You can either read Katharine Birbalsingh’s brilliant ARC Speech or hear her present it below.

A Moral Crisis in the West

“Hi everyone. Well, I am Britain’s strictest head mistress, so I need all sitting up straight and all eyes on me. A few weeks ago, we all saw the same footage. A young man called Henry Novak, barely out of childhood, handcuffed on the ground, begging the police for help. He had been stabbed multiple times and subsequently died. And what followed was the confusion of our commentators as they struggled to explain how our young police officers sworn to protect the public could behave in such a way. No one seemed to have a convincing answer.

“But when you spend a lifetime in schools, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Those young police officers are not a special case. They’re collateral damage. And the pattern runs far further afield than policing. Last September, Charlie Kirk was shot and within hours, young people were celebrating all over the internet. Despite the fact that his two little children would have to grow up without their father, many of us looked on in disbelief.

“What has happened to the moral core of our young people? Something has changed profoundly in how our young people see the world. Those police officers were not evil. They were not incompetent. They were terrified. Terrified of being seen as racist. Charlie Kirk held views young people find objectionable. And so his death was cause for celebration.

“Henry Novak’s attacker was a brown man. So the police’s deepest instinct to protect the victim was overridden by their most powerful fear, being accused of racism. The police are not special. They’re what some of our young people have become so consumed by white guilt that they will do crazy, irrational, and inhumane things rather than risk being seen as racist.”

How White Guilt Changed a Generation

“Unless we try to explain this change in our moral core and the moral core of our young people and why we are witnessing this culture change across many western countries, we cannot pretend to care about the West. Our profound lack of interest in the moral values surrounding our children has caused our civilisational collapse.

“The reason the younger generation see things as they do is because they have been taught to view people in two camps. Those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors. And in their eyes, Charlie Kirk was an oppressor. So his death did not warrant grief. The man who killed Henry Novak belonged to the oppressed class. So the police’s job was to protect him, not the dying man on the ground. This is not cruelty or incompetence. This is white guilt. And we are the ones who have taught this to our children.

“We, the boomers, the Gen Xers, the older millennials, we are responsible for not teaching our children the difference between right and wrong. We are the ones who immersed our children in a culture of victimhood which is at odds with the culture of personal responsibility we all grew up in. A culture we’ve very stupidly taken for granted. As little as 40 or 50 years ago, the bedrock of traditional small C conservative values that built the West were commonplace in our schools and in our general culture.”

Save Our Children, Save the West

“I want you to live your lives by the small C conservative values that were instinctive to our grandparents. Be brave and put away your lifestyles of anything goes. Saving the West ain’t easy, you know. And then you need to narrate those traditional values openly with your children, your grandchildren, your nephews, your nieces as if we’re going to war. We need to inoculate our children against the seductive ideas of victimhood and hold them to account so that they can see that they are morally responsible beings with agency whatever their race whatever their religion.

“So yes, Henry Novak’s police officers were trained with the wrong priorities, but that training was only fuel on a fire that has been burning their whole entire lives. A young man lay dying on the ground, and their most powerful instinct was not to help him, but to manage their own terror of being seen as racist. This is not a policing failure. This is a civilisational failure and it belongs to us because of what we have done and are doing to our children.

“I talk about all of this and more on my new podcast coming out in August – it’s called strictly education, for parents, for teachers out there, and you can find me on YouTube. We all need to be brave enough to teach children a sense of duty and service, love of country, gratitude over entitlement, hard work over laziness, forgiveness over vengeance, and our children will reject the oppressor and oppressed narrative instinctively. They will know in their hearts that dignity comes through owning one’s moral agency, through being responsible and sacrificing for the betterment of the whole. Schools matter, families matter, children matter. Save our children and we’ll save the West. Thank you.”