Safeguarding – another word for tyranny
BRUCE NEWSOME
AUTHORITIES are abusing ‘safeguarding’ powers designed to prevent sexual predators accessing children to punish individuals with politically incorrect views. Meanwhile, the same authorities protect teachers who flout the law against partisan teaching.
The latest scandal goes something like this. In November, a primary school in London dismissed a teacher who admonished three Muslim children for washing their feet in sinks. When one child claimed the practice was justified as a ritual before prayer, the teacher responded that this is not a faith school and that ‘Britain is still a Christian state’.
The facts of the case are second-hand, because the teacher wishes to remain anonymous. He has engaged the Free Speech Union to help to sue the local authority.
The FSU says the process began with a complaint from a parent governor. The school invited three children to submit written statements. These were examined by the headteacher, the local safeguarding officer, two social workers, and a detective from the child abuse team of the Metropolitan Police. The school suspended and eventually dismissed the teacher.
The safeguarding officer concluded that the teacher had caused emotional harm, justifying a ban on working with children, although the ban was later overturned.
The investigators seem to have treated the statement about our Christian country as the severest issue. Lord Toby Young, founder of the FSU, said: ‘Things have reached a pretty pass in this country if a teacher can be branded a safeguarding risk because he says something that’s incontestably true.’
Young says that the FSU counts ‘15 people on our books who’ve been branded a risk to children because of their political views’.
One of them is Jamie Michael. In February, he was prosecuted for inciting racial hatred via a video he posted on Facebook in July 2024. The video complains about unvetted immigration, Islamists and ‘radicalised idiots,’ but does not incite anyone: so says his lawyer and the jury at Merthyr Crown Court, which took just 17 minutes to acquit him.
Months later a local safeguarding board ruled Michael ‘not suitable’ to work with children. Then the Football Association of Wales banned him from coaching his daughter’s football team – or any children. His Facebook video is the only apparent cause. No other complaint has been made against Michael. He had passed all background checks. He is a decorated Royal Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Safeguarding rulings are easy to make but expensive to overturn. They are usually made by persons with no training, qualifications or accreditation in law or childcare, except their employment by a school, or youth group or sports administration. These rulings are usually made at the most micro level, with unclear chains of accountability. Sometimes, they are made without any interaction with the victim and without any defined process or consultation with higher authorities.
Opaque decisions and unclear accountability are almost impossible to challenge. Letters to local authorities are routinely ignored. Letters to Members of Parliament or Ministers will provoke the usual irresponsibility about ‘independent’ authorities.
The victim’s final recourse is civil litigation, which is horrendously risky in Britain, given the high bar for proving harm and the low prospect of compensation.
With the FSU’s support, Jamie Michael is crowdfunding a legal challenge to overturn the decision by the Football Association of Wales. (To donate, please click here.)
Michael has the FSU’s support because it sees a political motive behind the ban. Safeguarding is also being used to punish people with unclear politics, although the punishment is still political.
Take the alacrity with which courts, schools, and sports authorities stop fathers accessing their children when mothers claim that fathers are abusive. As I have reported here, in family courts (and schools and sports organisations) a claim of abuse does not need to reach the burden of proof normal in criminal courts, i.e. beyond reasonable doubt. Claims by women are routinely treated as facts. Claims by men are routinely ignored.
I learned of one case recently where a man received a letter from his county’s cricket authority telling him not to attend any more matches in which his son plays (for the county side), because of a safeguarding concern filed by the boy’s mother. That organisation refuses to disclose the concern. The victim doesn’t have the resources to sue the organisation.
How many men are in the same position? Nobody is counting. But when I interview fathers about their experience of family disputes, most report being victims of false safeguarding concerns.
Mothers too can be abused by safeguarding concerns, if they express the wrong politics. Lucy Connolly, jailed in October 2024 for inciting racial hatred through a tweet that did not incite anyone (although it expressed indifference if asylum centres burned down), says that her daughter was banned from a new school after the head teacher identified her politics.
Meanwhile, teachers get away with pushing woke politics despite laws against partisan teaching.
In October, a concerned parent leaked PowerPoint slides used by teachers at a chain of academies in England owned by Orion Education. One slide plots Reform UK, the most popular party in Britain, as the most right-wing party, just to the left of ‘fascists’. The slides state that some Reform members ‘have extremist views’.
Further slides warn that newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Sun ‘often publish dramatic headlines about immigration, especially about “small-boat crossings” in the English Channel . . . This type of reporting can make people feel afraid or angry, which far-right groups then use to support their arguments.’
The pupils are instructed to use ‘trusted sites’ such as the BBC and the Guardian instead of the Sun, random blogs or YouTube channels.
I contacted Orion Education to ask if it had adjusted any policy in response to the leak. It never answered. I asked the same of Kent County Council, which also never answered.
Other slides from Orion Education state that ‘critics’ characterise England’s flag as a ‘provocative and exclusionary symbol used by far-right groups to intimidate immigrants and minorities’.
In September a teacher was recorded saying something similar to teenagers at Broadoak School in Partington, Greater Manchester. She said she has been countering protests against asylum hotels, where she saw her opponents ‘using Nazi salutes and throwing very racist abuse towards the people inside’ and using British flags to express racism and to intimidate. (She reassured students that she doesn’t think British flags are ‘inherently racist’.) When a parent went to complain, the school called the police, who detained him for eight hours on suspicion of a public order offence until he was released without charge.
Days later, the school apologised to parents for the ‘upset’ and promised an investigation.
Don’t go thinking that the school saw sense.
At the time, the school blamed parental ‘upset’ on a perception of the school’s failure to be ‘balanced and impartial’. The school did not admit the perception as fact.
Almost three months later, no investigation has been published. I telephoned the school, whose receptionist initially claimed: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ When reminded a second time, she interrupted me: ‘I’m not going to discuss it, because obviously we have no students here, so, see you later.’ She hung up.
I called the Dean Trust, which administers Broadoak and ten other schools. It did not answer or return my calls. I contacted Trafford Council, which did not get back to me. Manchester City Council referred me to Trafford Council.
Meanwhile, also in late September, ten primary schools took about 100 minors to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool to distribute leaflets at the behest of the National Education Union. (The NEU is lobbying for school meals to be provided to all pupils, beyond Keir Starmer’s extension of the entitlement to all recipients of universal credit.) The deputy headteacher at Whitefield Community Primary School, Marie Beale, claimed she was acting at the behest of the students, but also said that ‘we’ feel the children should be there.
Nearly three months later, I asked Liverpool City Council if it were aware of any investigation, by any of the schools or the education authority, into the lobbying. Nobody replied.
Britain is an authoritarian country, from national to local government, where woke politics are taught and protected by the same authorities that abuse safeguarding concerns to punish people with other politics.
This article (Safeguarding – another word for tyranny) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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