Mercy Muroki: Are you offended by the Tiger Who Came To Tea? Of course not - because you’re not insufferable

A Scottish campaign group called Zero Tolerance, which is mostly tax-payer funded, has criticised children’s books such as The Tiger Who Came to Tea because they say the books are reinforcing ‘harmful’ gender stereotypes and, down the line, causing sexual harassment and rape.

The Tiger who Came to Tea, by German author Judith Kerr has been a staple on children’s bookshelves in Britain and abroad for over 50 years.

It tells the story of – a tiger who joins a little girl Sophie for tea, eats all the food in the house, drinks everything. Then when Sophie’s father comes home to find that all the food and drink is gone, he suggests the whole family go and have a nice family meal at a café for dinner.

That’s it. That’s the story. Are you offended? Of course not, because chances are you’re not insufferable.

Ordinary people read the book to their children and say – “aww, isn’t that nice!”

But Zero Tolerance have said: “The Tiger who came to tea… is reflective of a society that we need to think more closely about.”

No, it’s really not. It’s just a book about a fictional tiger who came to tea.

They say: Well, why is the tiger male, rather than female, or … gender-neutral… it doesn’t reflect real society.

So, hold on a second… what you find unrealistic about a literal talking tiger ringing a doorbell, sitting at a dinner table, then proceeding to casually consume tea and biscuits with two humans is that the tiger is not gender-neutral?

What a skill it must be to be so utterly intolerable.

This organisation, Zero Tolerance published, yesterday, it’s “gender and diversity audit” of over 3000 books found in Scottish nurseries.

What next? Cancelling the Very Hungry Caterpillar because for fat shaming. Or the angry giant in Jack and the Beanstalk for showing signs of toxic masculinity?

The reality is, girls today are not the sensitive cry babies they’re painted as.

In fact, girls are doing better than boys these days on many fronts. They’re getting better results at school, for example. Just this year, the number of girls getting the top grades in maths at A levels overtook boys for the first time!

Girls don’t need to be mollycoddled.

I wonder what the late Judith Kerr, a German Jew, who saw the Nazi’s literally BURNING books written by her own father in 1933 for being too ‘un-German’, for not fitting the accepted narrative would think of the fact that 80 years on, some people still seem to want to cancel and rewrite literary works that don’t fit their narrative