Catch 'em younger...

As ever The Twitter supplies with me an inexhaustible source of merriment and material and yesterday was no exception. I innocently challenged a stubborn assertion that in the UK: “207 OAPs freeze to death every day.” It is my custom to challenge all manner of clumsy, blunt-edged, political weaponry and this one was a sitting duck. "Really?" I asked, "per day?" Over what period? If that’s over a year then 75,555 people a year dying from freezing in Britain is outrageous… especially in, say, August. The truth, as ever, will be more prosaic, especially as the poster later admitted – although not to me – that he’d quoted a weekly, not daily, figure in error.

But it doesn’t matter, does it? More old people tend to die in winter regardless of their politics and the cold itself is a known contributor, but only part of the story. 2010’s winter was the coldest for a long time, so it is obviously the fault of the vicious Tory cuts. That, my friends is the crux of the matter. A willingness to propagate unsubstantiated and vague facts that highlight cruelty, sleaze, impropriety or any other failing by those of the right is one of the left’s very favourite raisons d'être. The simple reality that some people favour a more self-reliant view of society will never bring about revolutions.

No, revolutions are a long game and the Milimob’s current electoral strategy appears to be to leave it to the next generation. Two recent accounts should fill us with a bit of new year foreboding. The first is a Daily Mail ‘olds’ story about primary school children and younger being branded as bigots.The kids’ taunts are standard playground stuff, learned at home, from social media and most of all, probably, from the playground itself. It’s funny, sometimes inventive and only hateful to the ears of people who have been taught to watch out for and report such things. These kinds of people, it goes without saying, predominantly sit on the left of politics. And what better time to lay the foundations of lifelong leftism than during those tender, impressionable years?

The other story, by coincidence, is about selecting teachers of the future and the suggestion that the seeds may be there at a very early age "Give me a child of seven,” said the Jesuit, “and I will show you the man." But I’m wondering whether the ‘racist’ kids are likely to be selected, or would the nomination more likely go to the sneaky pals who dob them in? How likely is it you will be mentored as a future shaper of children’s minds if you are on a state register for incorrect thoughts? When Orwell imagined his junior Thought Police shopping their parents to the party he missed a trick; why catch ‘em young when you can catch ‘em younger still?

Tomorrow belongs to me

The party told its devotees that “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength” the contradictions of doublethink easily circumnavigated by reducing language to black or white. With the correct application of educational programming critical thinking skills can be developed only in the minds of future strategists. The rest need only follow the party line and simply parrot the rehearsed scriptures at the daily Tory Two-Minute Hate. Two brain-cells good, four brain-cells bad?