Last week, Andy Burnham - a man who might yet prove to be a different KIND of disappointment to his predecessor - announced a big new scheme to let kids go to work from a younger age. 

 I don't spend enough time around kids to be able to gauge their reaction, but on instinct alone I'd guess that they were less than thrilled. 

 Sometimes, the simplicity of childhood allows for clarity of thought, as when they ask things like "why do we have wars?" Or "why doesn't someone feed people who are starving?" Another one that crops up is “Why do you have to go to work?” It’s only fragile, grown up egos that keep us from admitting that there isn’t really a satisfying answer. When I was a kid, all the adults had jobs and they all seemed pretty unhappy about the situation. Every child can see that working seems like a terrible way to go through life.  

 This didn't stop a joyless automaton by the name of Charlie Mayfield from going on Radio 4 and touting the benefits of the scheme, explaining at one point that if a child wants to be a plumber, it will be good for them to get experience by going out and doing some plumbing.

 I'm not saying that there are no children who want to be plumbers - kids are weird, and it's one of their better qualities - but I'd suspect that most young people do not dream of being a plumber. In fact, if you ask kids who want to be a plumber why they've decided on that path, I'd be willing to bet a decent chunk of them think it's because you get to jump on mushrooms and rescue princesses.

 Alright, kids are way older than their years these days. Probably by fourteen, the new age at which kids can gain work experience, they’ll think that the selling point of being a plumber is that you get to fuck lonely housewives. They'll be crushed when they learn that a plumber turning up promptly enough for a customer to still be horny might be one of the least realistic things in all of porn. 

 Overall, however, I doubt many kids want to be plumbers. I doubt most plumbers want to be plumbers. The only thing that work experience with a plumber will teach a fourteen year old is that neither of them want to be there but that one of them has to be, or they'll starve. Which might actually be the key lesson the government is trying to impart in the first place.

 The cheerleader for this scheme that I heard interviewed, Charlie Mayfield - Sir Andrew Charles Mayfield, properly - is some sort of business consultant whose father was a high ranking army officer. He went to private school, followed in the family tradition by joining the army, then moved into the private sector and became Assistant Product Manager for Instant Horlicks.

 "Assistant Product Manager for Instant Horlicks" is a phrase so boring I had to look it up three times before I could type it out, by the way, because my brain kept refusing to accept information that dull.

 Mayfield later became the Chairman of the Commission For Employment And Skills before the department was eventually wound up, presumably because anyone they dealt with suffered the same kind of stupefying boredom that meant I couldn't retain "Assistant Product Manager For Instant Horlicks." The Commission For Employment And Skills seem like a group of people that you could be on the phone to right this minute and not notice, or people you could be in a meeting with and not fully perceive, like the human equivalent of industrial carpeting. If someone said “I’m from the Commission For Employment and Skills,” I think they’d immediately start to fade out of my perception like a poster that’s been in the sun too long.

 In short, Charlie Mayfield seems like the sort of person who is absolutely qualified to drone on about jobs, and pathologically incapable of talking about dreams. 

 I'm not saying he doesn't dream - he must logically enter REM sleep like a normal human - but I don't think a privately educated facsimile of his own father who went on to work for the company that makes soothing drinks for the elderly is really capable of understanding passion, or enthusiasm, or fun. If you ask kids what they want to be, they often have wildly ambitious ideas, and that's the point. No child (or young teen) should really WANT to be a plumber.

 Unfortunately, people like Charlie Mayfield can't understand that. He seems to think that bringing back child labour will break their spirits and teach them to settle for a menial job early, and that this is desirable. Teach the kids to be wage slaves in dull, manual jobs, for their own good. I suspect that he has a dim view of the working classes and assumes that they would all naturally want to be plumbers and brick layers and fishermen, because these are still somehow the only jobs that politicians and the media treat as "real."

 The reality of modern Britain couldn't be more removed. Andy Burnham's new government should, if it really wants to improve the country, be encouraging artists and dreamers. This isn't just me being a hippy. The arts are one of the biggest industries the UK has, and they are summarily ignored or actively diminished at every opportunity.

 Consider what the arts are worth to the UK. The creative arts have given us the Beatles, the Stones, and all the other British Invasion bands of the 1960s. We gave the world James Bond, Harry Potter, about a third of the actors in Hollywood, David Bowie, David Hockney, and the London West End.

 I could go on. So I will. The Jack Reacher franchise, Led Zeppelin, Vivien Westwood, everything filmed at Pinewood Studios (so Aliens, Tim Burton's Batman, a good chunk of the Avengers movies, most of the things Tom Cruise has been in lately), Adele, Lily Allen, Ozzy Osbourne and Oasis. Rockstar Games, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto and the Red Dead Redemption games, are a Scottish studio. That's before we get to David Attenborough documentaries, Aardman Animation, The Office, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, and Shakespeare. These are all products of the British creative scene, and they're just the ones that spring to mind. 

 Games Workshop - the nerd shop that sells little figurines for people to paint so that they can engage in fake tabletop battles - spawned the Warhammer franchise(s), and is estimated to be worth as much to the UK economy as fishing. Brexit was sold in part as a way to defend the nation’s fishing rights, and yet we failed to ask the people who make little paintable orcs what they thought even once, despite the fact that their concerns should clearly have been given equal weight.

The only things we’re allowed to care about any more are “proper" jobs and ways to slave away at them in the hopes of becoming… not rich, exactly - the rich don’t want to have to associate with everyone else - but in the hopes of making our poverty more bearable. So there will be schemes dreamt up to allow kids to start their drudgery earlier, and any talk of a creative career is to be discouraged, even though the arts are worth vast amounts of money and would be worth even more if they were actually supported.

Forget that art makes life worth living, or spreads joy, or says anything meaningful - if your sole interest is bloodless, sterile economics, the arts are still a fantastic investment, and they’re summarily ignored.

The argument from people like Sir Charlie Bland-Fuckwit would be that “we can’t all be artists,” but the answer is that actually, no, YOU can’t be an artist. Most people are inherently creative, and would thrive if given the chance, but somehow we’re ruled over by second generation army officers from private schools who have had the imagination stamped out of them until they can’t envision anything other than someone maybe wanting to be a plumber or an electrician instead of something actually economically useful, like a dancer or a set designer. Just because you couldn’t think of anything better to do than whatever your dad decided for you doesn’t mean you get to crush the dreams of the rest of us, you fucking Instant Horlicks of a man.

I was already annoyed about all of this when I read about the whale.

Apparently, there’s a museum in Gothenburg that has the world’s only taxidermied Blue Whale. It’s fifty feet long, meaning it’s only half-way to full grown, but you can still walk around in it. It used to be open to the public until a couple were caught trying to have sex inside, which is both weird and kind of admirable. I can only hope that someone at least managed a wank in there at some stage, just so I can coin the term Jonah-nism.

Anyway, following that incident they decided to stop letting everyone in, and only open the whale’s mouth for special occasions. It’s open during elections and sometimes the museum reportedly puts Santa in there at Christmas and uses it as a grotto.

There are probably all kinds of valid scientific reasons to stuff a whale, but let’s not kid ourselves: The best reason to do something like that is because you can. It’s of no practical economic use to anyone, but it’s still a benefit to the world because it makes it a more interesting place. And “when I grow up, I want to stuff a whale and walk around in it” is the exact sort of thing that kids SHOULD be saying. We should encourage them, because maybe one day they’ll succeed and then we’ll all have a whale to walk around in.

I genuinely believe that fucking around is one of the most important things you can do in life. It leads to interesting stuff. Or not. But that doesn’t matter. The point is that fucking around to see what happens is a far better motivation than money.

A future where kids are told their ambition should be “plumber”, and that they can start at fourteen, sounds dreary and awful. A future based on art and music and stuffing a whale just for the hell of it would be objectively better.

I guess what I’m saying is, if someone offers you work experience, tell them you want to be an orc painter or a whale stuffer, or you’re not interested. Because “not being interested in work” is almost certainly correct. Every child knows it.