Questioning

If you’re following me on Bluesky, you’ll have at least a rough idea of my political views.  I mean, I’m an LGBTQ+ blogger working in the public sector so I’d have to be pretty masochistic to be a Tory, but if you hadn’t figured that out yourself then my posts and reposts would soon convince you of my lefty tendencies.  Being anonymous means that I don’t have to faff around with that “all views my own” nonsense and I must admit that I’ve found that quite liberating.

In the classroom, on the other hand, I believe strongly in remaining politically neutral, not just for professional reasons (i.e. the DfE tells me I have to) but also from a moral standpoint: teenagers should, in my view, have the space to explore the world around them and come to their own conclusions about it.  This is leaving aside the fact that despite the right-wing press’s conspiracy theories, teenagers aren’t all that brainwashable, or at least not by their teachers anyway.  We’re the ones that make them do all that horrible learning – even if we were trying to turn them into Marxists, why on earth would they listen to us?  We can only just about persuade them to do their ties up properly.

At the most recent election, though, I realised that my classroom principles of political neutrality were being tested when one of my Year 9s started to quiz me about who I was voting for.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” I said.

“Are you voting for Reform, sir?”

“No,” I said before I could stop myself, “I’m bloody well not.”

For those of you unfamiliar with UK politics, Reform were formerly known as The Brexit Party and are led by gurning Trump sycophant Nigel Farage.  It occurred to me as I was saying it, and from the surprised look on some of their faces, that there was a good chance that Reform were exactly who these kids’ parents were voting for.  I braced myself for complaints, but thankfully none came.

I did ask myself, though, after having denounced Reform almost instinctively, at what point along the moral spectrum do we as teachers draw the line?  Nigel Farage’s views, despite all his attempts to dress them up, stand in complete contrast to much of what we teach our pupils: the man is a racist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, a transphobe and an all-round-not-hyperbole-but-a-dictionary-definition-of-the-word fascist. 

To be fair, the DfE states that “You should always take a reasonable and proportionate approach to political impartiality. This should not interfere with effective teaching and meeting other responsibilities, including promoting shared principles that underpin our society such as tolerance and respect.”   It goes onto say that “You should also continue to challenge misinformation and extreme views, such as those based on discrimination and prejudice.”  This would appear to give reasonable grounds to, at the very least, question the likes of Farage.  Which would be fine, but Farage wasn’t the only bigot standing at the last election.

Last October, at the Conservative Party conference, Rishi Sunak stood before his party and announced, “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman. That’s just common sense.”  I’ve just copied and pasted those words and read them back to myself and they still enrage me, even a year later.  There is no way I can go into my school, where I run my LGBTQ+ group and do my best to support the trans kids that are in our care, and try to “both sides” an argument like that – which presumably I’m meant to, given that they were spoken by the actual prime minister of this country.

The UK has been getting itself into a horrible mess about trans rights for a few years now, with transphobic views now frequently masquerading as feminism even on the left.  The Labour Party offered to talk to JK Rowling (“she who has been radicalised”, as I saw someone on social media describe her recently) to listen to her “concerns” before the election, with Secretary of State Wes Streeting, among others, seeming to have followed her directly down the gender-critical rabbit hole.  Who decides that this isn’t an “extreme view” or “misinformation”?

I’ve written about Section 28 and the effect it had on me as a pupil, and I’m not just worried about the possibility of a Section 28-esque law against trans people, I’m not entirely sure we’re not already living under one.  After Brexit and the ever-rightward stretching of the Overton window that followed, how are teachers going to be able to be able to balance the duty of care they have towards some of their most vulnerable pupils while maintaining a political impartiality that accepts the right to misgender them and even deny their existence?