https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/passport-pimlico-bruce-bawer-0/
Last week in central London, hundreds of pupils at a top-rated private secondary school, the Pimlico Academy, staged an angry walkout. The target of their wrath? Headmaster Daniel Smith, who, upon his arrival at Pimlico last summer, introduced himself to parents with a letter saying that he had “the highest expectations of conduct and achievement for all.” Somehow he didn’t realize that, in 2021, them’s fightin’ words.
In keeping with his high expectations, Smith instituted a number of changes at Pimlico that the protesters condemned, in cartoonishly “woke” terms, in a written manifesto. For one thing, he established a dress code that they opposed because, by specifying proper clothing for boys and girls, it ostracized “non-binary” pupils. As part of this code, Smith forbade hairstyles that “block the view of others” (which, protesters charged, was racist code for “No Afros”) and prohibited brightly colored hijabs (anti-Muslim, of course). Note that similar rules are in force at many other English schools (and that in French schools, the hijab is banned entirely).
Smith also introduced a so-called “knowledge-led curriculum,” including courses in British history that, in the view of the malcontents, included too much information about “white kings and queens” and too little about “BAME [Black Asian Minority Ethnic] figures.” (As one black girl told a reporter on camera: “Tudor kings and queens don’t reflect who we really are.”) For good measure, the protesters accused Smith directly of “racism, Islamophobia and transphobia” and faulted him for paying insufficient homage to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Smith came to the 1200-pupil Pimlico from the Ebbsfleet Academy in Swanscombe, Kent, where he was vice principal. By all reports, he was as strict at Ebbsfleet as he’s been at Pimlico – but there was apparently not a whimper of outrage in response. How to explain this difference? Well, one factor is that the kids at Ebbsfleet are mostly working-class whites, whereas Pimlico is overwhelmingly non-white, mostly black Caribbean and African. Many have only rudimentary English; some are Muslim. Plenty of them, it’s clear, have drunk deep from the Black Lives Matter wells. During the walkout, somebody scrawled on the school’s outer wall: “White schools for brown kids are u mad.” Another graffito read: “Pimlico Academy…run by racists…for profit!!!”
My first thought, upon reading the manifesto and graffiti, was: where did these kids – most in their early to mid teens – pick up this rubbish? Are they being used by adults? It’s notable that many of their parents support the protest; at last week’s walkout, kids and parents alike carried professionally printed BLM posters bearing the logo of the weekly Socialist Worker newspaper. Most of the teachers also backed the protest; last Thursday, they voted to declare “no confidence” in Smith’s management. On Friday, the Daily Mail noted that the influence of the far-left National Union of Teachers on this revolt cannot be underestimated. On Sunday, the Mail reported that, sure enough, the Socialist Workers Party had been active behind the scenes of the protest.
Given the protesters’ palpable hostility toward British freedom, culture, history, and capitalism – in short, toward everything British – it was no surprise that the symbol of their beef with Smith was the Union Jack.
