Thread by @docrussjackson

Tonight on #bbcqt:

Descendant of William Gladstone & ex-biomedical venture capitalist, Tory MP George Freeman!

YET ANOTHER #Spiked & GB "News" regular & Brexit Party candidate, Inaya Folarin, a founding director of Toby Young's toxic hard-right Free Speech Union!

Matthew Syed:

https://twitter.com/bbcquestiontime/status/1623643608220946432

AS USUAL, #bbcqt audiences won't know Inaya Folarin is a #Spiked & GB "News" regular, a Brexit Party candidate, & a founding director of Toby Young's toxic Free Speech Union, & a TORY IMPOSED NPG Trustee, she's framed as just a 'journalist & author' & Founder of Equiano Project.

Here's a great explainer about the wider toxic network of authoritarian fringe groups & individuals who are appointed by the Tories to important institutions & bodies, who shape & influence Govt policy, & who are virtually always represented on #bbcqt

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The network involving Spiked, the Free Speech Union, the Equiano Project, & many more, are characterized by an authoritarian ideology, including hereditarian and pseudoscientific beliefs, that views Black and working-class populations as unstable and threatening.

These groups, organisations, & individuals shape policies that seek to silence critical debate about structural racism, while promoting an education characterised by intensified testing, selection, curricular control & strict discipline. Birbalsingh & Calvin Robinson are typical.

Over the past decade the recurrence of think tank activity, conferences & journals has supported their repetition of often extreme ideas about race, intelligence, culture & authority, providing them with credibility & mechanisms for objectivating these ideas in education policy.

Actors who have moved within these highly influential networks have come to shape policy both in the political spotlight (Johnson, Gove) and behind the scenes through, for example, the Department for Education.

In recent years the networks have also captured several key posts as advocates or board members in organisations that are supposed to hold government to account and advance equity and social justice.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1447341019775782913?s=20&t=Kf77p_1G9hLxP5ZlIkMKGg

These include the Office of the Children's Commissioner (de Souza); the Social Mobility Commission (Birbalsingh); Equality & Human Rights Commission (Goodhart); & ostensibly "independent" inquiries into school exclusions (Timpson) & race inequity #PREVENT (Sewell, Muroki).

Central to their shared values is the need to embrace the fluidity necessary to block progressive, antiracist change. Right-wing populism purports to represent ‘the people’ against an ‘elite’ that has neglected the masses by favouring a third group, usually a racialised minority.

In contemporary English policy discourse - gleefully amplified by the billionaire-owned press every day -the shared problems confronting education are named repeatedly as ‘social liberalism’, ‘antiracism’ & ‘wokeness’.

Within education policy, their basic narrative is that political energies have supposedly been misdirected towards 'indulging' particular fractions of the school population: 'undeserving' Black & working-class young people.

The active structuring of racial inequality through policy requires that political energies shift away from addressing these young people's problems and that Black and working-class youth are located as the problem, exiled from the centre to the fringes.

These networks create a new governmental capacity to resist progressive change - delegitimising critique of structural racism, eliding race inequity, & promoting deeply racialised enterprises of curricular control & strict discipline, which sounds a LOT like white supremacy.

Previously on #bbcqt...

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1621283997677404166?t=sjLvJZc1H11n18pmRZCM0g&s=19