"Influencing the voters of tomorrow while they're still young"

The line between education and tax-funded propaganda gets blurrier and blurrier.

At Tong high school in Bradford, the general consensus seems to be that the words "asylum seeker" and "illegal" automatically go together.

It's a misapprehension that teacher Hayley Clacey is keen to debunk, which is one of the reasons why she has invited local charity Retas (Refugee Training and Advisory Service) to the school. Throughout the day, refugees from Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon will work with children and class teachers to explain why people have to flee their own countries and what life is really like for those seeking refuge in the UK.

Bradford has two BNP councillors and 17 more candidates from the party seeking election next week. This political climate is something of which the school is keenly aware. With a catchment drawn primarily from two poor, predominantly white council estates, teachers are using the freedom of their hour-a-week tutorial programme to combat racism.

Holme Wood being one of them - Holme Wood and Buttershaw seemed to be the home of the roughest 'lads'. Twenty year back when I lived in God's Own City they certainly weren't big multiculturalists.

Influencing the voters of tomorrow while they're still young has also become a priority in Burnley, which, together with Oldham, experienced violent race-related disturbances in the summer of 2001. Around £250m has been spent on a total overhaul of Burnley's education system, with entire schools being closed, demolished, restructured and rebuilt.

Because of the way school catchment areas had been set historically, he explains, Burnley's secondary schools had been either overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly black. The white schools got good results and were oversubscribed, and the minority ethnic schools got poor ones. All this is changing, partly as a result of a report published last summer on the reasons for the disturbances.

"The county council is completely reorganising the schools, including the catchment areas, so there is a better mix of pupils," says Townsend. "Five new schools have just opened and we've got rid of all the old ones so the kids now have the chance to grow up together. The BNP are latching on to that and calling it forced integration. Of course you can never force integration, but you have to give people who would be open to that the chance to experience it."

Of course you can never force integration. Just close all the schools and open new, integrated ones. They can always go private, can't they ?

(Having one child at private secondary and two at State secondary, it's interesting to see that the private school is much more integrated than the State one, where the Asian Muslim kids form a separate group in the playground. At Speech Day they all sat together. Admittedly the state kids all live close to each other and their dads drive taxis, whereas at the private school they live miles apart and their parents are NHS consultants).


I've explained before why this kind of thing is only likely to delay, rather then stop, what I fear will be a split of of British politics on racial lines.

Arresting BNP members, Guardian exposes, BBC undercover documentaries, forced multiculturalism in schools are in the long term ineffective. Unless some kind of leftist police state comes into being.

There is always that possibility, I suppose. I'm just not sure that they could administer it competently enough to be effective !

PS - Sir Andrew Green's essay on the 'Britain a nation of immigrants' spin, "The Great Deception", is here.