It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, when they see the streets crowded with our troubled adolescents, who are, more often than not, ill-favoured of countenance and bereft of civility.
Moreover, they are commonly fatherless, feckless, hopeless, homeless, insensible with skunk, fatigued with indolence, blotto with Stellas, fractious with daggers, or incapacitated with a morbid obesity and barely able to totter along our pavements. An utter shambles. Something must be done.
Mrs May’s government is at last going to do it – with the fierce, traditional Kipper values of unthinking patriotism and discreet racism.
Michael Fallon, Minister for War, has a Plan. Get the army in. Get guns into state schools. Get a military ethos.
Sir Michael has proposed a Cadet Expansion Programme (CEP) in 150 state schools. Boys and girls as young as 12 will be given the experience of battle, weapons, killing, marching up and down, saluting flags – that kind of thing. Pointless discipline.
I propose to go further, using my own experience of my grammar school Combined Cadet Force. We 13-year-olds learned how to shoot a real gun, kill a man with the side of your hand or string a piano wire across a path to garrote any wandering Hun. It worked. We saw none.
We were ordered by pleasingly psychopathic sixth formers to march in Sisyphean circles around a playground. This taught us to march round a playground.
We were taught to attack a sack, a four-part exercise, a blood curdling shriek, a thrust of the bayonet, a vicious twist – up through and ribcage. This gave us a rush of pure, exhilarating sadism. We were taught to “present arms”, which could be dangerous. My chum Geoff Seale plonked a bayonet through his foot, severing arteries and shredding nerves. He was crippled for life and much given to walking round in circles, but my goodness it bred backbone.
I will take the above further. The lower orders no longer need an education. They’re better off with not thinking, blind obedience and rehearsing a little light murder. You never know when they might come in useful. Britain is under threat from the likes of ISIS, Putin, Corbyn and multifarious foreigners who begin at Calais.
Amanda Everitt, chairwoman of Mothers Against Murder, is one of many not keen on this. She suggests that guns and fundamentalism can be a dodgy mix. She’s probably a hippy. We need to get real. My proposal will cleanse our great town of unsightly children and promote, not before time, some good, solid and fascist British values.
- Ian Whitwham is a former inner city London teacher.