There is a rot setting in at the heart of our public life. It is not subtle. It is not polite. It is not accidental. It is a deliberate capture of the institutions that should define truth and protect our children. Reading Nicole Lampert in the Telegraph about Jewish teachers being forced out of the National Education Union is not a fringe story. It is a warning shot. A blaring alarm that the mental terrain of British education has been seized by those who mistake zealotry for justice.
A union is meant to be a bulwark for its members, a shield for their rights, a platform for fair debate. What we see in the NEU under Daniel Kebede is something else entirely. A political club that bullies its way into classrooms and staff rooms, crowds out dissent, and creates a hostile environment for Jews who dare to speak about their own lives. A union representative telling a Jewish colleague that Israel "doesn't exist" is not ignorance. It is ideological coercion dressed up as discussion. Reality is not negotiable. Truth is not a matter of faction.
When teachers march with flags, when they parade slogans like "intifada", when Al Jazeera is offered as if it were a neutral classroom resource, we have left the territory of education. We have entered political warfare in the very spaces where children should be taught how to think, not what to think. There is no "both sides" here when one side's creed demands the erasure of another people's history. Neutrality dies at the school gate under those conditions.
The damage does not stop with silenced teachers. It lands on children who are too young to separate fact from fervour, authority from activism. When pupils are taught that a country can be wished out of existence, that slogans born in blood are "liberation", that one people's history is illegitimate, they are not being educated. They are being trained. Trained to see the world through grievance, to divide humanity into approved and forbidden identities, and to mistake moral certainty for moral courage. This is how prejudice is handed down wearing the costume of compassion.
And let us not mince this. Blocking a Jewish MP, Damien Egan, from visiting a school because his presence "might inflame" certain groups is not safeguarding. It is capitulation. It is fear masquerading as care. It is telling the loudest bullies in the room that they have the power to dictate who may speak and who must keep silent.
This is about capture. The union does not merely talk about Palestine. It has inserted itself between parents and children, between facts and feelings, between education and ideology. It shapes the narrative, pushes the politics, and appoints itself the arbiter of who is safe and who is suspect. Jewish teachers leave. Parents shrink back. Children are handed a narrowed lens through which the world must be viewed. The supposed protectors become gatekeepers of a single, rigid point of view.
A free society does not thrive on one script. It thrives on contested ideas, on the clash of thought, on the right of each child to see the world in full, not through a sieve that filters out everything inconvenient. Education should widen minds, not bind them in the shackles of the latest political fashion.
If we allow teachers' unions to become extensions of political movements, if we accept intimidation as "debate", if we tolerate the silencing of Jews inside their own union, then we have already surrendered a piece of what makes this country worth saving. This is not about one conflict. It is about the right of every voice to be heard in the classroom, and the duty of every educator to uphold fact over dogma.
We should not flinch from saying it plainly. What has happened in the NEU is a betrayal of education, a threat to pluralism, and a sign that the ideology of the moment has snapped at the heels of reason. Face it now, or accept that we are raising a generation taught to chant before it can reason.
Damien Egan and Daniel Kebede