IT HAS come to light that a British politics teacher was referred to Prevent, the government’s counter-terrorism programme, after showing his A-level class videos of Donald Trump in late 2024 and early 2025.
The teacher, who is in his 50s, told the Daily Telegraph he was ‘likened to a terrorist’ when ‘safeguarding officials’ sought his referral.
Henley College in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, with more than 2,000 students, reported the lecturer to the local child safeguarding authority, which then made the referral to Prevent as a ‘priority’.
Safeguarding, as I argued in these pages just a few weeks ago, has become another word for tyranny. British authorities are abusing ’safeguarding’ powers, originally designed to stop sexual predators, to punish people for holding the wrong political views, while ignoring overtly partisan teaching so long as it aligns with the approved ideology. The last case I reported concerned a teacher dismissed for reprimanding Muslim children who had been washing their feet in the school’s sinks.
Now we have a new, almost parodic, case study. What was the veteran politics teacher doing? Giving extremist sermons? Jihadi propaganda? Inciting violence? No, none of these. His alleged offence was showing several Trump-supporter videos during lessons on US politics and propaganda — alongside equivalents featuring Kamala Harris. Reportedly two students complained that his teaching was ‘biased’ and ‘off topic’. One snowflake said one of the videos induced ‘quite uncomfortable’ feelings. That was enough for Henley College to refer the matter to the Local Authority Designated Officer.
In documents seen by the Telegraph, officials suggested that showing Trump-supporter videos could amount to ‘emotional harm’, might constitute a ‘hate crime’, and raised concerns about ‘radicalisation’. Let that sink in. A teacher discussing a US election with 17- and 18-year-olds is treated as a potential extremist, while schools that bus children to Labour Party conferences, or label supporters of Reform, Britain’s largest and most popular party, as ‘fascists’, or allow pupils to skip school to go on climate protests, face no safeguarding scrutiny at all. Such overtly partisan and uncritical teaching and indeed straight indoctrination in our schools and universities goes unpunished provided it aligns with the approved ideology. Prevent is nowhere to be seen.
The teacher, who wishes to remain anonymous, puts it plainly: ‘They likened me to a terrorist. It was completely jarring. It’s dystopian — like something from a George Orwell novel.’
That comparison is not hyperbole. Prevent is explicitly a counter-terrorism programme. It is supposed to intervene where there are signs of violent radicalisation. Yet here it was deployed against a teacher who aired the views of supporters of a democratically-elected president as well as his opponent.* The teacher says the school does not ‘tolerate anything about Donald Trump’ because of a ‘complete left-wing bias’.
A spokesman for Henley College, which attracts students from Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, said: ‘We are committed to safeguarding the wellbeing of all our students and staff, and follow statutory safeguarding procedures in line with Keeping Children Safe in Education 2025.’
Except that, as per above, schools don’t follow statutory guidelines against partisan teaching. Yet they do bend statutory guidelines for safeguarding to censor views they don’t like.
As with the cases I have reported previously, the charge of ‘emotional harm’ does the heavy lifting. Emotional harm is undefined, unmeasured, subjective and infinitely elastic. It requires no criminal standard of proof. It allows officials with no legal training to act as moral arbiters, political commissars and judge-jury-executioners. Their verdicts are practically impossible to challenge without ludicrously expensive civil action.
In this case, the outcome was predictable. After half a year of investigation, stress and formal accusations of misconduct, the teacher was forced out of his job. After the Free Speech Union’s intervention, he accepted a £2,000 settlement — loose change against a £44,000 salary. He now works as a supply teacher. Safeguarding rulings are cheap to impose and ruinously expensive to resist. The case fits perfectly into the pattern already established:
· Teachers are punished for saying Britain is a Christian country — but not for telling pupils that the English flag is a far-right symbol:
· Fathers are barred from seeing their children on the basis of untested allegations — but schools face no sanction for disobeying statutory guidelines against partisan teaching;
· Airing American support for Donald Trump triggers Prevent referrals — but Labour Party leafleting trips for primary school pupils pass without investigation.
Safeguarding is not being applied neutrally. It is being used selectively, asymmetrically, and ideologically.
As the Free Speech Union has repeatedly argued — and as Toby Young put it regardind this case —there is now ‘a clear-cut case of safeguarding protocols weaponised to silence someone for political reasons’.
As with the earlier cases, the damage goes far beyond one individual. Every educator watching this case will absorb the lesson: avoid unapproved politics — or risk your career, your mental health, and your ability to work with children. Meanwhile those who preach the approved worldview, however partisan, however distorted, are tolerated and protected. This is not safeguarding children. It is safeguarding ideology.
* Editor’s note: No reader of TCW should be surprised. Last year our website was branded as a far right influencer at an Essex County Council Prevent training session, Councillor Neil Gregory told us. Writing to Kemi Badenoch (who chose not to make it a cause celebre), he reported that political activist groups such as Antifa and Just Stop Oil did not seem to be thought of as a comparative ‘threat’ by ECC.
