Glibness — if it had a texture, it would be somewhere between treacle and baby oil. And we — friends — have just endured a monsoon season of glibness. The coming together of the Unicef report on childhood and a deadly blip in the gun murders of teenagers has ensured a drenching as pundits, campaigners and eek-voiced TV reporters have poured out their favoured theories as to why British kids are so much worse than everyone else’s.
It’s true that, mined properly, the Unicef report gives us some worrying insights and raises some interesting questions. And kids bumping each other off with firearms isn’t something we should get used to, and refuse to worry about until they turn their weapons — God forbid — on Times readers. But oh, the nonsense and how hard you had to work to discover that the Unicef data overwhelmingly concerned teenagers, not children; that much of the material was old; and that the authors, of course, had added health warnings.
So the tide of glib gave habitat to entire shoals of political red herrings. When George Osborne battered Gordon Brown for ten years of failing British children on the basis of data that — at their most recent, were collected after five years of Labour Government — it wasn’t helpful. Nor was condemning that distant caricature, Margaret Thatcher.
Campaigners on income inequality blamed income inequality, helped by one significant indicator in Unicef’s measure of childhood problems being income inequality. But why, for example, would income inequality make Swiss kids twice as likely to describe their playmates as kind and helpful? We don’t know. Or, rather, we all knew everything as we rode our hobbyhorses until their flanks were pitted with spur-marks. It was lone parents. It was poverty. It was the decline of discipline. It was the dog-eat-dog society. It was the child-eat-hot-dog society. |
