Now cancel culture wants to put our children off reading

‘Can I still read Harry Potter?”, a BBC Radio 4 documentary will ask next week. I can spare you 30 minutes of cultural experts, academics and fans gravely assessing J K Rowling’s misdemeanours, and give you the answer now: no. No – you and your children may not read one of the bestselling book series of all time.

After all, the journalist and former Harry Potter fan hosting the programme, Aja Romano, has already made her position clear, having accused Rowling, pictured, of “pernicious hate” against the trans community and the “spreading of misinformation” in the past (you’ll remember that controversy around the writer stems from her taking issue with the idea that “women” should be called “people who menstruate”), and declared her books guilty of, among many other things, “fat-shaming”, “repeated examples of bigotry”, “queerbaiting” and “upholding patriarchal structures”.

There I was thinking Harry Potter was just a bunch of schoolchildren caught up in witchcraft and wizardry, the Famous Five meets The Chronicles of Narnia. How short-sighted can one heterosexual, privileged white person-who-menstruates get?

But now that I’ve been made aware of these pernicious undercurrents, I shall prise the book from my eightyear-old’s hands and chuck it on the bonfire with joyous ceremony. Because only by purging children’s literature in the way cancel culture is advocating can we hope to cleanse younger generations of the sins of the past.

This particular bonfire is raging. Roald Dahl’s collected works were long ago reduced to cinders (“antiSemitic”), alongside most fairy tales. The Three Little Pigs is “offensive to Muslims”, and Little Red Riding Hood is “promoting alcohol to minors” (she has a bottle of wine in her basket).

The Dr Seuss books have been reduced to a curled and blackened crisp (stereotypical depictions of Asians, who “all wear their eyes at a slant”), as has Where the Wild Things Are (banned in some US states for inciting child abuse, what with Max being sent to bed without supper). In the Night Kitchen is a goner (the boy in this book is naked), as is Babar (which promotes colonialism and is “politically and morally offensive”) ffensive ) and, of course, Tintin (“inciting citing racial hatred”).

Adults are big and cretinous nous enough to make their own n decisions, and by that I mean ean follow the herd. New statistics on the most “cancelled” celebrities of

2020 – just published by Gamblingdeals.com – illustrate this, with J K

Rowling coming third. The author lost a whopping 351,000 of her Twitter followers as a result of speaking her mind. And if these cancel-happy grown-ups want to pare their literary worlds down to the handful of writers who have never thought, done or expressed something “wrong”, that’s their progressive prerogative. Let me know how entertained and enlightened you feel in five years’ time.

Children, however, are not so easily swayed. Remember that it’s a little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes – also presumably cancelled – who is the first to call out: “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!” They see through frauds, pretences and poses and are able to distinguish right from wrong, but only if bad is shown alongside good.

Halving their world view from the outset and reducing the vivid tales that make morality come alive to woke sermonising is one sure way to kill off reading completely – in a country with one of the lowest literacy rates in the developed world, a country where just 53 per cent of children say they enjoy reading, and only 26 per cent of under-18s spend even a few minutes a day immersed in a book.

But perhaps the most important factoid in this whole conversation lies buried beneath the loss of earnings incurred by cancelled celebrities in Gamblingdeals.com’s findings.

Since her initial controversy, J K Rowling’s follower count has been “back on the rise, indicating that cancel culture has an expiry date”. To me, that doesn’t just mean that the anger and outrage prompted by her comments has expired, but that it was never really there to begin with: that the whole thing is empty posturing.

Is any adult seriously asking themselves: “Can I still read Harry Potter?” I doubt it. And if in reality the ques question is “Can my children still rea read Harry Potter?”, it may be wor worth remembering how many youngsters saw the book as the their gateway drug into an addic addiction we should be doing ev everything we can to e encourage – one that may just help them survive the months ahead.

After her trans row, JK Rowling is now guilty of ‘upholding the patriarchy’