"Imagine a classroom with almost nothing in it, save some hard wooden benches and a stack of Bibles. Imagine the school it is in has only one loo, no canteen, gets freezing cold in winter oh, and the playground is full of gravestones. If this sounds to you like the perfect setting to teach the country's most vulnerable children, then you're going to love Reform UK's new Send policy,"
"This time last year, I was booking my place at a new year Reform rally that turned out to be a short, sharp lesson in just how fast old norms and taboos were collapsing on the right. Yet in retrospect, the most surprising thing about the young men I interviewed that night was how ordinary they were: no different, really, to all the ambitious young Tory turks I've met, except for the palpable sense that the energy on the right was elsewhere now."
"It's fair to say that optimism has wavered a few times over the past year, which has taken me from interviewing teenage Nigel Farage fans at one end of the spectrum to making a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the far less widely examined surge in young women voting Green (which airs this Sunday night, thanks for asking) at the other."
Reform UK's SEND proposal would convert nearby empty churches into weekday schools to cut taxi bills for children sent to distant special schools. Proposed church classrooms would be sparsely furnished, lack facilities, and risk offering unsuitable environments for vulnerable pupils. The policy reflects broader shifts on the right, where old norms and taboos have weakened and energy appears to be moving away from traditional Conservatives. Observers encountered a mixture of ordinary young right-wing activists and rising Green support among young women. Political optimism has fluctuated over the past year amid many conversations with pollsters, politicians, householders, academics, and thinktank researchers.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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