Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit
CHILDREN at one primary school, it was recently revealed, have been banned from making daisy chains, on the grounds that they might catch germs if they start poking around in the grass. Needless to say, hopscotch, football, climbing and just about every other traditional playground pursuit are also heavily frowned upon in today's safety-first education culture.
But don't imagine that children are any more welcome to engage in more up-to-date pursuits. Paul Burstow, Liberal Democrat MP for Sutton and Cheam, is worrying himself that the nation's children are suffering repetitive strain injury by using electronic gadgets too much. A generation of teenagers, he wails, must be saved from going down with those hitherto unknown conditions, 'text-message injury' and `PlayStation thumb'.
To this end, he has put a motion before Parliament demanding that more be done to dissuade children from using gadgets. The wording reveals much about how a LibDem MP thinks. 'This House notes.' he writes, 'that only £97,000 has been invested in research into repetitive strain injury and that none has been allocated to looking at long-term effects in children.' How much taxpayers' money does one need to fritter away just to tell you that if you spend too much time tapping away at a little keyboard, your fingers are likely to ache and you may get cramp?
Mr Burstow's use of the word 'invested' implies that he believes that the state will get a return on its money: that, as a result of warnings and bans on playing electronic games, fewer man-hours will be lost to sickness in future years. It is a delusion: government-sponsored health scares merely create another pretext for employees — especially public ones — to take time off work and claim compensation. Enterprising teenagers are no doubt already turning to their PlayStations, so as to give themselves a pretext for early retirement on the state.
Ross Clark
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