Education ‘will grind to halt’ unless pay rises address recruitment crisis, union leader warns – UK politics live | Politics

In another interview this morning Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, brushed off questions about Labour experiencing a sharp fall in membership numbers by claiming that people who joined under Jeremy Corbyn preferred being in a party of protest to being in a party taking the “difficult decisions” needed in government.

The question was prompted by a report in the Observer at the weekend by Toby Helm. Toby said:

In a report to the NEC last week, the party’s general secretary, David Evans, caused surprise when he revealed that membership, which had stood at 390,000 in January, had plummeted to 366,604 at the latest count, with more than 11,700 of these being in arrears. Labour membership reached a peak at the end of 2019 when it hit over 532,000.

One senior Labour figure who was there said: “It is a big fall in just two months. People were surprised, even taken aback.”

Labour insiders believe that the fall has been caused primarily by anger among Muslim and others Labour supporters over Keir Starmer’s position on Gaza and his refusal over several months to call for an immediate ceasefire.

Asked about the figures on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Jones said that “membership numbers of parties go up and down all the time”. He went on:

There was also a huge surge in membership of the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn and many Jeremy Corbyn supporters preferred a party of protest as opposed to a party who have had to make difficult decisions around the trade-offs in its preparation for government in the hope that we get to run this country.

We’ve still got plenty of Labour Party members across the country, I think more than any other party.

Jones is right to say that, overall, Labour has more members than any other UK party. But, in proportional terms, the SNP’s membership is much bigger. Its membership has been falling, but a recent report said it was still 69,235 at the end of December. Given that Scotland’s population is less than a tenth of Britain’s, it has more members per head in the country where it contests elections than Labour does.

There is widespread agreement in the UK and the US that Israel has “gone too far” in its war against Hamas, Darren Jones, a Labour Treasury spokesperson, said this morning.

In an interview with ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Jones said:

I think what we’ve seen from President Biden, from Keir Starmer, and now from Lord Cameron, our own foreign secretary, is that countries that supported Israel’s right to defend itself and to recover its hostages from Hamas terrorists in Gaza, which clearly is their right to have done in the first place, have all said that you’ve gone too far, that we need to bring this war to an end, we need to get around the negotiating table, we need to aid to get to people who desperately need it in Gaza.

This latest situation, not only has it resulted in the death of aid workers, which is unacceptable, but it’s now making it much harder for aid to be made available to people who are in the most desperate situations.

But Jones did not support the call from Lord Ricketts (see 9.50am) for the UK to end arms sales to Israel. Asked if he was in favour of this, Jones replied:

The fact of the matter is if the UK, for example, stopped supplying arms, the war would not end. What we need to do is get the parties to a position where the fighting can stop.

Jones also sidestepped a question about whether he thought Israel was in breach of international law. He said:

As always, on questions of international law, it’s for judges and courts to make that decision, not for politicians.

A Scottish government minister has refused to say if comments by Harry Potter author JK Rowling could have been recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, PA Media reports.

As Libby Brooks reports, Police Scotland said yesterday that comments by JK Rowling challenging police to arrest her for online misgendering did not amount to a crime.

But it is not clear yet whether or not this is being logged as a hate incident. The Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser has recently threatened to take legal action against Police Scotland unless they delete a complaint against him now recorded as a hate incident.

As PA Media reports, the Scottish government’s community safety minister Siobhian Brown told the BBC this morning that it was an operational matter for the police to decide if the JK Rowling complaint should be recorded in these terms.

The UK should stop arming Israel, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser, has said, after seven international aid workers were killed in Gaza in an Israeli airstrike. Sammy Gecsoyler has the story.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak’s first year in office was blighted by a wave of public sector strikes. Some of those disputes were ultimately resolved, but the problem has not gone away and this morning Daniel Kebede, president of the National Education Union, has been warning about the prospect of a further strike by teachers in England unless pay is improved.

The NEU is holding its conference this week and, an interview with the Today programme, Kebede said recruitment was now such a problem that education was at risk of grinding to a halt.

I would say there is a mood of desperation, if we’re being honest. The profession is very much on its knees. Morale is at an all time low.

And of course, we can see that in the crisis in recruitment and retention; 9% of the teaching profession left the profession last year prior to retirement. The government is continually missing its recruitment targets for new teachers. We missed it by 50% for secondary teachers this year.

Quite simply, if we continue on this direction of travel, education will grind to a halt …

Teacher pay has plummeted by 25% over the last decade. A teacher in England in their fifth year of teaching earns £7,500 a year less than a teacher over the border in Scotland. It’s grossly unfair.

Kebede said the union would debate whether to hold a strike ballot later this week. But it has already held a preliminary ballot (an online ballot that have the legal authority of a proper, postal strike ballot), and those results showed 90% support for strike action for an above-inflation pay rise, on a turnout of just over 50%. Kebede said the government should take this seriously.

We’re a union of half a million members. To get over 50% of members voting at a rate of nine in 10 for strike action is incredibly significant.

Last year the government tried to minimise the impact of strikes in the public sector by passing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, giving employers the right to force some workers to come in on strike days to maintain services at a particular level. But there is fresh evidence today this is not working. In a story for the Daily Mail, David Churchill says rail companies are refusing to use the law to lessen the impact of the Aslef strike taking place this weekend. He reports:

MPs called on train chiefs to resign or have funding pulled for failing to use the powers which would force unions to keep 40% of services running during stoppages this week and next.

The deadline for lodging their intention to use the ‘minimum service levels’ laws passed on Monday.

But industry sources told the Daily Mail that bosses for the 16 train firms affected had failed to meet it.

Drivers from the Aslef union will now inflict travel misery on millions with industrial action on different parts of the network between tomorrow and next Tuesday.

Parliament is in recess and there is not much in the domestic political diary for today. The biggest debate in politics today is about whether or not, in the light of the killing of seven aid workers, including three Britons, in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, it is now time for the UK government to declare Israel in breach of international humanitarian law, but most of our coverage of that story will be on our Israel-Gaza war live blog.

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