Celebrities In ‘Telling It Like It Is’ Shock Horror I

First up, the thinking man’s crumpet, Joanna Lumley:

The actress and campaigner said that today's youth "find it laughably amusing to shoplift and steal" and take little responsibility for their actions. In Africa, by contrast, children as young as seven are sent out to work and carry responsibility for their family's livelihood.

Well, yes. But this isn’t Africa.

Has the nation’s darling gone too far this time?

Lumley, 64, said society had changed for the worse since she was a child.

That most certainly is true, to a point.

But is it really all bad? Haven’t we gained as well as lost?

"There was one 'crime' during the whole time I was at school, when a fountain pen went missing. Stealing just didn't happen. I was taught not to shoplift, not to steal, not to behave badly. We weren't even allowed to drop litter," she said.

"We are very slack with our moral codes for children these days. Nowadays, children find it laughably amusing to shoplift and steal. We smile when they download information from the internet and lazily present it as their own work. We allow them to bunk off school and bring in sick notes."

‘We’ don’t. This would imply that all families work to the same morals, and I’m not sure that it’s entirely true.

Certainly, I know families bringing up children who do not subscribe to the ‘everything goes’ policy. It’s harder for them as a result, no doubt. But they stick to it.

"I have had the good fortune to travel widely, doing programmes all over the world, and I have seen quite small children take on huge responsibilities. So in Ethiopia, for example, you might find a seven-year-old expected to take 15 goats out into the fields for the whole day with only a chapati to eat and his whistle. Why are we so afraid to give our children responsibilities like this?"

Well, that’s because – unlike Ethiopia – there are strict laws regulating the work children can do. It’s called ‘civilisation’.

We may have got a lot wrong here, and had yet more bad rules and policies forced on us by the unelected EU, but we haven’t necessarily made our country a worse one than Ethiopia!

This, however, is spot on:

"Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing. I think we're leading our children into a false paradise. We're not teaching them how to apply themselves and be present, how to accomplish a job and finish it, how to learn other languages and actually achieve a trade.

"What are we doing with our education policies? Running from one side to the other, with no notion of where we are going."

Indeed.

Unfortunately, those with a vested interest in continuing the status quo (or even furthering the decline) will find it easy to dismiss everything she says as the words of an out-of-touch old woman, unable to cope with the complexities of modern society.

And that’s a pity…