Trade unions were forged to fight for the rights and interests of workers and employees. Today, however, too many have been hijacked by activists, obsessed with fringe causes and foreign wars at the expense of the members they were meant to serve. Whether it’s Unite the Union set to debate anti-Israel motions while its strike has left Birmingham littered with overflowing bins or UCU pushing boycotts of Israeli academia while British lecturers are drowning in workloads, the mission is drifting.

Nowhere is this more glaring, or more damaging, than in the National Education Union (NEU). With about 500,000 members, it is the largest education union in Europe. Its ideological bias has the potential to reach deep into every school in the country, shaping not just the work conditions for teachers, but the learning environment for children.

At a time when GCSE pass rates in English and maths in England have slumped to near or below 60 per cent, the NEU’s leadership is busy funding Gaza protests. At a Stop the War coalition event during last month’s NEU conference, the union’s Secretary General Daniel Kebede expressed his pride about the “twenty-eight national demonstrations in opposition to the genocide in Gaza which we have financially supported, we have assisted in any way possible. There has always been someone from my national leadership represented at those demonstrations.”

Most teachers, one would presume, joined this union to fight for better classrooms, not to be conscripted into the ideological trenches of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Members who don’t share the dominant worldview – be they Jewish, politically moderate, or those who just want the union to focus on pay and conditions – must feel increasingly alienated or silenced.