Bleak Midwinter

It wasn't enough to shaft Education at the Top End, then? Or to kick out the Cornerstone of the NHS, act all surprised that it goes a bit Wobbly and stick it with a Condemned Notice before Claire Raynor has time to reach for her Spectracles? Or to fold up Welfare and Unemployment, and snip at it with a pair of scissors, like a child making a Paper Snowflake- look how clever the pattern is, oh and so many holes? No, now it's actually time for Taking Candy from Babies. Booktrust, the scheme that provides Free Books to All Children between 9 months and 11 years, which includes Bookstart, is to have its funding cut by, er, 100%. (I had a state-funded education, but thankfully, not under The Coalition, so i can work out that this is A Bad Thing.) I can give you no better Thumbnail Sketch of the Great Yawning Moral Chasm of Unremitting Wickedness that is Michael Gove than this One Act- Taking Books off Babies. It won't let me underline it twice, but for the record, that is me SHOUTING. When i lived in North Yorkshire, we had a tiny Public Library where Every Week, Nigel would come and read stories to the Pre-Schoolers, with the Look of a Man Clinging to the Crow's Nest of a Storm-Tossed Boat who knows that the Sharks are hungry. Gone. When Joyce was little, in Wales, we would trot round twice a month after Toddlers to catch the Book Bus, and hand over our tickets to a Morose man in a Paisley Shirt whose Life Work of Providing Catherine Cookson to the members of the Evergreen Club for Retired Persons had left him a little Low- Strung. Gone. And now this. Well, let it be their Epigram, Gove, Osborne, Clegg, Cameron, Cable et al: the Wise Men come to visit the Newborn Child, brought into this World as Gift for all Mankind, dressed in their finery, with their Wealth and their Position and their Privilege. And they look down at the Promise of a Life, and give it the Empty Bag that is Conservative Greed and Liberal Democrat Self-Interest. Then take the bag back.