Banning Easter in favour of Refugee Week or 'How to Create Civil War #101'

Open letter to Stephanie Mander: Headteacher at Norwood Primary School in Eastleigh

I wrote this letter to Stephanie Mander, Headteacher at Norwood Primary School in Eastleigh, Hants. — in the wake of her decision to cancel Easter in favour of Refugee Week. If you’d like to enter into a polite dialogue with the school, the email is here adminoffice@norwood.hants.sch.uk

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Dear Stephanie Mander,

Re: Canceling Easter

I’m sure you believe that you are doing the right thing. I can assure you that you are not.

I’m a historical sociologist with some expertise in state formation. The kind of welfare state to which I’m sure you are committed was only possible in the context of a shared national mythos — a strong 'we-identity’. This was partly based on ‘invented traditions’ (as per the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm) and ‘imagined community’ (as per anthropologist Benedict Anderson). It was also based on a great deal of coercion (as with the banning of minority Celtic languages and the imposition of national schooling and a national curricula). And most of all it was based on the solidarity effected by two world wars — the Dunkirk Spirit.

Social democracy is necessarily an exclusive, membership based form of solidarity. It depends absolutely on the distinction between insiders (citizens) and outsiders (non-citizens); and upon a pre-cognitive, pre-political sense of a shared ‘community of fate’ (i.e. the unspoken understanding that ‘we’re all in this together’).

You may the yawning and rolling your eyes: ‘What is this ‘right wing’ academic troll saying?’ But actually such observations are highly relevant to the present moment of political polarization. This exclusive ‘we identity' was the reason why Germans were willing to pay trillions of Deutschmarks to include East Germans after reunification in the 1990s. It’s absence across the EU is the reason why the same Germans were unwilling to pay to bail out Greeks in 2008/9.

In short, the more diverse [and potentially divided] a society becomes, the more important shared identity and culture become. The discourse of ‘decolonization’, the disparaging of white men [as per the recent scandal in RAF recruitment], the perception of two tier justice (as with the new sentencing guidelines which provide for heavier sentences for white males), and also people like you actively undermining any sense of shared history among our young people — in this case by banning Easter celebrations that have defined our calendar and place-bound sense of community for 2000 years and replacing it with a partisan political celebration and defence of illegal migration — amounts to a rolling political and cultural catastrophe. It is a recipe for conflict and civil war.

This much has been recognized recently by Professor David Betz at the Department of War studies at UCL in London. He predicts a quasi state of civil war in the UK within a decade ( see here)

The cumulative impact of this kind of thoughtless trashing of shared British culture and Christian civilization, is to undo the possibility of our living together and the very foundation which has allowed Britain peaceably to absorb more migrants than any country in history, save the United States.

As I said, I don’t doubt your motives. But you are making a terrible mistake. I would urge you, most sincerely, to think again.

Yours sincerely

This was the letter she sent to parents