BRITAIN’S left faces two interconnected struggles — one, to confront a Labour government whose renewed austerity is entrenching the long-term decline in living standards and public services; two, to defeat an insurgent far right which feeds off the results.

This week’s National Education Union (NEU) conference in Harrogate indicated how that can be done. The decision to use the union’s political fund to campaign against Reform UK candidates is important, especially coming from a union not affiliated to Labour. 

If this is a declaration of war, it’s mutual: Reform leader Nigel Farage has repeatedly attacked teaching unions, accusing them of “poisoning the minds of young people... against everything this country has ever stood for.” 

Attacks on education unions are par for the course in their Easter conference season, and true to form the Sunday Times opened the week with a salvo at NEU leader Daniel Kebede, taking aim in particular at his record of solidarity with Palestine and “militant” stance on pay.

Farage’s hostility echoes that of successive Tory education secretaries who understand organised labour is the biggest obstacle to the “Germ” (global education reform movement) — “the international drive in education policy towards competition, choice, standardisation, privatisation, test-based accountability and performance-related rewards.” 

This model, which has produced the exam-factory system preventing a rounded education for so many children today and also explains the refusal to ditch a discredited Ofsted inspection system, has obvious attractions for the marketising right. 

But Farage’s attack is provoked by the progressive social role of education unions, in particular their anti-racism and part in challenging imperialist narratives about British history and culture — the often misrepresented “decolonising the curriculum” debate. 

In the context of the Europe-wide shift to transform “welfare states into warfare states” this now includes anxiety over young people’s unwillingness to “fight for their country,” by which is meant be deployed to other countries to kill and die for British ruling-class interests.

This alone shows what a bulwark against the far right educators can be. The NEU decision to campaign against Reform meets its challenge head on, placing organised labour at the forefront of the anti-racist movement.

It also packs a punch because of what has been called the “hinterland” of the education sector — the influence exercised by schools as centres of community life and because teachers and support staff regularly interact, in a work-related context, with broad cross-sections of the whole local population in the form of children, parents and grandparents. 

This role allowed the NEU to win communities to a period of remote learning, forcing a Tory government to U-turn, at a time when school buildings were becoming vectors of Covid transmission in the pandemic. It also explains why the School Cuts campaign, detailing what Tory funding policies meant for individual schools, was effective enough to shift a calculated 700,000-plus votes to Labour during the 2017 election. 

Reform UK’s response to this formidable social strength is, like that of successive governments, to try to divide teaching union activists from the wider membership. But the NEU’s success in delivering strike votes smashing through Tory-imposed thresholds meant to make them impossible shows this will be difficult.

The ability to shift votes in 2017, though, depended on a contrast between Labour schools policy and the then government’s. 

This makes campaigning against the current government’s failure to properly fund schools, address child poverty or for that matter its often racist immigration posturing an equally important part of a left political strategy, as debates on all these issues and more in Harrogate this week indicated.

This was an encouraging conference by a militant union with an important role to play in shaping a united working-class front against austerity, racism and war. It offers hope that the left can return to the offensive in British politics.