Meet one of Labour’s newest members…. the head of Britain’s biggest teaching union

Christine Blower, the outgoing general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), has said that she will be joining Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Blower made the announcement during her final speech to NUT conference this week, before she retires as head of the union in May.

She told delegates she would be using her newly-found free time to join the Labour Party “led by Jeremy Corbyn, to fight for the better world we know is possible”.

Blower is considered to be among the more left wing of the trade union leaders, but is not the first to join the party over recent months: the PCS’s Mark Serwotka has signed up, as has the FBU’s Matt Wrack, who has also led his union to reaffiliate with Labour.

There have been some concerns raised within Labour about the past comments and political activities of these new members. Serwotka once described the 1997-2010 Labour Government as “the worst government in the history of this country”, while Blower stood as a London Socialist Alliance candidate in the 2000 London Assembly elections.

The move marks a growing relationship between the leaderships of Labour and some trade unions. On the first day of the NUT conference, Jeremy Corbyn became the first leader of a party, and first prominent politician since Estelle Morris in 2002, to speak at the teachers’ union congress.

Corbyn told delegates that the Tories’ plan to expand the school academies programme is “an ideological attack on teachers and on local and parental accountability – an attack which was nowhere in their manifesto at the last general election.”

Delegates at the conference voted in favour of holding a strike ballot over the plan, which Blower claims “represents the total abolition of national pay and conditions”. In her speech, she welcomed the support from Corbyn.

“We heard very clearly in Jeremy’s speech on Friday there will be fierce opposition from the Labour party. We are delighted to hear this,” she said, noting that the Labour leader “has stood with us over the years in many campaigns which have been important to us”.