Save the Scouts

A couple of years ago, Simon Barnes wrote a moving piece in this magazine about how his son Eddie, who has Down’s syndrome, had changed his mind about political correctness. Political correctness might be met with derision, he wrote, but it was also what made his son’s life bearable. In the not-so-distant past, Eddie would have been shut away and people like him made fun of in everyday conversation; now he is received everywhere with kindness and consideration.

Simon was right. I am in the same position as him: I have a daughter, Eliza, who has grown up in a world of kindness that is a world away from that in which I grew up. I hate to think of the bullying and abuse she would have to endure if she were transported back in time to the 1970s classrooms I knew. My generation of children mocked such people because we didn’t know them; they were hidden away, looked after in some institutional world of their own.