Month: Feb 2023

Supporters of the PCS Broad Left Network offer our deepest sympathy and solidarity to the family and friends of Brianna Ghey. Brianna Ghey was a 16 year old trans girl who was murdered in Warrington last weekend. In response, vigils have been called across the country to stand with the LGBT+ community. The PCS Broad Left Network urges our supporters to make every effort to support these vigils and the struggle for LGBT+ rights generally. Brianna was a much loved daughter, supported and cherished by her family. Like anyone, she wanted to live a life with the space and support to be her true self. Due to the UK government’s appalling U-turn on reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the absolute failure of our society to make space for trans people to live as their authentic selves, Brianna’s death will have to be recorded using her deadname and her death certificate will wrongly declare her to be male. This injustice demonstrates the erasure of Brianna’s young life, just one example of the erasure faced by all trans people who get married, live and die under a system which forcibly denies who they are. Now that she has died, the state – aided by reactionary elements in our society – will insist that she never truly existed as the wonderful young woman that she was. This erasure, propped up and deepened by the disgusting transphobic discourse ripping through the media at present, is the genocidal outcome of the anti-trans lobby.

That word is not used lightly; the Lemkin Institute for Genocidal Prevention describes the gender critical movement’s ideology and practice as having a “genocidal nature” in their 2022 report and call it a “centerpiece of right wing ascendency in the Western world”. The 1948 United Nations Convention on preventing genocide states in Article 2 that alongside the obvious definition of killing or harming members of a group, one definition can be “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction or in part.” While the Convention refers to “national, ethnical, racial or religious groups”, the parallels with the targeting of the very essence, existence and validity of trans people as a group as described in the Lemkin report are clear. A person’s trans identity is an inherent and inalienable part of who they are, and there is a growing voice in society urging us to deny that. We must reject it, and trans rights must be upheld and defended as an urgent matter of life and death.

Trans people, the LGBT+ community and their allies, can see that her murder is not simply an isolated incident. LGBT+ rights are under attack in a way that hasn’t been seen since the 1980s and the introduction by the Thatcher government of the hated Section 28. In reality, despite improvements amongst social attitudes and legal protections won because of the struggles of LGBT+ people to have their voices heard, trans people continue to face unrelenting hostility throughout their lives: in schools, on the streets, in the workplaces, and in wider society.

The newly-appointed Deputy Tory Chairman, Lee Anderson, has openly stated that their party will use a culture war-type agenda to sow division by attacking trans people in a bid to desperately try to cling to power. Disgracefully, much like their approach to striking workers, Keir Starmer’s Labour sit on their hands whilst trans people face attacks from the right and the far-right. Trans people also face specific barriers in accessing public services, such as access to mental health provision and gender reassignment services, because of the austerity policies of successive governments and councillors representing the mainstream capitalist parties. Hypocritically, some of so-called allies of trans people amongst these pro-austerity parties are the same politicians who have voted to introduce cut services, scrap or water down equality training including in the civil service, slash legal aid and introduce tribunal fees to deter access to justice. PCS members at conference have consistently voted to show their solidarity with our trans comrades by passing motions, often in spite of the recommendation of the Left Unity-dominated National Executive Committee, to unequivocally defend trans rights.

The PCS Broad Left Network is proud to demand justice for Brianna and her family and friends. The BLN recommits its pledge to stand with the LGBT+ community and against the austerity policies that fan the flames of division, hatred and discrimination in our society. We urge our supporters to join the vigils over the coming days ahead to demand justice.

The union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) met this afternoon, Tuesday 7^th February, to discuss the impact of the all-members national strike action taken by 100,000 PCS members on 1^st February. Rightly, the attitude of the NEC was positive, given the big turnout on pickets and demonstrations across the UK and union members’ clear support for a fightback on pay, on pensions, on redundancy rights and for many other improvements.

Fiona Brittle, BLN supporter elected to the union’s NEC, voted for further action to be called on 28^th February, 15^th March and 16^th March, all of which are dates where coordination with other unions is possible, including teachers’ and lecturers’ unions NEU, UCU, NASUWT and EIS. Coordinated action would seriously raise the pressure exerted on the government and has been under-developed by the current leadership of PCS.

However, it is not enough to simply call for further dates to be named. There must be a clear industrial plan, demonstrating the impact of well-supported strike action and this must be explained to members across the union, both those with mandates and those re-balloting. Fiona laid this out very clearly at the NEC, even while voting with other NEC members who had gone even further to name specific dates in April as well.

In addition to demanding proper exploratory work be done to extend coordinated action, and for a serious campaign of national strike action be announced no later than 16^th February, Fiona also renewed her demand that branches must be given access to members’ contact details.

Branches cannot contact members via the usual route of desk-dropping circulars or work emails because we need to talk about strike action. Home emails and phone numbers are essential, to reinforce attempts at mass engagement by our key activist layer in the branches.

This is certainly necessary as we approach the expiry of the union’s mandate, on 7^th May, 6 months after our ballot victory on November 7^th 2022; the nearer this gets the more thoughts should be turning to re-balloting, to including action short of strike action, and to making a serious case to members as to why they need to vote YES to help us win our demands.

The NEC majority, led by those who call themselves “Left Unity”, refused to support any of this, voting down all of the proposals made by Fiona to strengthen the national campaign, and opposing all dates for action except 15^th March. Broad Left Network supporters will throw themselves into building for March strike action, but we must also highlight to members the utter failure and calamity that has been the union’s current leadership during this dispute.

Keep pressure on the union’s Left Unity leadership

Our criticisms of the current leadership of PCS, Left Unity, are well-known by now. During the pandemic, they abandoned our national campaign on pay, pensions, redundancy rights and the rest, in favour of an offer for cosy fireside chats with senior Tory ministers.

While members were being forced back into unsafe offices, they failed totally to mobilise any serious resistance even though sporadic ballots over safety in Departments like DWP showed that there was enormous support in key workplaces for a militant attitude.

For the five years up until the most recent national ballot was launched, in September 2022, Left Unity supporters on the NEC made a point of principle out of opposing disaggregated ballots, where individual civil service employers would be balloted at the same time but on a department-by-department basis.

These so-called leaders spread rumours and scaremongered in order to witch-hunt out anyone who called for consideration of how disaggregated ballots could be used to break through the barrier of the 2016 anti-union laws, including the overall 50% participation threshold. This included the union’s then-Assistant General Secretary, Chris Baugh.

They said disaggregated ballots would “wreck the national campaign.”

Four years later, in 2022, they finally switched to a disaggregated ballot, which is how we arrived where we are now, with 100,000 members and 126 areas across the union with a live mandate on which we can finally take the action we need to win on pay, on pensions etc. There was no admission of failure, or of previous mistakes. They just chucked out everything they’d ever said up to that point and switched course.

With the most recent ballot, they failed to include action short of strike action as a question on the ballot. They claim this is a strategy, but the view of BLN supporters is that they are incompetent. They fail to understand that real socialist politics are not just a wish-list of nice things; it’s a way to understand how to make the union a vehicle for workers’ struggle.

Action short of strike action could have been used to frustrate the massive use of overtime to undermine strike action in the civil service. It could have been used to target even more intensively the key areas where targeted action has been authorised, with small number of members taking weeks upon weeks of action. It could have been used to stop employers moving work from one striking site to another, which is not striking.

These are just a selection of low points. Other failures, especially the dismal, centralising, anti-democratic, machinations of the current leadership are not hard to find.

BLN supporters – not just those elected to the NEC but those in branches and on regional and other committees – called on the NEC to launch a powerful national campaign right out of the gate, upon winning the mandate back on 7^th November. They refused.

Today we learned of a further consequence of that refusal.

The Left Unity majority on the NEC clearly forgot that Northern Ireland’s anti-union laws are slightly different. By failing to call action covering NI within 28 days of securing the mandate for action, the NEC allowed our mandate in the important areas, including the NI Home Office and NI Passport Office branches, to lapse.

Members in Northern Ireland, who won a mandate with 100,000 of the rest of us on 7^th November, must now be re-balloted or face exclusion from the national campaign. This shameful failure is the latest in a long list and proves that the current leadership must be replaced.

A fighting, socialist programme for the 2023 PCS elections

Reps and members from across many different civil service departments and the privatised, contracted-out areas, have long recognised that there are problems with the current leadership by the Left Unity faction, and these problems are getting worse. This is clearly shown just by the above brief historical recap of their failures since 2018.

Those of us who have served on Group Executive and National Executive Committees with this leadership know that reasoned argument has no effect upon them. Their rants, insults and screaming behaviour of some of their worst elements are well-known across the PCS activist layer. They are a serious barrier to our union’s victory and they must go.

The Broad Left Network was founded by PCS reps in order to put forward a plan for a campaigning, democratic union, governed by socialist policies. This year we will fight the 2023 elections in PCS on a stark programme, recognising that we are in the middle of a major dispute and that members are under enormous pressure, through the cost-of-living crisis:

• Support, build and lead the strikes across PCS.
• Develop a serious, escalating programme of national, targeted and selective strike action to beat the Tory cost-of-living squeeze and the anti-union laws, including action short of strikes to maximise pressure on the government, our employer.
• Ensure that PCS takes the lead in calling for mass coordinated action across the trade union movement.
• Strengthen democracy and accountability within PCS, including by extending elections to include full-time officers, and by bringing their pay more in line with the members they represent.

In the elections, Broad Left Network candidates will be standing alongside candidates from another organisation within PCS, the Independent Left.

Independent Left has agreed the above platform. This allows both sets of candidates to stand on one united, left slate. Such a move recognises how important it is to oust the charlatans clinging to control just now, and to replace them with a new generation of socialist, activist union reps who have the ideas and the ability to get out and build our union and its campaigns.

Nationally we are calling on all branches to support and nominate the following:

National President – Marion Lloyd (BEIS)

National Vice Presidents – Fiona Brittle (Scottish Government), Bryan Carlsen (HSE), Bev Laidlaw (DWP) and Jon-Paul Rosser (HMRC).

Ordinary NEC: Dave Bartlett (MOJ), Tom Bishell (DWP), Rob Bowers (Defence), Fiona Brittle (Scottish Government), Alex Brown (Health Group), Sarah Brown (Met Police), Bryan Carlsen (HSE), Josh Chown (Home Office), Eleanor Clarke (Cabinet Office), Victoria Cuckson (HMRC), Chris Day (National Archives), Alan Dennis (Defence), Nick Doyle (HMRC), Matt Exley (Culture), Chip Hamer (Culture), Rachel Heemskerk (DWP), Karen Johnson (DLUHC), David Jones (DLUHC), Bev Laidlaw (DWP), Marion Lloyd (BEIS), Chris Marks (DWP), Vijay Menezes-Jackson (DWP), Nick Parker (ACAS), Rob Ritchie (Shared Services Commercial Sector), Jon-Paul Rosser (HMRC), Dave Semple (DWP), Gary Spencer (DLUHC), Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale (DWP), Paul Suter (DWP), Colin Young (Education).