Strong Showing for PCS Broad Left Network ln First National Elections
Elections in the Public and Commercial Services union concluded on Friday 14th May with the election of a commanding majority for the Democracy Alliance on the union’s National Executive Committee for 2021-22. This means that the incumbent NEC, a leadership that is moving decisively to the right, has, with some exceptions, secured its own re-election, although on a very low turnout of 7.5%, with around 13,000 out of 170,000 members voting.
Broad Left Network activists, contesting the elections as an independent socialist group for the first time, secured one place on the 35-strong body, with young member Rachelle McDougall being elected. BLN activist Dave Semple secured sufficient votes to be elected to the NEC but due to a limitation on the maximum number of members from DWP, is knocked off in favour of the next highest candidate from outside DWP or HMRC.
Impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, during which tens of thousands of Civil Service PCS members have not been in their offices, and where the ability of activists to get out to workplaces to campaign has been drastically curtailed, Broad Left Network activists are far from despondent at securing one place on the National Executive Committee. This post will allow the left to continue to scrutinise and exert pressure on the re-elected leadership.
Broad Left candidate for PCS President Marion Lloyd finished a strong third, with around 2,500 votes – only 4000 votes behind the incumbent. From one of the smallest employer groups in the union, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Marion had sought to capitalise on nearly 10,000 votes in the November 2019 General Secretary election – but the Covid-19 pandemic has decisively cut across the ability of socialists to mobilise the workers who voted in the GS election.
BLN supporters proposed discussions with the Independent Left on an electoral agreement that the results show, could have made inroads into the DA majority. However, the IL’s lack of seriousness has been revealed by their refusal to properly engage with this.
Dirty tricks by the current executive have also played their role. Despite ensuring masks were worn, hand sanitiser was used and social distancing was observed during leafleting, activists from the Broad Left Network and our supporters were publicly condemned by the executive as having undermined the dispute between the union and management in the Swansea Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency.
As well as being simply untrue, this use of union resources such as the national website to publicly smear one of the factions standing in the election is an example of the worst kind of interference.
Standing on our record: building a left alternative in PCS
Far from undermining the strike in DVLA, Broad Left Network activists – including current NEC members Marion Lloyd, Alan Dennis, Fiona Brittle and Dave Semple – sought to strengthen the strike by ensuring that the most senior leadership in the union had a serious strategy. The Democracy Alliance NEC resorted to scurrilous public attacks to cover for their failure to ballot much earlier rather than their “too little, too late” approach.
This lack of seriousness is repeated in virtually everything the leadership of PCS has done for the last two years. To defend against the danger of a premature return to work during the successive peaks of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, Broad Left Network activists called for the union to prepare a serious industrial response. Democracy Alliance, and its component parts the PCS Democrats and PCS Left Unity, argued for months that the Tories were not seeking a swift return to work, and then that it simply wouldn’t be possible to ballot during the pandemic.
As the big civil service areas, such as the courts and Jobcentres, began to force people back into the office and to insist upon resumption of face-to-face activities, it was belatedly discovered a ballot was vital to protect members safety, but the leadership had already squandered the momentum that could have been built up while the union’s leadership dithered. Even then, in DWP, this was limited to a consultative ballot, with no teeth. But for the intervention of the second wave of Covid-19 in late 2020, Jobcentre staff would have been forced back into the office. This seems to be exactly what is happening now, as the second wave has receded and renewed pressure is exerted by the bosses to drastically scale up face to face work in Jobcentres.
Faced with Tory and senior management indifference to the threat to staff of reopening Jobcentres and dragging in unvaccinated 18-to-24-year-olds, as well as the danger of reinstituting benefit sanctions amidst the continuing pandemic, the answer of the union’s right-wing leadership is exactly the same: a consultative ballot. That this move is months overdue, that it has no force and effect as members cannot take strike action afterwards, that it was launched after the Jobcentres actually reopened just emphasises how ill equipped the current leadership of the union is , even while they talk about defending members.
Coincidentally, the ballot in DWP, the largest group of members in the union, despite being weeks or even months later than would have been prudent, has fallen right in the middle of the election period, enabling the incumbent majority to use the machinery of the union to raise their profiles.
On pay, since 2019 the union’s National Executive Committee have done absolutely nothing that resembles building a meaningful campaign. At Annual Delegate Conference in 2019, they put forward a hugely divisive motion to exclude pensions and redundancy rights from being added to the national pay campaign. These are all issues that require serious national struggle. By that point, three different ballots had failed to pass the 50% participation threshold imposed by the Tories and the result was a pay campaign stuck in the mud while pensions was returning to the minds of many members, as a result of legal campaigns and new information highlighting our overpayment of pension contributions. BLN activists argued we should use this to build momentum. The current leadership continued not to listen.
Meanwhile, with some employer groups getting over the 50% threshold and others not, BLN argued that it might be necessary to hold a disaggregated ballot, to allow some areas to establish their mandate for action and to take action in a coordinated way, whilst the union continued to agitate and build in areas which fell short. This would have enabled the launching of a dispute with a Tory government caught in a particularly weak position.
This was not just opposed but denounced as industrial sabotage. It was also used as a dishonest excuse by some in Left Unity not to support the democratically elected LU candidate for AGS Chris Baugh. This not only effectively split LU but was a portent for the rightward shift of the union’s leadership that we’ve seen during Covid.
When the pandemic began, Broad Left Network activists recognised the extreme dependence of the Tory government upon Civil Servants, and the certainty that once the pandemic passed, austerity would resume. We argued that the pay campaign should be stepped up, linked directly with other issues and that the union should exploit the weakness of the Tories. This could start to undo more than a decade of pay austerity that had blighted the lives of many workers, especially at the lowest grades in the Civil Service, who now get a pay rise only when the minimum wage goes up.
Not only were we denounced as insensitive to anyone who would lose relatives to Covid-19, but the cabal at the top of the union threw out the union’s pay demand of 10% and wrote to the Cabinet Office – without the approval of the NEC – to tug their forelock and ask for an “above inflation” pay rise. The subsequent endorsement of this capitulation to national unity by the NEC, opposed only by BLN members, is an indictment of the Left Unity/Democracy Alliance NEC majority as well as the Independent Left who supported it.
The Tory grandees, sensing their weakness and recognising the weakness of the PCS leadership, offered what they thought would be enough to delay any renewed pay campaign. This succeeded. In the following months the most the NEC managed was a petition and a debate in parliament that was attended by a dozen MPs, not even a majority of MPs in the “PCS Parliamentary Group”. This is held up as a huge success despite the extra pennies that have found their way into members pockets is precisely nothing.
For every single issue the union has faced over the last several years, there is a clear divide between the PCS Broad Left Network, on the one hand, seeking to build a fighting, democratic trade union, and the increasingly rightwards moving PCS Left Unity and their PCS Democrat allies.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the struggle to ensure the accountability of the tops of the union’s full-time structure to the ordinary members of the union. Once upon a time, PCS Left Unity believed in electing all Senior National Officers in the union, and this has repeatedly passed the union’s Annual Delegate Conference – but for the Democracy Alliance this is merely a rhetorical pose, never meant to be acted upon.
The General Secretary himself has indicated clearly why this, despite commanding the support of the union’s membership and activist base, is forever on ice. His view is that the full- time officers answer to him, and he answers to the NEC. This really is a re-hash of the days of Barry Reamsbottom and the total resistance of the old right wing Moderates to the lay reps exercising any hands-on control of the union
Build the Broad Left Network, Build the Union
Broad Left Network activists recognise that, even had we taken control of the National Executive Committee in the 2021 elections, it would have had to be a platform to transform the union. The vibrant, combative, instinctively democratic culture of PCS has been rotting from the top down and stopping that rot is a fight that needs to be taken into every branch and every workplace, so that members see that there can be a union which is prepared to stand up and fight.
Broad Left Network activists have a serious programme for change. We are not interested in being a token opposition to the current leadership of our union which is bereft of any idea about how to build and develop a campaign with a serious chance of winning for members.
We want to win our union back on the basis of a socialist programme, which is the only one that can ensure we have a fighting, democratic PCS and that can secure serious victories against a vicious Tory government and against the private sector bosses who with one hand grab an ever-bigger slice of public services while the other holds the whip they wield over our privatised members.
Over the next year we intend to take this fight into every single branch, to every single workplace in every single department and every single employer where there are workers represented by the union. One of the biggest things that divides us from the re-elected Democracy Alliance leadership is that they look for excuses not to fight blaming an absence of mood amongst members whereas we look to build the confidence of activists to fight and to win industrially and politically with the ideas of socialism.
If, like us, you know that our members want to fight, have the power to win and you want to help unite workers across this union, then join the Broad Left network.
PCS Broad Left Network 