Ian McMillan: I have seen the future... and it’s not a pretty sight

I took my crystal ball to a pawnbroker’s last year so I’ll have to make do with my crystal flat cap. It’s more appropriate for this area, although it doesn’t half leave a ring round your head if you wear it for more than 20 minutes.

Let’s gaze into that shining crystalline neb and divine the future. Not too closely, though: those crystals are sharp! Let’s take a stroll down a Yorkshire high street in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2017; watch your step though, the pavement’s not been gritted since the Olympics.

I’ll be 61 in 2017, and of course that’s not old; I hope I’ll still be full of vim and vigour and I’ll have to be because I’ll have to keep working for at least another six years.

My job’s easy, of course, and I can probably keep doing it till I’m 95, but what about those teachers and nurses and binmen who are having to work until their late sixties so that they can get their pension?

There’s a couple of them at the bus stop: that teacher’s having to get somebody from EmployAKid.com to carry her marking because it’s too heavy for her.

Ah yes, EmployAKid.com, the Government’s brilliant idea that they floated just before the 2015 election to get the two million unemployed young people off the dole. All you have to do is agree to let somebody between the ages of 16 and 25 help you with menial tasks and they’re deemed to have a job. You don’t have to pay them, of course, or train them, or give them anything like a contract. They carry your bags or wash your windows or take your dog for a walk and the Government looks after them. It doesn’t pay them either, because that would rob them of their dignity. It gives them McDonald’s vouchers and walking boots. Remember their slogan: ‘Employ A Kid Because It’s Neat For Neets!’

Catchy, I think you’ll agree. There are a few Employ A Kid people at the bus stop. You can spot them easily by their orange jumpsuits. Tangerine Toilers as Michael Gove called them in a leaked memo. And whose idea was it to rename the local Jobcentre the Scrap Yard? Nobody’s saying.

The High Street’s still a little bare since Poundland pulled out. They couldn’t compete with 50p Heaven and the 20p Cave of Delights. After all, who’s got the money to spend a pound on a pair of shoes any more? There’s still a couple of charity shops, but they’ve mostly gone too. Competition’s healthy but most charity shops were bludgeoned out of the way by Sick Pay, the Mega-charity that replaced the NHS.

It’s a clever name, of course, dreamed up by advertising executives in high rise offices overlooking the glittering city. That narrows down which city it was, incidentally, because cities haven’t glittered round here for years.

Sick Pay really is an amazing marketing phenomenon, a simple idea that has transformed the way we think about funding things that were previously funded by the state. The thinking goes like this: we all want to help people less well off than ourselves and if we leave it to government they’ll just be all heavy-handed and they’ll get it wrong and of course they haven’t got any money.

So why not replace the complex and creaky National Health Service with a chain of outlets that we won’t call charity shops, we’ll call them “New to You” shops. Sick Pay: New To You. Genius. And if the shop manages to sell those fifteen old headscarves that we donated when Auntie Elsie died, the hospital down the road will be able to buy a couple of bandages and a bottle of bleach.

At the far end of the road is the Super School, you can just make it out behind the barbed wire. It’s a Free School of course, there are thousands of them in Yorkshire now, of all different kinds.

This one isn’t called the Super School because it aims to have magnificent teaching and a marvellous curriculum; no, it’s called the Super School because it bases its teaching on the Super-hero principle.

The teachers wear cloaks and have their pants on outside their tights and lessons include “Saving the World” instead of geography and “Walking through walls” which has replaced physics. Their slogan, like all the slogans in this austere world, is very clever: “You’ll Believe Our Kids Can Fly!”

Language, as ever, is being used in 2017 as a tool to keep everybody baffled and happy. Mind you, the Super School isn’t the oddest of the Free Schools. At the far end of town there’s one called “The School For Posh Kids” and in one of the villages nearby there’s one called “Eaten” (get it? clever language again) which only serves junk food to the pupils.

I hope this is all fantasy, I really do. Save this column and have a look at it in six years. If you haven’t burnt it to keep warm.