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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Every week we pick a few of our writers who will read their pieces in the magazine that week for you. This episode will be joined by Rod Little,

who gives his take on the public sector pay-throughs.

He'll be followed by Paul Embry, who writes about how the Labour Party needs to find its

working-class roots again. And at the very end, Rachel Johnson despairs that Christmas is back on.

First, Rod Liddle.

I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them and amenability towards doing a spot of teaching.

They still seem terribly averse to the whole idea.

During the first lockdown, 60% of young children received no virtual lessons at all from teaching staff,

and one in five pupils over 12 was

given no work to do according to the children's commissioner virtual lessons shouldn't have been

terribly difficult to arrange but most of the time there were none my own daughter had no

virtual lessons from march to july which is why she's no longer in the state sector. She did, however, complete

five physics papers, and being scatty, sent them one after the other to the wrong email address.

Nobody anywhere noticed. When we rang the school to inquire about online lessons, we were told

mimsy stuff about how our priority should be to protect her

mental well-being during this terribly stressful time, yada, yada. What head teacher in the

north-east reported that almost her entire staff was sitting at home on their asses doing nothing at all.

...