It's called a brain injury Boris, not a scab

Boris Johnson, in his usual half witted, half arsed, half thought about way, rights in his usual full literary style about the pleasures of scabs today in the the Telegraph.

The problem with Boris Johnson is, as ever, that it is all fluff, all nonsense, all a load of guff packaged in a lively form of prose that engages and lulls you in to thinking it has substance, which sadly it does not. Indeed, Boris Johnson's writings are "the Emperors new clothes" of political thought. Look closely and there is nothing there.

Of course, the real reason he writes is to paint some fanciful picture of an England long gone and lost (and as as far as I am aware, one that only exists in nostalgic bunkum) , and also to have a go at Labour. Boris uses Ed balls announcement that he would like to see more kids playing games like British bulldog and hopscotch to attack the culture of health and safety.

Boris Johnson chooses to base his argument on the use of a form of soft tarmac that local authorities and school use underneath climbing equipment. Of course if Boris knew his stuff he would know it is very difficult to skin a knee from falling vertically from a climbing from on to a hard surface. Scabs on knees are far more likely to occur from falling horizontally, from a trip whilst playing football or falling from a bike. So the use of soft tarmac underneath play equipment has nothing to do with the lack of scabs. Football, Boris should know, is not played underneath climbing frames.

Then Boris chooses to claim that deaths in parks have changed little in the last 20 years, again in an attempt to prove somehow that safety measures employed like soft tarmac have no effect. What Boris fails to understand is that few children die in parks, and few children have ever died in parks in the past due to playing on play equipment. What soft absorbant tarmac is there to do is to prevent much more serious head injuries that can lead to brain damage, spinal injuries and broken bones. Has Boris found out the statistics for these injuries ? What do you think ?

In my experience there is a fear of being sued whenever anything new is built, but that leads to new parks and play equipment being as safe as possible. Were it not for absorbant tarmac, would any knew playground be built ? And as for the argument against made by the part time member of Parliament for Henley that parks have declined so much under Labour, need we remind him of the massive sell off of school fields under the Tories ? I guess Eton didn't have to sell their fields off.

Mr Johnson ought to remember that soft tarmac is there to prevent brain injury, not a scabs on knees and friction burns. Come on Boris, if it comes to friction burns you really ought to know about them. Ask Petronella !