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  1. Politics
26 May 2010updated 27 Sep 2015 2:19am

Do we want the BNP in our schools?

Arguments over whether or not Adam Walker’s comments were “racist” obscure the real issue.

By Daniel Trilling

A BNP activist and former teacher has been cleared of racism by the General Teaching Council. Adam Walker, 41, used a school laptop to post comments online describing immigrants as “savage animals” while working at Houghton Kepier Sports College, in Houghton-le-Spring, County Durham. He also claimed Britain was a “dumping ground for the filth of the third world”.

Despite declaring itself “troubled” by Walker’s views, the GTC decided that while Walker’s postings demonstrated an attitude that might be considered racist, the specific references to immigrants were not necessarily “suggestive of any particular views on race”.

The ruling has been criticised by teaching unions, including the NUT, whose leader, Christine Blower, described the decision as “perverse”.

The decision in March by the then schools secretary, Ed Balls, not to ban teachers from joining the BNP outright means that the debate has now descended into an argument over semantics. (The GTC, in effect, is saying it’s not racist to describe immigrants in general as “filth”, because immigrants are an ethnically diverse group — a line of argument not unlike that of a comedian who makes jokes about black people saying “I’m not racist, I hate everyone . . .”) But this threatens to obscure a more fundamental question: should BNP members have any involvement in our schools at all?

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The education system plays a crucial role in the far-right party’s quest for respectabililty. It has made a determined effort to get its members elected to school governing bodies. (This has been made easier in recent years by a shortage of ordinary people willing to take up governors’ posts.)

In Stoke-on-Trent last year, for example, three BNP councillors attempted to join the board of governors of Edensor Technology College, a school where 80 per cent of the pupils are Asian.

Speaking outside the GTC hearing in Birmingham, Walker and his party chairman, Nick Griffin, presented the case as a free speech issue. But there is a clear difference between expressing privately held views and being a member of a political organisation that is committed to dividing British society along ethnic lines — the party’s 2009 county council manifesto, for example, declared that mixing white and non-white children was “destroying perfectly good local secondary schools”.

Furthermore, Walker plays an active role in the BNP. He stood as a parliamentary candidate in May and, as the NS revealed in April, during the BNP’s election campaign he was frequently pictured by Nick Griffin’s side, wearing army fatigues. Here is how we reported it at the time:

On Saturday [Walker] was parading in front of news cameras gathered in Barking to cover the BNP’s campaign launch. Asked if he was a real soldier, he admitted he wasn’t. “I’m wearing this uniform in solidarity with our boys in Afghanistan,” Walker said.

David Cameron has already said that he sees membership of the BNP as “incompatible” with the role of a teacher. It remains to be seen whether his government will take a fresh look at the matter.

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