Totalitarian Sport

Among traditional methods of keeping the rabble in line, one of the more profitable is the truck system, whereby workers are paid not in money which might be mis-spent on trivial or vicious lower-class pastimes, but in tokens which can only be redeemed at shops owned by the employer. A school near Sunderland has implemented a variant of this system, refusing to let pupils through the gates unless they are dressed in uniform bought from a particular local firm, in which it is as yet unclear how many of the school's governors, owners or shareholders have some coincidental financial interest. Parents said that their children were lined up in the rain while the head teacher checked the shade of their trousers against a colour swatch; the head teacher defended the action by pointing out the dangers of a slippery slope into who knows what bestial state of sartorial chaos. It is to be hoped that the school remembers to order all pupils' laundry done in the same place and with precisely calibrated degrees of frequency, temperature and branding, in case unequal fading over the course of term should bring on academic apocalypse.