There is no time for hopeful New Year’s resolutions, nor for a pithy, fun introduction to this article. That is because the Labour Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is planning a war on Britain’s children. Its aim is to poison and brainwash the minds of British youth. It will also make them less well-educated and less prepared to face the world in 2025 and beyond. 

We must resist this, and that starts by calling it what it is: evil.

You may think this is hyperbole, trotted out after too much festive frivolity. But allow me to make my case, and to call for you to join me on the barricades.

The most obvious and egregious front of Phillipson’s war is her “review” of Britain’s curriculum. The terms of reference for the Department for Education’s review will explicitly call for a curriculum that reflects the “diversities of our society” and help produce young people who “appreciate the diversity” of Britain. In other words, old dead boring white men will be replaced with ahistorical teachings that are meant to align young people with the false but modish trends that have already had too much power in Britain today. 

Just as the tide of woke is receding in its place of birth, the USA, British kids will be forced to lap up more of it here.

This will, according to the Telegraph, include “decolonising subjects which have been branded too “mono-cultural”. The review is being led by an academic who criticised the Blair years for being obsessed with academic attainment. 

Well, I went to a state school in the Blair years. When the lad who said he heard voices wasn’t stealing hammers from Design and Technology and attacking other pupils, I learned more about Rosa Parks, Leon Trotsky, and the Prophet Mohammed than I did about Churchill, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Christ or indeed anything about British or English history that wasn’t Henry VIII. 

Talking to a young school-attending family member at Christmas, it already sounds like it is much more diverse already. I’m not sure how much more decolonised the curriculum it could get unless it consisted entirely of the works of Frantz Fanon.

Some of this might be understandable if our schools were in a parlous state already. But the Tories bequeathed a system where English children were the best at maths and English in the Western world. Yes, there was far too much wokery and meddling from the usual suspects, but educational achievement, and the economic, cultural and societal (not to mention individual) benefits that flow from that will be enjoyed for years to come.

For every mad issue we would face … many more would come

When I was a Special Adviser in the Education department in the Boris years, we faced lobbying by every group imaginable who wanted their pet project to be included on the curriculum. Some of these were worthy — many were not. The response we would always give, and would have to consider ourselves, was what would the topic under consideration replace? 

For every mad issue we would face – from major ones like stopping schools from shutting down during omicron, to the small but meaningful ones like making sure that the Queen’s jubilee book used BC/AD not BCE/CE — many more would come. Ten Tories in the DfE could only do so much under the current system to hold back the tide of horrors generated by the educational blob, both outside and inside the department.

That was under a Conservative administration. We few ministers and SpAds spent much of our time trying to stop woke leftie things happening. Frequently, we would fail. I accept my own share of the blame for this, though I often wonder how much more nonsense would have happened were it not for the efforts of some excellent Tory educationalists. 

Under our old boss Nadhim Zahawi, these included people like headteacher Mark Lehain, Policy Exchange’s Iain Mansfield and Tom Kennedy, charity boss David Thomas and now-MP Patrick Spencer. They held back that tide of horror, as many more did before and after. 

This rearguard action meant that there was much less time to focus on pushing a  positive conservative agenda. But without those catchers in the rye, and with a crazed ideologue in Phillipson, it’s no wonder things are about to turn truly dystopian for Britain’s kids.

Beyond the curriculum “review” (as if we don’t already know exactly what nonsense it will recommend), Phillipson is determined to attack our education system on multiple other fronts.

There are the disgraceful punitive attacks on those who have scrimped and saved to send their child to a private school, whose efforts are punished with a new tax. We know that this will disproportionately hurt children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities whilst barely affecting Eton. Bridget Phillipson doesn’t care.

Or the scrapping of funding for the Latin GCSE in state schools midway through a year, hurting those few kids who dared to think they were allowed to rise above their station (and messing up their A-level chances). Bridget Phillipson doesn’t care.

Nor the removal of freedom for academies in how they teach, leading to greater parental choice and better results. Bridget Phillipson doesn’t care.

Nor the cancelling of the Free Speech Act that would help students and scholars alike at British universities have redress against the cloying cancel culture that is ruining higher education. Bridget Phillipson doesn’t care about that either.

Whilst people are (rightly) horrified by Rachel Reeves crashing the economy, Ed Miliband’s attempts to take us back to the stone age, or city Steve Reed trying to kill off family farmers, Bridget Phillipson is the single biggest threat to Britain in 2025. Behind that benign façade, is a mind full of spite and hatred for Britain and its traditions. 

She wants to use your children to tear it down, and sacrifice their futures on the altar of the trade unions and loony left activists to succeed Starmer when his failures bring him down in the next few years. She must fail.

P.S. For those who care about children receiving a proper education, please get in touch with me; I have an idea for exactly this for the new year that I would love some support on!