'Cultural Marxism' is destroying our children's souls, says Miriam Cates
School teachings are having a devastating effect, the Red Wall Tory MP says
“Cultural Marxism” is destroying children’s souls and leading to an increase in self-harm and suicide, a Tory MP has argued.
Miriam Cates, who represents the Red Wall seat of Penistone and Stocksbridge, said the teaching of critical race theory and concepts in schools were responsible for higher levels of various mental illnesses.
She told the National Conservatism Conference she was unsurprised fewer young people were choosing to become parents because they did not have “hope for the future” themselves.
“That hope is sadly diminishing in so many of our young people today,” Ms Cates said. “Because liberal individualism has proven to be completely powerless to resist the cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children's souls.
“When culture, schools and universities openly teach that our country is racist, our heroes are villains, humanity is killing the Earth, you are what you desire, diversity is theology, boundaries are tyranny and self-restraint is oppression, is it any wonder that mental health conditions, self-harm and suicide, and epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion characterise the emerging generation?”
Anti-Semitism
Lord Mann, the Government’s anti-Semitism tsar, questioned Ms Cates’s use of the term “cultural Marxism”, saying it was rooted in a “conspiracy theory with anti-Semitism at its core”.
But Yoram Hazony, the chairman of the conference and an orthodox Jewish theologian, said the term was “an apt phrase to describe the cultural agenda promoted by many on the Left today” and insisted he “offers no platform to anti-Semites”.
Ms Cates said liberal ideology was “literally dying out” as a result because children who are not taught to be proud of their nation’s history have less desire to continue it.
At the start of her speech, she had claimed the UK’s declining fertility rate represented even more of a danger to western society than Vladimir Putin’s Russia or rising global temperatures.
“None of our philosophical musings or policy proposals will amount to anything long lasting unless we address the one overarching threat to British conservatism and the whole of western society.
“No, it’s not climate change, it’s not Russia or China or Iran. It’s not the neo-Marxist ideology that has so weakened our institutions. No, there is one critical outcome that liberal individualism has failed to deliver and that is babies.”
Ms Cates also made her strongest criticisms of the Government’s childcare offer to date, arguing a policy package including Jeremy Hunt’s expansion of free childcare at the Spring Budget “devalues the crucial role of motherhood”.
“This childcare policy implies the chief role of a mother should be as a GDP contributor, while outsourcing her child to the state.”