Brackston Hicks, the Conservative MP for Greater Dogging and Gauping West, has issued a passionate attack on what he calls “The Nanny State gone mad”, after the local school cancelled its annual field trip to Afghanistan.

The trip, which had been organized by St Buryem in the Fields Church of England School for the last fifty years, was designed to give children coping skills for later life by subjecting them to a manageable level of risk and allowing them to find their own solutions to every day problems.

“This whole sorry episode shows just how out of control the bloody do-gooders have become.” Hicks told our reporter yesterday. “For almost a generation these children have been traversing minefields, bringing down helicopters with shoulder-mounted artillery, engaging local bandits in firefights and generally learning all about the skills which will equip them through their adult lives.”

But as the school’s Head Teacher, Ida Budget pointed out, the trip has been considered too risky by the school’s governing body. “It’s a great shame because the pupils had picked up so many valuable skills on this trip. Their work with home made explosives was doing wonders for their science grades, and the fun they had harvesting opium was something that kept them talking for the other eleven months of the year.”

“But we simply couldn’t justify the risk of exposing so many young children to the intense levels of sunlight that you experience over there. Many of our children have fair skin and it was considered too dangerous to expose them to the potential risk of skin cancer.”

This news comes in the wake of tragedy at Flayback’s Primary School in Petty Yodeling, Surrey, in which thirty pupils were asphyxiated after being wrapped from head to toe in cotton wool.

A spokesman for the education authority said “We did everything we could to minimize the risk involved to our children, but we forgot to take into account the children’s growth rates. As they grew during the year, the straps we had used to keep the cotton wool in place became tighter. Obviously we couldn’t cut them out with scissors as this could have caused nasty scratches. Although most of the children in the class were dead by May, some more hardy members of the class managed until the end of July before showing any obvious effects.”

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