Children’s literature has become horribly right-on

There was a spat the other week about a children’s book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, which is about an encounter between a little girl called Ama and the nation’s pin-up, Brenda Hale. The book’s author is the Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch. It’s written in vague rhyming couplets with the worst illustrations I’ve ever seen in a book for children.

In a newspaper report about the book, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, was quoted saying ‘This looks like deliberate propaganda to bend the minds of children’, while MP Andrew Rosindell said that ‘she is being painted into some kind of hero in this book aimed at children’.

Ye-es, Mr R. That’s the idea. That’s what an awful lot of children’s literature is about now: generating role models for woke children. For anyone who reviews, publishes, sells, buys or reads children’s books, the move to children’s lit as consciousness-forming propaganda has been evident in Britain since at least 2017, when Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls took off.