It was advertised in the Labour Party conference fringe guide as an NUT (National Union of Teachers) meeting with Tristram Hunt, the Labour shadow minister for education, but turned out to be something different and more interesting.
It started earlier than advertised in the guide. When I got there, the room was already full, with maybe 100 people. NUT deputy general secretary Kevin Courtney was there, but it was not an NUT meeting. It was an hoc event organised by an individual activist, Emma Hardy-Mattinson. And Hunt was not scheduled there.
Hardy-Mattinson is a right-winger in NUT terms. The event was chaired by a very New-Labour-sounding Labour councillor from Croydon. When it broke into discussion groups, my group at least was coordinated by people who sounded very New Labour. (“We have to be smart about this...”)
Yet the temper of the event was left-wing. The discussion group I joined was asked to discuss: “How do we raise standards in a Labour way?” The question was immediately challenged. What do we mean by standards? Shouldn’t we ask something like: “How do we help students learn better?” For life, and not just for exams and for work?
One teacher in the circle had already proposed to the plenary that formal assessment should check only literacy and numeracy. When I advocated abolition of all school exams and of Ofsted, I got more nods, and fewer “oh, that’s too radical” shrugs, than I got in the Workers’ Liberty school workers’ fraction.
Another circle reported back for abolition of performance-related pay, another for abolition of faith schools. When one teacher hesitantly defended faith schools, others were vehement against them.
There were speeches for abolishing Academies and faith schools; for at least stripping private schools of their charitable status; for much better pay for teachers; for re-basing the whole schooling system on cooperation, not competition.
Those attending were, it appeared, almost all teachers, there because they had come to the Labour conference as delegates or observers.
In short, there’s more left-wing feeling in the Labour Party ranks than you’d guess from the very-controlled proceedings inside the Manchester Central conference centre.
Inside, CLP delegates as well as the union delegations were mostly cowed into making a show of unity in preparation for the May 2015 general election.
At the conference entry, however, Solidarity sold perhaps more briskly than it would sell at a large far-left event, and the left-wing “Yellow Pages” bulletin was warmly welcomed — despite the fact that the actual Labour people entering the conference, delegates and observers, are now much outnumbered at the event by exhibitors, advisers, apparatchiks, media people, and so on.
The hunker-down factor has affected the “outside” left, though. The flurry of leafleters and campaigners at the conference entry was much smaller than in 2011 and 2012 — I missed 2013 — with no left papers on sale except Solidarity and the two rival Labour Briefing publications.
