Why is the Government so bad at fighting the culture war?

Last week the Government released new guidance on political impartiality in schools. It was briefed to the right-wing media as an “anti-woke” measure. The Telegraph dutifully announced that schools would be “forbidden from promoting Black Lives Matter to children”; The Times told us that teachers would have to “avoid using material from campaigning organisations…like Stonewall, that may have partisan political views.” It was implied that history teachers would no longer be able to use lesson plans such as “Churchill: hero or war criminal” that highlighted the controversies around him.

There followed the predictable twitter reaction suggesting this was an outrageous assault on truth and freedom. But the guidance itself it utterly anodyne. It mostly just restates existing law around impartiality. It doesn’t mention Stonewall at all. In one example it specifically says schools can teach about Black Lives Matters, and should reinforce the view that racism is unacceptable, but that teachers need to be careful about associated political views like withdrawing funding from the police. There is no mention of Churchill, just a vague reference advising primary teachers to be careful about young children’s understanding of controversies. Moreover, the document gives both prejudice against gay people and climate change as examples of topics which are not politically partisan and should be taught as fact. If you gave this document to a Republican school board in the States they’d condemn it as borderline Communist.[1]

Last week also saw Tory party Chair Oliver Dowden deliver a comically bad speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. It reads like a young adviser had frantically cobbled together random lines from the Daily Mail comments section. (To give a flavour apparently “woke warriors [unspecified]…are engaged in a form of Maoism determined to expunge large parts of our past in its entirety.”) It contained no policy suggestions. It did claim the government has made it illegal for schools to teach “white privilege” as “though it were undisputed fact”, but it hasn’t. The term isn’t even mentioned in the guidance to schools which, in any case, has no legal force.