FORGET what the political commentators keep telling you – that he is finished, a ‘dead man walking’, will be gone after the May elections etc. You can be pretty sure that Starmer is going to be depressing us for some time yet. The PM is proving to be a dispiritingly energetic political zombie.
Our unwritten constitution has relied in the past on the unstated maxim that, when all else fails, you can embarrass a prime minister out of office. But that was before the election of the first AI head of government, and androids don’t blush.
The lobby journalists who watch over the political landscape – satellite hacks if you like – haven’t noticed how much it has changed, nor that they are reporting on a political class which is as shameless as they are.
A process-obsessed political neophyte like Starmer is the beneficiary of the fact that there is no codified way of getting shot of him. So those same hacks carry on writing the same thing while the Prime Minister just rides the whole thing out. In a way it’s impressive.
But when he does finally leave Downing Street, perhaps having killed off the rest of us after a tribunal in a place you’ve never heard of told him to release bubonic plague or something, you can be sure that he’ll be screeching ‘free breakfast clubs’ while gripping a copy of the relevant legislation much as Linus clutches his blanket.
Starmer does seem excessively taken with the initiative, given he can’t describe it accurately. We all know they’re not really ‘free’. Less commented on is that they’re not even ‘clubs’ being instead, from the perspective of their ‘members’, an extension of the school day in the company of other kids you’re effectively banged up with for seven hours already. With some awful slop thrown in.
That said, what do I know? The concept must have something to be said for it, otherwise why would young men in our most refreshingly diverse towns, with beards and receding hairlines, be disguising themselves as schoolchildren just so they can join them?
Perhaps it’s a prime ministerial rite of passage to wax loudly, lyrically and often about some project nobody normal gives much of a stuff about. Remember the Cones Hotline, the vanity project of the unlamented John Major, whose monochromatic vision for the country so bafflingly failed to fire up the national imagination?
Or maybe it’s just a feature of the tyrant mind that it is susceptible to eccentric fascinations. Fidel Castro, it is said, was obsessed with the minutiae of dairy production. Could be that Stalin collected football cards, conceivably Robespierre enjoyed Robot Wars?
There’s more to it of course. The enthusiasm for these currently voluntary prequels to the official school day isn’t just down to the weirdness of the First Algorithm to the Treasury. Truth is, breakfast clubs conform to the Government’s ideology of perpetual state intrusion and its suspicion of traditional family structures.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day for reasons that go beyond nutrition. There is more to eating together than functionality, there is also communion, and contracting out the primary responsibility of parenthood – to feed your child – to the machinery of the state is something we should hesitate over, no matter how convenient.
In our home the purpose of breakfast is to dignify the day ahead in a private space from which everyone else, most especially Bridget Phillipson, is quite intentionally excluded.
Within this private space we pray, and quite likely will discuss sport or debate something we’ve seen on TV (whether Dexter Morgan would win a fight with Hannibal Lecter was a recent discussion point). Or, if it’s a Monday, we might talk about why Christ was really and substantially present in the previous morning’s Eucharistic celebration.
Breakfast is also my chance to remind my son that men can’t be women, ‘climate change’ is ideology pretending to be science, nations require borders as a matter of logic, it is better to be kind than to be nice, and it is quite likely that smartphones are high-tech Ouija boards.
I am not sure these are discussions which would be encouraged within the breakfast club context.
I have no unqualified affection for home schooling. John Stuart Mill was home-schooled and tragically became a utilitarian; Bertrand Russell had private tutors and turned into a scoundrel. Greta Thunberg was a truant, albeit a state-approved one, and look how that turned out.
People have busy lives, and some interaction with the educational establishment is fine, if only to spy on it and warn future parents how evil it is. But could parents be left with some time with their children, at least to start the day with some light indoctrination before the state undoes that good work and the whole thing starts again with Sisyphean inevitability?
