Driving past a school a few days ago, I stopped to let a group of children cross the road. There must have been ten of them, all in single file, wearing their plum and grey school uniform, with two teachers keeping guard at the front and the back. I stopped long enough to see what happened when they reached the other side.
The teachers made the children they were very young, maybe five or six years old open their arms wide to establish a distance between themselves and their neighbour on either side. Then, off they went, not laughing, skipping or whispering as small children do, but in a glum, stretched-out column, remote from one another.
The children were not the required two metres apart. How could they be? Their little arms were much too short to achieve that span. Still, if one of them had stumbled into the bus lane they were far away enough to mean that no adult could have got there in time. That was my Mummy Mind kicking in. If youve ever had small children of your own you never stop doing that kind of instant risk assessment.
Looking at that sad school crocodile, my Mummy Mind was telling me that those children were in danger. Not from a passing bus. The danger was from unnatural, anti-social distancing measures (SDs) which have been foisted upon them by adults who claim that its about keeping them safe from a virus which is fast disappearing and which doesnt harm children anyway. Its like that fairytale in which the wicked witch convinces Rapunzel that she must stay locked up in a tower for her own good. The witch is lying.
Is our Government lying about schools, children and Covid19? Has the fear they instilled through public health messaging worked so well that millions of parents, under the powerful spell of irrationality, are now too scared to send their kids to school so classrooms must be reordered to cope with an imaginary threat? Have the teaching unions seized this opportunity to bugger up Boris? (Silly question. Course they have.)
Could Matt Hancock be serious when he did a handbrake-turn on plans to get all primary-school pupils back for four weeks before the summer holidays? (A painfully modest ambition as it was.)
Astonishingly, the Health Secretary even hinted that secondary schools may not be ready to resume in September, thereby maiming the prospects of millions of teenagers who are already depressed, disheartened and zombified by a daily diet of Call of Duty.
If Hancock is serious, this is now a national scandal. It calls for legal action against the Government (one group of parents I know is already taking advice at the highest level), against the teaching unions and, quite frankly, against any of the wickedly useless adults who have failed to provide that service which is enshrined in Article 2 of the First Protocol of the Human Rights Act. A childs right to an education.
It is simply incredible that British schools will not be ready by the start of the autumn term. Why the hell not? Some 22 European countries have reopened their schools. That has not led to a spike in coronavirus infections. On the contrary, Frances education minister said it is more of a risk keeping children at home (Gavin Williamson, are you listening?).
Children, if they get corona at all, are asymptomatic and the World Health Organisation said this week that asymptomatic transmission is very rare. Teachers are more likely to get the virus from a supermarket trolley than a student. Normal flu poses a far greater threat (in an average year, flu kills twelve children under the age of 15, Covid has claimed 3.)
The worry now is that, after such a prolonged absence from school, and from bug-trading with snotty-nosed classmates, they will be even more vulnerable to infection. Some paranoid parents are unwittingly raising mini Howard Hugheses, a scientist friend observes, with a baseline psychology of isolation and greatly reduced exposure to the germs that teach their immune system while theyre learning. Its quite scary."
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It is a national scandal that children will soon be able to go to Thorpe Park, but not to school - Telegraph.co.uk
