Month: Oct 2023

Marion Lloyd, Broad Left Network supporter and the candidate of the left in the forthcoming PCS General Secretary election, has secured 80 nominations. John Moloney, Independent Left supporter and the left’s candidate for PCS Assistant General Secretary, has secured a whopping 87 nominations.

Published yesterday, these figures demonstrate the huge support for Marion, for John and for a fighting, democratic PCS. Breakthroughs across the union – but particularly in Revenue and Customs Group – now mean Marion’s election and John’s re-election are a step closer.

Current PCS national president Fran Heathcote, who arrogantly assumed she would be crowned General Secretary, and in whose interest outgoing General Secretary tried to stitch up this year’s Annual Delegate Conference, secured 90 nominations.

This is a far cry from the 170 nominations that she boasted she would receive when the campaign began. Marion Lloyd has run an energetic and outward facing campaign, speaking to the concerns of ordinary members, and along the way defeating Heathcote in every branch where the two spoke.

Both Marion and John are standing on a platform of only taking their civil service wage – rejecting the current General Secretary wage of £103,100 and repaying the difference between the two into the PCS campaign fund.

Heathcote, on the other hand, could not make up her mind whether she was intending to take the full General Secretary salary. Asked about this at two separate hustings, she has been unable to give a clear answer.

Marion’s election platform is very straightforward. She has consistently argued that a determined PCS national campaign could do a lot better than the £1,500 non-consolidated, one-time payment extracted from the government in June, just before the NEC cancelled the entire campaign.

Added to the question of pay, in order to build the strongest campaign possible, must also be tied questions such as opposing the 66,000 job cuts announced by the Tory government, and defending civil service offices and local services across the UK – on which Heathcote has been abysmal.

In a significant boost to the Broad Left Network/Independent Left campaign, John Moloney secured 87 nominations, beating his opponent Paul O’Connor’s tally of 84. O’Connor, long-serving unelected PCS full time officer, bragged that Broad Left Network was “a busted flush” earlier this year.

All eyes now turn to efforts to get out the maximum vote. On a high turnout, it is absolutely clear that Marion and John will decisively win the General Secretary election. We urge all branches to draw up plans now for ensuring every member votes when the election begins on 9November.

Vote Marion Lloyd and John Moloney – candidates for change

Tory Party conference closed on 4 October 2023 with some nasty surprises for UK civil servants. Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced his intention to reduce the size of the civil service by 66,000 jobs. Promises of green jobs and levelling up were replaced by demands for greater productivity from the public sector, further attacks on strikers and the dumping of net zero carbon goals.

Civil service jobs stood at 489,000 (full time equivalent) in June 2023, up about 2% since June 2022. Recruitment and job losses across the UK civil service have been uneven over the same period. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) lost more than 3,500 full-time jobs while some areas gained substantial numbers (7,000 into Home Office, 800 into Ministry of Justice outside the Prison Service).

Virtually all major areas report increases in the amount of pressure on staff, with workloads skyrocketing especially in those areas where staff numbers are in freefall. Underneath headline figures, some departments are having to continually recruit because of staff turnover, as low wages especially amongst the lowest grades of AA, AO and EO drive people to take other jobs.

Despite this, there has been little to nothing said about staffing or workload by the national leadership of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents civil servants and privatised government workers, and in which all Broad Left Network supporters are members and activists. In the most recent national campaign, the most the leadership would seek was a “jobs guarantee.”

Successive Scottish Governments have granted Scottish civil servants a no-compulsory redundancies guarantee, which of course any serious union rep would welcome. But this has not protected Scottish Government staff from the pressures of workload due to understaffing. If the UK government gets away with destroying 66,000 jobs, this will diminish the funding available to Scotland under the Barnett formula.

Oppose all cuts and fight for 100,000 new civil service jobs

A united response to workload pressures and attacks on staffing is therefore required. This must be linked to the question of pay, as Jeremy Hunt’s intention to save £1 billion by attacking civil service jobs will not be the only means whereby the Tories seek to attack the “amorphous blob”, as the civil service has been described at fringe meetings with Tory cabinet ministers.

Additional savings from pay “restraint” (i.e., cuts in the pay of civil servants relative to the rising cost of living) are a favourite Tory means of clawing back the small concessions won through the £1,500 one-off, non-consolidated, pro-rata payment that most areas were paid in summer 2023, or the 4.5-5% average pay rises received by most government departments for 2023/24.

Other savings are planned by shrinking the number of government buildings (meaning longer commutes, less spending in town centres, fewer local services) and a 5% cut to all operational budgets for 2024/25. These too must be opposed vigorously by a robust industrial strategy, including strike action, by coordinating with other trade unions and by putting political pressure on MPs.

PCS has passed useful policies that lay the basis for this. Our call for 1 million climate jobs, for a just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy that supports workers and communities and for energy democracy are all objectives that the entire labour movement could rally around. The Prime Minister’s decision to essentially bin net zero objectives has been met with silence by the leaders of PCS, however.

Instead of exerting political pressure on the Labour opposition, the leadership of PCS under Fran Heathcote has become all but indistinguishable from the Labour front bench. PCS fringes at Labour conference are to be addressed by such dignitaries as the head of the Trades Union Congress – no friend to workers in struggle – and Lord Coaker, a shill for Ed Miliband’s proposed MOD cuts in 2015.

Long-standing PCS policies – opposition to benefit sanctions (which Sunak has also indicated should be tougher), opposition to cuts to social security (also touted by Sunak last week), demands for tax justice that would secure thousands of highly skilled jobs in HMRC, among others – have all been cast aside by a leadership increasingly focused on one thing – their own political survival at the top of the union, which matters to them above all else.

PCS also has long-standing policy in defence of Trans rights. The last year has seen a determined Tory attack on equality policies inside the civil service, and Sunak, in the headline speech of the Conference, attacked gender self-identification, the latest in a long line of Tory retreats from the one-time commitment by Theresa May to simplify the overly medicalised process for transitioning.

Again, the leadership of PCS has been silent at best, both on the wider “war on woke” narrative that the tabloids spin and which has been a feature of a battle going on in some government departments, and on this renewed attack on Trans rights by Sunak.

There is a route to a fighting, democratic, socialist alternative in PCS

Recent developments in PCS suggest that the current leadership are not having things all their own way. As acknowledged and welcomed by the Broad Left Network steering committee at the time, a group of several dozen union reps in the PCS Revenue and Customs recently resigned from PCS Left Unity, the ruling faction of the union’s National Executive and key employer-based executives in PCS.

Their statement, now signed by around a hundred activists, and a further article published on their website after PCS Left Unity responded in typically arrogant and dismissive fashion, detailed criticisms of the lack of accountability within PCS LU itself, the undemocratic attitude of Fran Heathcote and a whole series of mistakes by PCS’ leadership over years, in respect of digitalisation, how to support the union’s different employer groups etc.

Broad Left Network supporters generally agree with many of these criticisms and many, particularly those who themselves are active in PCS Revenue and Customs Group, have signed the statement or have signalled full support directly in communication with lead R&C activists. Marion Lloyd, national chair of the Broad Left Network and General Secretary candidate, has signalled her own support.

Broad Left Network give full support to the meeting organised for Tuesday 10^th October and urge socialists in PCS Revenue and Customs Group to sign the statement and to participate fully in a comradely discussion about how to build a fighting, democratic PCS which genuinely places equality at the heart of what we do.

A further development has since emerged yesterday, on 8 October 2023, when the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) formally announced their own resignation from PCS Left Unity.

In their statement, they agree with criticisms we have consistently put forward – that the NEC seized on the first available concession and then wound down the action, that the recent all-members ballot was deliberately confusing, that any attempt to escalate strikes opposed by the leadership.

Unfortunately, the SWP fail to mention that the only consistent force to call strikes early, to call them systematically, to escalate strike action, to undertake detailed analysis on what works and what does not and opposing cancellation of the June strikes has been the Broad Left Network.

SWP members on the union’s national executive voted in favour of cancelling the June strike action. It is not entirely clear if ordinary SWP members in PCS know this, and we believe that those same NEC members have now split with the SWP over their decision to leave PCS Left Unity.

Opposition to the careerism that now runs amok at the top of PCS, and commitment to a democratic, accountable PCS run by and in the interests of the lay members of the union are powerful organising principles that have been lost by the union’s NEC. They are also the basis for a serious fightback against the coming job cuts and attacks on our pay – regardless of whether Tories or Labour hold the whip.

Marion Lloyd and the Broad Left Network remain as committed as ever to rebuilding these in PCS, and this is the basis of our principled alliance in the General Secretary and Assistant General Secretary election with John Moloney, who we urge the SWP to support. Refusal to do so is support for John’s opponent, a union full time officer who has been at the heart of the union’s timid industrial strategy and who has actively worked against the union’s democratic lay structures.

The time for change in PCS is long overdue. Please support Marion Lloyd and John Moloney in the upcoming elections, for a return to PCS as a fighting socialist trade union.