Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Lib Dems have revealed the extreme side of modern liberalism

issue 21 September 2019

A friend’s seven-year-old daughter was asked by her school to write something about the NHS. Her only experience of it had been sitting for four hours in A&E while her father, in some pain, waited to be treated for a cricket injury. So she wrote about that. Her teacher deemed it ‘inappropriate’ and told her to write it again and make it ‘more positive’.

I assume this authoritarian hag wanted something along the lines of: ‘The NHS is the only good thing about the UK and would be even better were it not for the Vicious Tory Cuts. It is staffed by thousands of brilliant people who have swum here from Libya simply to attend to our ailments. Boris Johnson wants it closed down because he’s a white supremacist and hates poor people.’

This kind of propaganda is present in every area of the curriculum, every day and across every age group, along with a concomitant intolerance of any divergent view. You dare to wonder if any of the kids, given this daily saturation, will emerge with open minds and a vague grasp of the realities of the world. Perhaps one day soon, when the entire liberal edifice comes crashing down, wrought apart by its own manifest contradictions and lack of logic, we will see a change in our teachers — who were once, remember, solid Tory voters. Until then we will be churning out a procession of slack-jawed, credulous halfwits who are simultaneously woke and sleepwalking.

One of those slack-jawed halfwits is Kirsten Johnson, the Lib Dem candidate for North Devon. Asked on the BBC’s The World This Weekend to explain why such a large proportion of her constituency voted Leave, she reeled off the rote-learned liberal shibboleths: ‘Demographically it’s 98 per cent white.

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