Half their poor teachers feel compelled to feed their croaking charges with their own provisions, such as nuts, apples and organic carrots. A silly liberal kindness, which nourishes only dependency. Moreover, many paups can’t digest this stuff. Why? Insufficient gnashers.
Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company – a woman much given to the luxury of sentiment – sees “kids so malnourished they’ve lost their teeth”. A soup kitchen in the playground with Infant Complain or Thin Gruel might be kinder to their bleeding gums. But this is merely to tinker with the intractable. These unsightly infants are a scar upon this great nation. Desperate situations require desperate remedies.
We can no longer be exercised by the alleged causes of this woe. We can’t go all Oliver Twist about it. A patrician distance is in order. A ruthless war on the shirking, skiving, absent-fathered, single-mothered booze-sodden parasites, who peep red-eyed through their blinds at dawn, who fat, feckless and blotto, will not rise from their fetid slumbers to feed their feral and accidental bastards.
The present, courageous “Starve the Paupers” strategy of the Chancellor and the Great Gove thus seems just the ticket. Their breathtakingly unsentimental initiatives are the result of harsh deliberation and fierce logic. In a time of no jobs, no Sure Start, no EMA, no homes, no future, no hope, of massive tuition fees and rigorously formidable Latin Abacas, this 15 per cent of infants are doomed. Expendable. Surplus to the national effort.
Moreover, they bugger up league tables and have a most deleterious effect on the education of our more important vitamin-rich classes.
Ergo, attack the problem in their early years. What robust joined-up thinking!
I propose we go further with some with a more clinical pogrom, whereby these helpless infants might more usefully expire and thus avoid the present more lengthy and costly agonies of pneumonia, rickets, consumption or the oblivion of drugs. It would surely be more merciful to let them more gently perish.
The poor mites could be force-fed, plumped up and used in Economic Burgers. If they will not be plumped, then they could be put to sleep in the School Medical Suite, sponsored by The Infant Dignitas.
I have no personal interest in this grave matter – my own rather well-nourished daughters having grown up and attended the more illustrious Russell Group universities.
With apologies to J Swift.
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Ian Whitwham is a former teacher at an inner city comprehensive school. At the Chalkface: Great moments in education, a compilation of Ian's best ever columns, is available now.