Peter Rhodes on Rwanda, unisex loos and a tiny portion of porridge
From this column in April 2022: “Something must be done about the Channel people-smuggling trade. But if sending migrants to Rwanda is the answer, I’m Ramsey MacDonald.”
No-one has yet been sent to Rwanda and our beloved legal system is determined no-one ever will be. And I’m still not Mr MacDonald.
A private school in Scotland may allow children to socially transition without their parents’ knowledge. Under its new transgender policy, George Watson’s College says pupils aged 12-plus would “usually be deemed competent” to demand that parents are not informed if they chose a new gender.
As any old-style teacher will tell you, one of the golden rules of education is that pupils and teachers must never share a secret.
A few years ago the the Guardian’s “Secret Teacher” column stressed the point to teachers that “students are not your friends” and went on: “This is why, for example, we never promise to keep secrets for children who approach us with a problem.”
Couldn’t be clearer, could it? Yet in the name of progress, that vital old rule is being scrapped. If you can’t see the dangers, look harder.
Meanwhile, a teenage boy has been arrested over four allegations of “serious sexual assault” at an Essex school’s gender-neutral lavatories. No surprises there. A unisex toilet is at best embarrassing and at worse a happy hunting ground for sex pests. It’s like HS2, a third runway at Heathrow or a car-parking space available only by app. No-one wants them, no-one voted for them and yet still we get them.
What’s jail really like? To find out for a C4 series, a group of minor celebrities have been banged up in the disused Shrewsbury Prison where they did menial tasks and were searched by former prison officers. One of the stars says a former prisoner told him the show was “extraordinarily accurate, except for the drugs, the violence and the suicides.” Oh, please.
These celebs all knew their ordeal would be over in a few days. Nobody was beaten up or sodomised, no-one’s family was threatened and the stars could quit at any time.
It sounds like prison with all the nasty bits taken out. In other words, not at all like prison.
