As parents of two kids in primary school, it’s fair to say that the teachers strikes are inconvenient for me and my partner. For me it means taking time off work at a really busy time. For my wife, who runs her own business, it means rearranging appointments and potentially missing out on a few days’ pay.
Similarly, as someone who values education, I don’t want my kids to miss out on valuable learning time. But we both wholeheartedly support the striking teachers.
Anyone who tried, as we did, to grapple with home schooling during lockdown, will know how challenging it is to try to encourage your own kids to sit down and learn for an hour or two a day. Our kids’ teachers are expected to achieve this every day, often more than 30 kids, all with different needs, in supersized classes with ever fewer teaching assistants (TAs) to support them.
There is a crisis in teaching.
More teachers and TAs are needed to deal with demand, but more than 12 years of Tory austerity have meant real-terms pay cuts, and the cost of living crisis has made things harder still. Burned out, undervalued and underpaid, teachers are understandably leaving the profession in their droves, making the situation even more difficult for those who remain – and increasingly undesirable for talented people who might otherwise have considered joining the profession.
All of this affects our kids, damaging them much more deeply than a day or two off school – and that means much more to me than the inconvenience of a day off work.
This article will be published after the first day of strike action (1st Feb), and our plan is that we will have thanked the teachers standing on picket lines and headed down to Weymouth for the TUC’s Protect the Right to Strike rally. They may not be in school, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be learning a valuable lesson from their teachers on how to express their democratic right to withdraw their labour and stand up for what is right and fair.
Pat Osborne
North Dorset Labour Party

The Prime Minister (Rishi Sunak as I write …) has laid out the government’s resolutions for the coming year, listing five issues they’re determined to tackle, with “no tricks” and “no ambiguity”.
The five ‘people’s priorities’, as he described them, are halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing debt, cutting NHS waiting lists and stopping small boat crossings to the UK.
Critics have observed that these are all just vague aspirations and somewhat light on details such as ‘by how much’ and ‘by when’. They also involve events that are likely to happen anyway, to some extent, with inflation already forecast to fall and the economy to grow. It has further been suggested that Sunak’s choices are partly aimed at pacifying the increasingly vocal Tory hard right in order to try and hold the party together.
Our local MP Simon Hoare thinks it was a ‘really good’ speech, perhaps because it avoided mentioning the part played by 12 years of Tory government in creating much of the mess we’re currently in.
More importantly, there was no mention of the worsening environmental situation, with ever more extreme weather chaos and a continuing decline of our already severely depleted natural world.
Surveys show a clear majority of people is concerned about climate change, but the government’s own advisors say still not enough action is being taken.
They are failing us … disastrously.
Failing to rapidly decarbonise our economy, failing to stop the pollution of our waterways, failing to make older houses cheaper and warmer to live in, failing to ensure that all new homes are fit for the future and so on and so on …
Instead they continue to do things like subsidising tree burning by a Drax power station, encouraging more fossil fuel extraction and approving a new coal mine in Cumbria.
It’s not New Year’s resolutions we need, it’s revolutions. A revolution in the way we do politics, to be inclusive and focussed longer term on the common good. And a revolution in our economic system, with our country’s wealth shared equitably instead of relentlessly moving upwards to line the pockets of the already rich. That really would be a Happy New Year!
Ken Huggins
North Dorset Green Party

The clarion call has gone up for “prosperity and the nation” in order to inspire us all with confidence in this government’s aims and objectives … we’re back to cake and eating it, again, eh? … last-century philosophies, ill-suited to our future, with a sprinkle of nationalism, a thirst for economic leadership for a selected few, a desire to be first among equals (Boris, that translates as primus inter pares) and the natural position of an Englishman.
What utter tosh!
What do you suppose is the response of our neighbours, allies and friends across the world, other than, “There they go again. Who do they think they are? Best ignore them.”?
The only halfway-benign future for this planet, including the flora and fauna on which we all depend, lies in consensus, in co-operation, in integrative action. Straightforward, undeniable, gold-plated, copper-bottomed fact: the environment – qua global warming and genetic diversity – requires a global approach. Migration requires global interventions, not temporary barriers. Energy and supply-chain interdependencies show there are no national-only economic solutions.
There are only co-operative solutions. Of course, we could sort it all out with a war or two. That has been the typical response to such challenges from time immemorial. Couldn’t happen, today, you say?
It is happening. Right now.
We need to smell the coffee or, better, sniff the cordite carried on a cruel, cold east wind.
The solutions lie in finding ever better ways of working together: locally, regionally, devolutionarily (I may have just made that word up), nationally and internationally. There is no way back to the neo-imperialist, elitist world sought by the right wing of certain real and other not so real, parties. The Lib Dem line says we need to recognise and understand the social and geo-physical constraints on human activity, find sustainable ways of working within those constraints and then use all our talents, technologies and resources available to do just that and do it fairly.
This isn’t soggy or woke. It is very, very challenging and hugely demanding of the professionalism, integrity and accountability (sic) of all of us.
It is not just the outfall of Brexit or the first-past-the-post electoral system that needs challenging, it is the mindset of “apart is better, separate is better, different is better, better-than is better … yesterday was better” that needs to be confronted.
It isn’t easy, though. There is a seductiveness about that old Lifemanship line, “if you are not one-up, you’re one-down”.
It plays out in so many of our own local, parochial, personal and familial interactions. We all rue our many petty actions on a daily basis, and it is the same at governmental level. We need to look at our behaviours and ask the question; do we need to win and come out on top?
Or do we simply need to do better together?
Mike Chapman
North Dorset Lib Dems