In order to promote equality, Castleview Primary School in Edinburgh last week asked boys to wear a skirt to school for the day. The school had apparently been inspired by a story from Spain, where teachers and pupils wore skirts for the day to demonstrate solidarity with a boy who had been expelled for wearing a skirt to his school last year. And apparently, in Spain, 4th November is now officially 'wear a skirt to school day'.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the response from Castleview parents has not been uniformly enthusiastic, if you will pardon the pun, with one disgruntled parent tweeting, "If a boy wants to wear a skirt to school, he should be allowed, but why put pressure on people to ask their son to wear a skirt or be seen as some sort of bigot?"

Fair point, though the school appears unimpressed, with teachers responding that clothes "don't have a gender" and that everyone should be free to express themselves as they choose.

Now, whether or not clothes are associated with 'gender' is questionable. How many boys, for instance, wear a bra? But even so, requiring boys to cross-dress could perhaps be seen as infringing their right to freedom of choice, combined with an ideologically motivated attempt to bring about political change in the wider community. All of which begs the question, why have schools become complicit in normalising and promoting the notion that sex is purely a social construct, so that we – and specifically here, children – can choose our gender at will?

However regarded, at the end of the day this is no more than an ideological attempt to coerce children – and their parents – into acceptance of a woke agenda aimed at destroying what is disparagingly branded 'heteronormativity'.

In a recent and fascinating speech to the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Russian President Vladimir Putin, referring to the social and cultural problems currently afflicting Western society, pointed out that this was the same programme introduced by the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, following the 1917 revolution. He said the aim then had been to impose progressive sexual and social views that would dismantle the traditional family structure, which was seen as underpinned by capitalist values derived from the Christian faith.

But this attempt, he emphasised, had been an unmitigated disaster, which had served only to dangerously fragment Russian society, and had subsequently been unequivocally and decisively rejected. Russia today, he said, held to more 'conservative values' based around a more traditional approach to morals and time-tested tradition.

Commenting further on the 'new' moral values of the West, where children are taught that they can pick their gender and where 'women' are increasingly being airbrushed out of existence, he went on, "I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times."

It has been well said that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. It should then be remembered that the aim of the Bolsheviks was not just to overturn the political system that had existed in Russia under the Tsars, but to spark a far wider socialist revolution that would ignite the whole of Europe and spread to the US: to detonate, in a nutshell, worldwide revolution that would entirely destroy the old order, and allow them to take control.

In the early days of the revolution, the Bolsheviks had thought this was inevitable. Europe, however, had remained stubbornly resistant, and so the Communist International (the Comintern) had been charged with finding out why. At the instigation of Lenin, a meeting was organised at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, drawing together Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukacs and Willi Munzenberg.

Developing plans already underway in Russia, the group put forward a complex strategy to destabilise Western civilisation by undermining Christian belief and the family ⎼ promoting, amongst other things, promiscuity, widespread abortion, and homosexuality. The plan, as articulated by Munzenberg, was to "organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink", a group he famously labelled "useful idiots".

It is the fruit of such policies that we are seeing in the West today. Requiring boys to wear skirts on the spurious justification that it will promote equality is not a sign of social progression. Rather it is the overt pursuit of an agenda that seeks to destroy the traditional structures of Western society and promote chaos, which can only serve to facilitate the imposition of totalitarian control.

'Useful idiots' indeed.

Rev Lynda Rose is founder of Voice for Justice UK, a group which works to uphold the moral values of the Bible in society.