I’ve been catching up on bookmarked reading and viewing recently, and finally got around to watching Britain’s Benefits Scandal - Fraser Nelson’s hard-hitting but also rather humanising Channel 4 documentary on the shocking state of dependency in the UK. You come away from it in no doubt about the depth of the problem, but also disabused of any notion that this is a simple matter of sponging layabouts. Of course, we’re paying for it and that’s not on. But it is the waste of human potential that is so depressing. You realise how embedded is some people’s sense of hopelessness and how ill-equipped they, and we, have become in finding a way out of it.

Nelson interviews the addicts, the disabled, and others too defeated or too caught up in the infamous benefits trap, to do anything. Whether their helplessness is learned or a function of the system in which they are entrapped, its going to be no easy task unlearning their dependency or disentangling them from the knotted mess. But there are other, less seemingly downtrodden folk, who are caught in the net.

Gabriel McKeown, writing for UnHerd, makes the observation that the UK has a ‘generation trapped in a purgatory between the classroom and a job market that has rejected them’. The graduate dependent, she says, is a consequence of the mismatch between the higher education sector and the workplace. The access for all mantra has both flooded the market with ill-prepared labour and destroyed the reputation of a sector once associated with the pursuit of excellence. But is it really any better an idea, as McKeown puts it, to move away from today’s institutions that ‘sell courses based on what 18-year-olds think is interesting’ to ones that supply ‘what employers actually need’?

Is that really what universities are for? It seems to me that this would be to misunderstand, and further undermine, what is their limited but vital role. They are, or at least should be, centres of learning, unapologetically elitist, and nothing whatsoever to do with the world of work. Turning them into instruments of capitalism is hardly an advance on their being instruments of state policy. The fault lies elsewhere: in a failure to think coherently about our economy, about how we raise productivity and the general standard of living. And about how the state and market can best work together to plan a way out of our current woes.

Then, and only then, will young people know where they fit in, and what talents might be fostered in them. The vast majority should never go to university. I don’t say this out of any judgement on their abilities, or out of any desire to lower their ambitions, but based on my own lived experience (if, as a white, balding, middle aged bloke, I’m allowed one). I attended a ‘university’ which used to be a polytechnic and has since been demolished. It wasn’t an elite experience. It was disappointing and diminished. I would have been better served getting a job or going to a proper university (if I’d got the grades) rather than a rebadged poly. The education system can indulge you without educating you or preparing you for what comes next.

And that’s where these young people now find themselves. According to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), at approaching double the pre-pandemic rate, over 700,000 graduates are out of work and claiming benefits. A third of them on health grounds. The CSJ, like McKeown, berates the rise of daft degrees and contrasts the declining earning potential of young people compared with those who have taken the apprenticeship route. It rightly makes the case for putting an end to a two tier education system in which a technical education is seen as second best, when it is by definition the most useful.

According to PwC’s chief people officer, Phillippa O’Connor, post-pandemic graduates tend to lack the ‘resilience’ and ‘people skills’ that previous cohorts brought with them to the workplace. And for the govenment’s employment tsar Alan Milburn, its not just graduates who aren’t ready to work for a living, its young people as a whole that lack the work experience that previous generations had doing a Saturday job. Even I, homebound, distracted and skillless as I was, had one of those. Today, whatever their route to the benefits queue, young men seem particularly prone to passivity.

Over a third of men under the age of 30 who claim Universal Credit, are not required - on account of a reported health problem - to look for work. That’s nearly 1 in 20 men in their 20s. Or over 200,000 of the 6.5 million people on out-of-work benefits. Many of them with the perfect excuse to feel sorry for themselves and get paid for it. Of course, this is not to deny that among some of these numbers we must count the genuinely sick and disabled, but I imagine they most of all are genuinely sick and tired of being crowded out by those who may be less deserving of our support.

Having said that, I am sympathetic for anybody who finds themselves in this sorry position. I’ve perhaps been there myself at times, looking for something onto which to hang one’s troubles. But to become so dependent, so young, perhaps indefinitely, can only make it harder to find the resources in oneself to live independently and participate in and, most importantly, contribute to the community of which you are part. A million under 25s are not in education, employment or training. It is no good for them or us. Indeed, the weakening of the social contract implied by this breakdown of the link between those who pay and those who (sort of) benefit, isolates them further.

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It’s not just young men. Ella Whelan argues young women are struggling too. Those who start families also have rocketing childcare costs to absorb, or else they stay at home. As we see in the Nelson documentary, this strain between raising a family and earning a living has a lot to do with the welfare problem too. Young women are particularly vulnerable to the undermining of resilience that is the hallmark of a therapeutic culture, says Whelan. After #MeToo, young women are to be forgiven for seeing the workplace as toxic or a threat. It is not so much laziness or something else lacking in young people, and others, so much as the culture of the couch. This is evident, as we’ve already seen, from the growth in sickness claims.

On health grounds, 4.2 million people are in receipt of Universal Credit with no expectation that they will look for work. While this is, in part, a consequence of the higher level of needs of those being transferred from Employment Support Allowance, those with health issues now make up half of all claiming Universal Credit. Over two thirds of health assessments for Universal Credit include claims for mental health difficulties. 2.8 million people are economically inactive due to long-term sickness. There are 1.5 million people claiming the (perhaps ironically named) Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) for often mild mental health problems - with the likes of anxiety, depression and ADHD continuing to account for much of the increasing benefit take up, often from young people.

This is especially depressing for those nearer the beginning of their lives. A quarter of the economically inactive whose inactivity is apparently due to health problems, are below 35 years of age. These figures weren’t great before the pandemic, and have worsened since. Its as if a mass resignation has taken place. Demotivation has set in. And you can understand why. The world of work, like much else, has never seemed so depressing. Unemployment is on the rise, and what employment there is can seem full of dead end, dull and often poorly paid retail and hospitality jobs, especially for the young, and even these are on the decline.

As for the rest of us, many got used to not having to go in to the office. Some resent the return of the old normal or even take offence at going hybrid. As absurd as this may seem, you can see why some might have taken the easy option, made their excuses and decided not to take part anymore. They’ve given up trying and given in to the seductive narrative that they just can’t cope anymore. To be fair, the government, despite the backbencher defeat over its plans for PIPs, is making all the right noises about tackling the sick note culture. But it is a huge problem and there aren’t any signs that it will have any success in tackling it, especially as it’s more reasonable approach runs counter to the prevailing welfare-friendly views of its supporters.

Despite encouraging rhetoric about getting people back into work, the government can’t quite bring itself to question the status of some of those claiming - in both senses of the word - poor health. The language is all about supporting and coaching the sick and disabled. I suppose it can’t admit its own error. While there’s nothing wrong with compassion and helping people get off benefits - indeed, I’m all for it - and many will have genuine conditions, and a few will not be able to work at all; there are others who have - perhaps opportunistically, even cynically - piggy backed on a system that was never intended for them but has loosened its criteria, and both responded to and enabled a cultural sickness.

This is not to deny the material reality of growing unemployment either, but the UK does have a worklessness problem that is peculiar to these islands. This can be explained up to a point, by the government’s raising of employers’ national insurance contributions, business rates and the minimum wage, and not to forget the huge cost of net zero to potential employers. All of which have made it less likely that they will take on high risk, low skilled, unexperienced, young people, and contributed to the UK having a rate of youth unemployment above the EU average. But there is much more to it than that.

Unlike other countries, we didn’t recover after lockdown. We remained locked in. We stayed in bed. And that seems to be as much a consequence of the emergence of a therapeutic state and society over the past couple of decades, embedded further by our response to the pandemic, than it is driven by these more recent if wrongheaded and undeniably punishing policy decisions. The surge in mental health problems may itself be, in some part, a response to increased hardship, but people interpreting their experience through the disabling prism of psychological harm is more to the point.

As Milburn has explained:

We’re spending more money on health and disability benefits for 16 to 24-year-olds than we are on apprenticeships.

As the youngsters say, that’s messed up. It’s got to the point where the government is having to pay businesses to take them on. Not only those taking on young apprentices, but those who accept young people who have been on Universal Credit for more than six months. Young people out of work and education for more than 18 months will be guaranteed a work placement too. This is all very supportive I suppose, but it also sounds rather desperate. Instead of a well thought out policy, perhaps replacing those increased government imposed costs on businesses with a commitment to business-led apprenticeships in growth industries, there seems to be a knee jerk ‘get those figures down’ approach.

As Celia Walden at The Telegraph puts it ‘whingeing, sickness and inactivity’, contrasts embarrassingly poorly with the stiff upper lip of generations gone by. So much so, that this rather pathetic image is now ‘carved into our national identity’. While I don’t buy the argument that a clear line can be drawn between the genuinely sick and the ‘malingerers’ that she and other critics complain about, it is clear that something has changed in the national psyche. We’re not the same as we were. We see ourselves differently - as weaker, less able. The virtues that animated previous generations to make do or get on in life, or to pull together and fight wars, have faded. Blaming individuals or the system they are dependent on isn’t enough. We need to change our outlook, reboot the UK and expect more of ourselves.

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Image: Owlchemy Labs

Okay, it wasn’t nice. But there was something grimly amusing about the BAFTA controversy over John Davidson .

Anybody with a ‘neurodiverse’ condition like Tourette’s syndrome, or with a child with the condition, will know how embarrassing it can be when they say stuff you’re really not supposed to say. They don’t say it intentionally, of course. They can’t help their outbursts. Those who live with it have to get used to the uncomprehending looks, or sometimes even the cruelty of those who refuse to understand or accommodate them. Equally, I wouldn’t want to dismiss the understandable discomfort many will feel about the use of the ‘n’ word. Not least Delroy Lindothe and Michael B. Jordan who unwittingly triggered the offending tics as much as Davidson unwittingly vocalised them.

But the impact of the unbleeped word in our increasingly tight-lipped and anxious not to offend culture, is quite something to observe when the supposed offence comes out of the mouth of somebody we should obviously sympathise with. Some were sympathetic, including the host Alan Cummings. He couldn’t have handled it better, acknowledging the offence that some would no doubt feel, while explaining Davidson’s condition and how he had no control over such slurs. Others - Dawn Butler MP and actor Jamie Foxx among them - were less keen to defend the man with a disability, than they were to stress the gravity of the offence caused by what he said. Foxx even claimed, wrongly, that Davidson ‘meant it’.

For those who express any doubt about the validity of certain identities, the reception can be frosty. Even if they happen to have a strong claim to an admitteldy less culturally valorised identity themselves. As Davidson experienced, not for the first time, at the BAFTAs. Some put compassion above affirmation. But others clung to their right not to be offended as if it overid every other consideration. Both at the show and long after the bongs were handed out. As Tom Slater writes in The Spectator, the reaction to Davidson’s singular word pointed to the limits of the inclusion ethos.

It also revealed, he says, the existence of an identity league table in which: ‘the briefly hurt feelings of black millionaires counts for more than the daily anguish of a disabled Scot’. Stella O’Malley in a piece for UnHerd echoed Slater in describing Davidson’s treatment as evidence of a ‘hierarchy of harm’. A psychotherapist and a critic of therapy culture, O’Malley observed how the ‘trauma’ of one group can trump the other. What it confirmed for me is that, for the identity obsessed, intent means nothing. Context is irrelevant. The utterance is all.

What was meant by it? Who said it? Why? These details don’t matter. I found myself to be unusually sympathetic with the BBC’s predicament. It could do no right. If it cut the comments from its coverage, as Butler and others urged it to do, then people like me would be outraged. If it didn’t, it stood accused of not taking racism seriously. But why should Davidson, or anybody else with a disability like his, be edited out as if their ‘lived experience’ is any less important than anyone else’s?

If we regard Davidson as our equal, then surely he has as much right as anybody else to be heard - even if he’s not in control of these outbursts? Isn’t that what living in a civilised society is all about? Isn’t that what inclusion is supposedly all about too? Tolerance for the differences between us, and compassion for those who struggle with conditions like Tourette’s? The Davidson incident should remind us of something else that, like Tourette’s, is little understood. To defend somebody’s right to speak, or to involuntarily blurt out unpleasant words, isn’t to defend the words they use.

We should defend our collective right to hear each other and even to be offended. It might not be nice to hear words like that uttered by Davidson, but might it not do us some good, and perhaps encourage a robustness of character, to hear them? Isn’t this the genuinely kinder way too? By escaping the boxes we put ourselves in, wouldn’t we be more likely to have compassion for those we may not ordinarily identify with or otherwise understand? One thing is for sure. If we can’t hear that which we find uncomfortable, we will be less able to have the difficult conversations we badly need to have.

Image: Kaworu1992

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As recent events at Davos confirm, the established way of doing things doesn’t last forever. As The Guardian put it, yesterday’s events, saw Donald Trump using the global elite’s get together as a ‘stage for his own vision of how the world should work’. This only goes to show that orthodoxies are overturned. They lose their hold and - eventually - they come to an end. And if it can happen on the world stage, surely it can happen in our schools too.

The education system is, seemingly, more interested in kids emotional and mental states than it is in their intellectual development. For those of us who understand the principal role of schools as the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another, this is - to say the least - a problem.

We have not only seen the downgrading of knowledge in the classroom, and the increasing politicisation of the content of lessons. The idea of children’s frailty as a defining feature of their experience has really taken a hold too.

The numbers of children with anxiety issues, special needs and ‘behaviour disorders’ are all on the rise, despite this therapeutic and inclusive approach having been in place for decades. It’s clearly not working.

Coming to think of it, this goes back decades - perhaps as far back as the end of the Cold War when the turn inwards, if not the turbulent events we are now witnessing globally, has its origin.

So, whatever you think of The Donald. Whatever your views on the rightful owner of Greenland - surely ‘the blob’ isn’t more immovable than the Berlin Wall?

Read Class is in Therapy Session in Teach Secondary magazine.

… the thoughts of my co-panellists …

… and the thoughts of the audience at this year’s Battle of Ideas …

We talk a lot about identity these days - gender identity, racial identity - even, as I’ve been exploring recently, neurodiverse identities. But we don’t talk nearly enough about our national identity or identities. As I’ve discussed before, our starting point is a rather confusing one - with what the historian of Tudor England and political commentator David Starkey describes as our particular ‘biculturalism’. Am I English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish or British? We have a kind of built-in identity crisis with centuries old roots. But the crisis runs deeper than an accident of our birth.

As Starkey has also observed, officially - for decades now - the line we’ve been fed is that we only have two values - toleration and diversity. ‘In other words, we’re nothing’. A point elaborated on in a lecture on Why Britain is Broken and How to Fix it, ‘A thousand years of history are reduced to two bland abstract nouns’, he argues. And yet this evacuation of meaning from our national identity, as pronounced as it is on this damp and deteriorating island, is not necessarily peculiar to us.

In a talk entitled The Rise of Western Art & Culture, he draws our attention to the contrast between the fact that, in a very material sense, we are living ‘the best lives’ that were ever lived anywhere. And yet, ‘the sense of aimlessness, of formlessness, of pointlessness is overwhelming’. It is, he says, for all our riches, ‘pretty much Rome 410’ for our civilisation. He’s right of course. Indeed, that very word - civilisation - is rarely uttered. We can hardly come to its defence if we can’t even say it.

We talk, instead, about culture. But we don’t dare compare one with another. That the leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch saying ‘some cultures are better than others’, could be received as somehow controversial, rather than a statement of the obvious; only points to the depths to which our culture/civilisation has fallen. There has been welcome outrage that our centuries old jury trial system is under threat from the technocratic bean-counters more concerned with arresting the backlog than administering justice. But very few are as outspoken about the sharia courts that operate in this country as an almost parallel system of justice for some.

For Peter Whittle, founder of the New Culture Forum who sadly died this week, ours is a two tier society. A term coined in response to the prime minister’s mishandling of the ‘riots’ in Southport last year. As the author and social commentator Frank Furedi argued, there was an underlying sentiment felt by many at the time. A feeling that they were being ‘dispossessed of their cultural legacy and way of life’ and that they ‘have no place in a world where Identity is everything’. As Whittle suggested, it wasn’t just about an increasingly partial police or court system. There was a wider sense in which the political priorities pursued in parliament were felt not to be being pursued on behalf of us, but in spite of us.

Writer and trade unionist, Paul Embery, commenting on the summer protests triggered by events surrounding the troubling presence of ‘migrant hotels’ in the Essex town of Epping and elsewhere this summer, traced developments back to,

… the disorientation and bewilderment caused to my fellow citizens in Dagenham by the effects of the new global market, especially the rapid and large-scale deindustrialisation and demographic change that began to take hold in their community.

That feeling is still simmering. We are expected to celebrate the atomisation and fragmentation that has accompanied the changes Embery describes; and to distrust wider solidarities around that which we hold in common. Is it any wonder that many feel they don’t belong or feel confused and vulnerable, or that some are prone to lash out - however wrong or misdirected that may be? It is perhaps in this context that the controversy over mass immigration and leaky borders needs to be understood. Unprecedented and impactful on communities, poorly managed and unaccountable to the electorate, as the policy (or lack of one) currently is; there is more to this than the particulars of the ‘small boats’ or legal migration issues.

While we may be better off than those that lived on this island, or in the West, before us; there is, at the same time, economic stagnation, political chaos, and a general sense of institutional decay with which we have become all too familiar in recent times. But this is symptomatic of what can only be described as an existential crisis. We don’t know who we are. That clambering for a national identity, or a unifying idea or belief or value, is the absence into which everything else is sucked. The unease over uninvited strangers in our midst, however justified it may be, has become a lightning rod for a pre-exiting discontent with and within our national community.

As with the national identity crisis, the experience of immigration is not peculiar to the UK. As President Trump put it, ‘Europe has gone through a lot of problems, and a lot of it’s having to do with immigration’. But real enough as the problem is - I can’t help feeling that it is a secondary issue. The biggest problem we face is not unrelated, but there is far more to it than too many people coming from the wrong kinds of places.

I don’t mean to underplay the deep challenges we face at the level of demographics and culture. Too many are too scared to say as much. ‘We escaped, but they are now here’ British Iranian Mahyar Tousi’s mother said to him after leaving Iran, after 7/7 and the Westminster Bridge attacks. Tousi recounted this to those who had taken to the streets of London, for once in defence of Israel and the Jewish people who have found themselves subject to hate in the UK post October 7th. But, as Tousi made clear in that speech, the Islamism from which that hate has sprung has been with us a while.

As Rob Killick argued, following JD Vance’s Munich speech …

These wokeists have allowed and encouraged the vilification and suppression of views they do not approve of, they have encouraged the growth of the divisive politic of diversity, they decry and denigrate the nation state, and they have suppressed recognition of and opposition to the internal threat to our societies from Islamism and its supporters.

Islamism is not the same as Islam, of course. While not without its challenges - like the ‘Burka’ ban controversy that became such a troublesome issue in parliament earlier in the year - I don’t think Islam is quite the mortal threat to Western civilisation it is sometimes made out to be by some on the right. Having said that, it is hard to assimilate traditions into the host culture when we’re not all that sure what that culture is. It is only by talking and disagreeing about it - as happened at a fascinating debate on this very question at the Battle of Ideas last month - that we might better understand the threat, if that is what it is; and, in the process, better understand who we are as a people.

For instance, I disagree with Rupert Lowe, formerly a Reform UK MP, on his call for the banning of Halal and non-stun animal slaughter. While, as a farmer, his concern is animated by the increasing use of what he regards as a cruel method of killing animals for Halal meat; he also calls for the banning of Kosher meat. But it seems to me that in a free society, regardless of our concerns for other creatures (which I share), we should put freedom of religious belief and practise above that of animal welfare (and above any distaste for what a few Muslim women wear).

But he is right to raise the issue. As he says, millions of people in the UK are ‘unwittingly’ consuming Halal meat. If, instead of calling for the banning of a religious practice, we demanded the labelling of all meat produced in this way, this would lessen the extent of the suffering these animals undoubtedly endure, while protecting what are, I would argue, two fundamental British values - freedom of religion (or the value of ‘toleration’ about which Starkey was too dismissive) and freedom of choice.

There is a genuine sense of foreboding about our current state and what the future holds. You only have to scroll through the daily feeds to get a feeling that the UK is in a state of deterioration, a slow collapse and disintegration of that which holds us together. In my darker moments, when I look around me and see people from a variety of ‘communities’ each of them living their parallel lives, is it really all that far-fetched that a kind of civil war, as some academics would have it, could break out? We’re not at each others throats, but I do sometimes wonder what is holding us together? This is not just a question for the multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in which I have happily enough lived and worked most of my life.

It is a much deeper question about the kind of society we want to live in. The right - to the extent that the word holds any meaning these days - is right to be concerned for the future of our way of life. But I remain optimistic. I was in the West End on Budget day last week. The headlines were all about the row between the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and the Treasury, over the mysterious ‘black hole’ that opened up all of a sudden like one of those sink holes you see cars disappearing into. But it was the convoy of tractors, blaring their horns and playing vaguely familiar techno tunes as they ploughed through the capital’s streets, that inspired me with their noisy resistance against a government determined to tax farmers off their farms.

If we’re going to work out who we are, and find some optimism in these troubled times, who better to look to than those literally looking after the land we call home?

Image: Battle of Marston Moor 1644 by John Barker

Apologies to those of you who subscribe to these pages. I’ve been a bit quiet of late. The reason is I’ve been writing this book. It will be published next year. Normal service will resume very shortly!

I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at the Battle of Ideas Festival next month, which is being held at Church House, Westminster. I’ll be speaking on a panel alongside Lisa McKenzie, working-class academic and author of Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class; Jean-André Prager, senior fellow at Policy Exchange; and [just added] Gawain Towler, former head of press at Reform UK.

The blurb for the session reads:

The government suffered serious embarrassment earlier this year when its attempts to rein in Personal Independence Payments (PIP) had to be hurriedly scaled back in the face of a backbench revolt. But the scale of welfare payments today remains a huge worry – and there seems little appetite to bring this spending under control. Earlier this year, there was a furore about the scale and availability of cars through the Motability scheme, which runs a fleet of cars said to be worth £14 billion.

According to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP): ‘In 2025 to 2026 the government is forecast to spend £316.1 billion on the social security system in Great Britain. Total GB welfare spending is forecast to be 10.6% of GDP and 23.5% of the total amount the government spends in 2025 to 2026.’ Of this spending, £174.9 billion goes to pensioners and £141.2 billion to children and working age adults. Going forward, an ageing population means these costs will continue to rise – and that’s without the huge liabilities for public-sector pensions.

Moreover, does the emphasis on state-funded welfare make sense? With millions on working-age benefits for sickness and disability, many worry that too many people are being incentivised to remain out of work. A new report by Policy Exchange, Out of Control, identifies how poor incentives and ‘concept creep’ have stretched societal definitions of mental ill-health and neurodivergence so far that public services are stretched to breaking point, with costs of support spiraling to tens of billions each year.Getting people into work would make them better off, reduce the welfare bill and potentially improve the economic outlook, too.

What is to be done? Are politicians prepared to have the difficult conversations, from reducing working-age entitlements to increasing the retirement age? Is the debate unnecessarily gloomy about the UK’s ability to afford welfare in the future? Or will we face an abrupt financial reckoning if nothing is done?

For more details click here. I hope to see you there!

I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at the Battle of Ideas Festival next month, which is being held at Church House, Westminster. I’ll be speaking on a panel alongside Lucy Beney, counsellor and children’s correspondent at Save Mental Health; Baroness Joanne Cash, life peer and radical; and Dr Ashley Frawley, sociologist and author of Significant Emotions and Semiotics of Happiness.

The blurb for the session reads:

There is no doubt that far too many of our children and young people are not thriving mentally or emotionally in the way that they should be. In 2024, almost 20 per cent of school-aged children in the UK had been diagnosed with a mental-health condition, up from 10 per cent 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, the line between ‘learning disabilities’ and ‘mental-health issues’ has also become increasingly blurred. According to the charity ADHD UK, a diagnosis of ADHD is listed as a ‘mental-health disability’ under the Mental Health Act 1990. Over 1.6million pupils in England have been identified as having special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), up 24.9 per cent since 2016, while the number of children with an education, health and care plan (EHCP) has risen by an astonishing 83.4 per cent – up 11.6 per cent in the past year alone.

The care minister, Stephen Kinnock, has confirmed that the government is committed to its manifesto pledge to put a ‘mental-health practitioner’ into ‘every school in the country’. The idea has widespread support, with the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives offering similar commitments. Already, there have never been so many staff and volunteers working within schools with a specific responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of pupils: senior mental-health leads, educational psychologists, mental-health support teams and more. Access to counselling is available in many schools. Despite this booming school-based ‘mental-health industrial complex’, the wellbeing of pupils continues to deteriorate and rates of ‘mental illness’ continue to rise.

However, a recent Family Education Trust report by Lucy Beney, a qualified counsellor, asks if such interventions are not only ineffective, but perhaps harmful. She discusses everything from ‘diagnostic inflation’ and ‘social contagion’ to definitions of ‘mental health’ and ‘neurodiversity’, from the impact of schools encouraging young people to look at life through the subjective filter of their own feelings to the capture of mental-health professional bodies by critical social justice theory.

If one fifth of children are suffering so much that they are deemed as having a ‘disorder’, should our focus be on where we as parents and teachers are going wrong rather than what’s wrong with children? Is school the best place to address such mental distress, however it’s categorised? And what are the opportunity costs if classroom time and resources are taken away from academic pursuits that could potentially be more conducive to better mental health?

For more details click here. I hope to see you there!

We lack faith. In God, in ourselves, and in our institutions. Each of them, in one way or another, have let us down. Starting with ourselves - Freya India, who writes with great insight on young people and relationships in these strange times, describes her younger generation as ‘chronically doubtful’:

Generations before us had it harder, at least materially, but in their world, even as it sometimes fell apart, something beneath stayed intact: customs, understanding, a shared floor and foundation. Ours is one where all that underneath has been destroyed.

Indeed, India argues that ‘faith in a world of doubt is threatening’. People who throw themselves into relationships, who make themselves vulnerable to others, or hold convictions, are urged to rein it in or tone it down. We are instead encouraged to keep our distance, be non-committal, and remain distracted and unserious. When you consider what a conservative commentator like Melanie Phillips argues we are up against - post October 7 or, taking the longer view, post 9/11 - this is rather worrying:

The Palestinian cause is being used as a wedge issue to weaponise western antisemitism against Israel and the Jews, whose destruction is viewed as an essential front in the wider war against the West, Christianity and the entire non-Islamic world.

Phillips cites atrocities committed not just in Gaza and not only against Jews, but across Africa, the Middle East - where many more Christians have been slaughtered by radical Islamists - and in the West too, to make the case that a holy war is being waged on Judaeo-Christian civilisation and that we are, for the most part - despite all the horrific attacks and the growing sectarian divisions - seemingly oblivious to it. Maybe Phillips sounds over the top, but I think she has a point.

There is definitely a Christian revival, and a renewed sense of urgency, amongst conservatives. Whether its Jordan Peterson, rather compellingly, talking about the importance of sacrifice in in the living of meaningful lives; or his conversation with international Christian figures on how faith equips us to rise to the challenge of our ‘civilisational moment’. Both delivered at a conference organised by his ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) organisation. Both speaking to India’s concerns about the absence of certainty and aiming, as their recent publication put it, at ‘restoring our foundations’.

Annoyingly, this also sounds like the Starmer government’s unconvincing mantra, repeated ad nauseum by its robotic ministers, about how it is ‘building the foundations’ that the previous government supposedly forgot to build. Albeit as it sets fire to the house, and as the roof falls in. But still, I think India and Peterson are right about this need to go back to basics (as another awful British PM once said). These basics are spiritual and historical, as much as they are moral and political. As former government minister and Brexit negotiator, and now Baron, David Frost puts it:

You don’t have to accept Christianity’s metaphysical claims, but you do, I think, have to accept that it originates in the execution of a specific person, Jesus, a Jewish teacher, who “suffered death under Pontius Pilate” in around AD 30.

From Jesus to St Peter and the bishops of Rome to follow, whatever one’s faith or lack thereof, there was something undeniably awe-inspiring about the events surrounding the passing of Pope Francis in April. As The Telegraph reminded us following his funeral:

For two millennia, the history of Western civilisation has been inextricably linked to the history of the Catholic Church, an unbroken succession linking each Bishop of Rome back to Saint Peter the Apostle, and the foundation of the Church by Jesus Christ.

For all its well documented problems, it is still one of the more popular of our international institutions. For all the real politik of Trump and Zelensky seen in dramatic dialogue ‘among the cardinals’ in St Peter’s Basilica prior to the funeral - somehow (post-Oval Office debacle) the setting and the occasion heightened the former rather than sullying the latter. And for all the political clashes over whether the next pontiff be a progressive or a traditionalist ahead of the election of the new Pope via the conclave - the Church, as that leader had it, ‘remains the same’. (Well, sort of.)

Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley thinks Pope Leo XIV will be more ‘collegiate’ than his predecessor, but echo Francis in championing the Church over the office and the robes. Which is as it should be. So what of the English Church, less lush, less ornate? How is it doing? While less than half of us describe ourselves as Christians, it has nevertheless played a central role in shaping who we are as people. And, after a long decline, church attendances are once again on the rise - markedly so for Catholics with, reportedly, 1.8 million practising (of more than 6 million) compared with approaching a million attending Anglicans.

While many are from migrant communities, others seem to be young men in search of much needed clarity and community, and on the rebound from the ‘growing cultural fragmentation and alienation’ to which they have become accustomed. Another conservative convert, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has noted this development in the US too, upon which she raises hopes - if young women can be persuaded too - of a ‘renewal of the Western spirit’. She understands, intellectually as well as spiritually, what we have lost:

Liberalism, when it ditches the guard rails of classical philosophy and Christianity, becomes hedonism, nihilism and misery.

Her colleague at Courage Media, Connor Tomlinson, points to the rising numbers, again particularly young men, being baptised particularly into the more hardcore traditions of Catholicism and the Orthodox Churches, consequent upon a ‘moral decay in Western civilization’. Of course, this God-shaped hole in society and in people’s lives isn’t a new phenomenon. It is one we have been facing since the creation of the modern world. That it is being filled in … with God … is perhaps the surprising part. A loss of faith in anyone or anything. A loss of a narrative - something that we might live by. These are, surely, what are driving this holy revival.

While I am not one of the converted and not entirely conservative, I feel the same pull and am encouraged by this revival. And yet,

It’s actually over. By ‘it’, I mean the shared Greco-Judeo-Christian culture which fed and shaped the human imagination for the past 2,000 years. ‘It’ was probably over years ago.

A.N. Wilson’s corrective is sobering. Have we allowed ourselves to be carried away by holy rhetoric? This revival, while proportionally impressive, is numerically much less so. A couple of million or so practising Christians in a country of tens of millions is not a lot. Wilson thinks we’ve already reached the ‘end of Christendom’. Is he right? Has a hunger for a new faith in something, for surety over doubt, for order over confusion, and unity over division, blinded us to what’s really going on? Not necessarily. While I’m not a christian and I wouldn’t even describe myself as a ‘cultural christian’, there is so much to draw on. And those foundations still need digging.

Image: Andreas Wahra

I’ve accumulated a list of bookmarks. These are links to websites and various online resources that are meant to make our kids safer online. I’ll admit, as a former Safeguarding Link School Governor, I’m not convinced they make our children any safer than they otherwise would be. Admittedly, I haven’t tested this hypothesis to exhaustion, but I’ve tried and failed to take various measures to restrict or protect my children when on some device. More often than not, it has to be abandoned because however straightforward it might seem to those for whom safety is the only consideration, the reality tends to be rather more complicated.

If you put an age - or any other automated - restriction on what your child can access, you soon learn that the kind of thing they were playing or watching previously, is now out of bounds. Whether they should have been or not may be a moot point. But it’s also something that we, as parents, make a judgement call on. Should your 12 year old be accessing content meant for a 16 year old. Maybe. Maybe not. It depends what it is. It also depends on your circumstances. If you’re working from home and don’t have much time for active parenting, you may well decide that it isn’t the end of the world if they hear a few words that you ideally wish they wouldn’t.

They probably hear much worse in the playground, you rationalise to yourself, or when their sweary aunt visits. Maybe they’ll come across other stuff you’d really rather they didn’t. If the primary school is telling them there are multiple genders during assembly, you rationalise it to yourself, how much more harm will a suggestive scene or an adult comment in an otherwise harmless show do? These filters aren’t very good at filtering anyay.

I’ve had to remove restrictions for this very reason. Better safe than sorry? You can’t protect kids all the time. We used to understand that, and we still do to some extent when it comes to the real world. We get it that at some point you have to let your child walk to or from school, or head to the corner shop on their own. That is how they learn, and get streetwise and learn to look out for themselves. We seem to forget this online. While of course we should do what we can to ensure they are not watching porn or getting into exchanges with malicious strangers, there is only so much we can do.

As I say, every solution I’ve come across turns out to be nothing of the sort. It’s that metaphorical sledgehammer cracking that tiny nut - and everything else in the vicinity. Of course, if we take all their devices off them, ban them from having a phone etc then, yes, they’re not going to be exposed to the potential dangers associated with those devices. But they won’t have learnt how to deal with them either. They will be too trusting of strangers in chat rooms in much the same way as kids unaccustomed to going out will lack the awareness they need to cross the road safely.

CEOP, which is part of the National Crime Agency, is typical of the online child protection industry’s idea of safeguarding. Their advice to parents includes ‘talk with your child about gaming’ and ‘learn together’ by watching an animation. This would not survive contact with my kids - of course, parents should talk to their kids about the games they’re playing but in my experience abuse animation gets mocked by bored, giggly kids. The other advice is to ‘set boundaries’ - well, that’s for parents - and ‘safety settings’ too. Changing settings is fraught with complications and - if my experience is anything to go by - you’ll soon feel the need to change them back.

‘How risky is in-game chat?’ A good question. One many a parent worries over. There are , let’s face it, perverts online who will use these platforms for their own dark ends. It would be nice to know how big a threat they are. But, and again this is typical, rather than answer it’s own question, CEOP raises the prospect of risks. There is no attempt to quantify or scale these risks, or put them in some sort of context. It’s just a list of things for parents to worry over even more than they already were - from sexual language and images, to blackmail and grooming. As if scaring and guilt-tripping parents about their failure to follow the safeguarding script protects children.

It’s the same on Childnet. A mother with her arm around her daughter as they both gaze into her mobile phone. They both look delighted with themselves. ‘Have a conversation’ we are instructed. ‘Speak to your child about how to stay safe and happy online’. It’s just not real. No child is that happy having their mother looking over their shoulder at their phone screens. And no parent needs to be told how to ‘have a conversation’ with their child. Maybe I’m wrong and parents are totally incapable of relating to their own children and couldn’t possibly work this out for themselves?

The NSPCC sums up the wrong-think of the industry. ‘We won’t stop until every child is safe online’ it declares, impossibly. The UK Safer Internet Centre seems more interested in pushing a campaign than it is in providing useful information, while leaving parents to get on with the messy business of raising their kids. They list one of their Manifesto aims as: ‘Ensuring the Effective Implementation and Delivery of the Online Safety Act’. A piece of legislation that is intended to ‘make the UK the safest place in the world to be online’ with all the restrictions and regulations on our speech that would entail, is not going to be good for kids either. The internet needs to put the world at their fingertips, not cut it off from them.

These types of organisations, many of them charities, are far from being grassroots movements speaking up for children, parents and families. They are often wealthy, well connected and busily lobbying for legislative change. The UK Safer Internet Centre - an umbrella group of charities including Childnet - even describes itself, quite unashamedly, as the ‘bridge between Government, industry, law enforcement and society’ and says ‘we are the engine of the online protection landscape in the UK.’ A narrow outlook that can only, in my view, do more harm than good. These entities are a million miles away from the families doing their best to raise their kids.

Which is why, if I were to recommend just one useful source of information on how to safeguard your children’s activities online, I would recommend Internet Matters. While it too is guilty of mission creep into what is properly understood as parents’ business, its parental controls guidance is worth a look. If you’re concerned your child is watching things on Netflix that they really shouldn’t; if you’re worried about what their browsing on Google; or what they’re watching on YouTube then this is a handy guide. It’s not about scaring but informing you, with good advice on how to go about it.

Having said that, in the end, you may find that these restrictions are too restrictive. They may deny young people access to the content that may well enrich the quality of their informal learning and understanding. Or maybe you, as a parent, are less rigid about the rules that you set in your household. And you don’t want your child to be brought up or ‘controlled’ by some program on the internet. It also depends on the child.

It is parents, not IT experts, or safeguarding ‘experts’, who are best placed to make these judgement calls. Those of us with kids with autism, for instance, may find that they spend an awful lot of their time online. They are, potentially, more vulnerable than the average young person online. But, nevertheless, it is also their place of retreat and safety (as it is, to some extent, for all kids). For autistic kids it might become the site of the pursuit of their specialised interests, allow them to hide from the world, protect against building anxieties, or allow them to engage with other human beings in a way they feel comfortable with. I’m not minded to take this away from them.

At the risk of contradicting myself though, parents can also feel uniquely poorly placed to make these decisions. We often don’t feel in control or we lack the expertise. But it’s important to understand that safeguarding isn’t a technical exercise. It is about the building of relationships and the informal monitoring that can result. There have surely never before been so many influences on our children’s day-to-day lives before. They are constantly exposed to stuff that we simply don’t get. I don’t regard myself as a technophobe. But, compared to my nearly teenage son, I’m utterly clueless. While he recently built - assembling it part by part - his own PC, I can barely turn the television on (not least because he’s hooked it up to his devices).

But who else is there to hold the ring? To police the boundaries of their lives. We’re not perfect. We’ll make mistakes. But they have to learn. And the alternative is to make their lives a mollycoddled misery. If we really want to protect our kids - and I’m having a go at myself here more than anybody - we need to, somehow, be a bigger part of their lives. We need to get a better understanding of these new worlds they inhabit. We mustn’t cramp their style or venture too far into these worlds that they have created for themselves. We’re sure to get lost.

But we owe them. They are in that world of virtual encounters because of how restricted we have allowed their offline or ‘real’ lives to become. We mustn’t turn the online world into this restricted and suffocating place that campaigners seem so keen on. Our kids go out far less and ‘see’ so much less of each other than preceding generations. But by knowing them a little better, we can at least do a better job of not only protecting them, but helping them to grow and go out into the real world with a boldness that will hopefully make them capable of re-imagining it.

Image: Willowbl00

I’ve been putting this off. The getting rid of the kids’ books. The ones they’ve outgrown. The thing is I’m rather fond of a few of them. The books (and the kids). And I really don’t want to dispose of them. Actually, come to think of it, I’m the only one who feels this way. I suppose I missed them the first time around. I didn’t enjoy reading as a kid. The classics passed me by. The Roald Dahls and the Enid Blytons. I think I managed a few of the Mister Men. And there were the Janet and Johns at school.

So it is perhaps not just that I am reluctant to part with a few of them - most aren’t all that - it’s that I’m conscious that I’m running out of excuses to do just that. Why keep the little kiddies books when they’re not little kiddies anymore. They’re far from all grown up and the teenage years are yet to hit, but it feels like my last chance to really grasp what it is about these books that still - as an adult - makes me so reluctant to let them go. So, which books? The ones that sit beside me are Dick Whittington, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and Macavity. There’s another which I’ve held on to because I can’t quite believe it exits. It’s the anti good children’s book.

It is the tallest of tales. And quite unseasonal. Grandpa Christmas is written by Michael Morpurgo, widely regarded as one of our greatest living children’s authors, a former Children’s Laureate and perhaps most famously the author of War Horse, that was so popularly adapted for the stage. It takes the form of a letter written by a grandfather to his granddaughter. It starts off nice enough, recounting happy times in the garden together enjoying the wonders of nature. Half way through, though, it gets dark. Quite literally. A picture of the blue-green Earth is set against a dark sky and grandpa says:

But one day, if we do not care for her, this good earth of ours will be as arid and lifeless as the moon.

Really Mr Morpurgo? One: are you really sure about that? Not even the Climate Change Committee, stuffed as it is with Net Zero ‘burning planet’ zealots is saying that. Two: are you sure it’s the sort of thing we should be saying to the next generation? Especially if it’s more invention than fact. Do we really want the next generation to be consumed by this unfounded gloomy outlook on a future they are yet to make?

The life of this world is as fragile as you are ….

And so it continues with this not only tiny, lonely planet that Mr Morpurgo insists we are destroying. We too are pathetic creatures, all of us as ‘fragile’ as the next. Worse, it turns out grandpa (or rather Mr Morpurgo) has gone full on Gaia: ‘earth is a living, breathing being’ he says wrongly, ‘and we must hurt her no more’. Okay, I know it’s supposed to be fiction. But this is fiction on top of another fiction and it’s really not the sort of thing we should be inflicting on the young and impressionable.

I wish for you a world where, in flying our planes, driving our cars, heating our homes … we do not overheat the planet, do not melt the ice caps, raise the oceans, and so bring famine and flood and fire down upon ourselves.

Keep it light! It might as well have been written by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Milliband. I’m surprised it’s not required reading in schools. Not becuase it’s good - as you might have guessed from the above, it really isn’t - but because it’s propaganda for a society that no longer believes in itself, that sees its citizens as polluters and destroyers of all that is good in the world. It’s a childish notion that can only pollute our children’s imaginations. Why not fill their minds with possiblities about how we might harness our most advanced technologies to create the energy we need, and in that way make the world a better place?

I was going to drop the books off at my kids’ old nursery but I think this one needs to go in the rubbish bin. Well, in the recycling. That would be rather fitting don’t you think? So what about those other books? What do they have that Mr Morpurgo, in this instance at least, so clearly doesn’t? A certain brutality. In the version of Dick Whittington I have - one of the Ladybird Tales - we learn by the second sentence on the first page about poor Dick’s circumstances:

His mother and father were dead and he had no one to care for him.

Kids can deal with this kind of thing. The death of a person - even a parent - makes a horrible sense. A dying planet is devastating in a much bigger way. It means there is no hope. It’s not a sad fact of life that we all must face. It is literally hopeless. By the second page of Whittington we have some optimism: ‘When the village people talked of London’ we hear ‘they spoke of it as a wonderful place’. And indeed it is. Yes, it has it’s issues - big ones - but it is still a place of wonder for kids. Okay, the streets aren’t actually paved with gold but it’s still a place of hope.

The Tiger Who Came To Tea is wonderfully surreal. That’s the word that comes to mind just looking at the wonderful illustrations that the book’s author, Judith Kerr, also drew. It’s also charmingly old fashioned. Everything happens - the tiger of the title arriving at the family home for tea and then, eventually, leaving - before dad arrives home from work. It’s an old world of stable roles and happy familial routine. So much so, the arrival of a tiger is accommodated without too much fuss.

Then he said “Thank you for my nice tea. I think I’d better go now.” And he went.

There is joy of a different kind in T.S. Eliot’s (yes, the poet) Macavity: The Mystery Cat. Originally a poem in his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the version I (sorry, my daughter) have is an illustrated 75th Anniversary Edition. The language draws you in, without you quite knowing what it is all about or why. The nonsense of it, the rhyme of it is infectious and stands for a love of language if nothing else. There’s something captivatingly elusive about this cat:

Mcavity’s a Mystery Cat:

he’s called the Hidden Paw -

For he’s the master criminal

who can defy the Law.

He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying

Squad’s despair:

For when they reach the

scene of crime - Macavity’s

not there!

There’s a lot of talk of trans these days - even in schools; but very little in the way of transgression. That’s what’s missing. The kids love it. And so do I.

Image: Unknown

I grew up in 1980s Birmingham. I remember the racism of the time. It was a casual racism. It was also an institutional racism, in the proper sense of the word. The immigration issue was, unlike now, very much discussed in terms of race. And the police really did operate along racial lines in its policing of the inner city riots of the time. But a lot has changed since then. While - despite what you might hear to the contrary - most people’s ‘lived experience’ is that the old racism has faded over the decades; we are, nevertheless, now witnessing the re-emergence of antisemitism.

I say re-emergence, but speaking personally I honestly don’t ever remember it being a thing. Despite all the other quite blatant and openly expressed racism against black people and Asian people, antisemitism seemed something of a museum piece for my generation at least. It was what happened before and during the War. We only knew it, decades later, through what we heard and (most shockingly) saw on TV about the Holocaust. If we were taught it, we might have known, as Tanya Gold writes, ‘much of the interwar aristocracy did not like Jews’; and going back a little further, Edward I, who expelled the Jews from England (see pic above) was evidently not a fan either.

I suppose it must be true, as Gold suggests, that we have absorbed Jewish culture. It is a part of us. And yet, some whose parents were perhaps themselves once subject to vile and even violent discrimination; or who are themselves recent arrivals, are today visiting the same treatment on another, much smaller, minority. On a community they regard as somehow alien. It is an uncomfortable truth, as Rod Liddle argues, that an unwise immigration policy, and a lack of integration has inevitably brought with it deep discriminatory attitudes towards Jews that we have yet to grapple with.

But this is also a deeply domestic problem, with young people apparently lacking an understanding of the horrors of that time, and even a sympathy for today’s imperilled Jews. As Mary Wakefield puts it: ‘Somehow the idea of Nazis as the example of ultimate evil has lost its hold’. But, while the rise of the ‘Voodoo right’ is an increasing concern; it is the sympathies of the ‘progressives’ - those who tell us they are on the ‘right side of history’ - that I personally find the most disturbing of all. Their willingness to walk alongside apologists for pogroms, or to not notice the age-old Jew-hating tropes, is especially worrying. They really should know better.

As Dolan Cummings argues, while for most of us Israel v Hamas is a bloody war sparked by an atrocity; for ‘pro-Palestine’ allies in the West, it is a way of demonstrating that ‘cosmopolitan morality demands that, in any given conflict, we take the side of those who are least like us.’ The Jews, he concludes, ‘have the misfortune of being a people attached to a particular but very fluid prejudice, the idea that the world’s problems can be blamed on them.’ And so, around the world (wherever their mortal enemies and their apologists reside), they find themselves attacked - and those attacks justified at worst, ignored or downplayed at best.

Do you remember Amsterdam? It was just six months ago that a ‘Jew hunt’ took place in the heart of Europe. Like so much else involving these inconvenient victims, it has been swiftly forgotten. This particular obscene attack took place following a Europa League football match featuring Maccabi Tel Aviv. Their supporters were viciously attacked and Israel promptly, and shamefully for the game’s hosts, sent planes to rescue its citizens. It was described as something out of ‘Europe’s darkest history’ taking place, as it did, on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht. King Willem-Alexander reflected on how his country had ‘failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War Two, and last night we failed again’.

As Zoe Strimpel explains, in a piece on the ‘genteel antisemitism’ of children’s author Roald Dahl, ‘Israel functions as an irresistible magnet and obsession for anti-Semites’. In the US, and continuing the theme of Nazi revivalism, Kanye West’s latest provocation, a song called ‘Heil Hitler’ released on VE day was subsequently removed from streaming services. There was also the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home on account of his support for Israel, and his being a Jew. And the defacing of Israeli actress Gal Gadot’s star in Hollywood, and her harassment in the UK where while shooting a film, again because she is an Israeli Jew.

Also in the UK, Gary Lineker - dubbed the ‘Kanye West of Soccer’ by commentator Jake Wallis Simons - went too far even for his BBC employers with a career-ending retweet of an obviously anti-semitic ‘pro-Palestine’ video. This was not long after defending a withdrawn BBC documentary exposed as Hamas propaganda. Then there was, during Passover, the no doubt charming and well-meaning, activists who targeted the Jewish community of the lovely Essex seaside town where I once lived, Westcliff-on-Sea.

Meanwhile, pensioner Julian Foulkes was arrested by six officers from Kent Police, ‘armed with batons and pepper spray’. This followed a filmed search of his home and was to lead to an eight hour interrogation at the station. His crime? To respond to a ‘pro-Palestine’ activist’s threat, on X, to sue Suella Braverman over her use of the term ‘hate marches’. He suggested, like the airport in Dagehstan, Russia, Heathrow could be the scene of a hate-filled mob forcing their way onto the runway tarmac intent on hunting down disembarking Jews. Whether you agree with him or not, it was fair comment and no business of the police.

He received a caution. And then an apology.

There have been some vile attacks and some hateful sloganeering. But it is institutions like the BBC and the police - confused by, or even implicated in anti-semitic sentiments as Jewish BBC employees have suggested - that are almost more concerning. They either don’t see it or don’t care. One member of staff has spoken about the ‘normalisation’ of Jew hatred inside the BBC. Another, referring to Lineker, has spoken of the corporation’s ‘endless willingness to overlook his apparent anti-Semitism dressed as Palestinian advocacy’. For these apparently ‘woke’ institutions, there is a blindness to the moral rot of institutional Jew hatred.

To be fair to London’s Metropolitan Police, following the fatal shooting of a young couple (both Israeli embassy staff and due to be engaged) outside the Jewish Museum in Washington DC; this effort to reassure Jewish Londoners was a welcome acknowledgement of the problem:

Since Oct 7 2023 we have seen a concerning increase in anti-Semitic hate crime, as well as the ever-present threat from extremism or terrorism. Officers have been working closely with community members and key partners … to provide advice, reassurance and a visible presence particularly in those areas with larger Jewish populations or in the vicinity of relevant venues.

While the ongoing Kanye West and Gary Lineker sagas seem trifling when Jews are physically threatened or even murdered simply for being Jews, there are important principles at stake here too. Calls for the criminalisation or cancellation of their like are unhelpful. Poisonous sentiments - however conscious they may be - amplified by overpaid and self-important footy commentators, or hatefully disposed and mentally unstable rappers, can all too easily become apologies for their violent expression by fringe elements. Still, the police should be protecting the Jewish community from these attacks, not shutting up people for the things they say - no matter how offensive.

We need to be able to have an open debate about this issue, and be honest with ourselves and each other about what is really going on here. The suspected gunman in that shocking double murder shouted ‘free, free Palestine!’ as he was lead away. While it’s no doubt possible to hold such views and not hate Jews, this is not an isolated incident. There can be no hiding from the reality of the ugly return of the oldest hatred - especially in this contemporary ‘progressive’ form. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, now is the time to challenge antisemitism in all its guises, and to show solidarity with our Jewish friends and neighbours.

Image: Expulsion of the Jews

I was delighted to get the opportunity to speak with members of the Academy of Ideas’ Education Forum, a discussion group including teachers and others last week. They kindly invited me to give a sense of what my forthcoming book is all about. Essentially it’s my take, as the parent of a child with special educational needs, on the neurodiversity movement, and what I describe as the crisis of needs in the classroom. I learnt a lot from the views and the experiences that were exchanged, and which I will reflect on further in the book. But, for now, click below to hear my introduction.

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I’m pleased to announce that I’m writing a book!

Despite a longstanding scepticism about the the increase in conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), since becoming the father a child diagnosed with both I’ve been forced to question my views. As I’m sure any parent with an Autistic child will tell you, the condition runs through them like a stick of rock. It’s not something they can fake, or a behavioural problem given a fancy label. It is an inseparable part of who they are. It can also be tough, both on them and on their families as we try to support them.

And yet, there seems to be something else going on too. It’s hard not to be struck by the record numbers of pupils being labelled as ‘neurodiverse’, having special educational needs (SEN) or struggling with anxiety and attendance issues. Why? How can that be? Do we know what normal is anymore? The book is less about providing answers - which I don’t claim to have - than it is about posing uncomfortable questions. Questions for you, me, schools, campaigners, and for policymakers. Instead of just celebrating how accepting we have become, or simply calling for ever more resources to meet the growing demand - why aren’t we querying what has changed? What is it about us that has allowed for this explosion of needs?

Are we in danger of making identities out of disorders? Why do some parents appear oddly eager that their children be labelled neurodiverse? Has SEN become a hold-all category for too many different kinds of issues and conditions, and thus an unhelpful term? At a time when schools struggle to fund SEN provision, is a growing ‘awareness’ of neurodiverse, and other similar conditions, part of the problem or the solution? Are there other reasons for the increasing rates of referral and diagnosis, and for rising numbers of children needing support in class? By asking these questions, I hope to stimulate open debate about what is going on, and to get closer to the likely drivers of what I describe as a needs crisis.

I also ask questions about schools and the impact of these needs on kids’ education. As the SEN agenda becomes a greater part of the school experience, is teacher autonomy being undermined by the expectation that they follow scripts produced by SENCOs and SEN departments for some pupils and lessons? How are mainstream schools expected to cope with students who are unable to regulate themselves against sudden, intense, and uncontrolled expressions of emotion or aggression? Instead of experts being brought in to teach teachers how to teach pupils with neurodiverse conditions or other special educational needs - wouldn’t it be better if experts taught these kids in specialist schools? Or is the problem of inclusion, and the variety and nature of the needs children bring to the classroom, more complicated than that?

I hope you can join me on the evening of Tuesday 13 May in Central London, as I explore some of these issues and themes with the Academy of Ideas’ Education Forum. I hope both to hone the arguments for my forthcoming book, and to obtain some insights from those working in schools and education, from parents, and anyone else interested in understanding the reasons for this crisis in the classroom.

Tickets available here

Image: Darryl Leja, National Human Genome Research Institute

The recent dramatic events in parliament - recalled for the first time on a Saturday since the Falklands War - raise yet more questions about the UK’s relationship with China. In Scunthorpe too, where steel workers prevented Chinese executives from the Jinye entering their plant. Indeed there was a rare coming together in the national interest of MPs and workers on this issue. The end result being to not-quite-nationalise but instead direct the Chinese firm (that somehow owns ‘British Steel’) to not obliterate what’s left of our primary steel making capacity. But how did we get ourselves in this mess in the first place; and what has it got to do with China?

Before answering that, it’s perhaps worth looking to China’s neighbours. As James Woudhuysen writes, a once politically stable Japan is entering turbulent times. With a ‘governing class in crisis’ following elections last year, and international tensions on the rise with, yes, China and also North Korea. Add to that an increasing problem with violent crime on its streets, a steep rise in immigration and a failing economy - and Japan is beginning to look a little more like us than it would like. Not long after those elections, South Korea did something rather out of character too.

Woudhuysen describes it as an ‘abortive coup’. Another otherwise stable Asian ally of the West facing political crisis, hostile neighbours, and unresolved economic problems. This time, rather than going to the ballot box, it declared martial law. While this was soon overturned as opposition representatives clambered into parliament to vote against it, amid the military build-up outside: it too suggested that instability has become the new normal. Or perhaps a return to the old pre-war normal that much of the world had a break from in the second half of the 20th Century. As Peter Frankopan writes in The Spectator, ‘we’re entering a new age of tension and change’ and the ‘headwinds are looking increasingly ominous’.

Particularly at sea. Whether it's the suspected sabotage of deep water cables or tensions over the choke points through which the bulk of world trade moves, watery war games are currently being played out. If this were just a local matter, the West might be less concerned. But between them, China (which now has a larger naval fleet than the US), South Korea and Japan, are building nine out of ten of the ships on which all of the world’s trade travels. In addition to China’s ‘military exercises close to Taiwan and Vietnam and confrontations with the Philippine coast guard’; the Middle Kingdom is increasingly making its presence felt off the coast of Australia.

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According to Tom Sharpe in The Telegraph, we’re not safe from China on this side of the world either. He gives a rather sobering account of it building the largest aircraft carrier in the world - a ‘supercarrier’: effectively a floating air-force. If you think Putin is a threat to his European neighbours, you just wait. A hysterical Sharpe imagines how this nautical beast ‘accompanied by massive invasion motherships could be sitting off our coast’ in just a few years time. He is not entirely wrong. Why worry over the dangers posed by Russia, when the only power to even consider rivalling the US commands much less media attention outside Asia. Yet, as Woudhuysen says,

While Russia’s war with Ukraine and the ongoing conflagration in the Middle East are dominating the headlines, the US’s principal foreign-policy focus will continue to be China.

Indeed, it has been argued that Zelensky’s claim that China has sent troops to fight alongside Russian forces shouldn’t be taken at face value. And that it is far more likely that the soldiers he is referring to are mercenaries, on which Russia is known to rely (rather than put its own men through the infamous ‘meat-grinder’). It is, so the argument goes, a claim motivated by Ukraine’s need to connect its war with the Chinese threat that is so uppermost in the American mind. Particularly since that press conference, where Trump and Vance so publicly signalled their impatience for that costly, far away war to be resolved.

And one can, while disagreeing with its stance on Ukraine, understand why the new US governing elite regards China as its greatest threat. Not only is it displaying its power across the globe, with its growing (in size and number) ships, its multiplying ports, and its maritime manoeuvres. It has also recently significantly increased its defence spending, and Chinese representatives in the US have even raised the prospect of war:

If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight until the end.

This was in response to the 20% tariffs Trump imposed, apparently to persuade China to do something about its contribution to America’s fentanyl crisis. China raised tariffs on US exports to 84% in response. A move described by Treasury Secretary Bessent as an ‘own goal’ that ‘will affect their economy much more than it will ours’. Following which, in announcing a pause of 90 days on its various tariffs on exports from around the world; the US then lowered tariffs to 10% for nearly every country except China.

On which it imposed another, much higher, tariff of 125% (or 145% if you factor in the 20% anti-fentanyl tariff). But again, the reaction of the rather hysterical ‘free market’ right betrays their intellectual prejudices more than it explains Trump’s protectionist policies or their impact on the world economy. For Trump, tariffs are a means to an end: ‘I think that we’ll end up working on something that’s very good for both countries’, he said. And he may well be right. Time will tell. The fact that there was £429 billion worth of trade between the US and China last year suggests they need each other rather more than they want to fight each other, economically or militarily.

Nevertheless, as David Goldman explains for UnHerd, ‘the old bilateral China-US trade relationship is untenable’. Rightly or wrongly, the ‘neoliberal consensus’ stands accused of destroying US manufacturing jobs. It has proven ‘deeply unpopular with the working-class and lower-middle-class Americans who form the Trumpian GOP’s base’. While China is growing as a military power, the things it says don’t match up with the reality on the ground. The experts seem to agree that there is nothing new in the bellicose rhetoric coming out of the CCP; the US is still the world’s most powerful nation and its military spending ($850b) dwarfs that of China ($450b).

Still, the launch of DeepSeek - an alarmingly competitive language model - was enough to cause panic on the US and tech stock markets. That the response was as overheated as the AI sector itself, is a reminder of the challenge presented by what Woudhuysen describes as ‘China’s model of authoritarian dynamism’ to a divided and dilapidated West. In more confident times, we might have understood what has been dubbed AI’s Sputnik moment as following the trajectory of the original Sputnik. Like the space race that led to the moon landing, surely these ‘giant leaps’ will ultimately benefit all of humanity?

Which is why I am less persuaded by The Spectator warning darkly about this latest AI advance as the latest ‘means to weaken the West.’ Of course, we shouldn’t be naive about the ends to which these advances might be put. But the idea that it is China that ‘creates dislocation’ in the West, as the magazine’s leader piece insists, is just projection. The West was already weak and dislocated. China might exploit that fact. Indeed, it would be strange if it didn’t. But it isn’t responsible for the circumstances we find ourselves in.

The West is in trouble. But that’s not the fault of DeepSeek. Nor is it the fault of tariffs, military manoeuvres at sea, the ‘dumping’ of Chinese goods on Western markets or - for that matter - the intentions of Jinye and the future of British Steel. We need to stop blaming China for our problems and, at last, realise that we did this to ourselves.

Image: Milena Milenkovic

Pushing thru the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over,
We had five years left to cry in

Five Years, David Bowie (1972)

We left the European Union a little over five years ago. Ever since, there has been no end to the ‘sighing’ and the ‘crying’ from those who rather wish we hadn’t. Even those who voted for it are understandably angered by the failure to do much more than get it over the line, or ‘done’ as Boris wrongly put it. Whether you think this was a good decision or a bad decision, the world has changed beyond recognition since we made it. The election of Donald Trump (twice) in the US. Wars in Europe and the Middle East. The unprecedented closing down of the world economy. The locking down of citizens in their homes, for months and years, in response to a virus.

The world, in other words, has been turned upside down. But we still need to be able to explain it, and the dominant narrative couldn’t be further from the truth. No, it wasn’t the fault of Brexit or Trump. Was it the death of (a surely Eurosceptic) David Bowie in early 2016? This comes up surprisingly often - the idea that it was his demise that led to our decline. Or everything going to shit soon after, as those rather fond of the status quo (but definitely not Status Quo) only half-jokingly wonder out loud. While his death shook this fan too, no it wasn’t him either. As Ross Clark in The Spectator argues, there is a lot of misinformation about our current plight:

Falling economic growth, rising inflation, empty supermarket shelves – all these came to be blamed on Brexit, ignoring the rather large spanner which had been thrown into the works of the global economy.

As Clark explains, far from a ‘stagnant UK falling behind a buoyant EU’, both are ‘trapped in the same cycle of relative decline’ - with even its greatest powers, France and Germany, in a lot of economic and political trouble. Across the continent, industry and public services are failing and strangled by risk-averseness and bureaucracy; there are clampdowns on the the free movement of migrants, and our cities are becoming less safe as violent crime and terror incidents become an ever more familiar feature on our streets.

While this commonality of a Continent in decline is hardly anything to celebrate, it does suggest that our relative freedom to act in our own national interest is the one thing that distinguishes the UK from our European cousins. That and the relative absence of xenophobic sentiment - save the disturbing rise in Antisemitism - does put us in a better position. Or at least it should. But five years later, we still haven’t found anybody or anything with the political will to take advantage.

Whether or not it was a good idea to bring decision-making back in-house, so to speak; it is important that we should have a good relationship with our neighbours. Indeed, the whole point of being a proper nation state is that you are fully in control of your political faculties. And, as a consequence, are able to engage with other countries on that independent basis. But that isn’t the same as ‘realigning’ with the EU. Or as John Oxley, writing for Unherd, describes it: ‘reconciliation’. That, he argues, is the direction in which this government is taking us. The ‘vibes’ are certainly Eurofriendly.

Which is more than can be said of European leaders with regards Trump and his threat to walk away from the Continent. Not withstanding Starmer’s call for the United States to act as a ‘backstop’ if Europe’s defence of Ukraine falls short. (That Brexit again.) No wonder they are at odds with the US President and each other over the defence of that battered nation if, as a Telegraph leader put it, we don’t have a ‘viable alternative, and the necessary fiscal muscle to maintain it’. This has only added to the sense that far from taking control, our society has never felt so out of control. Again, this is something we have in common with our friends.

The US has administered what Tom McTague, for Unherd, describes as a ‘geopolitical shock to Europe’. Starmer and Macron are fighting to take the initiative. To be the one to rally the Continent around efforts to renegotiate the Transatlantic relationship, as well as to manage away their own fraught internal problems. Starmer, the dull technocrat, may be strangely suited to the former when feelings are running high and there is demand for the calming influence of a grey mediator. But, as McTague says, we’re badly in need of conviction politicians if we’re to address the latter. The only convictions our PM has are thoroughly authoritarian and, therefore, part of the problem.

So where are the solutions coming from? Well, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves what that vote on June 23 2016 was supposed to be about. It wasn’t just a vote. It wasn’t even just about leaving the European Union. It was, as Claire Fox argued at the Oxford Union, a response to the ‘economic, cultural and democratic alienation of huge swathes of the country’ and, importantly, ‘the start of a democratic revolution’. As Fox says, the EU itself is now beset by populist revolts among its member states. A good thing too. No doubt there are Little Englanders and those who long for Empire - though its tricky to be both - but for me (and as an old lefty) there was always something appealingly internationalist about Brexit.

Precisely by appealing to the virtues of sovereign nationhood, it encouraged others to take control of theirs’ too. Or, as Fox puts it, ‘it let the genie out of the bottle’ and, to slightly mix her metaphors, has ended up ‘sweeping away the deadwood across the Western world’. Removing this particular obstacle to democratic accountability - or ‘tearing up excuses’ as Fox nicely describes it - was a way of ensuring there would be nowhere to hide for our politicians. Except it was never the only obstacle. There was always the awkward reality that the UK’s own political class were very much against it. And (as we discovered) would do everything they could to frustrate it.

They were also clueless and not up to the challenge anyway. Next stop the local elections.

Image: RayanS93

Neurodiversity Celebration Week is back. While I’m not about to get the party hats out, I do feel the need to be a little more positive this time around. So, I won’t bore you with how raising a child on the Autistic Spectrum is hard work, and how the condition itself and the fight to get some support is a struggle for parents. (Okay, I might do this a little bit). While they seriously overdo it, I willingly concede that celebrating difference as normal - as the celebrants of neurodiversity insist we must - is indeed a positive. People are naturally different and that’s a good thing. We should be tolerant of each others ways and peculiarities. I know I have mine. And I suspect you have yours.

I suppose the over-use of that word - diversity - tends to divest it of any meaning. It takes on a cultural political hue. It demands allies and shouts down doubters. But it is important to say that, beyond our common humanity, we are a varied bunch. And as irritating and even offensive as others might seem, we should try to get along and try to accommodate as best we can the baggage and the traits each of us bring. But in the context of neurodiversity, this quite reasonable position raises questions. If we are to accept these differences as part of being a normal human being, why do we need to label people at all? If we’re all neurodivergent, then who are the neurotypicals? More to the point, who’d want to be a boring neurotypical anyway?

And if there is this natural variety in cognitive functioning, as there surely is, then why are so many people being referred for assessments for neurodiverse conditions like Autism Spectrum Disorder? Those in the neurodiversity movement tend to be critical of any suggestion that any of their number should be described as ‘disordered’. And yet that is what the ‘D’ in ASD stands for. Presuming those diagnoses are reliable - and putting aside the fact that many people self-diagnose - those receiving those diagnoses must surely be understood as more than just different?

Like any other condition worthy of the attention of a medical professional, Autism actually has real world implications for the individual, necessitating some kind of treatment or support. There is a fuzziness about these conditions, not least when they are collected under the neurodiversity umbrella, there is no reliable genetic test; and there is a debate about the nature and even the existence of conditions like ADHD. But Autism is, nonetheless, long established as a real condition with serious consequences for those who live with it. Other kids might have a tendency to bite at nursery, or to struggle in class, or have tantrums when they don’t get their own way. But Autistic kids can do all this and more, and for quite different reasons.

They can get anxious and exhausted by the everyday. They might try to mask their Autism, or express their distress behaviourally through violent meltdowns - perhaps being restrained by teachers - or have shutdowns (where they essentially go mute for a prolonged period). Some, like my son, will be diagnosed with ADHD too or have a demand avoidant profile which makes their ability to engage with learning feel like an impossibility at times. None of us want to believe there is anything wrong with our children. There is what I’ve come to call the three Ds of denial, desperation and then (hopefully) diagnosis. At first, you don’t want to believe it. Then you become desperate - usually because of problems at school, maybe at home too. And then, you just want the diagnosis because it offers you a degree of clarity and hopefully some support too.

At least, that is my working assumption. Perhaps this is changing and more people feel the cultural pull of ‘identifying’ with being, or being the parents of, neurodiverse individuals. But I still think, for most parents, this isn’t a choice. It may feature prominently in the search for an explanation - but it would be perverse to wish a disorder or disability upon yourself or your child. Though as parents we might be conscious that there is a strong genetic component, most people don’t have a cognitive disorder. No matter how different we feel, only about 1 in 100 of us are Autistic.

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So what is it like to be Autistic? There is a long list of traits, behaviours and difficulties associated with the disorder. But, to put it simply, there are two core characteristics. One, they find it hard to understand the social world and struggle to engage with or communicate with people. The other, they have restricted and repetitive behaviours. This can sometimes include sensory issues - perhaps eating the same ‘beige’ food every day, finding certain smells unbearable, not feeling the cold, or a need for weightiness - my son lives in his dressing gown.

In other words, Autistic people are more than just different. They face very real challenges that vary widely in number and intensity across the spectrum, and they experience significant social disadvantage. While schools may think of themselves as inclusive, kids with special educational needs are four times more likely than their peers to receive a fixed term exclusion. We might think we are more aware and tolerant as a society, but Autistic kids keep getting arrested essentially for doing and saying Autistic things. We think we are more accepting of difference and yet, as I say, we have a peculiar and worrying fondness for labelling ourselves and each other.

And yet, to think how these children must have been treated in the past is also to get a sense of how far we’ve come. As difficult and frustrating as it is now to negotiate the thoroughly inadequate provision available for these children, I dread to think how awfully they must have been treated before we began to understand what Autism is. While we flatter ourselves that we are ‘aware’ - because we went on a course or because we have a reasonable adjustments policy that recognises ‘invisible’ disabilities - the truth is that even us parents often just don’t get it. Still, on the whole, we are far better informed than we were.

And yet I also wonder whether in other ways we might have dealt with things better in the past? Is there something about the way we live our lives and frame our problems today, that simply wouldn’t have been an issue before? I can’t be the only one who wonders where all the neurodiverse kids were in my own childhood. Or why schools were extraordinarily tolerant of disruption in the classroom - not to mention the ‘fight! fight!’ in the playground. The sort of behaviour that would guarantee at least a phone call home or even an expulsion today. I wonder if there is a tendency to over-react or to escalate issues rather than ‘nipping them in the bud’ as they might have back in the 1970s and 80s when I was at school? Are we now labelling these kids instead?

Whatever the reasons, and they are no doubt multiple, the considerable resources and expertise on which the dysfunctional special educational needs system relies, can’t cope with the demand. The numbers of people with suspected Autism in England waiting for an assessment has risen from less than 20,000 to more than 200,000 since 2019. That’s a tenfold increase in suspected Autism in just 5 years. Since 2014, the number of EHCPs – or Education, Health and Care Plans, for special educational needs children with a higher level of need (including Autism) - has more than doubled. So, there is clearly something going on - whether its growing real need, the creation of new ‘needs’ or the re-categorising of old ones. I suspect all three are in there somewhere.

It is actually difficult to get a diagnosis as many parents waiting long months for an assessment when they need help now, will tell you. The Health Secretary has joined those who argue that there is a problem of ‘over-diagnosis’. Certainly, an increasing tendency to seek medical or therapeutic help would explain why parents with children suspected of having neurodiverse conditions are being further disadvantaged by a system overwhelmed by a demand for diagnoses. However, those who claim it’s just bad faith actors playing the system, are as wrong as those offended by any questioning of how so many people could possibly get sick, disordered or disabled so quickly.

We need a debate that allows both tolerance of people living with these troubling conditions and a tolerance of views with which we might disagree. Nobody has a monopoly on the truth. This is a complex and costly problem for us all. While it pertains to what should be a small minority of the population, it has grown - particularly since lockdown - to a point where it threatens to play a leading role in bankrupting the nation. From special educational needs and mental health to disability and sickness benefits, we are (I hope) at the beginning of a national conversation about what’s driving this ‘needs’ crisis.

But I want to end on a positive note, as Neurodiversity Celebration Week draws to a close. Like any parent, I want to celebrate my child for who they are and what they do, rather than just banging on about the problems they face. Because amid all the heartache and difficulty, and the frustration with failing services, there is hope – and it comes from us and from them rather than from experts and the state. While I know, first hand, how very different their capabilities and experiences can be - they are among both the most gifted and the most severely disabled - it is important that we appreciate them for who they are.

Their obsessive qualities and deep interests can also make for great expertise (my son’s IT skills are quite something). Some of them are, in career-speak, brimming with transferable skills. It’s all about how you capture what they can do and accommodate them and everything they bring with them. Autistic people are not, as is sometimes assumed, without empathy, totally helpless or devoid of emotion. My son is particularly fond of our cat (pictured), for instance. Indeed, that we all identify with aspects of Autism - be it social awkwardness, the lack of a filter, difficulty expressing emotions or forming relationships, or a nerdy interest in particular topics - should help us to understand it. I certainly think we could learn a few things from Autistic people themselves.

Perhaps we could all be a little more Autistic in our attitude to emotions. We don’t have to express them all the time. Yes, it’s good to talk but emotional incontinence is a problem too. While it’s a good thing that we don’t feel compelled to ‘bottle things up’, sometimes putting a cork in it is the best option. As damaging as ‘masking’ can be for Autistic people, they are doing intensively what we all do to a no doubt lesser extent: suppressing our inner selves to function in a world that isn’t built around us. We need to at least meet them half way. And if we’re going to loosen up and have that debate about spiralling neurodiverse needs - a bit of the bluntness and brutal frankness that the Autistic attachment to truth-telling entails, might come in handy too.

Image by Darragh (my son)

Reading that doesn’t immediately spark joy is the best kind.

So says Philip Womack in a piece for The Spectator, in which he asks ‘Is it really too much to ask student’s to read children’s books?’. Basically, they had kicked up a fuss because he had expected his undergraduates - who were studying children’s literature - to read the Harry Potter books. Surely not an unreasonable expectation? To cut a long story short, they won. If teenagers supposedly interested in the subject can’t see the point of reading books for children a good deal younger than themselves, what hope is there of actual children being persuaded that reading is worth the bother?

While I haven’t got my kids interested yet, I recently enjoyed Treasure Island. With piracy all the rage in the Red Sea, it’s a genre surely due another a revival? It is a love of reading that I have now, but never had as a child, that I want to instil in my own kids. There is resistance, of course. But when it happens, when you share those moments with them and a book, particularly when they’re younger - it’s quite special. One way or another, I plan on gobbling up the children’s literary canon and entering into the imaginative world of its eternal characters so beloved by so many. Even if I end up reading bedtime stories - as novelist Kate Weinberg movingly recalls her father reading to her - to myself.

The latest evidence suggests the little ones are reading less and less all the time. Which rather reminds me of what my older cousin, an educationalist and author, wrote about an experience we shared early on in her career. In a fascinating book that she co-authored with her game designer son Chris, A Brilliant IQ: Gift or Challenge?, Lyn had this to say about me being her first student all those years ago,

Shortly after school began, David started refusing to read. When I arrived to babysit I’d find the books the school had sent home lying untouched on the table - in hindsight, I suspect this refusal stemmed from boredom, as he already knew how to read them perfectly well. Instead, we’d read the book backwards, or read across both pages at once, playing with the words themselves to make them fun again.

It’s a challenge I, and other parents, are faced with too. How do we make books attractive? It’s partly our fault. Being one, I’m not one to blame parents. But we really could try harder. World Book Day is around the corner and my first thought is, admittedly, ‘what films do they like?’ It’s the middle class parents who grew up reading and who can afford to shell out on a new costume every year, or have the time to (shock, horror!) make one. For the rest of us, it could be superheroes again. And, as Mary Wakefield has observed,

It’s impossible to submerge yourself in another world when the iPhone next to you tugs at you like Gollum’s ring. And if adults can’t resist, how can we expect children to?

But she also cites the author and editor Katherine Marsh who goes beyond blaming phones and social media for our children’s lack of reading. As Wakefield puts it, ‘the endless focus on analysis and the lack of enthusiasm for story’ is behind their lack of enthusiasm for books and particularly fiction. It is the way it is taught - in chunks, out of context, with one eye (if not both) on the next test, as a chore rather than as something to be enjoyed, something that might spark the imagination. But this isn’t exactly new. Wakefield also cites the great Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind - which, as I’ve said before, was responsible for opening mine as a young man. In it, she reminds us, Bloom remembers his students in the 1960s just not getting his bibliophilia.

While they are told to steer clear of Dahl and Blyton, many of the books kids are urged to read these days are more like ‘mini-lectures’ she concludes. Indeed, you might say that the very books they’re not supposed to read are the one’s they really, really should. Their views might be outdated or even downright wrong, but they’re almost always better books written by better authors. Even nursery rhymes are rewritten to suit the uptight and politically correct sensibilities of today’s sensitive censors, intent on depriving our youngest readers of a bit of rhyming mischief. It’s all very dispiriting for those of us who are rather fond of the edgy appeal of the best children’s writing.

It’s not that children shouldn’t be interested in politics and current affairs either. The Adventures of Tintin mapped and often, according to Michael Farr, even anticipated the great events of that turbulent century. We could do with something like that in our own era of convulsive change. An account of the times we are living in, that appeals to young people’s sense of possibility, is surely better than stories that are saturated in the divisive, deceiving and sometimes downright dangerous politics of identity? Tintin’s adventures took kids out of themselves and helped them understand the world around them.

There’s nothing to be gained from an overbearing obsession with the self. Much better that we encourage the next generation to set sail and battle against the elements. As Smollett puts it in Treasure Island: ‘We must go on, because we can't turn back.’

Image: IAEA Imagebank

How many times have you been told to ‘educate yourself’ because you said something off-message, unorthodox, heretical - in short, common sense? You can be sure that the person screaming this at you, usually via the medium of X or some other social media platform, isn’t urging you to get around to reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare or Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Far from it. They are usually just avoiding getting into an argument they are very likely to lose, by referring you to whatever the latest in pseudo-academic wokery is telling its followers to believe.

Which is a shame. We really should be making more of an effort to educate ourselves. To read the classics, to engage with great ideas - be they philosophical insights, historical tracts or great fiction that gets at the truth of what it is to be human. Of course, most of us would love nothing more than for our kids to be steeped in learning, and excited by the breakthroughs of the past. It is not the blue-haired kids with hare-brained ideas that are the problem here. It is the educational establishment that has allowed bad ideas to go unchallenged in the absence of any real commitment to the project of providing a ‘good education’ for the nation’s kids. While educational standards have been on the rise in recent decades, the experience of learning has in other ways diminished considerably.

We have seen, as one parent Jon Bryan describes it, the persistence of a ‘lockdown mentality’ in which the importance of face-to-face education has been downgraded to such an extent that not only a virus but even bad weather can shut it down. The concurrent ‘dangerous’ rise of a therapeutic education, in place of the old subject or knowledge based education, is, according to Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, ‘turning children, young people and adults into anxious and self-preoccupied individuals rather than aspiring, optimistic and resilient learners who want to know everything about the world’. There is also increasing discomfort with, and even opposition to, the teaching of Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE). It’s focus on adult intimacy and the promotion of values, doesn’t sit well with many parents particularly with the introduction of contested ideas over sex and gender.

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The provisions in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill are also a worry. While it promises to ‘protect children and improve education’ some argue that it will do anything but, on both accounts. The stringent requirements with regards teacher training might seem fair enough, but some of our best schools have flourished with unqualified (but very experienced) individuals teaching their kids. They will now be deprived of these non-blob expertise. The standardisation of pay and conditions will also impose a degree of uniformity that may intrude unhelpfully on some schools’ autonomy.

More importantly, the same standardisation and uniformity will apply to the allocation of school places, and to the teaching of the new as yet to be unveiled curriculum. Again, these freedoms until now allowed to Academies, to determine these things for themselves, will be removed to the detriment of those schools and the children attending them. While ‘forced Acadamisation’ for failing schools may not always be the best solution, the reforms seem aimed more at keeping schools local authority controlled than making sure they provide a good education. The centralisation of control over children’s education, despite the successes consequent upon the greater freedoms allowed to some schools by reforms beginning in the late 1990s, will surely not end well.

Those of us with kids with special educational needs may find that a good or even an okay education is hard to come by. So much so that we are forced to seek out alternatives to traditional schooling, whether that is special or specialist provision, home schooling or a mix thereof. The latter may take the form of Elective Home Education or something called Education Otherwise Than At School (EOTAS). As Nicole Lee, a solicitor specialising in special educational needs, puts it: for some children with more significant needs by the time a plan for their child is agreed ‘their needs - or needs that have developed through inadequate SEND provision - have become so severe that any type of formal educational placement wouldn't work’. Parents are left with little option other than to assemble an alternative of their own.

In short, if anything we need even greater freedoms than those associated with previous reforms, if the quality and the variety of provision is to meet children’s needs. The new Bill, by reversing the presumption that parents have the right to educate their children at home, will make things much harder for parents already struggling to find any provision for their child. It was, in an unfortunate coincidence, introduced to parliament as the sadistic parents of Sara Shariff were sentenced for the abuse, torture and murder of their 10-year-old daughter. During which the judge commented on ‘the dangers of unsupervised home-schooling of vulnerable children’.

This will have no doubt cemented in the minds of many a relationship between the brutal killing of a child and the parents’ claim to be homeschooling; rather than with parents desperately trying to find a solution to their child’s inability to attend any kind of school provision. Not only will parents ‘no longer have an automatic right to home educate if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or under a child protection plan’. Fair enough. ‘For all children, if a local authority deem the education and/or home environment unsuitable’, we are told, they ‘will now have the power to intervene and require school attendance’. It will be up to Councils, the bodies that shut down schools for many months, to decide whether parents are ‘providing a good, safe education’, and that it is both ‘suitable’ for their child and ‘in their best interests’.

The Bill will not only remove the limited freedoms some state schools enjoy. It will also remove the freedom of parents to decide how to educate their own children. Whatever you think of home schooling - I’ve tried it and failed badly - it is a fundamental right and we shouldn’t give it up. Of course, children must be safeguarded from significant harm. While rightly introducing a requirement that parents are involved in decision-making where children are at risk of going into care, and strengthening the requirement of schools to be involved in safeguarding arrangements; the legislation is otherwise far too top-down and tech-driven in its orientation to the business of protecting children.

Instead of addressing why society and the state too often fail to intervene in the most glaring and avoidable examples of horrendous familial abuse; or doing anything to address the group-based child sexual exploitation by ‘grooming’ and rape gangs that nearly brought down the Bill - it is introducing an administrative change. There will be a common identification number for all children (a ‘consistent identifier’) that will be used across public services to ensure that children won’t fall through the cracks. While, of course, it is important that the authorities are able to track those suspected of carrying out abuse, does that justify the identification of all children in this way? Can safeguarding be reduced to data sharing protocols anyway?

And, as have I, it is easy for education to get lost in all this noise about other things. Whether its identity politics, lockdown, therapy, sex ‘education’, children’s welfare and protection, or the politics of who runs our schools - none of it has much to do with education. As a former school governor, I can honestly say I don’t remember ever having a committee meeting where we discussed what our children were being taught. Not really. While, of course, you might expect administration, cleaning contracts, the finances and much else besides to be a big part of the governance of schools - surely all of us, parents, teachers, governors, need to have a much bigger say over what is the whole point of sending them to school in the first place.

That we don’t - this says a lot about the neglect, at every level. Not just of our kids’ safety but of their education too.

Image: Alessandro Patelli