Leading Scottish Teaching Union Defines Gender Critical Views as “Far Right”

There are moments in public life when you read something and genuinely wonder if someone is having you on. The briefing on the supposed rise of far Right activity by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), the leading teachers’ union in Scotland, is one of those moments. 

Scotland’s far Right is so tiny it could hold its AGM in the disabled toilet at Wetherspoons and still have room left for a flipchart. Yet here is the country’s largest and most influential union producing a 16-page political field manual that treats this microscopic fringe as if it is marching on Holyrood with flaming torches and matching armbands.

None of this resembles safeguarding. It is not professionalism. It is certainly not education. It is politics in fancy dress, and it insults the intelligence of teachers, parents and pupils alike.

The briefing begins with what looks like a perfectly sensible academic definition of the far Right. That lasts for all of two minutes. Then the definition begins to stretch and swell until it covers almost anything that does not suit the worldview of whomever wrote the document. Real extremists do exist, and nobody sensible denies that. Every society has a small fringe of people who are vulnerable to rigid identities and destructive beliefs, usually because they are looking for certainty in a chaotic world.

But the EIS manages to take this small and unpleasant fringe and stretch it to breaking point. Suddenly people who are pro-business, parents who worry about asylum hotels, anyone concerned about collapsing public services, women raising safeguarding issues, and every adult in the country who thinks biological sex corresponds to reality are all apparently drifting towards radicalisation.

And just to round things off, every Reform UK voter is thrown into the same pot. By this logic, if you have ever eaten a Sunday roast or nodded politely to a small business owner, you may soon end up on a watch list.

The serious point here is that when everything is described as far Right, nothing is. Real extremism – the sort that harms communities – becomes blurred and unrecognisable when the definition has been inflated like a bouncy castle in a gale. And while all this stretching and redefining is going on, certain issues are conspicuously absent. There is no mention of the Iranian bot activity that the security services have warned about, which has been actively stoking constitutional division in Scotland. Apparently that does not merit 16 pages of alarm. No, the real danger, as framed by the EIS, is not organised extremism but the parent who simply asked whether a Gender Unicorn worksheet belonged in the classroom. This is not safeguarding. It is political hygiene dressed up as moral duty.

Meanwhile, teachers across Scotland are dealing with some of the most challenging conditions we have seen in decades. Violence in classrooms has become routine. Literacy is collapsing in large parts of the country. Additional support provision is drowning under impossible caseloads. Staffing is stretched to its limits. Burnout is everywhere. Yet the leadership of the EIS has decided the top priority is to turn a handful of Facebook loudmouths into an existential Reichstag fire.

It mirrors what David Chalmers highlighted in England only last month. University of Leicester students were shown lecture slides comparing Margaret Thatcher to Putin and Hitler. When higher education starts behaving like that, you know something has gone badly wrong. Several English schools have reportedly taught pupils that Reform UK sits on the same political spectrum as the BNP, despite having as much in common as a wet teabag and a nuclear reactor. Clarity and proportion always seem to be the first casualties of a good moral panic.

The real danger in all this is not the far Right. It is the collapse of democratic norms. Real extremists exist, but they are not the looming threat the EIS pretends they are. What should concern anyone serious about civic life is the way our democratic foundations are being eroded from above while everyone is busy scanning playgrounds for imaginary fascists. In recent years, trial by jury has been quietly pared back. Elections have been cancelled for millions of voters. 

Ordinary citizens have been arrested for social media posts that would not have raised an eyebrow a decade ago. Executive power has expanded to the point where abnormality now passes for routine. None of this is the work of shadowy extremists lurking on encrypted messaging channels. These decisions are being taken in broad daylight by governments who congratulate themselves on defending democracy while chipping away at its pillars.

Yet the EIS can spot authoritarianism in a parent’s Facebook comment but somehow miss the steady centralisation of state power. It is the political equivalent of opening the broom cupboard to check for ghosts while the roof quietly collapses from above. If we are genuinely serious about resisting authoritarian drift, we need to look at where authority is actually expanding, not where it is easiest to manufacture a scare.

If the EIS wants to teach pupils something useful about authoritarianism, it might start by explaining how such systems work in real life. They come from above, not below. They justify themselves through the language of safety rather than through overt threats. They arrive quietly through admin, layers of bureaucracy, policy and guidance rather than boots marching. Authoritarian drift does not look like online caricatures of flag-waving oddballs. It looks like officials wearing a badge promising one more policy for your own good. Danger seldom arrives banging on the door. It appears quietly, disguised as reassurance.

Scotland has made itself particularly vulnerable to this sort of drift because we have no statutory safeguards on political impartiality in education. In England, teachers operate under clear legal duties and detailed professional guidance. There is oversight. There is accountability. Parents have recourse. Scotland has none of that. Scots rely on vague non-binding guidance interpreted wildly differently from one local authority to the next. Into that vacuum walks the EIS, presenting an ideological blueprint as though it were a professional handbook.

Imagine the reaction if the biggest teaching union in England published a manual branding Reform UK voters as extremists, casting gender critical women as reactionaries and placing small business owners somewhere on the spectrum of political radicalism. 

The Department for Education would have called a press conference before breakfast. Yet in Scotland, the EIS has gone further still. In its own words, this briefing “could be a collective CPD offer for members”, as though a partisan political narrative were simply another piece of professional learning. When professional development is treated this casually, the line between education and indoctrination is not blurred, it is being erased.

The combination of moral panic and a complete absence of structural safeguards is not a small administrative quirk. It is precisely how politicisation slides into classrooms unnoticed while the public is preoccupied with other things.

At its heart, this is a story of mission drift. Trade unions exist to defend their members’ material interests. Bread and butter solidarity. Pay. Safety. Conditions. Professional dignity. The EIS seems to have wandered so far from that mission it can no longer see it. It now treats safeguarding questions as misogyny, political disagreement as radicalisation, parental concern as the first step towards fascism, and mainstream views as contamination. 

This is not professional support. When an organisation forgets why it exists, it stops helping and starts preaching. There is a simple moral truth at the centre of this. Political neutrality in education does not exist to spare the feelings of politicians. Most of them struggle to protect their own feelings on the best of days. Neutrality exists to protect the public. It protects the right to disagree. It protects children from having their moral world narrowed by ideology masquerading as virtue. 

Once a union decides that whole sections of the electorate are too dangerous to debate, it stops being a guardian of education and becomes something much darker. In addiction recovery I teach that no one is beyond redemption and that a person should not be defined by his or her worst day or worst idea. The EIS is running the opposite programme, treating ordinary people as pathologies rather than neighbours.

Teachers deserve better than this. Pupils deserve better. A school system rooted in the common good cannot survive when its leading union treats ordinary people as if they are beyond dialogue. The EIS claims to be fighting extremism, yet extremism always begins with the belief that some voices are unworthy of being heard. That is the seed of every authoritarian impulse.

Anyone who has watched a life unravel knows how that impulse grows. Harm does not begin with dramatic gestures. It begins with denial, the quiet conviction that the problem is always someone else. That is exactly where the EIS has positioned itself. If it truly wants to protect Scotland’s young people, it will need to rediscover humility, remember its purpose and step out of denial. Because authority without humility does not safeguard a community; it wounds it.

Annemarie Ward is CEO of a leading addiction recovery charity in the UK. All views expressed are her personal opinions.