RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: What do we want? Doggy day-care!

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: What do we want? Doggy day-care! When do we want it? Now!

Desperate employers are offering perks including free daycare for dogs in an attempt to lure their staff back to work.

Pet ownership rose 24 per cent during lockdown, with the number of dogs increasing from nine million to more than 13 million.

Now people are insisting they can’t return to the office because they don’t want to leave their animals home alone.

You couldn’t make it up. I’ve heard some lame excuses for prolonging Working From Home but this one takes the Bonio. How did pet owners manage before Covid?

Needless to say, the public sector is blazing a trail. Lancashire County Council is even advertising doggy daycare as part of a package to attract community support staff.

Pet ownership rose 24 per cent during lockdown, with the number of dogs increasing from nine million to more than 13 million

Now people are insisting they can’t return to the office because they don’t want to leave their animals home alone

Nice work if you can get it.

Wait until strike-happy Mick Lynch, of the railway workers’ union, finds out about this latest bargaining chip. I can hear them on the picket lines at Euston already . . .

What do we want?

Doggy daycare!

When do we want it?

Now!

Elsewhere, employers are letting staff take their dogs into the office. Admittedly, there’s nothing new in this. When I arrived in Fleet Street in the late 1970s, I was surprised on day one to see the diary editor marching in with what looked like a Rhodesian Ridgeback on a lead.

A couple of hours later the fashion editor turned up with a miniature poodle under her arm. I wasn’t sure if I’d joined the Evening Standard or Battersea Dogs’ Home.

But if the practice becomes more widespread, pretty soon every workplace in the country will come to resemble a bad night at Crufts.

And why stop at dogs? Will people be able to bring other pets to work? How about rabbits, parakeets, small horses?

An exception can quickly become the rule. Take Working From Home, which was supposed to be a temporary measure but is now seen widely as an entitlement, the dreaded ‘new normal’ — just as this column warned it would be three years ago.

Not just WFH, either. As I reported last week, the civil service unions are demanding a permanent four-day week, on full pay.

South Cambridgeshire Council has just announced all desk-based employees will in future only be required to work four days a week, after a ‘successful’ experiment. They are even planning to extend it to dustmen, who begin a three-month trial soon. 

This summer 130,000 homes in South Cambridgeshire will have to go without bin collections on Mondays.

The Lib Dem-controlled council says this will lead to a reduction in stress and injuries and encourage households to recycle more. You can bet your life that this ‘trial’ will also be declared a roaring success — even if it inevitably leads to a surge in fly-tipping. Maybe they’ll let the dustmen take their dogs to work, too.

We’ve already seen the chaos caused by WFH in the civil service, leading to backlogs for everything from driving licences to passports. Just wait until they are only expected to WFH four days a week, as they will be before long. 

The Tories have caved in to the selfish WFH culture and Labour thinks it’s a brilliant idea. Deputy leader Angela Rayner (pictured with Keir Starmer) wants the whole country put on a four-day week

The Tories have caved in to the selfish WFH culture and Labour thinks it’s a brilliant idea. Deputy leader Angela Rayner wants the whole country put on a four-day week.

Right now, Britain seems only to be working part-time anyway, when half of it isn’t on strike. We’re in the middle of three consecutive Bank Holidays, as it is.

And every Bank Holiday seems to go on for a week, just as Christmas and New Year now lasts about a month.

Look, if private companies choose flexible working, it’s their bottom line. But at a time we’re paying the highest taxes in 70 years, surely we have the right to expect, at the very least, that civil servants — and dustmen — actually turn up for work every day.

Productivity, which creates wealth and generates tax revenue to pay for our hopelessly misnamed ‘world class’ public services, has gone down the gurgler as a result of the reaction to the pandemic. Few people appear to want to return to normal working.

Somehow the idea has become common currency that the first — and in some cases, only — duty of employers is to provide a cushy lifestyle for their employees.

What puzzles me is that so many people now seem to believe that the world owes them a living. Work has come to be viewed by far too many people as some kind of optional extra.

Who would ever have thought that employers would have to start offering to pay for doggy daycare, simply to bribe their staff to turn up for work?

The anti-Semites haven’t gone away

It’s 16 years since I made a Channel 4 documentary and wrote a Saturday essay in the Mail exposing the anti-Semitism on the Left of British politics.

At the time, few people would acknowledge the reality that the Left’s hatred of Israel and obsession with ‘Islamophobia’ had spilled over into real animosity against Britain’s Jewish community.

The shameful Corbyn interlude brought Labour’s army of anti-Semites crawling out from under their stones. And despite Keir Starmer’s claim to have stamped out the culprits, they haven’t gone away, you know.

The Guardian’s vile cartoon, along with the cartoonist Martin Rowson’s unconvincing apology, is evidence that Left-wing anti-Semitism is never far from the surface.

Most of the time they don’t even know they’re guilty of it, certain as they are of their own virtue, while constantly flinging bogus racist smears at those they falsely label ‘far-Right’.

But if you want to see real institutional racism in action, look no further than that self-righteous bible of the Left, the Guardian.

What were you doing at 24? I was married with a daughter and on my third mortgage, holding down a responsible job on a newspaper.

Yet, according to this Government, I would have been too young to be trusted with putting a £3 bet on.

New gaming rules would prevent anyone under 25 gambling more than two quid online to ‘protect’ them from becoming addicted.

Betting shops would have to ask punters who look younger than 25 to prove their age. Supermarkets and off-licences already do the same for alcohol purchases, even though it’s legal to buy booze at 18. There’s also a proposal to prevent new drivers under the age of 25 carrying equally young passengers in the car.

Yes, there are problems with gambling addition and fatal accidents caused by inexperienced drivers. But infantalising society isn’t the answer. 

If you are old enough to change gender, you’re old enough to put a fiver on a horse. And at 25, people should take responsibility for their own actions.

Nanny State politicians need reminding that Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister when he was 24.

The latest piece of climate-related lunacy comes from the eco charity Plantlife.

No, I’ve never heard of them, either. I thought Plantlife was that old Blur hit, featuring Quadrophenia’s Phil Daniels.

They’ve launched something called #NoMowMay, urging us not to cut our lawns this month. 

Letting the grass grow wild will encourage wildlife to flourish, it is claimed. 

As you might imagine, in the more respectable, houseproud suburbs this idea has gone down about as well as suggesting you dump an old fridge in your front garden. In my neck of North London, wildlife needs no encouragement whatsoever.

To be honest, I could do with less of it — especially the rabid foxes and the badger which keeps digging up our back lawn.

Cutting back the ivy from fence and trees is a task on a par with painting the Forth Bridge. And if wild flowers did bloom, they’d be eaten in five minutes by the ever-multiplying muntjacs. So all I can say to #NoMowMay, is #NoBloomingWay.

The latest piece of climate-related lunacy comes from the eco charity Plantlife

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