The current Labour Government is often criticized for being terrible and ineffective. However, there are rare occasions when Starmer proposes something so inappropriate that it incites strong negative emotions. I vividly recall a moment when I angrily flung the newspaper across the room and stomped around panting with fury.
Who does Starmer think he is, instructing teachers on what TV shows to display to students? According to reports from the BBC, which is usually considered a reliable source, Starmer has supposedly issued a directive for every school in the country to screen a four-part television series titled Adolescence.
This is supposedly because of the hit show’s harrowingly accurate depiction of everyday life among British teenagers.
By arrogantly declaring this mandate in a manner befitting a Prime Minister, Keir Starmer has epitomized the underlying absurdity of the Government. His actions reflect a nauseating combination of hypocrisy and excessive political correctness.
By encouraging this TV programme on schools – in class time! – the Government is also showing its cruel indifference to the real educational needs of children today.
In case you haven’t watched Adolescence I can save you the bother. It’s tosh – well-acted tosh. Like millions across the country, I sat down to watch it with high expectations.
It’s about a 13-year-old boy who kills a girl because of stuff he has been watching on the internet. The thesis of Adolescence, I gathered, was that pubescent males across the land were at risk of being turned into misogynist psychopaths, unable to cope with the slightest romantic rebuff.
They may be getting good grades. They may look as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth. But leave them alone with their laptops, in the darkness of their bedrooms, and they can be driven to mayhem – because there are evil online ‘influencers’ out there, who have become adept at persuading these young males that in the event of the slightest difficulty with girls the fault lies not with them, or their acne, but with the entire female sex.
The thesis of Adolescence, starring Stephen Graham, was that pubescent males across the land were at risk of being turned into misogynist psychopaths
So, I watched, agog, in the hope that this peculiar phenomenon would be explained; and it is on precisely this point, I am afraid, that the drama collapses.
We see some terrific performances: by the young kid, by his family. We certainly believe in his emotional disturbance, and in his parents’ tragic attempt to come to terms with what he has done. But as for exactly why he went so crackers, or what it was that he saw on the internet – we haven’t a clue.
There is a simple reason for this weakness. The story is not true. It’s not based on real life. Pressed on the point, the drama’s author admitted that it was a sort of composite of stories in which pathetic and resentful young boys were alleged to have attacked girls.
But who? What? Why? Where? When? We are not told.
The whole deceit makes me angry, because far from being a must-watch, Adolescence is essentially irrelevant to the problem of teenage knife crime in schools.
Yes, I am afraid kids do stab each other, but overwhelmingly the perpetrators and victims are young males (over 90 per cent of victims, to go by hospital admissions), and unlike the teenage couple in this drama, the victims and perpetrators are disproportionately young black males.
Even if the syndrome identified in Adolescence were widespread – even if our schools were awash with knife-wielding ‘incels’ – individuals, usually male, who are unable to find a sexual partner and are therefore involuntarily celibate – I doubt that you will achieve anything positive by getting children to watch a shudder-making story about it.
In my experience all such drama-based initiatives tend to glamourise knife crime in the minds of young people, and to infuse a basically nasty and humdrum event with a bogus Romeo-and-Juliet melodrama.
In case you haven’t watched Adolescence I can save you the bother. It’s about a 13-year-old boy, played by Owen Cooper, who kills a girl because of stuff he has been watching online
As a deterrent, these dramatisations just don’t work. If you want to tackle knife crime, then the Government needs to come down hard on the gangs, lock up people for going equipped with a bladed weapon, and above all back up the police.
The police have the power to stop and search, and they should be encouraged to use it. That was what we did in London from 2008-2016, and we saw steep falls in the incidence both of knife crime and murder.
If you want to get tough on knife crime, then get tough on knife crime – and don’t waste the time of both teachers and pupils with a load of sermonising twaddle about sexism.
But then what can you expect from Labour – a Government that is obsessed with imposing Lefty political correctness on every classroom in the land?
Starmer’s Labour is way to the Left of Blair and is now destroying the long-established and successful consensus about the way schools should be run.
As with the disastrous public sector pay awards, Starmer has given into the unions – cravenly accepting their demand that you can only be a teacher in this country if you have emerged from one of the generally Leftist teacher-training colleges.
This is imposing a pointless and destructive restriction on academic freedom, and the ability of good heads to recruit the talent they need.
Why do you think the Tory years saw Britain shoot up the global league tables for literacy and numeracy? Because the academy system gave schools the freedom to innovate, and to drive up standards – not least with the all-powerful and eternal incentive of competition between kids.
Labour hates all that, of course. They want schools back under the control of politicians, preferably Lefties. They want an end to academic competition and a return to a world where all must have prizes.
They aren’t interested in equality of opportunity. They want equality of outcome. They want levelling-down. Though many Lefties turn out to have gone to fee paying schools (like Starmer himself), they are now driving those schools out of existence – taxing them so exorbitantly that more than 20 schools have already closed this year or are in the process of doing so, and another 100 are expected to follow.
How much tax are those schools expected to produce, now they have closed? How does it help the national finances to force thousands of parents to put their kids through the state system rather than cover the cost themselves?
You can try asking Starmer, or Rachel from Accounts, but it’s no use. They have no answer. It’s nothing to do with economics or saving taxpayers’ money. It’s a policy driven by pure spite, pure Pol Pot dislike of anything that looks like effort or aspiration by the middle classes.
They can’t see a ladder of opportunity without kicking it down. They have even got rid of the Latin Excellence programme, causing huge disruption and disappointment, mid-course, to kids who were coming to love the subject – and restricting Latin ever more tightly to kids (like Starmer) who go to fee-paying schools.
What does Starmer prescribe, instead of Latin? A ballsachingly right-on and tendentious TV drama about the alleged causes of teenage male misogyny.
Ask yourself: who is really doing more damage to the life chances of teenagers in this country – Keir Starmer or the twerpish woman-hating ‘influencer’ Andrew Tate – and I am afraid that the answer is Starmer, by a country mile. If there is anyone getting away with murder in the classroom, it is Labour.
