Recycle Your Granny For Youth

The Minister for the Human Resources Scrap Heap, Ivan Lewis, has proposed a partial solution to the pensions crisis, the education crisis and the yob crisis: use pensioners as unpaid teaching assistants in schools. The minister's thinking appears to be as follows: This month a father of three was killed in Warrington. Four teenagers have been charged with his murder. The man was forty-seven, which has increased pensioners' fear of children. Also, the fact that fewer people are living in overcrowded houses with two or three other generations of their family has been disadvantageous to our sense of wellbeing, because "older people are living in communities without any real family networks or support". Hence, "At lunchtime in every school in the country, why couldn't older people be sitting down with pupils and sharing lunch instead of doing it at an older person's lunch club or at home?" In return for the free lunch, the price of which could be quietly recovered from what is left of the state pension, thus saving the taxpayer millions of pounds which wouldn't have to be spent on education either, the elderly "should act as role models for schoolchildren by going into classrooms to teach them about local history, British identity and values such as patience and hard work" - those values which have made growing old in Britain the bed of roses it is today. As an added bonus, many of them can "speak about life during the Second World War or postwar rationing", still the single most important aspect of our heritage, and useful for a healthy perspective on New Labour's wars. After all, what are a few thousand Asians or a few dozen public transport passengers when compared to the horrors of the Blitz, evacuation and tea rationing?