Michael Gove, you are going too far.

This is certainly a strange day for democracy; we hear this morning that those who have been convicted of the most heinous of crimes are to be given the right to vote in elections for Parliament, on the grounds that it is their human right to be allowed the vote. These are the people who have taken away the human rights of others by murdering them or raping them or invading their homes or stealing their possessions, not a thought for the human rights of the victims of crime only the perpetrators.

Now we hear that Michael Gove is proposing to sack teachers who are members of the BNP; why for God’s sake? The BNP is a legally constituted political party the same as the Conservative or Labour parties and as such their members and supporters should have the same rights to express their political opinions as the next person. They are not members of a proscribed organisation and whilst that remains the status quo they should be entitled to the same rights as those who hold different political views. What next, will we be proposing a ban on teachers belonging to Labour or SNP or some other party that the government does not like, I do so hope not but fear that this is yet another erosion of personal freedoms.

Don’t get me wrong, I loathe the BNP and the policies they espouse with a passion, but by withdrawing from them the right to work in teaching or the police or the NHS or wherever all we will succeed in doing is to drive them underground. We need to expose them to the light of open unbiased public scrutiny where the fallacies behind their rhetoric can be demolished and their credibility such as it is destroyed.

Michael, you burst forth into the national consciousness earlier this year promising a massive reduction in central control of our schools with decision taking to be devolved to a local level and now hardly six months into your job you are proposing to dictate to schools who they may and may not hire. Please rethink this awful authoritarian throwback policy.

A teacher is supposed to be a professional, and as such there is no place for him or her to be expounding their personal beliefs in front of a class of children, that is wrong and to be deprecated irrespective of those beliefs and any teacher who is found to be attempting to politicise children should be disciplined but it is wrong to arbitrarily punish somebody for their beliefs if they are making no attempt to preach them.

Please Michael, no more blanket bans on groups of people instead allow local head teachers and boards of governors to deal on a case by case basis, that is part of the reason for having them in the first place.