This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What are they teaching your children? Are they teaching them how to think – or what to think? Worse, are they monitoring you by trapping your children into answering intrusive questions about your private opinions?

Do you know? You may think that the crazy ideas of the hard Left are safely contained in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, or the Guardian newspaper.

But some recent disturbing letters from parents of school-age children made my stomach lurch. I saw in these accounts the gradually solidifying shape of a nasty new intolerance, state-financed and more or less unavoidable by anyone with school-age children.

First of all, for a flavour of the ideas encouraged in our schools, look at a recent competition for ‘gifted pupils’. Let’s say this was ‘somewhere in Southern England’. Its theme was ‘2016: A Pivotal Year In History’, which might seem harmless. But what were the 15-year-olds involved actually doing?

The competition brief allowed for a wide range of topics to be covered. Wide? Well, the winners discussed ‘prejudice in 2016’. What prejudice was that? ‘Incidents of hate crime after Brexit, Islamophobia and the media portrayal of these events.’ They also dealt with, yes, ‘gender, religious and racial equality’.

Another team in this competition ‘highlighted’ the way in which David Bowie and Prince ‘made people start to question social convention on gender identity’. Others tackled ‘biased slants from certain media corporations’ by which I doubt they meant the BBC, and, of course, ‘climate change’ and immigration, those two tests of correctness and acceptability among the modern Left. Do you see a theme here? You should.

For not far away, in a different part of Southern England, another parent tells me that his daughter recently came home from primary school bearing a decorated poster with ALLAH across the middle. That parent says: ‘I have yet to see a similar poster with GOD or JESUS across it.’

His son, at a secondary school, is about to visit a mosque. So far there have been no visits to Christian churches. But it goes further than that.

At a recent parent-teacher meeting, which discussed ‘refugees’, the head teacher spoke of ‘these dark days’ since the EU referendum.

The boy has recently come home from school and – with a note of disapproval in his voice – asked his father: ‘Dad, why do you read the Daily Mail?’ It turns out that a teacher had asked the pupils how their parents had voted for in the referendum, and when one of the pupils said ‘Brexit’, this teacher had responded, in a disapproving tone, by asking: ‘Why did they vote for that?’

Let’s not exaggerate. These teachers are not (yet) reporting politically incorrect parents to the authorities. But what worries me is that all the preconditions for surveillance and indoctrination are there. Socially and morally conservative opinions are treated as phobias and heresies. Parents who hold such views are undermined by their children’s teachers.

Already, on the excuse of discouraging Islamic extremism, schools are licensed to probe into the minds of their pupils. Once you’ve allowed this for one supposedly ‘extreme’ opinion, it’s not a big shift to move on to others.

In the meantime, might these attitudes affect such things as the grading of coursework, job and university applications? I don’t doubt it.

Governments come and go, supposedly Left-wing and supposedly Right-wing – though the supposedly Right-wing ones usually turn out to be nothing of the kind. But in the schools, the universities and most of the public sector, the wild Marxist Cultural Revolution quietly continues its long march through the institutions.

Korea's vast statues are nearly as loopy as the Labour manifesto

North Korea has banned foreigners from visiting the two giant idols of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang, supposedly because they fear someone will blow them up.

This is a pity. During a very strange visit to the world’s weirdest country some years ago, I was able to get very close to these 72ft monstrosities,

the objects of actual worship by North Koreans. To see them is to understand just how strange this isolated nation is.

My brilliant photographer colleague Richard Jones asked me to stroll past them, so cleverly showing just how vast they are.

I learned much on the trip, but two things linger above all. One was plentiful evidence that many North Koreans are drunk a lot of the time (and who can blame them?) The other was a weird street of shops, without staff or customers, offering peculiar, inexplicable ranges of goods.

My favourite displayed, in the same window, motorbikes, cornflakes and tinned sardines.

I was reminded of this when I saw the Labour manifesto, which contains attractive items, such as railway nationalisation, along with intolerable crazy rubbish such as votes at 16.

But the Tories should be careful about saying Labour is offering a return to the 1970s. I know quite a lot of people who look back on the 1970s with growing fondness, apart from the flared trousers and the hairstyles.

Can I have a large fried with that, officer?

How strange the police of a nation which doesn’t play baseball have adopted the baseball cap as official headgear. To me, it’s as odd as if New York cops started patrolling Fifth Avenue in cricket whites.

The only person who looked good in a baseball cap was the late Princess Diana, but she would have looked wonderful in dungarees and steel-toe-capped boots. Everyone else who dons one instantly looks stupider than he or she did before. Quite recently the Royal Navy adopted these garments for official wear, though, since we have hardly any ships capable of putting to sea, I’ve seen no sign it has actually caught on. Imagine Horatio Nelson, lying dying in HMS Victory, in a baseball cap. Now Northamptonshire Police are abandoning traditional helmets and wearing what they call ‘bump caps’ – lightly armoured baseball headgear which make them look as if they are working in a hamburger drive-thru.

The official excuse is a hope that the new hat ‘will remove a barrier to the non-binary transgender community joining the police service’. No doubt it will do this.

But I can’t imagine it will increase their already diminished authority, as they go out among the Friday-night drunks and dope-smokers doing whatever it is the modern police actually do (you tell me). I think we can expect cries of ‘Can I have fries with that?!’ as they sidle, embarrassed, through the seething streets.

Old-fashioned plain, severe uniforms existed for a reason. They conveyed authority. The new ones communicate an ingratiating matiness, which – when it fails to please – is forced to turn instead to the use of Tasers and clubs.

Afghanistan

Can we really be planning to send more troops to Afghanistan, the most foolish and futile military and political mistake of modern times? It’s just for training, apparently. Well, last time it was going to happen without a shot being fired, until the sad convoys of flag-wrapped coffins began to come back.

Telephone directory enquiries

The next time anyone tells you about how market forces drive prices down, just ask them to explain what happened to telephone directory enquiries. A call to these monsters of greed – free under the old, despised GPO – will hit you for at least £8.98 from one provider, and can now cost almost £24 for less than a minute. The main victims of this outrage are the old, who can’t cope with the internet. Sorry, but the market just isn’t a substitute for morality and human decency.

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