Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest

Synthetic phonics. As taught to me in an old pit village under the headship of an erstwhile Labour Councillor from the Seventies, and under the aegis of the first local authority that Labour ever won, which it had never lost in eighty years even then, or in well over a hundred now. "Trendy" teaching methods were as unknown in these parts as the abolition of school uniform would have been, or would be.

Like the discontinuation of the Council Carol Service. The pseudo-Right is as metro-myopic as the pseudo-Left, and assumes the latter's oddities to be typical, a task now made a lot easier by the pseudo-Left's overthrow of the Labour Movement that was still going strong the best part of 30 years ago, and which remains strong enough in parts of local government to be able to keep the phonics, the school uniforms and Carol Services going, insofar as there is even a question mark over them in the areas in question.

No primary school Nativity Plays these days? Get out of London for a while, if it is true even in very many places there. Most non-Catholic village primary schools in the old mining areas are County rather than C of E, but the old Methodist tradition keeps them singing Hark, The Herald Angels Sing, a Wesley hymn after all. Mostly elsewhere, the integration of the most obvious ethnic minorities has required nothing more than giving their children certain stereotypical parts, such as Asian boys as Wise Men, satirised in a sketch on Goodness Gracious Me. The extremely rare cancellation of these things has never been either at their instigation or for their benefit. Just look at where it happens.