Mark Andrews on Saturday: Towering egos, a failing education system, and while we will soon all be feeling the pain
Talk of building back better.
The Government's Cultural Recovery Fund, which is supposed to help businesses hard hit by the coronavirus, has dished out £36,2325 of taxpayers' money to a bondage club in London.
It seems Klub Verboten, which has a strict latex, leather and rubber dress code, is renowned for the spanking sessions it holds in purpose-built dungeons. Or in the words of Arts Council England, it is "a creative production company that makes a valuable contribution to the night-time economy". I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
Lash Out To Help Out, anyone?
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Arts Council England has form for this sort of thing. In October last year, it gave £215,000 from the public purse to a drag queen called Le Gateau Chocolat. I suppose we should be grateful David Mellor's no longer in charge, those Chelsea kits don't come cheap you know.
Still, this will come as a great comfort to the small businesses of the West Midlands which, according to a new report, have been some of the worst hit in the country, expected to lose an average of more than £22,000 by the end of the pandemic.
And when we are hit with the inevitable tax rises to pay for this largesse towards drag queens and fetish clubs, we will all share the pain.
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Meanwhile, it seems Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been caught, ahem, breaching the social distancing guidelines. Talk about hands, face and space.
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Nicola Sturgeon has told Andy Burnham that if he wants a 'grown-up conversation' about coronavirus restrictions, he only has to pick up the phone.
Yeah, right. As if either of these show-boating egos ever have a grown-up conversation about anything. Watching them trade insults over the airwaves is like an episode of The Inbetweeners without any laughs.
But Nicola accusing of Andy of playing to the gallery is a bit rich after she spent the whole pandemic in a game of one-upmanship.
Don't this pair show why it is time to get rid of all these supposedly devolved authorities and their empire building once and for all?
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White working-class children are the latest minority identified to be suffering from sub-standard education in a new parliamentary report.
But the problem with parcelling everybody up into different groups is that you miss the blindingly obvious – that the modern British education system is failing just about everybody.
Only last week, John Lewis boss Dame Sharon White spoke of school leavers unable to perform basic tasks like writing coherent sentences or doing a bit of mental arithmetic. They know all about the fashionable, woolly ideas that various governments have added to the curriculum over the years, but when it comes to their times-tables or spelling, punctuation and grammar, they haven't a clue.
Of course, the knee-jerk reaction was to complain about 'austerity'. But blackboards and chalk are really not that expensive.
When every child leaves school with a solid grounding in the 'three rs', then maybe we can look at lessons in 'teamwork', 'empathy', healthy eating, sexual minorities, environmentalism and whatever. Until then, all this stuff should be put on hold.
