It is Friday
24th June. As I squeeze into the overcrowded train carriage with the
rest of the oxygen-starved commuters, I contemplate how I can approach my
colleagues after voting for Brexit yesterday. They’re all Remainers. How can I
possibly tell them that we’re leaving the EU because of me? I’ll be lynched.
I decide to
keep schtum and, if challenged, and if faced with a blood-thirsty Remainer
looking to exact revenge, I’ll tell a big fat porky. I’m going to be an
indignant Remainer from now on, whingeing and whining about the ghastly,
xenophobic, racist little-Englanders who’ve finally got their way.
Walking into
our faculty office, I see a young colleague crying. She is distraught and
inconsolable about the result. She’s been a fully signed up member of Project
Fear from the beginning of the campaign, forever wailing and railing against
evil Brexiteers and their fascistic Daily Mail-reading supporters who inhabit
the darker corners of our society. She has spent the last few months
publicising her beliefs to anyone who’ll listen, including, of course, her most
attentive and easily manipulated listeners – our pupils. I ask if she’s okay
before slinking off to my classroom. The schadenfreude evoked is hard to
resist.
My first
lesson is interesting and worrying in equal measure. The kids can’t stop
talking about it and, being mostly first and second generation migrants of
Asian extraction, generally feel certain that it’s going to lead to pogroms and
deportations. Astonishingly, they’ve been led to believe that those who voted
out are genocidal neo-Nazis. I do my best to reassure them without exposing my
preference for leaving the European Union.
Their
misapprehension doesn’t altogether surprise me, though. Many of my colleagues
have spent the last few months openly claiming that the only thing standing
between immigrants and the baying, xenophobic British hordes is the EU. As an
appendage to Project Fear, it’s clearly done the trick. In a school referendum
organised to replicate the real thing, over 70 per cent of our pupils voted to
remain inside the European Union.
I later hear
about another colleague who has burst into tears, this time in front of her
class. There are reports of pupils doing the same. It is pandemonium. They
think it’s the end of the world.
At lunchtime,
curiosity gets the better of me so I decide to eat in the faculty office. The
fury of my colleagues is palpable. I agree, albeit in a subdued and
unenthusiastic way, with everything said. It is easier that way, and, more to
the point, I remember only too well from past experience how alternative views
are received. They are neither welcomed nor permitted, particularly whilst
caring internationalists are in mourning.
In amongst
the sound and fury is another, male colleague, quietly marking books. He is a
young, podgy, gregarious character who usually orchestrates our lunchtime
chats. On this occasion, though, he is mute. As the bell goes and everyone
eventually disperses, I give him a wink and whisper, ‘You voted out, didn’t
you?’ He grins and nods his head. ‘So did I,’ I say. ‘It’s our fault.’ We both
chuckle like two naughty schoolkids before heading back to our lessons.
The irony of
all this is, of course, that many voted for Brexit because of this suffocating,
unrelenting, need-to-conform-lest-you-upset-the-thought-police bullying that is
so prevalent, not just in our schools – though they are certainly an extreme
manifestation – but across the whole country.
Keeping up
politically correct appearances has indeed become exhausting, stressful and
all-consuming. I really don’t know what I can and can’t say. This, I think, is
compounded by the age of my colleagues. As older teachers have left the
profession, exhausted and demoralised by the overwhelming workload and woeful
pupil behaviour condoned by inept head teachers, NQTs in their early twenties
have replaced them. This is Generation Snowflake – the ruthless no-platformers
with an aversion to free speech and representative democracy; these are the
cry-babies devastated by the referendum result, the cry-babies teaching – no
brainwashing – our children.
Last week,
during what should have been a relaxed, lunchtime conversation with one of
them, we got onto the subject of women’s boxing. I said, quite innocuously, or
so I thought, that although I support their right to do it, I don’t really
enjoy watching women hit each other. You can probably guess what happened next:
she pounced on me, calling me a misogynist, saying that I shouldn’t be teaching
children and expressing her inability to work with a male, sexist reactionary
like myself.
The irony
was too delicious to ignore. ‘So you want me to say that I love to watch women
beat the crap out of each other, instead?’ I asked.
Seriously:
these are the unhinged lunatics who teach our kids; these are the people
spreading misapprehension and fear among our pupils. They think they’re going
to be deported, for heaven’s sake. That’s just cruelty dressed up as moral
outrage by imbeciles desperate to publicise their own virtue. It’s also a lie.
