Virginia Blackburn

FROM the mouths of babes and boarding school head teachers: at last someone is beginning to tell this generation of snowflakes to get real. Douglas Robb, head teacher at Gresham’s School in Norfolk, has written in his blog that today’s youngsters are mollycoddled, have a huge sense of entitlement, expect to walk straight into plum jobs and feel they deserve more than their parents and grandparents. They “look down their nose” at jobs in places such as fast-food restaurants or shops he said, before adding that he had interviewed a newly qualified teacher who had asked: “Why should I come and work for you?”

Hear, hear. At last someone is telling the truth.

For today’s snowflakes it really, really is all about them: hence all this nonsense about “safe spaces” on university campuses, “noplatforming” (refusing to listen to anyone they don’t agree with), refusal to work in jobs they think beneath them and all the rest that is marking so many as the most self-obsessed generation in centuries.

And of course that is a sweeping statement: I have nephews, godchildren and I know the children of friends who are delightful, charming and nothing like this. But a very vocal number are.

They are the same people who tend to get extremely upset if you tell them there are two genders and the vast majority of us are born into the one we belong to.

They are the ones creating alternative realities, demanding a place where no one is ever allowed to be upset by anyone and then getting upset themselves beyond measure at the slightest sign of dissent.

My generation had it pretty good too. I can’t single out a snowflake and say my life was much more difficult than theirs. It was not. But