The Broad Left Network steering committee, speaking for scores of socialists and union activists within the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, welcomes the decision by dozens of reps and union activists to resign their membership of PCS Left Unity (LU).
It is clear from the statement released by an initial group of 25 reps and union activists, the vast majority of which are in Revenue and Customs (R&C) group within PCS that they are fed up with LU’s attacks on union democracy and with the deterioration of PCS Left Unity itself.
Evidently this captures something of a mood, as since the initial publication on 21 September, the number of signatories to the statement has grown to over 100 names, including a significant number of members of the R&C Group Executive Committee and many branch officers from across Revenue and Customs branches.
PCS Left Unity: a barrier to a serious national campaign
Once a campaigning, socialist organisation, PCS Left Unity has degenerated sharply to become a serious barrier to the building of an effective national campaign on pay, pensions, redundancy rights and jobs.
BLN activists, a section of whom were themselves long-standing members of PCS Left Unity, raised the question of a disaggregated strike ballot in 2018 and were denounced for it. Union President Fran Heathcote and others seized upon the excuse to have us purged from leadership roles.
Yet, in 2022, when a disaggregated ballot delivered a record vote and a mandate for action for 100,000 civil servants, there was no “mea culpa” from a leadership that had been proven wrong. Serious debate and consideration of tactics play second fiddle to a shallow triumphalism.
Unable to come up with serious-minded and strong responses on issues like Covid safety, compulsory redundancies in the civil service and the rapid rise of workloads in many areas, all too often the PCS Left Unity members of the National Executive and other leading committees have resorted to name calling and shrieked denunciation of non-PCS Left Unity members.
BLN activists therefore fully recognise the picture painted by those R&C reps and activists now resigning from PCS Left Unity – and we agree, the task now before us is to build the kind of union that we deserve, one based on the power of members, reps and branches over their workplaces and over their employers.
PCS Left Unity: also a serious threat to union democracy
As the statement by R&C group activists makes clear, LU has also become an opponent of transparency, of union democracy and of accountability of those charged with the executive authority to manage the day-to-day work of PCS as a campaigning union.
The statement highlights the recent instance of Fran Heathcote, the union’s national president, deliberately attempting to have an important motion, submitted by and about LGBT+ members of union, talked out at the 2023 Annual Delegate Conference.
PCS Left Unity’s response attempted to defend Fran Heathcote without even mentioning or explaining the text she sent, which asked activists to volunteer to speak unnecessarily, in order to get Motion A50 talked out.
Evasiveness of language has become an art-form at the top of PCS, with its sole purpose being to escape accountability of the leadership to members.
Our recent ballot on pay, organised by the PCS Left Unity majority on the union’s National Executive Committee, is surely the example par excellence. If you voted yes, the union’s pay campaign ended. If you voted no, the union’s pay campaign ended.
This ridiculous choice was set up by a leadership which realised mid-sellout that their attempt to make people swallow the £1,500 one-off non-consolidated payment as a victory wasn’t going to wash. They needed to mislead members so they could later say that calling off strike action, cancelling the re-ballots and cancelling the strike levy was what members wanted.
There are many other examples of dishonesty and abuse of power, large and small.
Internally, LU convenors have shut down meetings they knew they didn’t have a majority in, to avoid nominations or a majority of votes being cast for people out with the leadership clique.
Externally to LU, debates at the leading committees of the union are deliberately distorted so that when motions are proposed that contradict Heathcote’s view, no moving speech is permitted nor any right of reply when the usual “attack dogs” throw slurs and mud.
The PCS Left Unity response amusingly claims that the LU leadership doesn’t indulge in mudslinging. Yet time after time, Heathcote and Deputy President Martin Cavanagh chair meetings where their supporters quite happily throw every insult they can think of at those supporters of Broad Left Network who PCS members elect to the NEC or DWP GEC.
No justice is sought within the official processes of the union because the PCS Left Unity majority on the National Executive is misused whenever Rule 10 complaints are submitted: allies of the President get off lightly, opponents are not so lucky – as has been the case recently with prominent LGBT+ activist Saorsa Amatheia-Tweedale.
It is a positive step for those PCS activists now resigning from PCS Left Unity to declare that they’ve had enough and that the union deserves better.
What next?
These abuses – and many others like them – must end.
Our view is that PCS Left Unity must be forced out of power in PCS, and socialist activists and union reps must band together to build a genuinely open, democratic, campaigning PCS that fights for members and builds working class solidarity.
The view of the PCS Left Unity leadership, on the other hand, is that they bear no responsibility whatsoever and that those resigning are “hopelessly naïve” and, worse, that those now resigning do not “genuinely reflect the views of their members on the ground.”
PCS Left Unity figures frequently refer back to the defeat in the early 2000s of a genuinely right-wing leadership of PCS, and the role that LU played in it – back when it was far broader than it is today and contained much of what is today BLN, the Independent Left and those now resigning in R&C group.
That victory was so important because it ended the arrogance of a right-wing NEC that believed only they, as the chosen few, spoke for members, and that where anyone differed, they could safely be denounced as charlatans and fakers.
Every step that has been taken by Serwotka, Heathcote, Cavanagh and the others has remoulded the union’s leadership from that which led the valiant pensions dispute in 2011, that saw 2 million workers take strike action, to one much closer to the old right-wing. The high-handed, imperious and dismissive tones in which they write and speak give them away.
Captured within this article are the clear, political reasons why PCS Broad Left Network unanimously made the decision to stand a candidate in the forthcoming General Secretary election. For a democratic, inclusive trade union. For a fighting union, not the shallow, top-down, social media dominated mirage into which Heathcote et al are turning PCS.
If you want to read more about what we stand for, you can read it online. If you want to get involved, you can join us online and access activist resources online.
If you want to fight for a chance to change the union, then this needs us back in our workplaces, organising to nominate Marion Lloyd for General Secretary and John Moloney for Assistant General Secretary and then turning out the vote in the election shortly due!
PCS Broad Left Network 