Analysis Breaking News

Teachers agree further strikes after rejecting government’s insulting pay offer

Solidarity and well done NEU teachers for standing firm as others w

Teachers have resoundingly rejected the government’s insulting and almost entirely unfunded pay ‘offer’ and agreed further strikes for 24 April and 2 May.

The government’s ‘deal’ represented a huge real-terms pay cut and would have placed an even greater burden on schools that already cannot cope on inadequate education budgets.

Solidarity with the NEU and their members, who have stood firm while some other union leaderships buckle – under pressure from Keir Starmer and the TUC that neither have denied – to ask workers to accept pay cuts in order to accommodate Starmer’s political ambition on some meaningless ‘jam tomorrow’ promise.

SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.

34 comments

  1. Certainly what would put an end to gauging by spivs and thieves would be to fix in concrete inflation proof wage rises
    The biggest change should be what we spend our money on, not least tax breaks and white elephants like Trident, HS2 and Hinckley

  2. The Labour leadership and its billionare-loving friends in the wider Labour movement either,
    i) intentionally facilitated this insulting pay offer to teachers, and/or,
    ii) failed to add its weight to the case of the teachers and encourage HMG/for-profit school operators to take their staff’s cost-of-living crisis seriously.

    Like a vaccine that doesn’t reduce its consumers infection rates or seriousness of illness, such a Labour leadership is a massive con – and as an M+S advert might say: “This is not just an ordinary con, this is a WEF-facilitated, Trilateral Commission con of the worst type”.

    Neither of these things could have happened when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of Labour.

  3. Skwawkie, you keep saying that some unions have given in and buckled under the demands of Starmer & the TUC, but which ones? I didn’t get that memo…

    1. The unions which readily accept de-facto pay cut offers during a global cost of living crisis?

      I didn’t get the memo either, but general reading of Labour/industrial News tells me who they are, and it’s frightening.

      1. I’m sure it is so please share the information. The NHS? Teachers? Who?

      2. I think each deal needs to be looked at in its own context before any accusation of selling-out should be made or taken seriously. It’s not like a football league where position on the table tells you everything you need to know.

        Point is, more unions are recommending more sub-inflation deals atm than at any time in TU history. Whether Labour’s hard-right leadership(and is friends in the TUC) are facilitating this or not, is moot but unprovable. I’m just v pleased that Skwawkbox picked-up on and publicised the NEU example, but more heinous examples also exist. Myself, I wonder how Pat Cullen (RCN) manages to live with herself, given her part in the nurses negotiations (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/24/srit-m24.html). I’m sure you and many others here can cite loads of other examples that cause them to question the motivation of the union involved.

        FWIW I suspect Starmer’s total failure to connect with and champion striking workers is the main issue here. Accusations of “sell-out” are an inevitable consequence.

  4. Starmer says teachers should go back to work instead of standing up for them he sides with the Tory’ again as usual

  5. Ed slimy basterd Millibans father was accused of hating his country called and stalinist. When Ed was Labour Leader the only person who stood up for him was JC. yesterday he showed his true colours by slagging JC of saying he should apologise over false A/S Goes to show what these fucking RATS are reilly like and this prick used to be a roving teacher

    1. Reply to Brian
      You are absolutely right Brian.I would also add that in 2014 Ed Milliband was publicly denounced as an antisemite by protesters because he spoke out against Israels bombing of Gaza and the resultant civilian deaths and injuries. He has kept his head down ever since because as well as being the ingrate identified by you he is also a coward.
      Ed’s behaviour between 2014 and now illustrates just how effective the Israeli lobbists are – many people are just too scared to open their mouths about Israeli excesses because they know they risk having their careers derailed and their reputations torn to shreds.
      However Ed Milliband is worse than most. His fear and cowardice have led him jump on Starmer’s bandwagon of hate directed at (lifelong pacifist and anti racist campaigner) Jeremy Corbyn.He has shamed himself and his dead fathers memory.

  6. Starmer is a multi millionaire on a huge salary.Most of the shadow cabinet are in the same position. Naturally they have no affinity with any workers who are forced to take strike action in support of a pay claim.
    If the TUC and Unions are backing Starmers Labour in the hope that things will be better under a Starmer government then they are sadly mistaken, Clearly they have yet to realise that Starmers Labour and the Labour party are two entirely different things.
    Starmers Labour consists of hard right unscrupulous Zionists who are well to the right of most Tories.God help us if they ever get into Downing St

    1. [At the risk of being accused of being too competent again by the ignorant little boy who frequents this site]

      As noted on a previous thread on this site, via a recent Times article, Starmer is very much tied in with the agenda of the WEF/Davos crowd who have no time for what they consider to be old fashioned notions such as ‘Sovereignty.”

      A stance which is going to require an unprecedented level of spin and propaganda from the corporate media to persuade/con voters who hold the concept of Sovereignty as sacrosanct to back him. Particularly in those ‘red wall’ seats who voted for the oven ready Brexit back in 2019.

      However, the elephant in the room is that Starmer’s Davos masters and mistresses are wedded to an economic model that is not only collapsing but is also being superseded.

      As economist Micheal Hudson explains here:

      https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/04/danny-haiphong-and-michael-hudson-discuss-the-collapse-of-antiquity-the-bank-panic.html

      “Today’s economic theory — it’s junk economics, basically. It imagines that the root of all inflation is labor wanting more wages, and the solution to any inflation — and in fact to any economic problem — is to pay labor less.

      This is the kind of junk economics that came out of the University of Chicago — the monetarist ideas of Milton Friedman, and it goes back to Austrian economics in the late 19th century.

      It was an anti-labor theory of how economies work, to oppose socialist theories of how economies work, and in fact to try to tell people, again and again, that the root of every problem is labor getting greedy and wanting to survive and wanting to protect its living standards instead of being forced further and further into debt.”

      And the debt issue, as Hudson also covers in the same piece,arising from what Hudson describes as:

      “we’re in the same kind of slow crash that you had in Greece and Rome and that you always have in almost any financialized economy where all the wealth is sucked up to the top, and there’s a transfer, not only of income, but of property — of real estate, of stocks and bonds, of companies — to the creditor class. And that’s what we’re having today.

      The creditor class in the US is very much like the oligarchy in Greece and Rome or under feudalism, except that class today is no longer a landlord class, because rent is for paying interest and it’s a financial class, not a landlord class.

      If you look at where all of this legal system came from that makes Western civilization so different from the rest of the world — well, it’s that Western civilization has a pro-creditor law that turns out to be a law that favors a minority at the top instead of trying to preserve all overall economic growth, which was the objective of economic takeoffs from the Bronze Age, Sumer, Babylonia, to the first millennium, to the Near East, to Asia, for almost every country outside of the West.

      So we’re seeing a division between the West and the rest of the world finally today that is very much like what you had 2000 years ago.”

      Starmer’s economic policies and stance on worker wage needs clearly demonstrates he is committed to vaingloriously attempting to maintain this collapsing paradigm on behalf of his Davos controllers.

      1. To put some meat of that wider economic context the graphs, charts and statistics here – some of which are sourced from the CIA Yearbook – are scary reading;

        https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-russias-economic

        Whilst this starts off by looking at the Russian economy and how it has performed under sanctions this is merely an introduction into the house built on sand model of the Western economic model which Starmer is but a representative part.

        The charts showing the USA and UK as having the largest current account debt’s of all countries on the planet, along with those showing the gap in which the unproductive economy dwarfs the productive economy makes sobering reading.

        Two observations stand out here:

        1. “Effect of Financialisation on the GDP

        In another vein, the US economy is so highly financialised that nearly half of the stated GDP consists merely of book entries transferring money from one account to another, not in any way comparable to the real production of manufacturing or the provision of real services. Many international economists have made statements to the effect that “When we remove the financialisation aspects from the accounts, the US real GDP is reduced by nearly 50% and the national per-capita income falls to about $15,000.”

        And given how closely the UK finacialised economic model is to that of the US the same applies to the UK.

        The second observation relates to a global map near the end of the article which shows the number of Economies across the world migrating away from the exploitative unproductive economic rent seeking model which Starmer, among others in other UK and Western political Party’s, is committed to.:

        2. “If accepted, the new proposed BRICS members would create an entity with a GDP 30% larger than the United States, over 50% of the global population and in control of 60% of global gas reserves.”

        And, once critical mass occurs on de-dollarisation those economies such as the US, UK and EU which are tied to this debt ridden dead end model are going to have nowhere left to go. Inflation is likely to exceed that experienced in Germany after WW1 as the free ride in which those debts and fiat money printing are subsidised by the rest of the world due to the dollar being the reserve currency (as explained earlier in the article) comes to an end.

        The best thing that Starmer could do is to be not ‘holding the baby’ when, not if, this rapidly unravels.

        All the name calling and bullshit delusional bluster in the world ain’t going to alter that reality and the butt-hurt of backing the wrong horse by single iota.

      2. Thanks for the link Dave. Much appreciated. To add weight to your posts, you’ll note the one financial statistic that is not recorded is how much of every £/$/€ etc actually ends up in the hands of the wealth creator (labour).

  7. Dave – “At the risk of being accused of being too competent again by the ignorant little boy who frequents this site”
    Maybe that’s the case within the bounds of the personal La-La-Land that evidently resides inside your head but back in the real world I’ve yet to see anyone accuse you of being too competent. Do you have any actual real life examples that evidence this rather weird assertion of yours

    1. Apart from publicly donning the hat which clearly belongs to you, steveH, have you actually got anything substantive to offer other than the white noise of empty rhetoric?

      By the way, how’s the Tourett’s today?

      1. Dave – A short acknowledgement that nobody on these pages (least of all me) has ever accused you of being “too competent” would have sufficed. If anyone else has ever said this to you then did it not occur to you that they just might have been taking the piss.

        ps, I don’t suffer from Tourette’s syndrome but I am empathetic enough to appreciate that it can be very debilitating for those that do.

      2. “I don’t suffer from Tourette’s syndrome…”

        Nor me.
        Sh.. sh..sh…sh..STARMER!

        As far as neurological disorders go, it must be one of the worst to have. (apart from supposedly being raised a socialist and being the only British-born politician to be invited to join the Trilateral Commission – and taking it up.

        TS and OCD, my idea of Hell.

      3. 264
        I don’t suffer from Tourettes

        That’s easy for you to say

      4. Doug – ….and presuming you have one, the point you are trying to make is?🤔

  8. In other words we don’t make anything anymore and our currency is toilet paper
    Would be ironic if the German people saved our Sorry arses by saying enough is enough to never ending warmongers and adopt Bitcoin backed by Gold

    1. just wave everything through… and explain that Boris’ bad brexit is caused by transsexuals, migrants, anti-Semites, Vladimir Putin, Jeremy Corbyn and Julian Assange, but mostly JC, who will forthwith be transported to Rwanda.

    2. Doug – Have the self appointed guardians of ‘the left’ got any suggestions? 🤔

      1. Socialist Brexit
        Avoids Neo Liberal competition laws and keeps Single Market and Freedom of Movement
        Starmer has NOTHING to Make Brexit Work

      1. desperate?
        Mighty oaks from even desperate acorns grow…. I can’t imagine crowdfunding happening when donkey man’s lies, racism and karma all catch up with him.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from SKWAWKBOX

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading