(Originally published on predecessor website 18th January 2005. Re-posted for reference on this website on 3rd March 2006.)
There is something nasty about many members of Britain's elite. It is difficult to put one's finger on exactly what it is. But last night, the nastiness was on prominent display in Newsnight, on BBC2. I have come to think that perhaps the phrase for it is 'liberal fascism'.
Jeremy Paxman is liberal fascist. So is David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools. The two of them were talking to each other which is why - as they egged each other on - they made the bullying nastiness and arrogance of their attitudes so obvious.
David Bell had made a speech in which he said that Ofsted has identified a significant growth in the number of independent faith schools. There are now around 250 such schools, with around 100 Muslim schools educating around 14,000 pupils and more than 50 Jewish schools educating around 9,500 pupils. There are also more than 100 evangelical Christian schools.
Mr Bell said: "Parents should be able to choose how their children are educated and should be able to pay to do so. That is the mark of a free and open society. But faith should not be blind. I worry that many young people are being educated in faith, with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society.
"This growth needs to be carefully but sensitively monitored by government to ensure that pupils at all schools receive an understanding of not only their own faith but other faiths and the wider tenets of British society. We must not allow recognition of diversity to become apathy in the face of any challenge to our coherence as a nation. We must be intolerant of intolerance."
That last last phrase could be considered the slogan of the Liberal Fascists. "We must be intolerant of intolerance." It sounds tough but decent. But what is the reality behind that soundbite?
It is Paxman saying to Bell that, at these faith schools, children are taught their religion and when they go home they have more of the same religion. He declared, outraged, "they are being brainwashed." In view of this "brainwashing", he wanted such schools to be closed down. Yes, that is the real agenda. Mr Bell, Mr Paxman and the government which created legislation of these new "citizenship" classes, want to close down schools which do not teach their own values and approach to life. They demand that children should be brainwashed, instead, with their own beliefs. This is liberal fascism.
There was a hint in his speech that Mr Bell thinks all pupils should be taught to think of themselves as 'European' and to think in terms of 'social inclusion' and multi-culturalism. In other words, they should be taught the beliefs - some of them clearly political - of himself and his companions in the ruling elite. This is liberal fascism.
I have visited one of the schools which Messer Bell and Paxman and the liberal elite at the top of the Labour Party would like to close. It was one where relatively poor people make really major sacrifices to enable their children to be brought up behaving decently instead of like some of the urban savages that are raised in state sink schools. That is, above all, what they are about. The school I visited is teaching what I would call 'good citizenship' in a way that most state schools totally fail to do. It is outrageous that Messrs Bell and Paxman should want to close down schools that are far better than the ones these liberal fascists espouse. How dare they flatter themselves that they are tolerant. They are bullies who want their own views to be taught, by force, to everyone else. They are enemies of what used to be good about British culture and civilisation.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Education
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