With their new sex education plan, the Tories have abandoned science and reason

So far this week, the government has cracked down on rainbow lanyards in the civil service, and now hopes to prevent schoolchildren receiving given age-appropriate sex education. Will they ever learn to live in the diverse, multicultural country they purport to lead, asks Sean O’Grady

Gillian Keegan, secretary of state for education, wants to ban sex education before the age of nine (Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

It was that great political sage Lee Anderson who, in a moment of remarkable candour and clarity, admitted to an interviewer a few years ago that he had won his seat, and the Tories a near-landslide, in the 2019 general election for three reasons: Boris, Brexit and Corbyn.

All three, as Anderson pointed out, had even by then gone, and so the Conservatives would need something else to campaign with. He supposed the answer would be “culture wars”.

On this, if little else, Anderson was right. Hence the latest government guidance on sex and relationship education. It’s basically yet another “dog whistle” to the hard right of the Tory party who reckon that if only they can get the homophobic and transphobic vote back off the Farageists, then they’re in with a chance of a hung parliament, and all the opportunities that will create to hang on to office for a few more months until something turns up, such as a spontaneous economic boom.

It’s a phantasmagoric notion, but at this stage it’s all they’ve got left, and they’re going for it – none more so today than the secretary of state for education, Gillian Keegan.

She’s declared a ban on sex education before the age of nine which, whatever its merits, and the opening up of a fresh front in the culture wars, is not a realistic approach in the world of smartphones and easy online access to all the worst and wrongest ideas about what sex and relationships are all about.

In a past era, the curious child might happen across a “nudie mag” as they were called round my way, tattered and torn, being passed around. Older pupils would share their own knowledge of human biology and the meaning of love, albeit not always to be relied upon.

Inevitably, the focus would be on the baser aspects of sex. That was certainly no substitute for a properly taught class on the subject, covering not just the stuff about gametes and zygotes, but the fact – and it is a fact, not “woke gender ideology” – that people’s sex, their behaviour, their preferences and family structures can be very diverse, and no less legitimate.

I’m also not sure what children who happen to have same-sex parents are going to make of the new ideologically driven Conservative Party-approved rules of life they’re to be indoctrinated with. If children cannot find out about appropriate personal behaviour, tolerance and respect, how are we to mitigate online harm and protect kids?

Now, we seem to be excluding useful and enlightened sex and relationship education, just because the headbangers on the right are upset about drag queen story hour, and what they see on the Eurovision Song Contest. I’m only surprised that Keegan didn’t take the chance to abolish the whole “woke” business and substitute it, with the head teacher just telling the school assembly what Rishi Sunak told the last Conservative Party conference in Manchester: “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman – that’s just common sense.”

It was worrying to see, for example, that the government wants to limit school sex education about contraception until the age of 13 – which is about as close as you can cut it, given certain biological realities. It’s what you might call “just-in-time” schooling, where no one wastes any time on lessons about changing bodies, new feelings and impending adulthood for a moment longer than necessary, and even then it has to be within a centrally proscribed set of rules. It is absurd.

Not, though, as absurd as the battle against rainbow lanyards being fought by Esther McVey, the “minister for common sense”. McVey argues that a modest gesture of support for their LGBT+ colleagues, helping to create an inclusive and tolerant workplace, is “political”. It is progressive, yes, but only political in the sense that bigots don’t like it.

The rainbow lanyard represents the shared values of the NHS and wider society, not an “ideology”. The only people who are offended are those who are homophobic and transphobic, and there is no reason to appease them – aside from winning a few votes, of course.

The right’s culture wars are increasingly a struggle against reality, and anti-scientific. Gay and trans people exist – they are not ideological “woke” constructs – and it is senseless to teach children that they don’t, or in some sense shouldn’t, exist.

In the Tory party, and even more among the fringe groups and the right-wing media, the search for new fronts in the culture wars is leading to some very strange ideas. Anthropogenic climate change is a matter of data-driven, fact-based science, not another branch of “wokery”. Vaccines, including the MRNA Covid ones, have saved many millions of lives over the centuries, with usually only rare serious side effects. Straying into the social sciences, cuts in taxes do not always and everywhere pay for themselves. And multiculturalism is not a cause of crime.

If the Tories want to merge with Reform UK and import a load of conspiracy theories, that’s up to them – but they needn’t pretend to be a serious party of government.

One day, perhaps after a further few rejections by an electorate they are increasingly at odds with, the Conservatives will reject their own choking, anti-science ideologies, re-establish their links with reality, and learn to live in the diverse, inclusive and wonderful nation they purport to lead. Meanwhile, Sunak, Keegan and the rest of them – leave them kids alone!