, setting me on the early road to a fulfilling career at the wordface rather than the relative drudgery of the workplace.

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

If the Education Secretary wants to reverse the betrayal of white, working class kids she could start by getting the phone and welcoming George to visit schools, checking out from his short stories.

I honestly think that if they could be persuaded to look up from their mobiles for an hour, they ‘d be enthralled and influenced by the experiences of a young kid not that different to them, regardless of the range in years.

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

When they’re not tasering one-legged 92-year-old guys or nicking individuals for posting hurty words on the internet, the police are significantly taking sidelines to supplement their income.

Some are working as painters and decorators, others as scaffolders nand delivery motorists. More intriguingly, 2nd jobs likewise 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 needs to take the biscuit.

It’s likewise reported that some officers are working as supermarket checkout assistants. I do not suppose there’s any danger of them nicking a couple of shoplifters.

Mind how you go.

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Couple in their 70s who bought an infant from a stranger are selfish in the extreme

First the frogs, now the octopuses
The unlawful migrant armada crossing the Channel daily may end up being the least of our problems. We now learn that a fleet of foreign octopuses from the Med is devouring crab stocks off the coast of Devon and Cornwall and threatening to put regional fishermen out of company.

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

We’re also informed that parakeets from India and Pakistan are an ‘unstoppable invasive species’ having escaped into the wild and are colonising cities as far afield as Plymouth and Aberdeen. No doubt we’ll be putting them up in the closest Holiday Inn eventually.

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

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

Take Labour’s ‘aspiration’ 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 few years’ time. And 3 percent of stuff all is still pack all.

AN NHS surgeon who compared Islamist terrorists to the Nazis has actually been struck off. If he ‘d said the same about those people who desire to leave the European yuman rites convention, Surkeir would have made him Attorney General.

Having recently declared that the original ancient Britons were black, the woke revisionists now declare the Vikings were Muslims. Don’t these people ever take a day of rest?