Cynical, wrong-headed and dangerous.
Ed Balls is a show-boat whose efforts to play the BNP card earlier today are cynical, wrong-headed and dangerous.
He has appointed former Chief Inspector Maurice Smithe to run an investigation into the merits of a ban on BNP members becoming teachers.
We believe that using the full force of the State in the workplace like this smacks of the kind of totalitarianism espoused by the BNP.
It is an erosion of our right to freedom of expression that cuts across the spirit of our unwritten constitution. Most people who see this will worry that, “today it is the BNP, but tomorrow it could be me”. And what ab0ut members of groups that espouse terrorism, vilify homosexuality, or sanction wife-beating? Are they to be banned too?
We think that Balls’s intemperate rhetoric at a party political function dangerously helps the BNP rally its own recruits with a narrative about an over-mighty state only too happy to prosecute racists, “so long as they’re white”.
Ed Balls is out-of-date and undemocratic to imply by association that everyone connected with the BNP is a racist. That group includes 947,000 voters, many of whom come from Labour’s heartland.
Of course, it is imperative that school kids are protected from racist brain-washing, overt or subliminal. Teachers must respect the honour of their profession and the authorities must not be complacent. That is why the teaching profession is already protected by a number of measures, including a requirement for schools to have equal opportunities policies, a duty to promote racial equality, a statutory duty to promote community cohesion, a duty on governing bodies, head teachers and local authorities to forbid the teaching of partisan political activities, and the disciplinary powers of the GTCE.
Where problems have arisen, these are implemented with vigour. For example, Adam Walker, a BNP activist, currently faces a General Teaching Council tribunal for allegedly using a school computer for inappropriate reasons. Despite Balls’s cynical implication, there is no new evidence that there is a BNP problem in our class-rooms.
The irony is that the BNP have flourished under this Labour government. They have exploited the bona fide concerns of British voters on key issues like job displacement, immigration, Islamism and now, the economy. Many of Balls’s Labour colleagues are bravely adapting to the new challenge by reviewing “no platform” policies and preparing to address these concerns head on. He, instead, is retreating to the failed, inflammatory tactics of legislation and regulation which will only create more resentment amongst the dispossessed, more martyrs amongst Griffin’s rag-tag army and take Britain a step closer to a police state.
It is one thing for Trade Unionists and anti-fascist groups to fly kites about oppressive legal remedies against their opponents. But it is quite another for a Secretary of State and potential candidate for the highest office of the land to exacerbate the problem with this sort of grand-standing.