PERHAPS the seven sixth formers at a Cumbrian school, who complained that they were victims of discrimination because they were asked to attend the annual carol service despite their atheist views, are the free thinking intelligensia of our future. I doubt it though.

Of course, the pupils concerned could just wait a few months and exercise their right to complain to a government-established watchdog about this disgraceful example of autocratic discrimination by their headteacher.

Oh, and there could be a few quid in it to salve their hurt feelings as their 17-year-old spokesman moaned about “not feeling valued”.

Schools Secretary Ed Balls has clearly taken leave of his senses by offering disgruntled pupils the right to air their grievances within 12 months of leaving school.

There are more than enough interfering public bodies now, without establishing this new complaints procedure which panders to the disaffected and the opportunistic. In the old days of national service every Army hut had a “barrack room lawyer” who knew his rights and spent most of his time complaining bitterly about authority. Now it looks like every school is going to have a professional whinger in the classroom.

Headteachers already have a nigh impossible job maintaining discipline without the idiotic Ed Balls coming along with yet another government initiative that can only make their job a hundred times worse.

That’s all teachers need — snotty kids stalking the corridors posing as political and religious activists and threatening any member of staff who attempts to impose discipline with future action, compensation claims and, no doubt, suspension and an interminable inquiry.

But back to the Cumbrian kids who decided they would like to abstain from the school’s Christmas service. It appals me that the headteacher even had to waste her time dealing with their complaint and state that “no-one was made to do anything against their wishes”.

Thank goodness none of their teachers offered to pray for them, otherwise heaven only knows where the story might have ended up.

It’s another classic case of modern education where the pupils are attempting to run the schools with the complicity of a Government that preaches political correctness in its most unreasonable and ludicrous forms.

I recall my schooldays when there was a service held each term — and woe betide any child who failed to turn up on Sunday afternoon and sit through a tedious sermon from yet another old boy who had gone into the church.

Names were taken. Absences were noted. Visits to the headmaster’s study followed on Monday morning. Hands were wrung painfully.

I’m not for one moment suggesting a return to the days of Whacko, the television comedy from the late 1950s which featured Professor Jimmy Edwards, MA (Applied For), as the tyrannical boozing, gambling, bottom thwacking head of a “school for the sons of gentlefolk”.

But nobody dared challenge the authority of our old head. And the point made by us attending those services was that, as pupils of the school, we accepted the rules of the school and it was our duty to support the school. Plus it let us see that adult life, for which we were being prepared, wasn’t always going to be about self indulgence.

Should I have refused to interview the Archbishop of York on his recent visit to inspect Cumbria’s flood damaged areas because I can’t prove the existence of God? Or decline to report anything appertaining to local churches because I am not a committed Christian? Of course not.

These days I suspect pupils would laugh at the concept of support and duty. More’s the pity. But then again, a few months down the line you can always trot along to consult Hurt Feelings Lawyers For Young People to see about getting old grumpy the history teacher sacked and a bit of compensation for the mental anguish your school caused you. And if nothing else, it gets you out of that boring old school service.

EROSION OF FREEDOM

ANYONE with an ounce of computer savvy and a home laptop has been able to find out the identity of the Premiership football manager spotted visiting premises for the sort of massage you don’t get from the club physio. Yet newspapers fear publishing the name will bring them in breach of privacy laws.

A free country? We are freer than most. But there’s plenty of evidence that judges and town hall snoopers only need half a chance to erode many of our basic freedoms. Privacy is for the rich and famous, not the hoi polloi like us.

As if we needed proof that we live in an era of creeping regulation, one privacy campaign group this week revealed there could be as many as 20,000 people with the power to enter your home and business on the pretext of anything from checking your hedge and the energy rating of your fridge to, I kid you not, inspecting your property to see if you are carrying out illicit hypnotism.

Laws intended to counter terrorism are being corrupted to poke into private premises, creating an atmosphere of surveillance on everything from mobile phone calls to the contents of your bin.

Political correctness has become the new religion. What was once there to protect us is now there to regulate and enforce and woe betide anyone who tells a joke that might be vaguely construed as offensive to a minority interest.

Alongside unwarranted intrusion it’s the age of litigation where you have to be wary of everything you say by way of criticism and where the courts seem hell bent on stamping out free speech with ever more draconian libel warnings.

It’s an insidious form of control. Some councils have up to 500 clipboard clutchers and government promises to curtail petty rules seem hollow when you consider Labour has brought in 430 new powers of entry.

The latest targets? International terrorists? Not likely. They are after bingo callers, who are told not to use phrases like “two fat ladies” any more for fear of offending players of more generous proportions, and members of the public who had their cameras impounded by the police while waiting to take snaps of the royal family at Sandringham over Christmas.

It is manifest that some powers are being abused and taken to ridiculous extremes. But when officialdom and bureaucracy are given their head, who is to stop them?

I suppose, when the council jobsworth shows up to check whether you are keeping rabbits in the back garden, you could always try a bit of homespun hypnotism like Kenny, the Little Britain character. It won’t work, of course. They’ll have a prohibition notice served long before you can say “Look into my eyes, not around the eyes ...”

REPEATS BY ANOTHER NAME

THANK goodness it’s nearly over and we can get back to something resembling normality.

If there’s one thing that really hacks me off during the festive season, particularly in the days leading up to the New Year, it’s all those television “best of, worst of,” programs designed to fill up the schedules when there’s nothing else worth watching.

The top 100 this, the most hated 50 that. It’s mindless stuff, regurgitating clips of film and giving some minor celebrity a couple of hours’ employment introducing it all.

It’s been even worse this year because we love compartmentalising things and we happen to be coming to the end of what are described as the “Noughties”.

Every year we complain about repeats on the box. These review of the year and decade programs are just another excuse for repeats, dressed up as something special, which quite frankly they are not.