Democracy is old fashioned, Serwotka tells PCS Annual Delegate Conference 2021
Spirited debate, marked the first day of PCS Annual Delegate Conference 2021, conducted online over 13th and 14th June.
Despite every effort to stitch up the Conference, including not permitting some well-known opponents to speak, and despite nominally getting the NEC motions through the Conference, margins were smaller than ever this year.
The cluster of motions from A9 to A12, which covered the debate on the future of PCS, as well as calls for the election of union Full Time Officers, to increase the accountability of the union to its members, is a good example.
Platitude after platitude, both in the text of motion A9, proposed by the NEC itself, and in the speeches from those , newly elected to the NEC for 2021/22, hand-picked to replace the flood of LU leaverswho got up to bray their allegiance to the Serwotka regime, was all that the NEC had to offer.
Despite bringing out what passes for big guns for this NEC, including the General Secretary himself, the NEC only won motion A9 by a hair, 60,617 for, 57,556 against and 2,156 abstentions.
That tiny majority was only achieved after the General Secretary publicly ruled out the very ideas he had hoped to push through, as part of the sham consultation run over late 2020, when reps were busy fighting to keep members out of the workplace, or safe if in them.
Serwotka promised that there would be no multi-employer branches, and that there would be no digital-by-default approach to union meetings.
What was of political significance during the debate was the moment where Serwotka lined up beside Reamsbottom and the right-wing General Secretaries of the past in arguing that electing full time officers is old fashioned and no one wants to elect the head of IT.
It might surprise a completely out of touch NEC to know that quite a few reps would probably like to elect that post and to make it properly accountable, given the wasteful gimmickry that has been the hallmark of PCS IT and the turn away from using the website for putting out information from negotiators in Groups, to keep members informed.
One of the larger branches in the union changing its vote would have been enough to sink A9, with its surfeit of vague buzzwords and meaningless action points, in favour of the far more definite A10, which sought to put focus where it needs to be: how we’re recruiting, why we’re not recruiting enough and why we’re losing members.
That is precisely the debate the NEC don’t want to have and which they have consistently ducked, because ultimately, it’s on their watch and they’re responsible.
Elections at the Conference did not go the way of Serwotka and his rubber stampers on the NEC.
Alan Dennis, national secretary of the Broad Left Network, and stalwart against the Moderates of CPSA, was elected to the PCS Standing Orders Committee, reflecting general discontent at the way this Conference has been handled.
Other important roles, elected by block vote from the Conference, went to Broad Left Network supporters, who are actually putting forward a strategy to deal with members’ concerns.
Given the way the Conference has been manipulated, and despite the narrow victories for the NEC motions, it’s clear that there is a significant group of reps and activists who sense that for all their self-congratulatory speeches, the emperor is a touch underdressed.
With around a third of branches not in attendance at the Conference, it’s also clear that a significant group of branches are utterly alienated by the way in which the union is being run, the huge centralisation, the closing down of debate, the stage management of important events.
Broad Left Network activists will spend the next year reaching out to branches, explaining the continuing political degeneration of Left Unity, who increasingly have no claim to be taken seriously as a left leadership, and renewing the battle for a fighting, democratic trade union from the ground up, one that engages all branches.
PCS Broad Left Network 