RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: White Working People Children have actually Been Betrayed

Saturday night at 8 o’clock found me not at the films but at the Cinema Museum, a covert gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, located in a former workhouse which was briefly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his mother fell on tough times.

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

Coincidentally, the celebration 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 was checking out from his collection of brief stories embeded in the 1950s, when he was maturing in post-war Bradford. They’re wonderfully written, warm, amusing, evocative, a piece of history, a working-class version of Richmal Crompton’s Just William experiences.

The storylines are based on the trials and adversities of a boy being brought up by a single mom – an unconventional family life at that time, sadly just too common today. The Fib And Other Stories has remained in print since 1975 and discovered its method on to the school curriculum, where it remains today.

I can’t assist wondering, though, how typically these marvelous texts are utilized in class these days, in between instructors stuffing their pupils’ little heads with trendy far-Left propaganda about ‘white privilege’, manifest destiny and, obviously, climate modification.

The kids in the photo which formed the background to George’s reading were certainly white, but no one might have described them as privileged. Those were the days when ‘austerity’ indicated living from hand to mouth, not having to choose a fundamental 50in flat screen TV, instead of a 65in OLED Ultra design, and only being able to afford an iPhone 14 rather than the most recent all-singing, all-dancing AI variation.

Child hardship 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, kids acquired their knowledge mainly from books, composes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, kids experienced genuine difficulty, not the poverty of ambition and creativity which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live through their cellphones, instead of strolling free and experiencing life to the complete.

Until the digital/social media transformation, kids got their knowledge mostly from books. Yes, TV played a huge function, as did the motion pictures, but no place near the dominance of TikTok and other apps providing pleasure principle in byte-sized pieces.

And how can squinting at the most current CGI produced smash hit on a cellphone a few inches broad ever compare to the sort of old-school, cinema, Technicolor and Cinemascope, best-out-of-Hollywood experience celebrated at the Cinema Museum?

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

Among the most dismal things I’ve checked out recently was the author Anthony Horowitz complaining the reality that his 300-page books are far too long to engage the much shorter attention periods these days’s children.

Not surprising that child, and indeed adult, literacy levels have plunged amazingly. All this has actually contributed to the shocking discovery that white, working class pupils – kids in particular – are being left. Even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has actually been forced to confess they have been ‘betrayed’ by the modern-day schools system.

They suffer from an absence of adult participation and ensuing scarceness of goal. The white, working class kid in George Layton’s stories definitely didn’t suffer any parental disregard from his aggressive mum. Nor did he do not have imagination 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 hardship 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 roadway to a satisfying profession at the wordface rather than the relative drudgery of the office.

George Layton is thinking about taking his one-man show 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 could start by getting the phone and inviting George to visit schools, reading from his narratives.

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

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

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

Some are working as painters and decorators, others as scaffolders nand delivery motorists. More intriguingly, second jobs likewise include a DJ (PC Hammer, anybody?) 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 also reported that some officers are working as grocery store checkout assistants. I don’t suppose there’s any risk of them nicking a couple of thiefs.

Mind how you go.

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Couple in their 70s who bought a baby from a stranger are selfish in the severe

First the frogs, now the octopuses
The illegal migrant armada crossing the Channel daily might end up being the least of our issues. We now learn 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 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 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 nearest Holiday Inn eventually.

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 worthless 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 couple of years’ time. And 3 percent of things all is still stuff all.

AN NHS cosmetic surgeon who compared Islamist terrorists to the Nazis has been struck off. If he ‘d said the exact same about those of us who wish to leave the European yuman rites convention, Surkeir would have made him Attorney general of the United States.

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