TEACHERS must resist the dangerous EU-US trade deal TTIP or see the profit agenda imposed upon education for good, NUT conference heard yesterday.
The NUT followed fellow teaching union ATL in condemnation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will allow secret panels of pro-business lawyers to fine states for economic intervention when it hurts the interests of a private business.
Educationalists and unions have raised concerns that it could prevent Labour shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt from carrying out his pledge to end the Tories’ free schools programme.
The relevance of the deal to education was highlighted in a document leaked in February, but activists have warned that the public is still blind to the huge impact of the treaty.
“TTIP is set to undermine democracy, protections of the environment and decent working conditions,” Camden’s Christos Sakellaridis told NUT delegates.
He said the deal might result in restaurants serving up “chicken washed in chlorine.”
Fellow Camden delegate Una Doyle said that the deal would “change all our lives forever,” and that the adjudication system “threatens to undermine the most basic principles of our democracy.”
Placing TTIP in the wider context of the capitalism’s encroachment on state education, delegate Nicky Downes said: “We need badass teachers to stop this profit-driven cancer from taking over our schools.”
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