Angered by the government's proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 65 and by its attempts to negotiate pay cuts for teachers, delegates at the Easter conference of the National Union of Teachers firmly rejected social partnership with New Labour.
Calls by guest speaker Brendan Barber, TUC leader, for the NUT to go back into talks with the government alongside the National Association of Headmasters/Union of Women Teachers, fell on deaf COLD.
Delegates voted UVCI" whelmingly against the social partnership approach advocated by Barber and the union's new general secretary Steve Sinnott.
There was condemnation from left and right for the aptly-named Rewards Incentive Group (RIG) which, with the participation of the NASUWT and the lecturers' union the ATL, had agreed proposals that will mean pay cuts for teachers.
Heartened by having won a promise of talks from the government on pensions after the NUT, UNISON and PCS threatened a ballot for strike action, the conference also voted by a huge majority to continue the pensions fight.
However the fact that NUT leaders had called off the stre ballot after hearing about a promise of negotiations with UNISON by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, does not augur well.
Sobering news came in the debate on New Labour's City Academies where speakers drew attention to the inroads made into schools by private capital and the increasing involvement of the Church Schools Society (now the United Learning Trust).
A few successes were reported, including Doncaster where a school campaign had managed to fight. off Peter Vardy's creationist, Christian fundamentalism. In the main however it was a tale of lost battles including North Westminster Community School.
Academies are publicly funded private schools. For as little as £2m businesses or organisations such as the ULT get land, buildings and facilities which belong to the public sector.
The sponsors have total control, including setting teacher's pay and conditions. The campaign is late off the ground and about 15 of the planned 200 academies are already built or at an advanced stage.
The right in the NUT continues to fragment, divided and confused by the politics of New Labour. The only issue which united the old CP-influenced Broadly Speaking group and a large, apolitical, liberal section of the delegates, was opposition to the proposal to establish a political fund. They won on a card vote, but with a reduced majority compared to last year.
A boost for the left and for union democracy came when the conference decided to alter the threshold in a vote for strike action from 50 per cent + of those eligible to vote to 50 per cent + of those Even a child can tell those pension reforms would leave teachers worse off voting.
The old rule had meant, for example, that despite a 70-30 vote in favour of a boycott of SAT's, the boycott had not gone ahead.
NUT member Joyce Hurndall, whose son Tom was shot by Israeli troops while attempting to rescue a group of Palestinian children, gave a moving account of his life and the obstruction she has faced in getting his death properly investigated and the soldiers who killed him prosecuted for murder.
A combined resolution on Iraq and Palestine was passed.
While there was no explicit call for withdrawal of troops from Iraq the resolution does commit the union to a conference of members to implement union policy on Iraq, Palestine and Cuba and to promote links with Iraqi
including the Southern Oil Company Union and the General Union of Oil Company Workers of Basra.
Conference heard that the NUT had grown by 50 per cent since 1991 and by 30,000 in the period 2001/04, making it the biggest teaching union in Europe.
It is no accident that other unions who have stood out against the government like the RMT and the PCS are increasing their membership while others are stagnating or even declining.
It's a lesson that general secretary Steve Sinnott, desperate to be noticed by New Labour, really doesn't want to learn.
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