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The Tories' ban on anti-capitalist resources in schools is an attempt to stifle dissent

<span>Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images

To see our plausible future, we don’t need a time machine: we can take a two-and-a-half-hour flight to central Europe. Unlike Britain’s Conservatives, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz began its political journey as a “centrist” party and a signed-up member of the Liberal International. In power, it radicalised.

Related: With its lurch to the right, Britain is no longer special in Europe | Stefan Bielik

The now hard-right authoritarian regime of Victor Orbán maintains the trappings of democracy – elections take place, opposition parties exist – but it has scorched away the substance. Its favoured blunt instrument is the “culture war”: whether that’s whipping up bile against migrants – leading to condemnation from the Council of Europe for fuelling “xenophobic attitudes, fear and hatred” – or using coronavirus emergency degrees to de facto abolish trans rights in May. Such ruses have whipped up a rightwing populist frenzy that has favoured Hungary’s rulers and destabilised their opponents. This year, Orbán’s autocracy also rewrote the school curriculum to promote its ultra-nationalist agenda, ignoring the outcry of the teachers’ union who protested against what “can only serve as a curriculum of a dictatorship”.

Last week, with no fanfare, our own government issued orders to English schools, banning them from using resources coming from organisations whose expressed beliefs included the end of capitalism. Believing that an economy whose organising principle is profit isn’t humanity’s endpoint is a legitimate opinion to be debated in a functioning democracy; but as Martha Spurrier, director of Liberty, tells me, this diktat “is a heavyhanded attempt to stop free speech and prevent free thought. It’s asking teachers – people interested in expanding minds – to become enforcers of politicians’ desire to quell dissent, criticism and debate.”

While Margaret Thatcher’s notorious, and now repealed, Section 28 clause – which in 1988 ordered local authorities and schools to “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” – differed in its specific bigoted intentions, there is a recurring theme. The architects of Section 28 could claim that their legislation did not proscribe any, or all, mentioning of same-sex attraction, but there was a chilling effect. Teachers became frightened to say anything, ensuring that an entire generation – myself included – only heard LGBTQ rights discussed in schools through the prism of the generally bigoted comments of our classmates.

Today’s real instruction to teachers from the government is clear: shield your students from critiques of the status quo. From Black Lives Matter to climate justice, many of today’s agenda-setting movements believe their struggles cannot be divorced from challenging capitalism: they may now find themselves barred from being discussed in the classroom.

Tory authoritarianism is not simply born of triumphalism as they gleefully survey the rubble of Corbynism. When former minister Esther McVey invokes the ghost of Joe McCarthy by warning of leftwing teachers “indoctrinating children”, she expresses Conservative fear of the young. While our ruling party has near-total hegemony among politically engaged boomers, it is a near-fringe party among generations Y and Z. Inexplicably, a collapse in homeownership in favour of an unregulated private rented sector, student debt, a lack of well-paid secure jobs, much reduced public services and social security payments, combined with falling living standards has led the young to conclude the current economic system is rigged against them – and have made their political choices accordingly.

The Tories comfort themselves that the young are afflicted by false consciousness, brainwashed by leftwing teachers and BBC comedy panel shows, and all they need to do is replicate Margaret Thatcher’s determination to remould popular attitudes: “Economics are the method,” as she put it, but “the object is to change the heart and soul.” By controlling what the young hear, they will surely see Conservatism as their true political salvation, the party hopes.

Whatever the motive, Britain is on the path to Orbánisation, as Tory politicians privately talk of fighting a culture war on “unconscious bias training, non-binary pronouns, the renaming of institutions and micro-aggressions,” to destabilise their opponents. Without such an approach, says one Tory MP who seized a Labour seat in December, “we end up having to talk about how rubbish we are at testing. It’s an obvious choice.”

Combined with efforts to install rightwing ideologues as chairs of the BBC and Ofcom – mirroring Hungary’s own curtailment of state media – the attempt to gag teachers underlines the grotesque farce of today’s “debate” on free speech. The latest contrived moral panic centres on censorious people on social media silencing debate, as though the real menace to our hard-won freedoms is some little-known Twitter user in Bolton who posts a few social justice hashtags.

But the honest test of a healthy democracy is the extent of our ability to challenge and scrutinise the policies and underlying values of those with power and authority. This discussion has been derailed by rightwing cheerleaders who have constructed a fantasy world in which, despite a 80-seat Tory majority and a predominantly Conservative press, somehow it is really the left who are in control. In this parallel universe, the right are in office but not in power: a fictitious leftwing establishment are instead calling the shots. The right to free speech is thus being redefined as the right to loudly champion the values of the government; it is the dissenters who, despite lacking legislative leaders or institutional media might, are supposedly threatening free speech.

What is described as a “culture war” is not just a means of stigmatising the struggle of minorities for rights and acceptance, or to distract from the Tories’ catastrophic handling of the pandemic, or to force Labour on to political ground that polarises its natural supporters, although that is undoubtedly part of the game-plan. We don’t need warnings from history: on the other side of Europe, these culture wars are being used right now to devastate democracy itself. Perhaps it will be different here: Hungary, after all, has a recent experience of dictatorship and its freedoms were more fragile. Perhaps, perhaps. But the further we travel down this frightening track, the harder it will be to turn back.

•Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist