Once you understand that the end game is to diminish the status of the family, destroy the soul, and make people dependent on the State, it all makes sense why.
It seems to me that the schools are training young people to want services they’d never have needed or even dreamed about without [PSHE]. It’s an attack on what makes our country great.
— Two comments written by UK Column viewers after the initial streaming of this interview
Dr Anna Loutfi, a barrister at Clerksroom since 2019, has an academic legal background but sprang to public notice (and was previously featured on UK Column News) when she addressed a meeting in a side room of the Palace of Westminster on the unlawfulness of "Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education" (PSHE) as a subject in schools in England and Wales. Under the Welsh equivalent name of RSE, the pernicious effects of PSHE on young children came to the notice of Welsh parents organised as Public Child Protection Wales, and took on alarming proportions in Scotland (as documented by the Scottish Union for Education) and Northern Ireland, before being widely noted in England.
In 2023, she began representing parents bringing a negligence lawsuit against the UK Government's Department for Education (covering England only in this matter) regarding the PSHE curriculum in state schools. The lawsuit falls under the Bad Education initiative, part of the Bad Law Project. Case updates and a donation button can be found here.
This interview commences with a discussion of the philosophy behind PSHE. Dr Loutfi has written a report for the public to set this out, Reclaim Education: The Case Against PSHE, which has an introductory section on its genesis in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, initially in the same terminological bracket as the so-called Whole-Child Approach. In the 1980s, the recently-deceased Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt widely publicised this as the Deliberate Dumbing-Down of America (book, PDF).
Dr Loutfi states:
Over the course of time—and assisted by various foundations who pumped huge amounts of money into the Whole-Child Approach as a necessary educational programme to be developed and applied across the sector in the United States and then elsewhere—[the educational system] takes the the seriously dysfunctional child or the child from a seriously dysfunctional family as the paradigmatic child, whereby the school [acts] in collaboration with external stakeholders—again, generously funded by various foundations and with state taxpayers' money. The vision of the child is that the child will, automatically by default, need support […]
As this philosophy and ethos has been developed in the United Kingdom since the 1970s, in essence imported from the United States, my concern is that we have now found ourselves in a situation where we take for granted the state, assisted by the "third sector", as the dominant authority on what children need in all circumstances, at all ages, and that there is also a sort of residual implicit philosophy that the parents can't really be relied on or trusted to develop any potential intervention with a child that has certain needs because the children are assumed to be fundamentally disadvantaged by the fact of having parents, because parents are associated culturally with dysfunctions […] So, if a child has issues, it is because the parents have failed.
Thus, the family is pathologised and branded dysfunctional, and the state and its schooling apparatus will admit of no distinction between various families' religious and philosophical understandings of what the good life is that their children are to be seeking. Helen Joyce and other authors have been highlighting that brittleness, fragility, being a "delicate flower" in need of a "Head Gardener", are thus set as norms to be expected of all children; highly profitable for the tax-exempt foundations who started the revolution in the first place.
There follows a lengthy and detailed section of the interview covering Dr Loutfi's unusually broad legal background, her experiences of Hungary—a country subjected to the first wave of school sexualisation a century ago—and her shock at returning to a fundamentally changed Britain, after fifteen years away, as a practitioner in the rare field of comparative family law. Raised in an activist left-wing British family, and being a graduate of Gender Studies from the famously Soros-funded Central European University of Budapest (where she found staff and students to be genuinely well-informed and open to debate), Anna Loutfi took some time in adulthood to perceive that Western academic inquiry was being shut down in a discipline nominally set up to maximise just that pursuit:
We started to see the ingestion of a new understanding of the social sciences and the humanities where social justice narratives dominated. There was also a sort of a new understanding of oppression as something that "identity groups" [suffered], which had no meaning in the Eastern European context—I mean, this whole idea of "queer people", "queer groups" […] Eastern Europe is not really an area of the world that is factored into the Western imagination.
This wealth of background afforded Dr Loutfi an unrivalled vantage point to consider the century-old explicit agenda to remould children:
We need to start really asking ourselves how sexuality, childhood and authoritarianism function together.
She cites George Bernard Shaw's 1928 essay, Socialism and Children, published in The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism, which insincerely generalises the phenomenon of parental child abuse to justify a universal state upbringing:
In the case of young children, we have gone far in our interference with the old Roman rights of parents. For nine or more full years, the child is taken out of its parents' hands for most of the day, and thus made a state school child instead of a private family child. The records of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children [NSPCC] are still sickening enough to show how necessary it is to protect children against their parents.
Dr Loutfi comments:
What I find really in curious about Shaw's comment is: the fact that sickening child abuse by parents is scarce, is for him evidence that the state is doing a good job of being the buffer zone and being the parent—in the place of the biological parent.
Shaw continues that "the social creed"—which Dr Loutfi takes as a synonym for socialism—will not tolerate any child having a home-raised nature that will make him uncomfortable with what he is indoctrinated with at school. Rather, in Shaw's frank words, adherence to the state creed
must be imposed on us when we are children, for it is like riding or reading music at sight—it can never become a second nature to those who try to learn it as adults; and the social creed, to be really effective, must be a second nature to us. It is quite easy to give people a second nature, however unnatural, if you catch them early enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood, and not contradicted in the child's hearing.
Dr Loutfi concludes on this point:
And I think we need to ask ourselves as a society, how does sexuality play a role, how does sex education play a role, in the inculcation of a second nature? But there is the relationship side as well now, which has been put in [the PSHE curriculum]; and that is equally, I think, to be attended to, because in the name of "relationships education", you can put anything you like […] It's the relationship side that allows the state to start to inculcate an understanding of what life is all about, from the age of four onwards […]
What is the function of telling a child incessantly that they're very special and unique? I think it has to do with the idea that they are not born to people and they are not of a place or of a community, or of a society, or of a culture, or of a family; [that] what makes them the person that they are is feeding in from the people around them. I think this is an exercise in alienation: that you come to school and you learn who you are, and that has nothing to do with who you were before you set out.
Dr Loutfi then discusses her realisation that the key authors of third-wave (postmodern) feminism—notably Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler—have been churning out "illiterate nonsense" and are far less perceptive than predecessors such as Simone de Beauvoir.
She observes that those seeking to normalise fetishes such as masochism
see it as potentially threatening that where there are young people around, the tendency will be, in a in a healthy society, for there to be a gathering of adults around the child to say to that person, "Go away. You are not practicing your predilection here"—and particularly mothers.
She deplores that what has enabled this negation of individual families' moral, ethical and religious values is the sexual liberation ethos, which does not view people as possessing inherent or God-given worth, jettisoning inalienable birthrights in favour of ill-defined, conditional and constantly tweaked secular notions of "human dignity":
Our "human rights" are precisely those rights not to have dignity. So you have the right to sell yourself in sex. You know, "sex work is a human right". You have the right to sterilise yourself. You have the right to mutilate yourself. You have the right to subject yourself to the most demeaning of sexual positions—as part of who you are, part of your liberation; as part of your human rights.
As someone "very disillusioned with the Church of England", Dr Loutfi remarks that the Reformation
is the idea that you will have to take religion back into our own hands, because the priestly class are corrupt, decadent, lazy, dishonest, immoral, fatuous, and fat […] We're at the point now [once again] where we have sort of a priestly class who have created this bizarre funding structure whereby there's plenty of money available to the priestly class within the church but there's no money available, for example, for small churches who are struggling.
The final section of the interview covers the constitutional significance in this regard of New Zealand (where Katrina Briggs, A B'Old Woman on Substack, has covered egregious abuses) and of the UK Equality Act 2010 (containing the Public Sector Equality Duty, which Polly Toynbee christened "socialism in one clause"); and the deliberately "befuddled" landscape of interpreting statutes with reference to the will of Parliament and shifting cultural norms. This is demanding legal territory but is necessary for concerned laypeople to grasp because, as Dr Loutfi sets out, there are shrill and disingenuous claims by activists that certain notions and duties are enshrined in law which actually are not, such as the "protected right" to "gender self-identify".
In that gap between policy and law, Dr Loutfi maintains,
we've simply abandoned children to the vagaries of EDI [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion] policy on school premises, whereby children are being told that "if that boy says he's a girl, then he's a girl, and and for the purposes of the school we have to treat him as having the protected characteristic of gender reassignment"—which means that as a matter of law, he is a transsexual. That boy, whether he's 7 or 5, is a "transsexual at law", if he has acquired the "protected characteristic" of gender reassignment through oral declaration, on some [bogus] reading of the Equality Act [2010].
[…] For any number of issues, we are increasingly forbidden from raising the young age of a child as a possible obstacle to certain procedures being imposed on that child. In fact, it is becoming vulgar to even raise that question.
What, then, is it that the pushers of such horrors as children's gender self-identification wish to remove from our consciousness? According to Dr Loutfi, it is that:
The good life is the private sphere.
Mentioned near the end of the above interview is Rousas John Rushdoony's 1950s book The American Indian: A Standing Indictment against Christianity and Statism in America.
Anna Loutfi hosts The Bad Law Show, which can be found on the Reclaim The Media YouTube channel. She has had a long-form conversation with UK Column's Charles Malet in that series.
See also UK Column's Dissident's Guide to the Constitution podcast series.