A St George's Day lament for the lost England of play-proof toys

Before last year’s Olympics and Jubilee, many commentators agonised over whether the Union Flag could ever again symbolise national unity, because of its attempted appropriation by various far right groups.

Yet New Labour’s hijacking of the red rose for party political purposes has been calmly accepted with a shrug.

Admittedly this only really troubles me once a year: but it is today, St George’s Day. When I shall proudly wear an English rose in my buttonhole and wait resignedly for some bright spark to say: “Well, I never had you down as a Miliband supporter.”

Luckily only a pale pink rose was available at Hann Towers this morning

To which I shall doubtless reply with a variant of my standard response to Labour canvassers: “I’m not, I just look stupid.”

It is something of a challenge being a patriot these days, particularly as the unlikely father of young boys. I was brought up in the 1950s to believe that British was always best. Nearly all my toys were proudly stamped “Made in England by Meccano Limited”, usually followed by the mysterious yet somehow reassuring “Patent Pending”.

I once made the serious mistake of thinking that “Empire Made” also counted as British, until my Dad pointed out that it was a polite euphemism for “Made in Hong Kong” and therefore rubbish. As was anything emanating from Japan or other points east.

His only concession, made with the teeth-gritted reluctance of one who had been shelled on the Normandy beaches, was that the Germans could be relied upon to make some things even better than we could.

When I acquired a level crossing for my Hornby train set, it came out of the box ready to use and was made of solid metal so indestructible that I still have it to this day, along with many of my Dinky cars and trucks.

True, they have sharp edges and kiddies probably die of lead poisoning if they are foolish enough to treat them as ju-jubes, but you can subject them to repeated multiple pile-ups without so much as scratching their paintwork.

Compare and contrast the Hornby trains of today which are my three-year-old’s pride and joy. All “Made in China”, naturally. I keep meaning to buy a stopwatch and take modest bets with myself on how long each addition to his layout will last. The level crossing I installed on Friday made it a creditable 24 hours before the plastic barriers were snapped.

On the one hand nearly all this stuff is labelled as not being suitable for the under-threes. However, no one should interpret this as meaning that it is suitable for the over-threes. It merely means that the Elfin Safety experts consider that children who have passed this milestone are less likely to shove the small parts in their gobs and choke to death.

The reality is in the very small print on the engine shed I recently acquired, precisely because I was impressed by its apparent robustness: “Detailed scale model for adult collectors. Scale model not designed for play.”

Not suitable for children

Let me tell you, Mr Toy / Model Company Mogul, playing is all any of us want to do with miniature trains, whether we are coming up to four or 60, and however much we may try to pretend that we are really constructing scale model dioramas to provide an educational insight into our industrial past. 

Following recent revelations about the true value of my “investment grade” model collection, I think I may as well give it to my boy Charlie to enjoy. The Hornby Dublo 3-rail diecast models would probably emerge unscathed from a North Korean nuclear attack, so it will be interesting to see how much damage he can inflict on them.

His mother may veto the spring-loaded rockets on the Tri-ang “Battle Zone” military train in case they put his eye out, but I feel sure that the circus train with the giraffe which ducks down before low bridges will afford hours of innocent pleasure.

Well, it certainly will to me, at any rate. After all, that is what toy trains are for.

Playing with and having fun. It just seems a shame, on this red letter and red rose day of English identity, that they cannot be “Made in England” any more.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Written for, but not published in, the Newcastle Journal of 23 April 2013. Though, to be fair, it was published in the Newcastle Journal of 24 April 2013.

Are we really yearning for change?

Nowadays the base assumption of politicians of all parties, in every country, is that people are yearning for change. My suspicion, however, is that many of us want nothing more fervently than to be left alone.

Manufacturers and retailers also believe that they can do better for themselves through the constant quest for something “new and improved”. Even the world’s most powerful brands sometimes get this horribly wrong.

In the 1980s I twice visited the city of Columbus, Georgia. Here, in the aftermath of the American Civil War, druggist John Pemberton dreamt up a medicinal drink flavoured with coca leaves (the source of cocaine) and kola nuts (providing caffeine). He called it Coca-Cola.

Back in 1985, I was proudly presented with one of the first cans of a revolutionary drink called New Coke: like Coca-Cola, only sweeter. It had naturally been launched to replace the original only after a massive programme of market research, which demonstrated unequivocally that it was what the public wanted.

The result was a textbook PR and marketing disaster. However much they claimed to prefer it in blind taste tests, Americans soon made it clear that they were not prepared to drink the new stuff. Within months the old formulation had been reintroduced as “Coke Classic”, and New Coke was eventually dropped altogether.

Clearly having learnt nothing from this story, a couple of years ago Nestlé completely reformulated the 70-year-old Black Magic brand, filling the boxes with supposedly more upmarket square truffles. Once again a consumer backlash led to the reappearance of something called “Black Magic Classic Favourites”, though sadly I can detect little resemblance between these and the original selection my late mother enjoyed so much. On the other hand they have got rid of that Montelimar chocolate that was always left behind at the end, so at least there has been one small improvement.

Compared with New Coke, New Labour has won rather a lot of popular votes and had a decent run on the shelves, but has it ultimately delivered any more consumer satisfaction? The public finances are in ruins, just like in Old Labour days, inequality has increased and for some reason Mr Blair’s performance at the Iraq enquiry reminded me irresistibly of John Major’s cruel line about hearing “the flapping of white coats” whenever he encountered one of his more obsessive critics.

It is head-bangingly frustrating that so much political discourse is devoted to correcting the entirely predictable results of previous Government initiatives. You massively liberalise the licensing laws, then discover that you have a problem with binge drinking. Well, blow me down.

Sell off the playing fields and create a culture of fear in which it is deemed unsafe for children to walk to school, then find that you have an issue with childhood obesity. Who would ever have thought it?

Export the country’s manufacturing jobs to China and rely on the income generated from financial services, then discover that the fantastic results of the number jugglers were actually all achieved with smoke and mirrors. Who would have predicted that? Well, only anyone who had ever read some history.

The problem is that the tyranny of the focus groups gives us, on the other side, the equally flavourless, impeccably socially liberal New Conservatives. Every party is constantly scouring the world for exciting new ideas, and all profess a fanatical commitment to “social mobility” without ever acknowledging that there must be snakes as well as ladders. We cannot all be company chairmen, university professors or members of the cabinet.

I long for someone in British politics with the guts that the Coca-Cola Company showed in admitting that they had got it wrong and reverting to their original formulation.

Bring on an election fought between Classic Conservatives and Labour Classic Favourites, ideally minus that rather sinister ingredient, Lord Montelimar of Foy and Hartlepool.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The juggernaut of political correctness

It is wisely said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. What we seem to be repeating right now is the Phoney War of 1939-40, with our very own Neville Chamberlain barricaded into Downing Street and life apparently continuing much as it always did.

Companies happily issue press releases announcing that they have been awarded major contracts to help build the Navy’s new aircraft carriers; even though it is a farthing to a banker’s bonus that these ships will be cancelled within days of the General Election, whichever party wins it, along with huge numbers of other public spending commitments.

Our politicians shadow box on the same tiny square of centrist turf, desperate to avoid saying anything interesting or radical lest they be skewered for a fatal “gaffe”. At least there was the faint hope of some entertainment from Labour in the form of old-fashioned class war, but now Lord Mandelson has apparently put a stop to that and it’s back to the cynical but hitherto successful New Labour philosophy of “screw the working class, they’ll vote for us anyway, let’s suck up to the would-be social climbers.”

I even read in the weekend press that they are planning to woo Tony Blair out of retirement to play a leading role in the Labour election campaign; but surely this can only have been a wind-up designed to capture damning shots of empty champagne bottles piled up outside Conservative Central Office?

While all this nonsense is going on, foolish people are making plans that can never come to fruition; our brave soldiers continue to die in a war that no-one seems to have a clear plan to end; and the crazed juggernaut of taxpayer-funded political correctness continues to crush all before it.

I was reduced to carpet-biting fury at the weekend by reading some reports from Ofsted (“raising standards, improving lives”) on the nurseries that my wife wants us to consider for our son when she resumes her career. This is not necessarily my or her favourite idea, but at least one of us needs to earn a living.

All we really want is somewhere that will keep him safe and warm, change his nappy, allow him to play and not take indecent pictures of him for circulation among the pervert community. But what we get is a rating system that seems to award top marks for kow-towing to the great god “diversity”.

Oh great, here’s a place where he’ll get to try lots of different foreign foods and to celebrate Chinese New Year and Diwali. Whoopee. But, no, sadly it has been marked down because “resources that reflect positive images of people with disabilities are more limited, thereby possibly compromising this area of children’s learning and development.”

Don’t get me wrong. I have no desire to inflict upon my son all my own prejudices from the 1950s, themselves picked up from parents born in the Edwardian era. But when “diversity” becomes a leading criterion for judging the quality of childcare in the still “hideously white” English countryside, I do feel that we have taken leave of our senses.

For where has our obsession with encouraging and celebrating “diversity” actually got us? To a point where dangerous, benefit-funded nutcases banging on about the imposition of sharia law can secure ample airtime to state their case. And when even the United States, home of political correctness, thinks that we are a nation of loons who have allowed ourselves to become one of the prime breeding grounds for global terrorism.

Would it not be wonderful if we could get on with the blitzkrieg of a general election in which at least one of the mainstream parties had the guts to confront some of the issues that really matter, rather than those that played well with last week’s nursery-educated focus groups?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.