“Socialists” Abandoning Children in Newham

Once upon a time there was a mayor, he whose name could not be mentioned. Back in those days £2.5 million was spent every year on an ‘every child programme’. (This mayor had a balanced budget and could invest in things that were important, err, like children.) 

This stemmed from the belief, that if you invested wisely, you could give children from poorer backgrounds access to opportunities that they would not have had otherwise. This in turn would equip them to better succeed as adults. That came from the days when socialists believed that there was something called the working class and the left was not infatuated by identity politics.

This money was used for every child to learn a musical instrument, have a visit to the theatre, to play chess, to take part in sports in the school holidays from BMX cycling to Basketball, Cheerleading to Cricket. The idea was to both increase the opportunities for learning and to give Newham children the exposure to the same sort of activities as their middle-class contemporaries in the leafier suburbs.

A new mayor took power in 2018. She decided that she wanted to cut these programmes so she created a new programme called ‘enrichment’ as she wanted nothing to do with the policies of the previous mayor. And the enrichment programme included much of what had been in the every child programme, but without the sports. She decided she couldn’t cut the programme all at once so she reduced the budget in 2020 to just over £1 million then in 2023 to £907,000, hoping no one would notice.

Not a peep from the comrades on the council. 

This is good wheeze says the new Mayor if I can only now remove the programme completely.   Let’s now finish the programme off and have ‘no provision remaining’ this year and see if we can get away with it. 

Not such a fairytale?