What can we read into claims on dyslexia?

Disleksia lures KO! Once again dyslexia has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Professor Julian Elliott, an educational psychologist at Durham University, tells us that dyslexia is no more than a handy fig-leaf for pushy middle-class parents too embarrassed to admit that wee Jimmy is a numpty. The implication is that it is also a handy label for a multi-million-pound dyslexia industry, staffed by specialists and academics with a vested interest in slapping it on more and more hapless bairns found crying into their readers. The prof last popped up two years ago in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme called The Dyslexia Myth in which he described the condition as "an emotional construct". Hate mail followed.