Education Secretary Michael Gove is upset, and Home Secretary Theresa May is upset he’s upset.
Apparently Islamic ideology has been imposed on Birmingham schools, turning them effectively into breeding grounds for fanatics, with bright if short-lived career prospects in suicide terrorism.
An investigation by Ofsted found that, rather than being an organic development, this was part of a concerted campaign by Muslims to change “the character and ethos” of our schools.
As a result, some publicly financed state schools cancel Christmas celebrations and nativity plays, while some others broadcast a Muslim call to prayers on their loudspeakers. In all such schools, Muslim girls must wear the traditional Halloween garb even when it’s not Halloween, sit in the back of the classroom and keep their mouths shut.
This, says Mr Gove, isn’t good enough: “We will put the promotion of British values at the heart of what every school has to deliver for children. What we have found was unacceptable. And we will put it right.”
So far so good, as a man said falling down past a 10th floor window. The question is, British values as defined by whom and on what criteria?
If Britain were still a sovereign realm, this question, though still valid, could be answered easily enough. But since our laws are superseded by those imposed by the European Court of Human Rights, just about any reasonable answer would be deemed unacceptable.
Both government officials and educators have tried to define Britishness so as not to offend anyone in Brussels and Strasbourg. Part of being British, they explain, is tolerance to those of other faiths. This is stipulated by British law, and going against it means discrimination.
In other words, all religions, including Christianity, must enjoy equal treatment under law and therefore at schools. Sounds reasonable but, at the risk of being regarded as a fossilised bigot, I’d suggest that such even-handedness is what got us in trouble in the first place.
For many years now, our schools have treated Christianity as at best one of the five major religions, no better or worse than any other. This has been reflected in the amount of time allocated to the study of various creeds. Two periods for Islam, two for Buddhism, two for animism (I’m guessing here) two for Christianity and so forth.
This not so much confirms as denies what it means to be British. Our realm is constituted along strictly Christian lines, as anyone can ascertain by looking up the text of the Queen’s coronation oath. More recently, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (aka William and Kate) married in a church ceremony, as they had to by law.
Stepping outside politics, British culture is specifically Christian, as are British pre-EU laws that can all be traced to the two Testaments of the Christian canon.
In other words, Britain is, if only residually, a Christian country. Giving Christianity equal time – at best! – thus constitutes an act of cultural and constitutional sabotage.
Therefore Christianity, in its religious, cultural, social and political manifestations, should be the only religion studied at British schools, and every school day ought to start with the Lord’s prayer. The odd period or two may be devoted to an overview of other faiths, but not to the detriment of the educational focus on British tradition.
Children of other faiths may be exempt from the prayer if they so wish, but not from the academic study of Western religious and cultural heritage. Should they or their parents deem it necessary for them to delve deeper into other faiths as well, they should do so at Sunday schools, or whatever they call them.
This doesn’t mean intolerance to other creeds or lack of respect for them. On the contrary, pupils must be taught equity, fairness and tolerance. Britain is, or rather used to be, a free country and denying other people’s freedoms is tantamount to denying our own.
But tolerance isn’t a suicide pact – by all means, let’s respect other religions, but not at the expense of letting them destroy our own, imposing in the process values that aren’t just different from ours but actively hostile to them.
I’m not so naïve as to imagine that anything I suggest could possibly happen even if HMG were so bold as to propose measures in this vein. The European Court of Human Rights would throw them out faster than you can say multiculturalism.
Even the timid, largely meaningless palliatives mooted by Mr Gove are regarded as wildly controversial. Teach pupils to be British? What on earth does he mean?
For example, in a typically ignorant statement, former Labour home secretary Jack Straw said: “It’s crucial that if we are to get the overwhelming majority of members of the Muslim faith on board that we draw a distinction between those who are devout and embrace British values as well, and those who are extreme.”
A devout Muslim, Mr Straw, can’t ‘embrace British values’ while remaining a devout Muslim. He has to sin either against Britishness or against Islam.
Such standard Muslim practices as the stoning of adulterers and the murder of infidels, for example, would be hard to reconcile with the English Common Law. Yet there are 107 verses to that effect in the Koran, and these diktats are widely enforced not only in most Muslim countries but also in the self-created Islamic ghettos mushrooming all over Europe.
What we are witnessing today isn’t just a Muslim plot to take over Birmingham schools but a pan-European drive to expunge Western tradition, knocking the cornerstone out of the edifice of what used to be called Christendom.
This is a sine qua non for the success of the European ‘project’ to which we’re all supposed to have subscribed, a morass into which we’re being sucked deeper and deeper.
It would take a national government brimming with moral integrity, intellectual rigour and stern courage to put up any meaningful resistance. If you think that any Western country, emphatically including our own, is blessed with such a government, there’s a bridge across the Thames I’d like to sell you.