Primary School Grammar And Spelling Lessons To Be Enforced Retroactively

Unemployment will soon be abolished at a stroke, say Britain’s cock-a-hoop grammar Nazis, as education secretary Michael Gove announced plans not only to make primary-school pupils competent in both spelling and grammar, but also to apply the requirement retroactively to everyone under the age of 65.

“Faced with the Sisyphean task of mastering the apostrophe, the entire social networking generation, hordes of vehemently (look it up) self-diagnosed dyslexics and a legion of poetry slammers could be looking at a lifetime of hard labour,” smirked the authoritarian leader of the feared linguistic police - known to his admiring minions as the Grammar Hitler.

I'll give you "Sir is a looser", Mrs Thompson

“Think not merely in terms of our emptied Jobcentres; think, too, of the millions of freshly-vacated jobs available to those of us acquainted with the homonym and the semi-colon once the nation’s semi-literate dullards have been forced out of work and into very small chairs,” he shrieked. “Indeed, Mr Gove might want to make an early start on the teaching profession, I might add, with a punitive remedial category for the ones who bleat about ‘stifling creativity’.”

Under the education secretary’s master plan, after two futile years of struggling to comprehend their native language, the hapless returners will face the nightmare of having to learn a foreign language - possibly the dreaded polysyllabic horror known as German.

“My scheme will, of course, undergo a rigorous public consultation before the planned implementation date of 2014,” beamed Mr Gove, resplendent in the black uniform of a Sturmbanngrammatiker. “That shouldn’t be a problem, though; only submissions which are 100% correct will be considered.”