THE TUC Women’s Conference opened today, with trade unionists warning of the threat of far-right influence on workers and children.

The opening panel heard from representatives of overseas labour movements, including Cathy Feingold from US union federation AFL-CIO, who highlighted the Trump administration’s attack on women’s rights and diversity programmes.

National Education Union president Sarah Kilpatrick warned that 14 years of Tory policies had eroded education, limiting critical thinking and creative subjects and making it easier for far-right ideologies to take root.

“What politicians have done in our schools is purposefully create a situation in which children are starved of an education,” she told delegates.

“But perhaps the worst thing has been the absolute limitation on the time in the school day. There is no space in the school day for critical thinking skills to be developed.

“You have to be extraordinarily wealthy to have had an education that allows you to develop those skills. There’s a real elitism baked into our education system.”

Ms Kilpatrick warned that by starving the society’s children of key thinking skills, “they become very easy to manipulate and control,” highlighting the impact that misogynist influencer Andrew Tate has had on young men and boys by perniciously flaunting a comfortable lifestyle “that has been stolen from them.”

She said: “There is a real problem that has been born out of enforced poverty — when they close down the Sure Start centres, when they shut down the public libraries, when they limited mental health services — that had an impact that was going to last for generations.”

Ms Kilpatrick criticised the current government for “leaning so heavily into the far-right rhetoric that saw Reform take seats in Parliament.

“I don’t see any hope in the Labour government. I do see hope in the trade union movement,” she said as she called for action to “reclaim our classrooms.”

TUC women and equalities officer Aisha Malik-Smith echoed those concerns, warning that last summer’s far-right riots “weren’t facilitated in a vacuum.”

She said far-right groups had been organising small, local protests against asylum-seekers for months, before finally mobilising on a larger scale.

“They didn’t seem a real threat then, but when they mobilised together, we saw the real disruption,” Ms Malik-Smith noted.

She criticised the narrative spread by far-right figures claiming to defend women and girls from Muslims or immigrants, adding: “We know so often that these are some of the most sexist people you would ever meet and we need to expose the hypocrisy of it.

“We have to ensure that our anti-racist education is in every workplace,”Ms Malik-Smith insisted.