Preparing for Annual Conference

and the struggle beyond it

against the ruling class offensive…

Unity in the Union

Unity between our unions

Unity amongst all workers

NOTHING LESS WILL DO!

 

As we prepare to vote in the imminent General Election, the choice between the three main parliamentary parties gives us a choice of deep cuts, serious cuts and savage cuts to our public services – and if the perpetrators are prepared to use those words instead of their usual fact avoidance techniques we can be pretty sure that, in reality, the cuts will be all three… serious, deep and savage.

 

At the same time the same three parliamentary parties vie with each other to not just underfund our services including the education system, but to accelerate the process of breaking it up altogether. Anything goes these days in terms of “education policy” as long as the end result is fragmentation and competition between schools - and another step on the road to full-blown profit driven privatisation.

 

More Academies and rocket boosted Academies. “Swedish model” Free Schools. More Faith Schools. Independent Trust Schools. “Parent power” to vote out Headteachers. Parent run schools. Increasingly independent “chains of schools” run by “Accredited status providers”. Some such “policies” disappear as quickly as they emerge, others “stick” and become reality. It’s difficult to match the latest divisive policy to a particular party. They have different buzz words and daily changing spin – what about the Tories recently found support for Workers’ Co-operatives?  - but they are all basically the same. They all represent a fundamental assault on the very existence of state education. Why?

 

Well, they all prepare the way for turning education over to the “powerful and predatory entrepreneurial interests” of the free market, identified by Education International more than ten years ago on a world scale. For turning public services into a source of profit is a world wide phenomenon. It is part of the capitalist offensive, which declared at one time “the end of history”, identified “free market” economics as synonymous with democracy, and has had no scruples in making working class people pay for the economic and financial crises.

 

There is nothing new in this. We have been analysing, documenting and reporting this “direction of travel” for two decades. It’s become such familiar territory that many progressive people, reading of the latest destructive scheme, just tut into their newspaper and move on. And many do not seem to make the connection with other attacks on working people. Perhaps they don’t want to because the implications are too great.

 

Clearly these are not just “election issues”. One (or more) of these parties are going to be in power – or at least in Office, doing the bidding of the rich and powerful who are ALWAYS in power – and the assault on us is going to be very real and much accelerated after May 6th.

 

We are now facing an all out offensive against all the gains made by working people since the end of the Second World War – including state education. Such an offensive cannot be beaten back if we all stick to simply doing our best to defend our own patch. We need a united response across all services and a positive program for the future.

 

Those gains for working people were made at a time that there was a widespread and powerful demand for change from the conditions faced by working class people prior to the war. On a world scale, fascism had been defeated and many nations were turning towards socialism. The Soviet Union was a powerful force, representing “another world” – soon to be joined by China and others. In Britain, the Labour Party’s 1945 landslide victory on a radical program represented real groundswell pressure for change. Nationalisation and collective ownership was widely seen as justified, positive and to be celebrated. And outside of Parliament the trade unions and other workers’ organisations were strong, and were getting stronger – a trend to be sustained for the next 30 years or more.

 

The privilege of the ruling class of the very rich and powerful was under threat, and they were canny enough to recognise their weakness, and make many concessions. But is it not now clear that they were simply, and intelligently, biding their time?

 

Of course that did not mean that the positive gains made by working class people in that period right up to the end of the 1970s were won without struggle. Our fight to extend the right to meaningful broad based education for all children, for an integrated system of comprehensive schools and further and higher education, for early years and community education… all of these demanded vision, determination, organisation and commitment to real struggle. And of course the struggle of teachers and other education workers, at the heart of their communities, was reflected in the struggle of workers across industry and public services. Nothing was given to us, but much was won.

 

And then, the counterattack. There is no other word for it, and the military analogy is not misplaced. The Thatcher administration was ideological, strategic, determined and very well organised – both in long term policy direction and in day to day organisation. They were determined to break the power of organised workers, and to re-establish the pursuit of profit in all sectors of the economy and politics. A breathtakingly ruthless program of deindustrialisation was carried out in the areas of strongest union organisation – steel, shipbuilding, coal, “the print” and so on. Wherever workers resisted we saw the full force of the state used against them – most publicly and dramatically against the miners 25 years ago. And a series of developing anti Union laws sought, very successfully, to nail the trade union movement down – and finally to “regulate” itself by forcing trade union leaderships to “repudiate” workers in action, or face possible sequestration and imprisonment.

 

When asked what she was most proud of achieving in her period in office, Thatcher famously replied, “New Labour”. Certainly the ruling class offensive has continued. De-industrialisation has been faster under New Labour than the Tories, and Blair made the attack on the public sector his very own mission – and when he spoke of “education, education, education” as his three priorities, he was, uncharacteristically, not lying. The fragmentation, marketisation, commodification and privatisation of education has been the flagship of New Labour – to be achieved by bullying and coercion, threats and some promises to Local Authorities – and by the constant denigration of state education and its workers

 

The unmistakeable conclusion is that there is a concerted attempt to reverse all the gains made by workers, to reassert unchallenged capitalist control, to turn over public services to those who want to make profit out of them, and to undermine any attempt by unions and community to resist.

 

Are we up to the job of resisting? Well we have a long way to go.

 

Firstly, trade unions, particularly teacher unions are disunited… and this is no accident. New Labour has achieved it by incorporating some teacher unions in their own exploitation though “Social Partnership” – a place at the table and in the corridors (and dinners) of power – while excluding and seeking to isolate others who insist of organising against them. Unity of our unions, in action, in policy and finally organisationally is an absolute necessity – a top priority – not a “choice”. Continued competition, fighting for members, is not a “strategy”… it is a recipe for disaster – and those who advocate it are doing the government’s job for it.

 

Secondly, the movement needs to stop avoiding the issue of the use of the most anti-working class laws in Europe against us. Of late, even unions abiding by the laws and winning big majorities for action in the required ballots are being prevented from taking the action by the use of the EU, national Courts and injunctions. Can there be a clearer illustration of the class nature of the law?

 

We need to campaign to end the anti Union laws – but in the end we need to create the conditions where we can act in defiance of them, with the government unable to react. We’ve done it before in the very earliest days of the laws (remember the “Pentonville 5” dockers?) and since – but it needs mass, widespread and concerted action… not just conference motions and wishful thinking.

 

Thirdly, we need a broad perspective on the struggle ahead – not just the defence of a teacher under the cosh, the defence of a school from Ofsted, the fight against an Academy…not even the defence of the whole of education on its own. We need to understand, and to centrally propagate the view in our communities that public services, jobs, pay and pensions are all under threat, and they are under threat from the same people, the same class that uses our money to bail out bankers, that are destroying the environment, that promote the widening of the wealth/poverty gap, that fail to meet “targets” on child poverty, that see and ignore a growth in homelessness… that launch war around the world.

 

For all these reasons, the NUT Conference in Liverpool at Easter will see an important event that we will need to ensure has some continuing effects on the union and our movement generally.

 

The Institute of Employment Rights, the People’s Charter, the United Campaign (for the repeal of the anti-union laws), UNIFY – for one education union, Education for Tomorrow and The Morning Star have joined forces to call a “fringe meeting” to pull all the strands of the struggle together, and to promote a radical strategy to win change, instead of the tendency in the movement to indulge in “campaign hopping” – constantly on the back foot, constantly vulnerable to attack.

 

We need to begin to turn the tables, and to establish firm ground from which we can launch our fight. The General and Local elections give us a starting point… but only that. If we are to resist and defeat this ruling class offensive, we need to be committed to a long haul, an unremitting struggle… but a struggle that will allow us to look up and see the future… a future based on the common good rather than dog-eat-dog competition, on real need, not individual greed.