The Long March through the teaching unions

Two years ago, when the Association of Teachers and Lecturers completed its merger with the National Union of Teachers, I returned my membership card and cancelled my subscription in protest.

There was an interesting precedent for this; half a century earlier, my father did the same thing with his union membership when a teachers’ strike was called. Aided by a number of like-minded colleagues, he rearranged the timetables and took on extra lessons and duties to ensure that the school stayed open and pupils, particularly those in exam years, received as much of their normal education as possible.

To anyone outside the profession, it may seem odd that either of us belonged to a trade union in the first place. However, as I have mentioned before, union membership was, until the recent emergence of an independent and apolitical service, the only way to gain access to expert legal protection and advice in the case of allegations of professional misconduct - a necessity when your job places you at constant risk of accusation based on the unsupported word of a child or teenager, however far-fetched or malicious.

Joining the profession therefore effectively meant signing up with a union. With the avowedly militant NUT and NASUWT available, those who instead chose the relatively genteel Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association, as the ATL was known until 1993, almost certainly did so because its policy of no strikes and minimal political activism was the best match for their own beliefs and opinions.

Unfortunately for these principled and peaceful souls, their good nature was to be taken advantage of in a cynical and manipulative coup. Starting in the early nineties, a concerted power grab by left-wingers led to the union’s first ever strike, affiliation with the TUC and finally the ‘merger’ - effectively a takeover by the much larger NUT - to create Europe’s largest teaching union. It is a virtual certainty that Labour supporters like General Secretary Mary Bousted, the hard-line Corbynite who masterminded the merger, joined this non-striking union with the specific aim of converting it into a militant organisation (in Bousted’s case, actually moving from the NUT in order to do so). 

Sadly, the apolitical stance of most ATL members was no match for the warlike ambitions of Bousted and her cohort; very few ever bothered to attend meetings or vote in union ballots, giving her and her associates an easy route to the top and to full control of policy. Even when their union’s very existence came under threat, a paltry turnout of 25% for the merger ballot suggests that three quarters of them just closed their eyes and hoped it - and she - would go away. Instead, they found themselves trapped in Bousted’s new super-union which, within a year, was demanding the restoration of flying pickets and the return of the closed shop.

It’s hard not to feel a deep sense of betrayal at this imposition of militancy on those of us who rejected it on principle at the outset. I am surely not alone in saying that neglecting pupils for political reasons goes against everything I believe about the importance of my chosen profession. I could understand taking part in a demonstration during the holidays or at the weekend, but to use children’s education as a bargaining chip seems to me despicable - to say nothing of the impact on parents in low-paid jobs obliged to take unpaid time off work if a school closes.

The NEU ballot turnout was 53% - a scant 3% above the legal threshold - suggesting that many of those apolitical ATL members are still out there, even if they are now so outnumbered by militants that their votes - or abstentions - can have little or no impact. For the sake of a generation of pupils whose education has already suffered considerable disruption, I hope that, when the strike days arrive, they will uphold the once-proud ethos of the union they originally joined and, in Churchill’s immortal words, keep buggering on.