Don, the issue isn't banning the BNP. It is that membership of the BNP might not be appropriate for people working in certain professions. Keep in mind that there are lots of people who vote Labour, for example, who might not be members of the Labour party. It has already been deemed inappropriate for people in the prison service and for the police to be BNP members. If someone is so entrenched in their beliefs that they are a card-carrying member of an overtly racist political party, I do not think that they should be teaching children. It is NOT just an issue of how they deliver the curriculum, it is the fact that, in some of the most deprived and socially excluded schools, the element of pastoral care is proportionally much bigger than in the more middle class, successful schools. In fact, it is a huge part of the job. There are difficult situations to be navigated every day, and these may include children from diverse backgrounds, and from new immigrant communities. I am not sure, for example, that I would trust a card-carrying member of the BNP to respond in the most sensitive and caring way to a child from a Somali or a Polish family; nor to treat that child with absolute fairness and respect if they were bullied, for example, or came into conflict with white British kids.

These are the reasons why the police and members of the prison service are not allowed to be members. Keep in mind that having the right teachers working at the coalface can be the determining factor in whether certain kids end up in prison, or having regular run-ins with the police. For these reasons, I think that the regulation should be exactly the same.

I was furious when listening to Maurice Smith on Radio 4 yesterday morning - one of the main reasons he seems to have come to his conclusions is that he is afraid it will set a precedent for all public sector workers to be banned from BNP membership. He thinks this would be bad, so he has decided it would be inappropriate to ban teachers. But teachers are in a unique position with relation to other public sector workers. This article from today's Guardian spells out the issues really well:

Official: it's fine for racists to teach