A STUDENT survey, conducted by an Italian youth association linked to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, asked secondary schoolchildren to call out “left-wing” teachers spreading “propaganda” in schools.

Nothing to see here, says the Italian Education Ministry; a youth group promoting its own questionnaire to assess student opinion.

Yet this story — reported exclusively for the Morning Star by Federica Adriani — should ring alarm bells.

A lot has been done to sanitise Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, rebranding this descendant — via the Italian Social Movement — of Mussolini’s original Fascist Party as an ordinary centre-right party. A process helped by the march of more traditional centre-right parties across Europe towards authoritarianism, xenophobia and racism. But that’s the problem: the extremism has not so much been abandoned as normalised.

Student Action’s leaflet promoting the survey asserts “The school is ours!” Youthful exuberance? Or a sinister call, from a youth group linked to the ruling party, for schools to be politicised along their preferred lines? There were no questions about right-wing propaganda in class.

Echoes of Mussolini’s regime, which asked pupils to denounce socialist teachers, are unfortunate from a political movement descended from his.

We should care. For one thing attacks by the political right on “left-wing” educators are a staple of British politics too. For another, the far right is increasingly internationalised. What’s pioneered in one country may be the blueprint for another.

The most frightening precedent is being set in the United States, with the terror unleashed on cities by a militarised Immigration & Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency having attracted admiration both from Reform UK and the leading figure in far-right street mobilisations, “Tommy Robinson.”

But we shouldn’t ignore Italy. As the Morning Star reported last month — in another story largely ignored by the rest of the British media — its Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini received Robinson in his government office. Why would a senior member of an allied government meet a rabble-rousing British thug, periodically in prison, who has publicly called for the US government to overthrow our own?

As well ask why another supposed ally, the number two in Washington Vice-President JD Vance, met a string of far-right leaders while on holiday here last summer. Theirs is an international project, which the White House’s National Security Strategy says involves assistance to “patriotic” parties to prevent “civilisational erasure” in Europe as a result of immigration.

Nothing new for Salvini, who in 2021 attended a summit with Polish and Hungarian leaders calling for a “resurrection” of “Christian Europe,” defined by its hostility to outsiders. At that Viktor Orban described Salvini as a “hero” for prosecuting the crews of search-and-rescue vessels which saved refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean, another reminder of the pioneering role Italy has played in dismantling international legal norms.

Italy’s anti-immigrant practices were cited as a model by Conservative and Labour governments here. The groundwork has been done for demonising teachers, too: alleged left-wing bias in the profession was a fixation of Tory education secretaries. Nigel Farage has dialled that up, accusing them of “poisoning our kids” and saying British education is controlled by the “Marxist left.”

Teachers are well aware of the need to avoid partisan politics in the classroom. At the same time, with the far right on the rise, their very duty to protect children requires robust anti-racism and anti-sexism — stances that are politically charged in today’s Britain and which the right resents.

It is not hard to imagine a Reform government wanting pupils to “out” teachers who stand up to its hate-fuelled message. And the right across Europe has common agendas and talking points, not to mention a shared inspiration and lucrative source of funds across the Atlantic.

So we should not ignore warning signs, from Italy or anywhere else. Their problem today could be ours tomorrow.