Trade unions were forged to fight for the rights and interests of workers and employees. Today, however, too many have been hijacked by activists, obsessed with fringe causes and foreign wars at the expense of the members they were meant to serve. Whether it’s Unite the Union set to debate anti-Israel motions while its strike has left Birmingham littered with overflowing bins or UCU pushing boycotts of Israeli academia while British lecturers are drowning in workloads, the mission is drifting.
Nowhere is this more glaring, or more damaging, than in the National Education Union (NEU). With about 500,000 members, it is the largest education union in Europe. Its ideological bias has the potential to reach deep into every school in the country, shaping not just the work conditions for teachers, but the learning environment for children.
At a time when GCSE pass rates in English and maths in England have slumped to near or below 60 per cent, the NEU’s leadership is busy funding Gaza protests. At a Stop the War coalition event during last month’s NEU conference, the union’s Secretary General Daniel Kebede expressed his pride about the “twenty-eight national demonstrations in opposition to the genocide in Gaza which we have financially supported, we have assisted in any way possible. There has always been someone from my national leadership represented at those demonstrations.”
Most teachers, one would presume, joined this union to fight for better classrooms, not to be conscripted into the ideological trenches of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Members who don’t share the dominant worldview – be they Jewish, politically moderate, or those who just want the union to focus on pay and conditions – must feel increasingly alienated or silenced.
For Jewish teachers and pupils, this activism has serious consequences. The obsession with Israel fosters a hostile environment for Jewish members, many of whom subsequently left. As a result, if teachers were to speak about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the terms laid out by the NEU leadership, pupils would likely receive only one narrative – the caricature of Israel as a colonialist settler state committing genocide. Complex history and nuanced debate are discarded.
Jewish pupils who identify with Israel, or even simply with their Jewish heritage, increasingly face ostracism and hostility. The CST reported a sharp rise in school-related anti-Jewish hate after October 7, 2023. The NEU, preoccupied with its anti-Israel resolutions, offered little more than platitudes about fighting antisemitism without dialling down its anti-Israel rhetoric.
The irony is brutal. A union that claims to fight for social justice and equality has helped create an environment where Jewish teachers are marginalised and Jewish pupils are made to feel unsafe.
These ideological antics are not good for public trust either. Most parents want their children to learn to read and write – not to be indoctrinated into a certain view of the Middle East.
The NEU is unfortunately not alone. The NASUWT, Britain’s second-largest teachers’ union, recently appointed Matt Wrack – the former head of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and long-time hard-left activist – as general secretary. Wrack’s background is not in education but ideological purity. At an FBU conference in 2016, he talked about the “so-called furore about so-called antisemitism”, framing it as a plot to undermine Corbyn, rather than a legitimate concern.
Thankfully, Neil Butler, the union’s National Officer for Wales, took the case to the High Court, and an agreement was reached with the union to reopen nominations. “The rights of NASUWT members to choose their leader freely and democratically must be upheld”, Butler told the press. “It is a shame that this matter was not resolved before legal proceedings were issued”, and that “so much time, and valuable union funds, have been wasted”.
Unions have always been political. But the danger comes when ideology increasingly replaces mission. There’s a critical difference between fighting for better funding, smaller class sizes, and fair pay (legitimate, necessary political work) and turning the union into a platform for one-sided foreign policy activism or other fringe causes. This is particularly worrisome where it may collide with the statutory requirement on political impartiality in schools.
It’s time the NEU focuses again exclusively on its core mission and leave Middle Eastern geopolitics to the diplomats. Because the union’s real battleground isn’t Gaza. It’s Britain’s troubled classrooms.
