Members of the National Education Union (NEU) hold a rally at Old Palace Yard, in Westminster, London, January 29, 2025…
It is no exaggeration to say, as National Education Union (NEU) leader Daniel Kebede does, that “the classroom has become the front line of every unresolved crisis in our society… hunger walks in with the children. Anxiety takes a seat at the back of the room.”
Schools are community hubs, and their intrinsic links across each community make teachers both receptive to local feeling and persuasive local voices.
So if a union the size of the NEU finds 65 per cent of its members who voted Labour less than two years ago would not do so again, MPs need to take note — especially since every opinion poll confirms this collapse in support for the party is general.
That it also found the most popular party among NEU members is now the Greens is another warning.
The conceit that the working class has nowhere else to go, that Labour can offend every one of its natural constituencies in turn while exclusively courting Tory — and more recently Reform UK — votes, should have died with the Scottish election wipeout of 2015, but remains the default setting of the zombie Blairites — whose long domination of the party has seen a steady decline in its vote, concealed at first by the initial size of the majorities that were shrinking but now threatening its future as a party of government. Peter Mandelson, a key author of that strategy, is gone: can the party escape his influence, and listen again to working-class people instead of the filthy rich?
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Original article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/labour-cant-afford-ignore-anger-across-our-education-workforce
