The UK’s biggest teaching union has exposed its true colours

The National Education Union’s (NEU) mask slipped last month when four of the organisation’s senior figures published a new book, Lessons in Organising: What Trade Unionists Can Learn from the War on Teachers. It was endorsed by the NEU’s general secretary, Kevin Courtney, who called it ‘an excellent review of the attack on teachers and their unions, by authors well placed to point to ways to improve the fight back and resistance’. 

The book confirms that the union’s priorities lie far from their members’ pay and workload, which they describe as ‘narrow issues’. Instead, the NEU’s leadership appears to be dedicated to fighting the ‘multiple oppressions of capitalism’ and transforming the union into a body that aims to ‘explicitly confront the corrosive nature of neoliberal ideology’.

As a member, for some years, of the civil service union, the FDA, I have more time for public sector unions than many on the right.