Child Labour

There is a saying which goes, “If you can’t beat them, what’s the point in having kids?” It’s funny because at times every parent has found themselves in a position where for a bleak moment it appeared the only option. You can’t give in to them when they get whiny and snotty – that’s how you end up with people like Tim Farron or Natalie Bennett – but sometimes the boundaries of parental wisdom are stretched to breaking point to come up with any other recourse than to run away and hide until the little fuckers – and you - have calmed down.

But beating is nothing to what you already did. The cruellest thing you can do to your children is to have them in the first place. They have no choice in the matter, you didn’t ask their permission and you have absolutely no idea if you will turn out to be the good parent you imagined before the sleepless nights and two decades of worry until they finally pack their red-spotted handkerchiefs and leave home... only to return a few months later, jobless, potless and bored to tears by the cruel grown-up world you thrust them into. As far as they are concerned you have condemned them to survive on the planet you wrecked, you selfish, selfish bastards.

But it needn’t be this way. You could put them up for adoption, or have them taken into the care system, or – and here’s a novel thought – you could undergo restorative justice for the crime you committed and put in the time to get them off on the right track. Don’t indulge their childish instincts for social justice and espousing any cause, it seems, that involves freely spending resources to which they have yet to contribute. If only there was a way to encourage them to pay for their own indulgences...

When I was a kid we couldn’t wait for the half-terms and the summer holidays. Weeding crops on our hands and knees, hoeing for the bigger kids, strawberry picking, stacking straw bales, potato picking and my personal favourite throughout the horse-racing year, paper-picking after meetings at Thirsk Racecourse. Dirty work, hard graft, cold and wet, sunburned at times, but – and here’s the thing - it’s true that where’s there’s muck there’s brass. And there is nothing quite the same as spending (or saving) your own money, the money you have earned, hour by back-breaking hour.

So what was so risible about Andrea Leadsom’s comments regarding fruit picking? The work ethic, the notions of effort before reward, living within your means, paying your own way and expecting nothing for nothing. These things don’t spontaneously arrive in young brains, they have to be firmly inserted. There is no need for college course, or apprenticeships or extensive awareness and sensitivity training before stepping into wellies and getting your hands dirty. You have to be cruel to be kind and cruelty begins at home; after all, you started it.

They may hate it. Good; incentive to work harder at school. They may love it, Good; forget the Diversity Studies and get on a farm management training programme. Degrees in esoteric nonsense devalue all of academia and every company can point to the battalion of degree-qualified morons who haven’t yet grasped the basic notions of timekeeping, shaving, showing willing and accepting that on company time you are supposed to be doing company work.

Traditional Irish farm workers... in the paddy fields.

But, but, you say, my little darlings are better than that. There’s your problem. For every Internet billionaire there are billions more who haven’t two pennies to rub together. For every Alan Sugar there are millions who will never break even at the end of the month. Entrepreneurship is all well and good but none of those who made it did so without understanding the value of simple hard work. Suffer, the children? They’ll thank you for it in the end.

Maybe not?

The media shitstorm around Andrea Leadsom is astonishing. Talk about playing the man. Every tiny scrap of, well, anything is being pimped-up and spun and presented as evidence of some sort of Hitlerian dominatrix complex. She’s – by media accounts – a liar, a hypocrite, a religious fundamentalist, a fifth columnist for Ukip, a racist and a homophobe. According to various sources she believes that children of unmarried parents will grow up to become axe murderers, that gay marriage will end civilisation and she has no hesitation in exploiting her own children for political advantage. She is, they say, a female Farage.

She is certainly like Nigel Farage in one respect – the relentless and downright vicious personal attacks have a remarkable similarity to the way he was pilloried by the bien pensant press for years. The establishment are out to get her. Meanwhile their favourite placewoman, Theresa May, is continuing in much the way she has conducted her ministerial career by remaining largely out of sight. Unlike Farage, however, Andrea Leadsom hasn’t had years to build up a following, demonstrate consistency and earn the loyalty of members.

The Firm, however, is still clearly worried. Recently the smugness with which they could expect the electorate to be hectored into voting ‘correctly’ has been eroded and superior smirks wiped from privileged faces. The rolling out of big guns from the past to berate the stupid voters and instruct them to do their bidding has had the effect not of a bulldozer flattening dissent but a peashooter. The public at large have remained unimpressed by headline acts but they have noticed one very peculiar thing.

When the elites on opposing sides get together to train their weapons on the little people who vastly outnumber them it smacks of desperation. It’s either a spectacularly brilliant double-bluff – maybe they secretly wanted Brexit, or Corbyn for leader – or far more likely it is a cock up of monumental proportions. Had they actually been listening, that rumble in the distance and getting nearer is the gathering stampede of millions of people saying no. No to politics as usual – in this respect Corbyn is dead right. They are saying no to the systematic abuse of parliamentary powers to do the opposite of what ordinary people want.

No, too, to being told how to behave, what they can and can’t say and what to think. They are saying no to the intrusive powers the state has taken upon itself to rip up our social fabric and engineer the pushing into second place of British culture behind that of any interloper. They are saying no to inferior education and life chances and no to the recasting of the British in history as the bad guys. They are exercising the very thing the establishment hates; democracy.

Has the electoral tide turned? 

So, when the selection goes out to the party members, the blizzard of ‘helpful’ information about why not to vote for Leadsom may just prove to have been counter-productive. It doesn’t take so long for everything a hostile press has to offer to simply be ignored. On the other hand, while the newcomer may be a relative unknown, so in many ways is Theresa May. This lack of engagement by the grey lady of the Conservative Party might just be her downfall. The party doesn’t’ have to say yes to Leadsom; they just have to say no to May.