Last week, Ed Balls, Secretary of State at the newly-named Department for Children, Schools and Families, said something which, remarkably enough, smacked of common sense.
Mr Balls, Gordon Brown’s Mini-Me, used to write speeches for the Prime Minister when he was shadow Chancellor. It was he who introduced the expression “post neo-classical endogenous growth theory” into a particularly turgid Broon monologue, which Michael Heseltine memorably dubbed “not Brown’s but Balls”.
Anyway, last week Balls tried a different tack and said something sensible. He said that childhood should be a “time for learning and exploring” and children should get the chance to play outdoors.
“My assumption is that, if it snows, kids go out and build snowmen and have snowball fights, that in October kids go out and play conkers, that they play marbles,” he declared.
Absolutely spot on, except that, in my experience, the best conkers usually had been picked, pickled and smashed by the end of September.
The point that Balls was trying to make is that these days, children don’t get out enough. Schools and clubs are afraid of letting them engage in the rough-and-tumble games of yore for fear of being sued. Health and safety (invariably elided into “healthansafety”) considerations have made us do our best to turn our offspring into a generation of wimps.
This depressing trend achieved its nadir yesterday in Llandudno. Every July for 39 years, a donkey derby has been held on Bodafon Fields. For almost two generations, children have got on the backs of donkeys, bounced about for a bit as their steeds charge down the course, have sometimes – fairly often, actually – fallen off and have generally had a beltingly good time.
God knows that this summer has been dire enough, so one might have hoped that this year’s derby would inject a little jollity into the otherwise unremitting gloom. Not so. The derby became the latest victim of healthansafety fascism.
The organisers, Llandudno Rugby club, were told that they couldn’t allow children to ride donkeys at a gallop. They couldn’t get insurance because of healthansafety. The insurers had been prevailed upon to offer a reluctant indemnity, but only if the donkeys were moving at walking pace and the riders were holding their parents’ hands. Anything more boisterous, and the club was on its own, at the mercy of Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne.
So the club had to call the derby off. As a protest, its members strapped cuddly toys to the donkeys’ backs and sent them careering across Bodafon Fields. None of the toys was hurt. An orange orang-utan apparently won. The watching kids were well and truly hacked off.
So Balls is right. Children are being deprived of the fun and excitement they deserve – no, need – at their time of life. Healthansafety has gone much, much too far.
But whose fault is it? Whose government has allowed the claims farmers to thrive and the compensation culture to flourish? Under whose watch did it become the case that you can’t turn on your radio without being assailed by ads from ambulance chasing “lawyers” urging us to pursue all and sundry through the courts, because, you see, where there’s blame there’s a claim?
It is Labour who have allowed this wretched state of affairs to develop, doing nothing to curb the compensationitis that is making us all frightened of our own shadows and terrified of being sued.
That Balls appears, belatedly, to have recognised this is welcome. Let him now issue an instruction to all teachers, next time it starts snowing, to send their charges straight outside into the cold and frosty air and let them slip, slide and snowball one another silly.
Special congratulations are due to the Richmond Housing Partnership (RHP), a south-west London housing association, for its innovative development of healthansafety thinking.
