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. This was a collection of inspirational mini biographies with pictures, about Malala, Maya Angelou et al. At the time it struck me as identical to the saint stories I read as a child, modern hagiography, only with Frieda Kahlo and Michelle Obama instead of Joan of Arc and St Agnes. The impulse is precisely the same: forming young minds.

The next Rebel Girls spin-off is immigrant women who changed the world. There now exists an entire family of spin-offs, from Stories for Boys Who Dare to be Different to Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women. They lifted sales of non-fiction books for children by 30 per cent last year.

You can see it in every bookshop: a woke children’s lit section. At the front display of the bookshop at the National Theatre, there’s My Heroes and Me (fronted by Malala); What Would Boudicca Do? (burn Colchester? An interesting take on the self-help guide); Little People, Big Dreams: Girl Activist (Winning Strategies from Women who Made a Difference); Feminism, a Graphic Guide.