Right-wing candidate joins the race to be DGS.

Right-wing candidate joins the race to be DGS.

On Friday August 29^th NUT secretaries received a message from Executive member Ian Grayson announcing his entry into the forthcoming election for Deputy General Secretary of the Union. Ian is the Executive member for the North East district, a prominent member of the conservative Broadly Speaking group and a mainstream Labour Party supporter. It isn’t clear whether he has the support of that group for his candidature or whether this is a sign of some division on the right of the Union. In any case the purpose of elections is to allow members to debate the alternative directions for their union and Ian’s entry could mean that the current debate between an advocate of the current strategy (Kevin Courtney) and a candidate who thinks we need to step it up (myself) is broadened to include someone who thinks we need to pull back from action and rely exclusively on persuasion and reasoned argument.

That is the only explicit message that can be gleaned from Ian’s appeal for nominations. He makes it clear that ‘I do not believe that industrial action will bring about the policy changes we would want. We need to approach matters differently’. He doesn’t really spell out what this different approach would amount to but he does repeatedly refer to ‘reasoned argument’ and ‘soundly-based, well-argued policies’ claiming that if we can produce these things ‘only then can we hope to be listened to by government’.

NUT members should need no more reason to reject Ian’s request for support than that. There are many things that should have been, and still could be, done differently and better in our three-year long campaign to defend teachers’ conditions and stand up for education but the lack of well-argued and reasoned policies is not one of them. The Union’s education policies and the wealth of evidence accumulated to support them are, in fact, one of our main strengths. And it isn’t just education- we have dismantled the case for pension reform, called the government’s bluff on their claim that pensions are unaffordable and taken apart the absurd argument that longer days and shorter holidays improve educational outcomes across the world. The suggestion that the NUT lacks reasoned, evidenced policies on conditions or education is nonsense.

And it is also a claim that Ian has never made on the Executive. Given every opportunity to improve or challenge Union policies he has by and large supported and welcomed them. But that’s not the worst thing. Ian Grayson’s material lets the government and Michael Gove in particular off the hook in the most outrageous way. In effect he argues that we haven’t been listened to because our case was not well-argued or reasonable. The truth is that we have not been listened to despite the reason and evidence because we have been challenging core ideological obsessions of the present government. The only time we have seen some movement in our direction has been when we backed up our arguments with collective action. 

Beyond that Ian’s election material suggests that we could hardly rely on him to present a well-argued and evidence based case. He claims that the Union is dominated by people who are out of touch with the concerns of ordinary teachers. In fact the NUT is the only teacher union (and one of the few unions of any kind) to have grown consistently over the last ten years. He claims that union resources are not always used to defend member and that there are too many ‘wasteful initiatives and distractions from our core work’ but gives not a single example of either. He wants to see our commitment to professional unity become ‘more than a cliché of platform rhetoric’ when in fact the NUT have taken joint action with ATL (on pensions in 2011), NASUWT (2013) and even NAHT and recently organised a teacher unity conference when no other union would. If anything we were too slavish and deferential in allowing the NASUWT to hold back the pace of our urgent campaign to resist the pension and pay changes which have dramatically worsened our conditions since 2011.

Ian Grayson does get one thing right. He says in his appeal for nominations that ‘the NUT will stand or fall on its reputation for defending and supporting members’. We have done that a lot better than Ian’s approach would have done since 2010 but not as well as we could have done given the scale of the attacks and the determination shown by members. We need to take that campaign to defend and support members forward and make it more effective. I am asking associations to nominate me for DGS so that we can do that. A nomination or vote for Ian is instead a call for a retreat and a counsel of despair.