It has a whiff of the old trailer for Jaws 2, the one where viewers were disabused of the idea that it was safe to go back into the water. In January, Matt Wrack, the left-wing, Corbyn-supporting general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) lost his attempt for re-election. But if anyone thought it was a sign of the trade union movement adopting a less combative attitude now that it had its much-wished-for Labour government, they were fooling themselves. Wrack has resurfaced, this time being nominated to lead the NASUWT, which until now has a reputation as the more moderate of the two largest teaching unions.
That Wrack has a background as a firefighter rather than a teacher does not seem to bother the union. From the point of view of some members, classroom experience is a lesser qualification for their leadership than is the transferable skill of a long history in union militancy. Besides forcing a 12 per cent pay rise out of the last government on the back of strike threats, opposing just about any kind of modernisation and refusing to accept pension reforms aimed at making public sector pensions affordable in the long term, Wrack used his last position to campaign for public ownership of banks and energy companies. If you are a teacher and you vote for Matt Wrack as your union leader you will be doing so not just because you fancy a fat pay rise – although you may do – but because you want to foment socialist revolution.
The news comes as Mick Lynch of the RMT union looks like being replaced by an even more militant figure, Eddie Dempsey. Far from becoming more moderate in response to the election of a friendlier, Labour government, the trade union movement seems to be heading firmly in the opposite direction. This is not what happened during the Blair government when the unions were generally becalmed – one exception being the firefighters strike of 2002, which predated Wrack’s leadership. It is closer to what happened during Jim Callaghan’s time, when an increasingly extreme union movement kept coming back with ever more unrealistic demands, culminating in the self-destruction of the Winter of Discontent.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves look like having their lives made increasingly impossible. They desperately need growth, yet they are going to struggle to achieve that when public sector productivity is sliding rapidly backwards and the unions are resisting any kind of reform to working practices. Reeves started badly by awarding train drivers a fat pay rise unconditional on any efficiency improvements. That has encouraged other unions to seek similar deals. Indeed, the reason why Wrack lost his job as general secretary of the Fire Brigades Unions is not so much that its members wanted a more moderate leader but that against subsequent pay awards to other unions, the 12 per cent pay rise he managed to squeeze out of the Conservative government began to look a little mean.
As we saw during the pandemic, when teaching unions dragged out lockdown closures as long as they could, closed schools can cause serious damage to children – the effects are still being seen now, according to a Cambridge University study last September, which found children with poor organisational and social skills as well as academic under-performance. The prospect of two large militant teaching unions is not an attractive one.
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