RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: White Working Class Children have actually Been Betrayed

Saturday night at eight o’clock found me not at the films however at the Cinema Museum, a hidden gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, situated in a former workhouse which was quickly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his mother fell on difficult times.

Truth be informed, I hardly ever venture south of the river. As Dave, from the Winchester Club, warned Arthur Daley: ‘Great deal of very wicked people’ in Sarf Lunnon.

Coincidentally, the occasion was a one-man program by my old mate George Layton, actor, 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 short stories set in the 1950s, when he was maturing in post-war Bradford. They’re wonderfully composed, warm, funny, evocative, a piece of history, a working-class variation of Richmal Crompton’s Just William adventures.

The stories are based upon the trials and adversities of a boy being brought up by a single mom – an unconventional domesticity at that time, unfortunately just too typical today. The Fib And Other Stories has been in print given that 1975 and discovered its way on to the school curriculum, where it stays today.

I can’t help questioning, though, how typically these glorious texts are utilized in class these days, in between teachers stuffing their pupils’ little heads with fashionable far-Left propaganda about ‘white advantage’, manifest destiny and, obviously, climate change.

The kids in the monochrome school photo which formed the backdrop to George’s reading were certainly white, but no one might have explained them as fortunate. Those were the days when ‘austerity’ implied living from hand to mouth, not having to choose a fundamental 50in flat screen TV, rather of a 65in OLED Ultra design, and just being able to pay for an iPhone 14 rather than the newest all-singing, all-dancing AI variation.

Child poverty was real, 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 revolution, children gained their understanding primarily from books, writes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, kids experienced real hardship, not the hardship of ambition and imagination which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live by means of their cellphones, instead of strolling free and experiencing life to the full.

Until the digital/social media revolution, kids gained their knowledge mainly from books. Yes, TV played a huge function, as did the films, but nowhere near the dominance of TikTok and other apps offering pleasure principle in byte-sized portions.

And how can squinting at the latest CGI created smash hit on a mobile phone a few inches wide ever compare to 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 very best images are said to be on the radio, even much better photos can be discovered in the printed word.

Among the most dismaying things I have actually checked out just recently was the author Anthony Horowitz complaining the reality that his 300-page books are far too long to engage the shorter attention periods these days’s kids.

Not surprising that kid, and indeed adult, literacy levels have actually plummeted amazingly. All this has actually added to the stunning revelation that white, working class pupils – kids in particular – are being left. Even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has been required to confess they have actually been ‘betrayed’ by the contemporary schools system.

They experience a lack of parental participation and ensuing scarceness of aspiration. The white, working class kid in George Layton’s stories definitely didn’t suffer any parental neglect from his imperious mum. Nor did he lack imagination or aspiration.

Education was the escape of poverty. 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 close-by pre-war Leeds.

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

George Layton is considering taking his one-man program on the road, to small provincial theatres. I have actually got a better idea.

If the Education Secretary desires to reverse the betrayal of white, working class kids she might begin by selecting up the phone and welcoming George to visit schools, reading from his narratives.

I honestly believe that if they might be persuaded to look up from their mobiles for an hour, they ‘d be enthralled and influenced by the experiences of a young boy not that various to them, despite the range in years.

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

When they’re not tasering one-legged 92-year-old men or nicking people for publishing hurty words on the web, the police are significantly taking sidelines to supplement their income.

Some are working as painters and designers, others as scaffolders nand shipment motorists. More intriguingly, sidelines also include a DJ (PC Hammer, anyone?) and a reiki instructor, 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 supermarket checkout assistants. I don’t suppose there’s any threat of them nicking a few thiefs.

Mind how you go.

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

First the frogs, now the octopuses
The unlawful migrant armada crossing the Channel daily might turn out to be the least of our problems. We now discover 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 local anglers out of organization.

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

We’re also told that parakeets from India and Pakistan are an ‘unstoppable invasive species’ having left 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 soon.

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

We have actually got enough problem with home-grown Stuka-style pigeons without importing kamikaze buzzards.

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

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

Having just recently declared that the original ancient Britons were black, the woke deconstructionists now declare the Vikings were Muslims. Don’t these individuals ever take a day off?