No, Just No!

For the first time ever, we have a British prime minister who studied for an English degree. Not all of his 58 predecessors went to university, but those who did favoured subjects such as history and classics and, more recently, philosophy, politics and economics.

And turned out to be so utterly useless at all those things… 

Yet reading fiction is a fantastic preparation for life, for understanding people and the times through which we live. Novels encourage empathy, they help you to stand in other people’s shoes, to navigate complicated, sometimes conflicting emotions, they entertain and bring joy.

I agree! 

However, there has been a marked decline over recent years in the numbers of children reading for pleasure.

Wonder why? 

In 2025, the educational charity End Sexism in Schools released a report – Manopolies – revealing that 76% of students study An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley for their modern text from a possible 21 modern texts (a play, wonderful as it is, that’s been on one board’s set text list for 39 years). Then a whopping 93% of students study either A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson for their 19th-century novel from nine possible texts (including Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen). Only 5% of students in England and Wales study a female-authored text at GCSE.

Oh, that’s why! Nothing kills the desire to read a book for pleasure as thoroughly as white middle class liberals demanding you read one that ticks an ‘equality’ box. And they think they can encourage kids to do it by forcing them into the curriculum. 

It’s true that there are diverse modern works by inspirational women on the lists of the four exam boards – Kit de Waal, Tanika Gupta, Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman are all offered. The problem is that schools are disincentivised to change the texts they teach as this would involve costs and additional work.

And so, 'The Guardian' decides to ask modern authors to pick books which will 'inspire a lifelong love of reading' and so should be set as school texts. Let's read some of the blurbs to see why, eh, Reader?  

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a blisteringly funny novel on the syllabus? The Trees is a daring satire on racism, generational guilt and cultural complicity, inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till.

Emmet Till is a black man who was lynched in the Deep South of America in 1955, and so bears as much relationship to the lives of modern black children in the UK as Nanook of the North. 

I recommend this play. For a Black working-class London family, it’s a normal weekday – until the teenage son is senselessly stabbed and killed.

Well, it’s gritty and urban, and realistic, but do children want to read about something so familiar to their lives? I thought the point was to ‘walk in someone else’s shoes’? 

This wise, chaotic, gentle, painful, funny, superb novel follows five teens trying to navigate the most difficult year of their lives, while the town’s cool indie kids are battling Stranger Things-sized perils in vignettes at the start of each chapter. It contains some of the truest (and helpful) lines about social anxiety I’ve ever read.

 Great, giving kids 'social anxiety' to read about to ensure more kids believe themselves to be victims. Why the need to ban the internet if the schools are going to spread popular social contagions instead?

In those two exam years, my daughter studied not one female prose writer, not one writer of colour, only four female characters in the entire trio of set texts (if you count Macbeth’s witches as individual characters, which is debatable, oh and a female pig, according to one teacher).

Your daughter has a virtue-signalling fool for a mother - let her read what she needs to without checking it against a politically correct purity test first. Female and black characters don't automatically make a work of literature better just because someone on the Internet said so!

One of the weaknesses of the literary education of this country is that students are not exposed early in life to the valuable literatures of non-European people, particularly Africans.

If they really were valuable, we'd all be able to name one. I can't, can you Reader?  

Convict In Haste...

...retrial at leisure? 

Former Cabinet Minister David Davis is to spearhead a Commons campaign raising questions about the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby as growing numbers of experts express concerns about the case. The ex-Brexit Secretary plans to table a series of questions under Parliamentary privilege amid disquiet within the NHS and the legal profession about the case.

Mail columnists Peter Hitchens and Nadine Dorries have highlighted that Letby was convicted of the murders of seven newborns and the attempted murders of six other infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital, despite the fact that no one saw her kill, or attempt to kill, a baby and there is no forensic evidence to prove her guilt.

One of your other columnists disagrees, though (paywalled).   

Some members of the Royal Statistical Society have expressed concerns over the use of statistics to secure a conviction on the basis of probabilities. Its recommendations on using such data in the cases of medical serial killers were not followed here.

Recommendations are just that. They don't have to be followed. 

But why would the state and all its operatives conspire to convict a woman of such a heinous crime?

Mr Davis is understood to be concerned about the justice system's institutional reluctance to admit to its own failings, leading innocent people to languish in prison. He said: 'There is a mounting consensus among experts that Lucy Letby's guilt was not established beyond reasonable doubt. I will be using Parliamentary privilege to raise these arguments: we must exclude the possibility that she has effectively been scapegoated for the wider failings in the system.'

Ah! Some might call that 'motive' 

'At the very least, this appears to be a mistrial. But the justice system moves slowly when it comes to assessing its own failings, so if she is innocent it could be a decade before she is released. We must try to do much better than that.'

Regular readers will know I don't automatically disbelieve claims of miscarrtiage of justice - in fact there are at least two glaring examples where I believe the convictions to be unsafe. But I'm not convinced this is one to add.    

So, This Is A Step Too Far, Eh..?

School leaders have accused Labour of “window dressing” after Keir Starmer pledged to introduce...

...supervised toothbrushing for young children in England’s primary schools.

While the policy has long been supported by the dentistry profession as a way of curbing decay, headteachers said it was not appropriate for their staff to check whether pupils had cleaned their teeth.

It's not appropriate to check what parents are sending in for a packed lunch either, but that didn't stop them, did it?

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “We have serious reservations about how such a policy could even work. It is not the role of teachers to be making sure children brush their teeth each day.

“Schools already play a role in teaching children about the importance of looking after their teeth through the curriculum, but there has to be a limit in terms of what we can expect them to do.

“We should demand more than window dressing from all of our politicians.”

Oh, be quiet! You've already meddled in things that were the purview of parents, you can hardly claim it's not your role now... 

The British Dental Association, which represents the profession, said it was encouraged by Labour’s proposal, given ministerial inaction over introducing a similar scheme.

So, have the hapless Labour brains trust decided there's more votes to come from dentists than from  teachers? Because maybe they shouldn't have let Diane Abbott do the maths...