RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: White Working People Children have Been Betrayed

Saturday night at eight o'clock discovered me not at the motion pictures but at the Cinema Museum, a concealed gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, located in a previous workhouse which was briefly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his mom fell on tough times.

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

Coincidentally, the celebration was a one-man program by my old mate George Layton, star, director, scriptwriter, author, whose finest hour - at least to my mind - was playing Des, the dodgy car mechanic in Minder.

George read from his collection of short stories set in the 1950s, when he was maturing in post-war Bradford. They're wonderfully composed, warm, amusing, expressive, a slice of history, a working-class version of Richmal Crompton's Just William adventures.

The storylines are based on the trials and adversities of a boy being raised by a single mother - an unconventional domesticity at that time, regretfully just too common today. The Fib And Other Stories has actually remained in print since 1975 and found its method on to the school curriculum, where it remains today.

I can't help questioning, though, how frequently these glorious texts are used in class nowadays, in between instructors stuffing their students' little heads with fashionable far-Left propaganda about 'white benefit', colonialism and, of course, change.

The kids in the monochrome school photo which formed the background to George's reading were definitely white, however nobody might have explained them as privileged. Those were the days when 'austerity' implied living from hand to mouth, not needing to choose a standard 50in flat screen TV, rather of a 65in OLED Ultra model, and just being able to manage an iPhone 14 instead of the current all-singing, all-dancing AI variation.

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

Until the digital/social media transformation, kids acquired their knowledge mostly from books, writes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, children experienced real challenge, not the hardship of ambition and imagination which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live through their smart phones, instead of wandering free and experiencing life to the complete.

Until the digital/social media revolution, children acquired their knowledge primarily from books. Yes, TV played a big role, as did the motion pictures, but nowhere near the domination of TikTok and other apps offering pleasure principle in byte-sized portions.

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

It can't. Just as the very best images are said to be on the radio, even better photos can be found in the printed word.

Among the most depressing things I've checked out just recently was the author Anthony Horowitz bemoaning the fact that his 300-page books are far too long to engage the much shorter attention spans of today's children.

No marvel child, and indeed adult, literacy levels have actually plunged alarmingly. All this has actually contributed to the stunning discovery that white, working class pupils - boys in specific - are being left behind. Even Labour's Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has actually been required to admit they have actually been 'betrayed' by the modern-day schools system.

They struggle with an absence of parental participation and consequent scarceness of goal. The white, working class kid in George Layton's stories certainly didn't suffer any parental overlook from his prideful mum. Nor did he do not have creativity or goal.

Education was the way out of hardship. It produced eloquent wordsmiths like George, in post-war Bradford - and our own dear Keith Waterhouse, late of this parish, who matured in poverty in close-by pre-war Leeds.

Literacy is the best gift we can bestow on any kid. My grannies taught me to read before I went to school, setting me on the early roadway to a satisfying profession at the wordface rather than the relative drudgery of the work environment.

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

If the Education Secretary wishes to reverse the betrayal of white, working class kids she could start by choosing up the phone and welcoming George to explore schools, reading from his narratives.

I honestly believe that if they might be convinced to search for from their mobiles for an hour, they 'd be enthralled and motivated by the experiences of a young boy not that various to them, regardless of the range in decades.

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

When they're not tasering one-legged 92-year-old males or nicking individuals for posting hurty words on the web, the police are significantly taking sidelines to supplement their earnings.

Some are working as painters and designers, others as scaffolders nand shipment drivers. More intriguingly, second jobs likewise include a DJ (PC Hammer, anybody?) and a reiki trainer, whatever that is.

My favourites are beekeeper and kickboxing coach, although the copper running a tea store has to take the biscuit.

It's also reported that some officers are working as supermarket checkout assistants. I do not suppose there's any risk of them nicking a couple of thiefs.

Mind how you go.

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

First the frogs, now the octopuses
The unlawful migrant armada crossing the Channel daily may turn out to be the least of our issues. We now discover that a fleet of foreign octopuses from the Med is devouring crab stocks off the coast of Devon and Cornwall and threatening to put regional anglers out of organization.

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

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

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

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

Take Labour's 'aspiration' to invest a pitiful 3 per cent of GDP on defence by the year 2525 with a shovel-load of Maldon's finest. The method Rachel From Complaints is taxing the economy to death, there won't be any GDP left in a few years' time. And 3 percent of things all is still stuff all.

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

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