School visited by extremism unit

The Langton Boys has been visited by the Department for Education’s counter-extremism unit in the wake of the cancelled talk by controversial speaker and former pupil Milo Yiannopoulos.

In a bizarre coincidence, the meeting took place on the same day, Monday, that a man attending a talk by Mr Yiannopoulos in America shot and wounded a protester outside the venue.

Mr Yiannopoulos, a Donald Trump supporter who makes his living attacking political correctness and feminism, was due to give a speech at the Langton in November. It was cancelled after left-wing academics from Canterbury’s universities threatened to protest at the school and complained to the DFE, which involved its counter-extremism unit.

Ken Moffat, the Langton’s head, described Monday’s meeting as like “being told how to suck eggs”.

He said: “The guy had come all the way down from Hertfordshire to tell us how to vet speakers and manage security – things we know how to do. “It was a bit of a non-meeting. “I did the get chance to tell him some of our concerns in that I felt they strong-armed us into cancelling Mr Yiannopoulos’s talk and made our position impossible.”

Fifty academics and university staff from Kent and Christ Church complained that Mr Yiannopoulos worked for the “ultra-conservative” Breitbart website, from where he espouses “hardline misogynist, white supremacist and xenophobic ideas”.

Mr Yiannopoulos has rejected these claims.

And ex-pupil Daniel Hamilton, a consultant on international affairs who spoke at the school last week, labelled the Dfe’s visit “a monumental waste of time”.

He said: “Debate is a key part of preparing students for the real world. That’s life.

“Rather than dispatching vain- gloriously titled pen pushers to harass teaching staff, the mandarins in the Department for Education should seek to learn lessons from the Langton’s outstanding record of success.”

The Langton says it is planning to hold a symposium on free speech in June.

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Picture: Mike Allen Langton Boys head Ken Moffat and controversial commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, whose cancelled talk at the school prompted a visit by the Department for Education’s anti-extremism unit