It’s becoming more and more apparent that the far Left and those who ally with it either or career advancement reasons or because they are agreement with it, have a stranglehold over many of the civic entities in Western nations. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is something that can be quite readily tested by looking at the output of our universities, our political classes, our schools, local government and in the UK the management of the National Health Service. When you dig down you can find a preponderance of statements or policies or mission statements that quite clearly show that there is a cultural bias towards the Left in these entities.

When looking at the left dominance of so many of our institutions in the West it can lead to despair. We know that under the present system we cannot reasonably expect that a person who is a social conservative, a civic nationalist, a believer in borders and nations or a person who speaks against the shibboleths of the Left, could achieve high office or be promoted to a position where he or she was in charge of something like the NHS, a major mainstream media outlet or a major local authority? I certainly do not think that there are that many conservatives by which I mean those of robust conservative views rather than being what Margaret Thatcher called ‘wets’, in the public sector or in the education establishment or elsewhere. Even when conservatives are tolerated, often grudgingly by for example universities, they don’t seem to have much influence over the culture of their particular establishment.

Especially in academia we seem to have returned to the dark days of the seventies in the UK when academic establishments like the North London Polytechnic were a ‘red base’. At that time and at that institution woe betide anyone who stepped out of line and declared that they were a conservative or opposed to Marxist thought.

We have similar problems today with academics who want to approach subjects in a spirit of free enquiry denounced as ‘transphobes’, ‘Zionists’, ‘racists’, ‘Islamophobes’ and ‘fascists’ by student and faculty alike. Just as in the 1970’s at establishments that had been taken over by leftist students and academics, it becomes all but impossible for those academics who want to think about, research and teach about things that are outside the leftist approved narrative.

So what is to be done about this? The current government’s drive to increase free speech in higher education is to be welcomed but I doubt that it will cure the problems of ideology being taught to students as truth or the political bias. The education ‘blob’ will still be incredibly powerful despite government action. We cannot I believe just sit around and wait for a government to improve free thought and free speech in the education sector. Maybe we need to set up alternative arrangements as has been done before such as in Poland under Communism.

There’s an excellent piece on the the Critic site today written by Ben Sixsmith and speaking of how independent intellectual life, something frowned upon by the Communist authorities, survived and indeed thrived in underground ‘schools’ and meetings. The writer, tells of how academics and especially dissident academics discovered a sense of solidarity amongst each other and set up underground institutions that could teach the truths that the Communists had suppressed, such as that the Soviets were the true perpetrators of the Katyn Massacre in World War II.

What caught my eye in Mr Sixsmith’s article was this paragraph:

The excluded and marginalised need not wait for mainstream institutions to accommodate them but should have the courage and energy to build their own. Sometimes intellectual activity must go to ground. The ground, as any horticulturalist could tell you, teems with life.

This is spot on. When it is impossible for mainstream institutions to accept a diversity of views or which are dominated by ideologies that are hostile to our own, then the correct thing to do is to make sure that your intellectual activities are not only those that are controlled by the State or by the political extremes, but are carried out in environments separate from either the extremes or the State.

Whilst the situation regarding academic freedom in the UK is pretty dire at the moment, the situation is not as bad, not by a long chalk, as was the situation in Poland in the 1970’s. Although we have a cancel culture we do not, yet, have secret police raiding the homes and workplaces of academics as was the case in Poland under Communism. However what we do have are violent extremists from the far Left, the cult of trans and those who follow other Marxist inspired viewpoints, possibly sometimes aided and abetted by faculty, who can make the dissenting academic’s life a misery.

Maybe what Britain needs are our own underground schools, taught by those who dissent from Leftist thought, who believe in freedom of speech and thought to act as a counterbalance to the left dominated mainstream? It could be a positive thing if Britain’s academics develop a sense of solidarity and to quietly teach to others all that has been suppressed by the academics and academies of the left? Who knows what such underground teaching could create? It might certainly keep alive the seeds of academic freedom and free enquiry whilst the mainstream educational institutions continue to go mad, until such time as these seeds can grow in freedom towards the light again.