I was halfway through my morning kippers at the club when I read the latest dispatch from the ivory towers of University College London. The researchers, bless their cloistered little hearts, have concluded that children in England who are smacked at ages three, five, and seven are significantly more likely to struggle with their GCSEs and go on to bully other children. The authors of the study present this as a negative outcome. They are even calling for a ban on the practice, claiming it has a negative impact on society.
I had to put down my silver fork and laugh out loud, much to the annoyance of the shadow chancellor sitting at the adjacent table. It is truly remarkable how little our academic institutions understand about the actual mechanics of the British economy.
They seem to operate under the delusion that this country is run by people who achieved top marks in double science. Let me disabuse you of that notion immediately. I have sat on the boards of three major utility companies, and I can assure you that not a single one of my fellow directors could explain the periodic table. What they can do, however, is ruthlessly subjugate a subordinate until the share price improves by a quarter of a percent.
The UCL study warns that physically punished children are significantly less likely to pass their exams. To which I say: good. Exams are a trap designed to funnel the compliant into middle-income drudgery. If a child is sitting quietly in an examination hall, diligently filling out multiple-choice questions about the causes of the First World War, that child is demonstrating a catastrophic lack of initiative.
The child who is destined for greatness is not taking the exam. They are outside in the corridor, physically intimidating the head boy into handing over his lunch money while simultaneously outsourcing their coursework to a terrified scholarship student. That is not antisocial behaviour, as the academics would have you believe. That is called proactive revenue generation, and it is the cornerstone of the British services sector.
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The researchers wring their hands over the finding that smacked children are more likely to bully their peers. They use the word bully with such distaste, completely failing to recognise it as the foundation of modern corporate leadership. What is a hostile takeover if not bullying on a macroeconomic scale? What is a corporate restructuring if not a very expensive, legally sanctioned wedgie delivered to the working classes? We do not call it bullying when you are over the age of thirty; we call it assertive synergy management.
Just last week, I was having lunch in Mayfair with an old friend who specialises in liquidating regional manufacturing hubs. We were discussing this very phenomenon. He credited his entire career trajectory to the stern, physically uncompromising discipline of his father, who never once let an infraction pass without swift, unilateral retribution.
If my father had sat me down to discuss my feelings instead of applying a leather slipper to my backside, I might have developed empathy, and if I had empathy, I would never have been able to fire those three thousand signalmen last quarter.
Vance is entirely correct. Empathy is a debilitating condition that severely limits one's earning potential. The beauty of the smack is that it teaches a child the most vital lesson they will ever learn: that power is arbitrary, that authority does not need to explain itself, and that the person with the largest physical presence dictates the terms of reality.
This perfectly mirrors the dynamic they will eventually encounter when dealing with a demanding board of shareholders, a particularly stubborn trade union, or an emerging market government that wishes to keep its own natural resources.
The UCL researchers tracked children at ages three, five, and seven. These are crucial developmental milestones. At three, a child must learn that the world is a cold, hierarchical place. At five, they must learn that negotiation is a myth perpetuated by the weak. By seven, if properly conditioned, they should be fully prepared to delegate their homework to a classmate while taking full credit for the results. This is the exact skillset required to make senior partner at a white-shoe law firm.
Look at the alternative. Look at the children raised by these modern, progressive methods. They are spoken to as equals. Their boundaries are respected. Their emotional outbursts are validated. What happens to these poor, coddled creatures when they enter the real world? They become compliance officers. They become human resources representatives. They become, God help us, academics who conduct studies for University College London.
They spend their lives writing reports about fairness, completely oblivious to the fact that the people who actually run the world are currently in a boardroom, yelling at a junior analyst until he cries.
I remember a conversation I had with a former Prime Minister at a shooting estate in Yorkshire. We were watching the beaters flush out the pheasants, and he turned to me and made a profound observation. He said that the problem with the modern electorate is that they expect their leaders to care about them. He blamed this entirely on the decline of corporal punishment.
When a population is no longer accustomed to sudden, unexplained physical discipline from a paternal figure, they start demanding ridiculous things like well-funded public services and accountable governance. It is a slippery slope from sparing the rod to expecting a functional National Health Service.
The researchers claim that smacking causes a negative impact on society. This depends entirely on how one defines society. If your version of society is a cooperative utopia where everyone shares resources and supports the vulnerable, then yes, perhaps a smacked child is disruptive to your little fantasy.
But if you recognise society for what it truly is—a brutal, zero-sum gladiatorial arena where the weak are ground into paste to lubricate the engines of commerce—then the smacked child is not a disruption. They are the apex predator we so desperately need to keep the GDP afloat.
We must resist this call to ban smacking with every fibre of our being. We owe it to our children to prepare them for the harsh realities of the global marketplace. We must give them the gift of trauma, so that they may one day inflict that trauma upon thousands of employees they will never have to meet.
So the next time your child misbehaves, do not talk to them about their feelings. Do not put them on the naughty step. Give them a sharp smack, look them dead in the eye, and tell them to go initiate a hostile takeover of the Lego bin. It is the only way to ensure their future success.