Mick Hartley

Another union dominated by the old left – with a Corbynist at the top in this case – decides to go against the law and demand that men be allowed into the girls' toilets and changing rooms whenever they feel like it. Jo Bartosch at UnHerd – The NEU has abandoned women — and the law:

When a union that claims to “stand up for the future of education” campaigns to overturn the UK’s highest court, it stops being a professional body and starts becoming a parody of itself. And yet this is exactly what the National Education Union (NEU) has done.

Over the weekend, the NEU — the UK’s largest teaching union — voted to defy a Supreme Court ruling which clarified that it is lawful to exclude men, no matter how they identify, from women’s spaces. The decision was not put to the union’s half a million members, but to the 52 people on its National Executive Committee. The motion, which with wearisome predictability was entitled “Trans Rights Are Human Rights”, attacked the ruling and derided the EHRC’s interim guidance as “incoherent [and] unclear”.

It's crystal clear. Women in the Equality Act means women: that is, biological women. But as ever for the old-school left the demands of trans women – men – are prioritised over actual women, with the absurd justification that men who want access to girls' safe spaces are somehow a persecuted minority.

Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s General Secretary, bemoaned that “a toxic climate has been created in recent years in which trans people, a small community, are treated as if they are a risk or threat to others.” He chose not to pass comment on the environment fostered within his union under his leadership: not a whisper for the teachers hounded out of classrooms, or dragged through tribunals, for the crime of asking basic questions about gender ideology.

While many teachers, sick of the radical posturing, are leaving the union. Or their jobs.

Meanwhile, in the real world — far from the NEU’s executive — classrooms are crumbling, behaviour is spiralling out of control, and burnout is baked into the job description. Teachers have spent years begging for clear, practical guidance on how to legally navigate the rising number of trans-identified students and staff. Now, the NEU’s overwhelmingly female membership has been let down by the very body charged with advocating for their rights at work.

The NEU isn’t standing up for the future of education — it’s preening in the mirror, nodding smugly while waging war on its own members. It’s time someone reminded union executives that teachers don’t need lectures from those to whom they pay their subs. They need safe workplaces and a union that puts safeguarding above student activist slogans.