IT WAS a pity that Suella Braverman could not attend the Family Education Trust conference in London at the weekend. The former Conservative Attorney General, Home Secretary and recent defector to Reform UK was forced to cancel at the eleventh hour when yet another pro-Palestine march was routed directly past the Army and Navy Club – ‘The Rag’ – on Pall Mall when she was due to speak.
Ms Braverman spoke to delegates by video link instead, explaining how her ‘security team’ had advised her against attending. ‘My work has involved me getting serious death threats and people getting prosecuted for going a little bit crazy in their reactions to me,’ she said. ‘So I am very sorry I am not there in person with you.’
One wonders, however, what sort of security advice Ms Braverman might have received if she had been booked to speak close to the huge Unite the Kingdom rally, a peaceful event attended by tens of thousands of people who were slandered by the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history as peddlers of hatred and division. Certainly, Ms Braverman rejected Sir Keir Starmer’s analysis. The real ‘hate’ march, she said, was before the very doors of The Rag where speakers screamed to the crowd about whom they should ‘fight’ over the constant bellicose drum beats of an army on the move.
‘Just outside where you are we are seeing two-tier policing,’ Ms Braverman told delegates. ‘We are seeing the Met Police putting out guidance last night about offensive language and, you know, hurt feelings but they wouldn’t do that for any of the hundreds of hate marches which have been anti-Semitic in nature and very offensive, I would say, to many of us, Jewish or not.’
Moving on to her speech as the education spokeswoman for Reform, she announced her intention to end the highly ‘corrosive culture taking over our schools and institutions and conning our children’.
‘I am getting increasingly horrified by the reports I get almost on a daily basis about indoctrination of children – there is no other way of putting it – in our schools . . . millions of parents have a growing sense of despair in the pits of their stomachs because something is badly wrong.
‘Parents are treated as trouble-makers but they are not the problem. Parents have every right to ask what is happening in their children’s classroom . . . Who gets to educate our children? Parents or activists? Families or bureaucracies? Communities or campaign groups? Too many schools are drifting far away from the purpose of education and toward activism. Childhood itself is being politicised. It is indoctrination, pure and simple, and it’s against the law.’
The prohibitions against political indoctrination, she explained, are included under sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Education Act, but have been legally tested only once and on that occasion they failed.
If elected, Reform UK will amend the law to make such sections readily enforceable with an explicit obligation on local authorities to act. The Education Secretary would be granted powers to intervene punitively in cases where such obligations went unfulfilled. There would also be total transparency of resources used in lessons, and third party outsourcing to activist groups would be forbidden unless strict criteria were met, including parental consent.
If Ms Braverman is true to her word, she will do much to curtail to the lurid sex education of the pornographers and the abortion industry which at present have free rein. There would be an end to lessons ideologically promoting open borders and mass migration, and the activities of extremist eco-cults like Extinction Rebellion which are operating in schools without question or impunity. Schools would be prohibited from such activities as celebrating ‘Pride Month’ (described in the Gregorian Calendar as June), creating ‘LGBT+ library corners’, and from preaching transsexualism and the many other proliferating DEI ideologies to children before they can even read or write. There would be a patriotic curriculum, with schools no longer free to cancel Easter and Christmas, or attack concerned parents, dismiss and silence dissenting teachers or ostracise children like Courtney Wright who resist their propaganda to reveal that they love their country, its history, achievements and culture, as she explains here:
The frustration Ms Braverman feels for the Conservative Party for failing to halt such indoctrination over 14 years in office was palpable. She identified the Tories as not just shiftless, but utterly culpable in the ideological capture of grass roots institutions, as TCW has reported here, here and here.
Ms Braverman boasted she was the first Minister in the Tory Cabinet to object to such radical policies at the time of their introduction, adding: ‘I’m afraid my Conservative ministerial colleagues did not support me. That’s why we got into this crisis.’
The Conservative governments of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak did nothing in fact to roll back the revolutionary legislation of the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, perhaps proving the truth of G K Chesterton’s observation that ‘the business of progressives is to go on making mistakes [and] the business of the conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected’.
According to Ms Braverman, Reform will break that cycle crucially by repealing the 2010 Equality Act. She believes this law at the heart of much of the chaos not only in schools but in all British institutions, largely because it creates the sort of fake ‘equality’ delineated by George Orwell in Animal Farm where ‘all animals are equal but some are more equal than others’.
‘We are going back to a pre-2010 legal position where people are judged on their character, on their talent and on their ability,’ she told the conference. ‘The notion of protected characteristics has been very damaging. It has put labels on all of us. It has divided all of us. It makes us search for the victimhood rather than take responsibility.
‘We are not going to divide people into blocks and encourage them to find grievance based on their personal characteristics. I wholly object to that notion and doctrine which is right through the Equality Act.’
Starmer has said her proposals are ‘shocking’, but given the mood of the country, that won’t hurt her a bit.
