AS this week was the week of our sister union’s annual conference, I wish to send my best wishes to them and their young members and I look forward to working with NEU colleagues in staff union meetings, demonstrations and trade union events.

During last weekend’s NASUWT annual conference, important motions were passed, and our colleagues had the opportunity to share their experiences in local industrial action along with their struggles in a devolved context.

Some of the most striking motions conveyed the rightful sentiment that our government believes that teachers are dispensable, able to be confined to the dustbin when they are no longer young, happen to become sick or are too high on the pay ladder — after all, they can just find a new batch of hopeful, perhaps naive PGCE students and NQTs to abuse (although the falling ITT targets suggest otherwise).

Without digressing too much, these motions included the right to relevant CPD and training, recruitment and protection of specialist teachers, suicide prevention, behaviour in Wales and Scotland and protecting the right to strike, among others. In all motions, discussion around the compounding crises we face was to be had, as well as emotional testimonies that struck a chord with all educators in the hall.

Disappointingly, an element of tribalism and sectarianism could be felt in the hall at times as well. As I wrote in my last feature, insulting another union or overemphasising that we are the “only” teachers’ union is unnecessary, and damaging to our movement.

Unfortunately, there are two teaching unions instead of one, and we must endeavour to work together at all times. When we fight against the government’s draconian laws and austerity, we should act as two divisions of the same army. Instead, it is as if we are two mercenary battalions that speak different languages.

Additionally, during our conference, members received the news that 78 per cent of eligible members surveyed in our latest consultative ballot did not support moving to a national statutory ballot for industrial action. Instead, it seems that there is enthusiasm for political campaigning and lobbying of the government with our demands for a New Deal for Teachers.

The demands within the motion that call for a New Deal for Teachers are admirable, and indeed are what need to be achieved to save our profession. The problem is that political campaigning for any new deal will most likely fall on deaf ears, be they Labour or Tory.

During our conference, there was a sense of nostalgia for the Tony Blair years from some of our colleagues, and I will admit that I am obviously too young to have experienced them. However, what we all know is that academies were the brainchild of Blair and that we as teachers also know that Blair was complicit in one of the deadliest, costliest wars in the Middle East, a war that interrupted education and traumatised millions of children in Iraq.

The Labour Party of Keir Starmer does not represent the interests of teachers, the working class or the working-class communities that we teach in. During a debate on a motion to save the arts and alternative programmes in our schools, a colleague aptly mentioned that Starmer’s view of education is from a private school perspective.

When he praised the arts, it was from the perspective of a child who attended a well-funded, expensive private school! He doesn’t know the lack of quality education in the arts and crafts that children are receiving now.

Now this wouldn’t have seemed so farcical if it wasn’t another piece of delusion on top of a pile of lies and U-turns. At best, the most likely incoming Labour Party MPs are of the liberal left, and as has been said before the working class are right to hate them.

When we campaign for a New Deal for Teachers, which does have laudable aims and the right demands, the Labour government will spit in our faces.

We can’t change what our members decided. Our colleagues have decided that their energy needs to be spent on campaigning for a New Deal for Teachers instead of balloting for strike action. As a member of NASUWT, I will respect that and campaign too.

The caveat is that maybe we need to realise that striking is in fact political campaigning in its purest form. Withdrawing our labour shows the Westminster government that we will not quietly accept the conditions we face.

The struggle that we face in our profession is emblematic of the world of work in our age: low pay, precarious temporary contracts, dangerous work conditions, lack of funding and a mental health crisis. This is not just about pay, it is about workload, privatisation, services for the children we teach, and our right to live in a better world. But this can’t be achieved by idly standing by because a union is only as good as its lay members.