More people need to become 'issues'

Both Labour and the Conservatives are determined to politicise every aspect of our lives

Since schools reopened following lockdown, concern has been raised about the large numbers of pupils missing from the classroom. But there is little consensus as to why children should be in schools. Almost no one makes the case for education.

One rare exception is Michaela Community School in London. Many pupils come from disadvantaged homes but perform well in national examinations. Yet headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh was forced to spend last week in court defending her school’s decision to ban prayer rituals.

As I wrote on Spiked, what’s at stake is far bigger than one child’s right to pray. Primarily, this important case raises the question of adult authority. Who is in charge of a school? Is it the teachers, the pupils or politically-motivated outsiders? It begs the question: what is the purpose of a school.

Birbalsingh is absolutely right to insist that school is ‘a place where children of all races and religions buy into something they all share and that is bigger than themselves: our country’.

Michaela imposed the prayer ban in order to maximise social cohesion. It wants to avoid pupils segregating themselves into religious groups. It wants pupils to see themselves as members of the same community, with a common identity and goals.

Michaela’s focus has always been on integration. At lunchtime, the school canteen serves only vegetarian food, so all faiths can eat together. The unity of the school community is elevated above the feelings of any one group. As Birbalsingh points out, this means everyone makes compromises. Christian families put up with revision classes on a Sunday. Pupils who are Jehovah’s Witnesses must study Macbeth alongside other students (they are usually forbidden from reading texts that feature magic).

In this way, the school becomes an important buffer against an outside world divided by cultural and religious identities. Inside, children can follow their intellectual and creative interests free from the pressures to conform to group demands. At Michaela, children are pupils first and members of religious and racial communities second.

Clearly, no child has the wherewithal to take a legal case to the High Court. They have been backed by politically-motivated adults determined to challenge a successful school that privileges British values and places education above identity. The attack on Michaela is yet another reminder that schools have become a key battleground in the culture war.

But we need to be absolutely clear: it is not Birbalsingh’s decision to ban prayer rituals that turns schools into a political minefield - it is the adults outside the school who are encouraging children to see themselves as identitarian activists.

Unfortunately for Birbalsingh, the case against Michaela can be brought because the Conservative government has either implemented, or left in place, a legislative mess that privileges some protected identities over others. Schools are expected to negotiate the competing claims of individual pupils - say for their gender identity or religious beliefs to be respected - against the greater good of the entire school community. And, to make matters worse, when, like Birbalsingh, they put the school community and national identity above individuals and group identity, they then find themselves accused of waging a culture war.

This illustrates why Keir Starmer could not have been more wrong in a speech he gave this week accusing the Conservatives of stoking up culture wars for political gain. Starmer said:

In its desperation to cling on to power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.

This suggests that civic institutions, such as schools, are politically neutral and it is Tory meddling that causes problems. But, in reality, the Conservative government has either avoided taking sides and, by sitting back, allowed activists to set the agenda, or, been responsible for introducing woke policies and practices. In schools, for example, the Conservative government has allowed lessons on sexuality and gender identity to flourish.

Interestingly, Starmer has nothing to say about practices that take institutions away from their core purpose. According to him, it is not activists who want to decolonise museums who are waging a culture war but those who want to defend a more traditional approach. By the same token, it is not the pupils, backed by lawyers, who insist on praying at school who are waging a culture war but the headteacher who wants to retain a more secular ethos.

The Conservative Party deserves criticism for not engaging more in cultural issues. And Starmer reminds us that, under a Labour government, no area of life will be free from woke hectoring.

The failure of both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party to defend British values or even basic scientific facts means that time and time again it is falls to brave individuals to stick their heads above the parapet. Katharine Birbalsingh is awaiting the outcome of her school’s court case. Professor Jo Pheonix won her case for unfair dismissal against the Open University this week but has spoken out about the huge personal toll this has taken upon her.

Friend of Cieo, Dan Waugh, recently discovered that the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling had labelled him ‘an issue’ for raising questions about the quality of evidence in a Public Health England report on the economic and social cost of gambling harms that was being used to justify the introduction of a gambling levy.

Recently, I made the curious discovery that I am an “issue”. Now, I have been called many things in my time – some not fit to print - but never before have I been labelled an ‘issue’. It is the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling (‘ABSG’) that I have to thank for addressing this gap in my CV – a body that provides advice to the Gambling Commission and, as I have discovered, indulges in conspiracy theories about Big Oil and little old me.

I first learned about “the Dan Waugh issue” – couched amid more general disparagements of my character - when I was granted access to a set of heavily redacted ‘informal notes’ from meetings of the ABSG. The advisory board had taken exception to a critique that I had co-authored on a Public Health England (‘PHE’) report on ‘the economic and social cost of [gambling] harms’ (addressed in previous articles on Cieo).

The PHE report estimated ‘the annual economic burden of harmful gambling to be about £1.27 billion’ – a figure underpinned by its speculation that there were 409 deaths by suicide ‘associated with problem gambling only’ in 2019. The ABSG described this claim as a ‘catalyst towards action’, but initially failed to subject it to critical analysis. Had it done so, it would have realised that PHE’s analysis was undermined by factual errors, mathematical mistakes and questionable calculations. For this reason, I wrote to the board, asking for a meeting to discuss my concerns; but was rebuffed on the grounds that my views were ‘already in the public domain’ - a curious basis for indifference.

Engagement with others proved at least a little more fruitful. The Gambling Commission admitted that it did not understand PHE’s calculations (later, it would describe them as not being based on reliable data) and a small number of MPs and peers took an interest, taking up the matter with the government through parliamentary questions. In this way, I came once again to the attention of the ABSG, whose members took exception to this scrutiny of PHE claims; and likened it to the suppression by Big Oil of research on climate change.

To successfully challenge politicised regulatory bodies, institutions and legislation, we need far more people to become ‘an issue’.