The late Auberon Waugh wrote that, as a child, he was constantly faced with the moral dilemma of the Chinese button. “Press the button and a Chinese man drops dead in China. Nobody will ever tell you his name or worry you about the circumstances, but you will receive £1 million in the post the next day. Do you press the button?”

I’ve come across the same teaser in an Edwardian short story where the heroine did mentally acquiesce in the death of a Chinese man for personal gain and was horrified to discover that a prominent Chinese statesman had died at the very time she did so. But we, too, face a watered-down version of the Chinese dilemma. Do we buy Chinese toys for next to nothing knowing that Chinese workers are paid a pittance to produce them? More pertinently, do we buy them knowing that the workers might well operate in unhealthy, dangerous factories? It’s not an academic question, this – 70 per cent of the world’s toys come from China.

Did you notice anything strange about the fuss about the recall of 1.5 million Mattel toys because they were tainted with lead? The latest to be recalled is the Cars character, Sarge – 49,000 from the UK and Ireland. An owner of a company that made toys for Mattel, Zhang Shuhong, hanged himself last weekend after Mattel recalled hundreds of thousands of Big Birds, Elmos and Dora the Explorers.

But the interesting feature of the scandal was that it was entirely focused on the consumers. We were told that lead can cause diarrhoea, vomiting and headaches in children; in large quantities it can be fatal.

Well, a small child would have to chew an awful quantity of Big Birds to kill itself. But all this prompts the question – if casual contact with lead is a problem for the infants who play with the things (and on purely aesthetic grounds my own tots will not be among them), what do you think it does to the workers who use the paint, day in, day out?

The condition of the workers in the toy factories that supply Western companies was ruthlessly analysed by the journalist Eric Clark, in his recent book The Real Toy Story. And what emerges is not just that the conditions in which most Chinese workers operate endanger their health, but that the much vaunted ethical inspections of those factories that make toys for companies such as Mattel are routinely circumvented by the factory owners.

But that doesn’t seem to bother us much. Public health experts say that Chinese manufacturers use lead paint because it is cheap and helps factories to contain their costs. And why do they need to contain costs so ruthlessly? Because they are subjected to inordinate pressure from the toy manufacturers to keep their margins tiny and to turn around production in short order – because that’s what consumers want, dirt-cheap toys. We’ve pressed the button, all right. Only this time, we know what happens.

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