Month: Jun 2024

Another week in PCS, another litany of obstructions under the President and General Secretary of the union, Martin Cavanagh and Fran Heathcote and their faction PCS Left Unity (LU).

LU Cost Privatised Members Three Days of Strike Action in DWP G4S

The left-led Senior Officers Committee, with a voting majority comprised of Hector Wesley, Bev Laidlaw and Dave Semple from the PCS majority left, voted in favour of strike action on the DWP G4S contract, so that members could join GMB members striking on the same contract beginning on 17 June and continuing intermittently for weeks yet to come.

A PCS Left Unity member responsible for issuing the correct notice to the employer failed to do so, meaning that strike action had to be pulled from 1-3 July, and only because majority left reps intervened to put pressure on the General Secretary and on the national President, was strike action saved for 4-7 July.

Although this was put down to “human error” by Left Unity supporters in the higher echelons of the union’s senior management, it is indicative of the continuing and massive failure over years on the part of once-dominant faction PCS Left Unity to exercise democratic oversight over the operations of the union. Notices of strike action, for example, are not copied to the elected senior officers of PCS.

Every attempt to wield democratic oversight, as in recent instances where dispute settlements have been reported to the National Disputes Committee, has been met with argument, delay and refusal to reply to correspondence.

The union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is led by the majority left,
comprised of Broad Left Network, Independent Left and independent socialists, 19 seats compared to Left Unity’s 16 seats, key offices are still held by Left Unity
supporters, including DWP Group President, PCS National President and General Secretary. The latter posts also sit on key committees such as the Senior Officers Committee and the National Disputes Committee.

These top posts are being used to block at every turn the ordinary democratic
operations of the union and the exercise of democratic oversight.

LU Blocks Any National Campaign Action

The majority left have tried at every turn to get the national campaign on to the
agenda of the NEC and its related bodies. Collectively, we demanded of the national president that this feature on the first NEC after conference, held on 4 June. This was denied.

National Vice President Dave Semple wrote to the General Secretary and National President to demand that the leverage information that they were gathering – without reference to or discussion with the NEC or the National Disputes Committee – be shared. This email has not even received a reply from either.

A submission from Dave Lunn, on behalf of the PCS Land Registry Group, which
broke the 50% participation threshold in the strike ballot that took place until May 2024, has also gone unanswered.

National Vice President Hector Wesley has written to the General Secretary to
convene a Campaigns and Comms committee meeting. This has been blocked by
the General Secretary, further frustrating any attempt to mobilise the union for action.

On virtually every matter, similar barriers are being thrown up. The implication is that the President, the General Secretary and their unelected supporters in the union’s most senior management layers believe they can simply prevent the left from exercising power by ignoring requests until it is too late – a perception reinforced by the decision by the National President to radically reduce the number of NEC meetings.

Misuse of Members’ Money to Organise a Cabal of the Right?

Reps across PCS who have any connection to the paid full-time structures of PCS have long been hearing rumours of major changes to the staffing structure of the union, including promotions undertaken without any advertisement internally or externally within PCS. None of these have been brought to the NEC.

A further recent round of this seems to have taken place. Three NEC members have written to the General Secretary demanding an explanation of what has been undertaken, including the creation, without NEC approval, of a new band of staff, 6A. This sits at the top of the union, earns tens of thousands of pounds more per year than average PCS members earn, and has been filled by two unelected individuals that supported Fran Heathcote’s campaign for General Secretary in 2023.

No explanation of this has been offered by the General Secretary, and no reason has been given why the elected committees of the union were not consulted, given that under the union’s rules, FTOs are appointed by the NEC, and on the basis of procedures that require approval by the NEC (see Supplementary Rules 8.1 and 8.3).

Full Time Officers are employed directly by PCS to do a difficult job and they deserve respect. More than one Full Time Officer, with no connection to any faction in PCS, has openly decried the way in which the union’s senior management is utterly unaccountable to any elected body and the favouritism and factionalism they believe is displayed when promotions inside the union’s full-time apparatus become available.

This must be investigated.

The NEC left majority has also heard rumours of a massive overspend on staffing in PCS, contrary to PCS Conference instructions that the cost of staffing should be capped at one third of the union’s income. Our intention is to investigate this and to report the truth back to branches and reps across PCS.

LU Backbiting Never Stops

As many reps across the union will know, from the revelations published by Hector Wesley and Tracey Hylton, then both members of PCS Left Unity, and amongst the most senior black union reps in PCS, the bullying culture within Left Unity is rife – and can spill over to equality matters.

LU have published a scurrilous article attempting to take issue with the NEC
appointments to the union’s delegation to TUC Conference, due to meet in Brighton this coming September.

The delegation consists of six members elected by Annual Delegate Conference, six members appointed by the NEC and the President and General Secretary. The six appointed by the NEC included Hector Wesley, Fiona Brittle, Marion Lloyd, Bev Laidlaw, John Moloney and Ellie Clarke.

This appointed group of socialist union reps includes black, LGBT+ and disabled
members of the NEC, it includes a DWP representative, and it is a majority-women delegation.

LU’s scurrilous attack is on the basis that Angela Grant, DWP Group President, was not included, nor was Jackie Green, a national Vice President and LGBT+ member. Angela Grant was the person at the centre of complaints made by black reps, and by her own admission made the infamous “we don’t do black for black’s sake” comment to Hector Wesley and Tracey Hylton, both black reps.

Angela Grant and Jackie Green have both repeatedly been on the wrong side of
Conference policy when debating LGBT+ issues. Both have been censured as part of the NEC majority of past years, for what Conference has obviously considered their poor approach to LGBT+ rights. Why would they be given the opportunity to take these views, manifestly opposed by PCS Conference, to the TUC?

The leadership of LU does not respect the union’s Annual Delegate Conference – as evidenced by Fran Heathcote’s performance in the chair of Conference in 2023, when she deliberately conspired to invite unnecessary speakers into a debate, in order to filibuster (i.e. talk so long that the next debate falls due to time) a motion on LGBT+ TUC matters.

The new majority left leadership is different.

Broad Left Network will continue to fight for the voice of reps, branches, groups and Conference itself to be at the heart of PCS. We will continue to push against the bureaucratic barriers being erected against the democratically elected leadership of the union – and we urge all reps across PCS to join us, to build this fight into a tidal wave that neither the right-wing rump nor the next government can withstand.

On 4 June, the union’s newly elected National Executive Committee (NEC) met for the first time. Following the May 2024 elections, the union has a changed political composition; a new left majority has been established, with 19 out of 35 seats won by PCS Broad Left Network (BLN). PCS Independent Left (IL) and left independents.

At Tuesday’s NEC meeting, the defeated group that has been leading the union, and which still retains the post of General Secretary and President, showed exactly what it intends to do to undemocratically keep hold of power in the union.

Even before the meeting, the Left Unity minority was hard at work to block any kind of change. They refused to put the union’s national campaign, or the battle to defend recently sacked union reps, on to the agenda in the first place, and refused to produce a written paper on either one. This would have immediately given effect to motions A315 and A323, passed by the union’s Annual Delegate Conference, which met in Brighton from 21 to 23 May and arguably the issues that concern members the most.

Once the meeting convened, the General Secretary bent to pressure and pledged to give a verbal report on the rep sackings – although thanks to manoeuvres by the President and a refusal to reorder a heavy agenda, this was never delivered. At the time of writing, the NEC still has not received a report on the sacked reps from the General Secretary.

President attempts to keep power through bureaucracy

The first item of business addressed by the union’s new President, Martin Cavanagh, was the proposal by him to continue with a set of “Standing Orders” (the rules governing how the NEC functions) which were put in place by the outgoing Left Unity leadership. These proposals were intended to protect the already substantial power of the National President and designed to make it as hard as possible for the new left majority to progress the issues that most concerned reps and members.

The newly elected left majority had submitted substantial amendments to these proposals to ensure the new NEC could govern effectively and take forward the programme it was elected to progress.

Cavanagh’s proposals were voted down and the amended proposals were agreed. However, the new President ruled that these were not passed because they required a two-thirds majority. The President immediately suspended the meeting and attempted to dismiss the NEC on the grounds that it did not have any standing orders.

This kind of Presidential obstruction of the work of the majority has not been seen since the right-wing led our predecessor union in CPSA and so many of us worked so hard to defeat – culminating with the election of Mark Serwotka in the Year 2000.

Broad Left Network supporters proposed that, instead of suspending the meeting, the meeting be adjourned for one hour. When the meeting re-convened just after midday, the left majority deliberately but unwillingly voted for Cavanagh’s undemocratic standing orders in order to prevent the indefinite suspension of the NEC that the President had threatened and in order to progress the key issues for members.

Important business was on the agenda, including the union’s political strategy and the belatedly-promised verbal report on the sacked PCS reps, and while Cavanagh and Left Unity are willing to play games with the business and needs of our members, BLN and our allies are not.

Left counterproposals defeated attempts by the President to assign a majority in all important sub-committees to Left Unity members, who no longer form part of the elected working majority. This included the Policy and Resources Committee, Organising and Education Committee, the Finance Committee, the Campaign Committee and the UK Civil Service Bargaining Committee, despite his slate of candidates having suffered defeat in the national elections. This was one high point of a difficult meeting that, thanks to Left Unity obstructionist tactics, yielded little that will benefit union members. The subcommittees now reflect the democratic mandate given by the membership. We must now make sure they meet quickly.

Some steps forward on political strategy

The PCS intervention in the General Election is vital and as such the political strategy was dealt with at the tail end of the meeting. The President immediately decided to use a President’s ruling to throw the two most substantive motions on political strategy off the agenda without debate or vote.

One of these motions was proposed by Broad Left Network supporters and is reproduced below. It sought to use the General Election as a springboard to re-launch the union’s national campaign on pay, pensions, jobs and rights at work.

High-profile demands on Labour, as part of a conscious strategy of mobilising members would be coupled with consultation with senior lay reps in PCS and with the 64 areas which won a strike mandate in May about taking industrial action during the general election to make our members’ needs into an issue in the campaign.

As part of wide-scale mobilisation, branches would be permitted to hold all-members’ meetings to discuss whether they wished to endorse anti-austerity parliamentary candidates – such as Jeremy Corbyn, long standing ally of our union’s members – in their constituencies.

With the motion thrown off the agenda by the President, this could not even be debated. Once the President as chair of the meeting makes a ruling, it requires a two thirds majority to overturn it – evidently, these should be used sparingly and only in the most serious of situations, not for deciding that motions from NEC members can’t be heard because they disagree with the paper put forward by the General Secretary.

Instead, the General Secretary read out her NEC paper on political strategy, which did not amount to much more than a “Make Your Vote Count” approach, used by the union prior to 2017. The third motion left remaining motion on the agenda was passed, and this succeeded in demanding that the General Secretary must write to the Labour leadership to firmly place on record the demands recorded in Motion A12, passed by Conference 2024, which mostly relate to the union’s national campaign in the civil service.

It is clear that Left Unity, despite losing the national elections, feels comfortable attempting to block the majority from accomplishing the programme that they published to members, even if in the process they flagrantly disregard PCS Conference policy.

Our answer must be the building of a massive united left across PCS, to build a fighting, democratic union, with a genuinely socialist leadership that abandons the defensiveness and obfuscation of PCS Left Unity and gets out among members and reps to mobilise for a serious national campaign. If you agree with this, we urge you to join PCS Broad Left Network, and to write to us at pcsblnetwork@gmail.com to invite BLN supporters from the union’s National Executive Committee to speak at your branch.

Below was the motion BLN attempted to propose to and discuss with the union’s NEC and which the President unilaterally threw off the agenda.

Motion on General Election Strategy for NEC 6 June 2024

The NEC recalls the motions passed by Annual Delegate Conference in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022, as well as the motion proposed by the previous NEC, 2023-2024, to ADC 2024, which was not debated. Under the authority granted by motions A304 and A305 in 2017, the NEC agreed to proposals from branches to back 91 Labour candidates in the June 2017 General Election.

Conference 2019 authorised the NEC to “prepare guidance for branches and members in line with existing policy should a general election be called before May 2020”. Under this instruction, the NEC took a decision in September 2019 that they supported the Labour Party in England and Wales, would urge a vote to “Get the Tories out” in Scotland and would adopt a “Make Your Vote Count” approach in Northern Ireland. In both the 2017 and the 2019 elections, Jeremy Corbyn led Labour on a transformative manifesto.

Since 2019, Conference has not repudiated either the ability of branches to apply to the NEC in order to support candidates for election in particular constituencies, or the ability of the National Executive Committee to take a decision on political strategy affecting the whole of the UK. A motion was proposed by the 2023/24 NEC to Conference 2024 to do just this, to eliminate the ability of branches to seek support for individual candidates, but it was not debated.

The NEC asserts that the calling of a UK General Election, to take place on 4 July, raises fundamental questions about our industrial and political strategy in the next few months.

A Labour government is the most likely outcome of the pending General Election – but this is not an excuse to demobilise the union’s campaign. It is grounds to step up these campaigns. We must put emphatic support behind those Parliamentary candidates who support our members and their legitimate demands and needs. The NEC must take steps to mobilise members, to demonstrate clearly our intention to fight, and must place clear demands on the likely incoming Starmer-led Labour government, as per motion A12, passed by ADC 2024.

This NEC decides as follows:

• Noting his decades of support for workers’ rights, for pay justice and national bargaining in the civil service, for the full funding of public services, for an end to the scourge of privatisation, for the nationalisation of energy, railways and the post office and for his opposition to racism and oppression domestically and internationally, from South Africa to Palestine, the Public and Commercial Services union endorses Jeremy Corbyn as the candidate for parliament in Islington North. The General Secretary will notify Mr Corbyn’s campaign and will work to identify ways in which the campaign can by supported by PCS nationally as well as by any groups, branches, reps and members who wish to participate, within the bounds of any constraints imposed by law. These will be subject to approval by the Senior Officers Committee.

• Instructs the General Secretary to write to the Rt Hon. Sir Keir Starmer, Leader of the Labour Party to seek urgent discussion and public commitments around the clear political demands raised in motion A12 of ADC 2024 and on the following points additionally, which are all consistent with the policies passed by PCS Conference since austerity began:
  • The need for an urgent pay rise of 10% in the civil service, and for a minimum wage in the public sector and amongst privatised staff on government contracts of £15 per hour, with appropriate additions for London, to address the pay crisis facing civil servants, workers in associated bodies and privatised workers on national government contracts across the UK, and to finally end once and for all the ridiculous situation where our skilled AA and AO grade staff are reduced to earning the National Minimum Wage each year.
  • Pay and pensions justice and reversal of the massive attack on our rights – including through the 2016 and 2023 anti-trade union laws – implemented by Con-Dem and Tory governments over more than a decade that has seen pay fall in real terms, has seen cuts to sick leave, to annual leave, to union rights, to job protections and attempted cuts to redundancy terms. As part of a fair settlement, we reiterate our campaign demand for a reduction in the working week without loss of pay, already being achieved in Scotland, to be extended to UK and other devolved civil servants, to government workers in associated bodies and to commercial sector workers on government contracts.
  • Repudiation of the Tory plan to cut 72,000 civil service jobs, and for politicians to make a public commitment to 100,000 new civil service jobs, including as part of the creation of a National Climate Service, in line with longstanding PCS policy, entailing genuine negotiation with the civil service trade unions covering workload protections, uses of AI, maximising flexibility for civil servants in respect of hybrid working and defence of and investment in our office estate.
     

• That the NEC appoints a team to meet with the Labour leadership, should the Labour leadership seek a face-to-face meeting, with appropriate non-voting support from amongst the FTO cadre as identified by the General Secretary.

• Instructs the General Secretary to communicate the above demands to the Labour leadership by the end of the day on 7 June 2024. The deadline for a response from the Labour leadership is set as 20 June 2024. The response – or lack of response – will be published to members. The message to members must be agreed by the delegation appointed to meet the Labour leadership.

• Reaffirms the right of branches to propose support for candidates in any parliamentary constituency in their geographical footprint to a branch EGM, where those candidates are positively identified as publicly supporting the minimum demands outlined above, where they are not in breach of PCS policy on equality including support for Trans rights, and where they have an established record of campaigning on these issues. Such proposals should be forwarded to the NEC via the General Secretary for final approval.

• The General Secretary will prepare and publish guidance by 10 June to explain how branches can apply to the NEC for permission to support candidates, to ensure civil servants do not fall foul of the pre-election period impartiality rules, to ensure civil servants do not use any facilities granted by the various employers to convene these meetings and to make all reps and members aware of what activities they can legitimately undertake in order to support union-backed candidates in the General Election. The NEC delegates the Senior Officers Committee to agree the final list of candidates endorsed by PCS.

• Asserts that industrial strategy and political strategy must go hand in hand in this period. Even whilst we take steps on our political strategy, we must also ready ourselves to renew our industrial campaign should a pro-austerity government, committed to following through planned Tory cuts in the civil service and related areas be elected. A Senior Lay Reps Forum is summoned for w/c 10 June to lay out the NEC’s political strategy, the major pressure being placed on Labour, the likely approach should Labour attempt to implement Tory cuts, and to take views from each area on the mood, organisational readiness and likely needs of each area regarding a potential pivot to action and/or a re-ballot, as appropriate.

• Instructs the UK Civil Service Bargaining Committee to oversee meetings with those areas that won a mandate in May 2024, to discuss their views and members’ views on the potential for invoking that mandate, especially on days where other unions are likely to be taking strike action, such as the BMA Junior Doctors.

Annual Delegate Conference (ADC) met in Brighton from the afternoon of Tuesday 21 May until 1pm on Thursday 23 May.

Conference met a mere six days after the union’s national strike ballot results were declared and eleven days after results were declared in one of the most important National Executive Committee (NEC) elections in the union’s history. In the 2024 elections, the 20+ year tenure of PCS Left Unity as the majority on the NEC was ended by a coalition of left forces including the Broad Left Network, the Independent Left and independents in Revenue and Customs Group.

One hand tied behind our back: the PCS national campaign under Left Unity

Controversy has raged within PCS since November 2022, when the union won a strike mandate covering 100,000 civil servants on questions of pay, pensions, a jobs guarantee, and the terms of the civil service compensation scheme. This ballot success came after years of ballots falling short of the 50% participation threshold since 2018.

Given the unprecedented circumstances, including a cost-of-living crisis in which inflation had exceeded 10% and a major upsurge in strike action, decisive action was called to unite all PCS members with a mandate, and to plant firmly in members’ minds that their union had a serious strategy to fight a decade of pay cuts.

The leadership of the union, particularly then-President Fran Heathcote and then-Deputy President Martin Cavanagh, failed to do this. They dithered for six weeks before calling any kind of strike action, and for three months before calling national strike action, wasting more than half of the six month mandate won in the ballot.

This dithering led directly to narrow misses in the May 2023 re-ballot; Tory anti-union laws require 50% participation to make any ballot valid, and under the anti-union laws, each mandate expires after six months. A layer of members was not convinced by the lacklustre approach of the PCS leadership under Heathcote and Cavanagh.

A full report on ADC 2023 can be read on the BLN website; the assembled delegates representing the heart of PCS democracy ordered that the campaign continue and proceed to a re-ballot in those areas that missed in Spring 2023. These instructions could not have been clearer – yet the NEC blatantly disregarded them, reflecting the degeneration of Left Unity, once a broad organisation that brought together the vast majority of the left across the union, now sadly declined.

When the government wrote to PCS on 2June 2023 to offer a one-off, non-consolidated, pro-rata payment of £1,500, with no requirement that the union halt the campaign, the union’s leadership under Heathcote, Cavanagh and the Left Unity majority on the National Executive Committee decided to terminate the campaign.

They cancelled the outstanding strike action in those areas which still had a mandate, they cancelled the re-ballots ordered by Conference 2023 and they cancelled the strike levy – after all the effort reps had spent ahead of its implementation in February 2023 trying to reassure members that an extra £3/£5 monthly charge was needed.

Instead of escalating and re-doubling our efforts when the government blinked, the leadership of the union surrendered – and then compounding the error by doing absolutely nothing for ten months under the delusion that a handful of meetings with the Cabinet Office once our mandate had safely lapsed would lead to any meaningful progress on absolutely anything union members care about.

Spring 2024: the re-ballot

From June 2023 until March 2024, the national leadership did very little except campaign for Fran Heathcote to be elected as General Secretary, which she duly was – with overwhelming support from the union’s institutional machinery – by a narrow 800-vote majority over united left candidate Marion Lloyd.

As April 2024 and the union’s NEC elections drew closer, the Left Unity leadership opted for a strategy they have used before, of launching a strike ballot to coincide with national elections, again hoping to use the machine of the union to name check Martin Cavanagh, who stood to take Heathcote’s now-vacated post as National President.

So poorly prepared for this pivot back to a ballot, after ten months of doing nothing, that in the first week of the ballot in March 2024, reps didn’t even have leaflets to give to members. No serious strategy was put forward except to argue for more targeted action without being able to show how this had had an impact in 2023.

National strike action was expressly ruled out for anything except propaganda purposes. NEC members from the Left Unity cabal have openly argued that members cannot afford national action and wouldn’t support it. This contradicts the views on which Left Unity was founded that for a national campaign united national action was and is essential to victory.

Reps mobilised the union. Days on days were spent out leafleting workplaces, holding meetings, drafting member-facing emails, doing everything possible to get out the vote. Every BLN and IL leaflet handed out said “Vote for Marion Lloyd” and right beside it, “Vote YES” for strike action. No such approach was adopted by Cavanagh et al.

Around 20,000 members secured mandates for action – including in Culture Sector areas, which did very well. More than 120,000 members did not secure a mandate because they fell below the 50% participation threshold. Conference met at the right moment to decide what to do next.

A314 v A315: Left Unity dishonesty defeated by a fighting strategy

Further miscalculations followed, on the part of the Heathcote/Cavanagh-led Left Unity leadership. The ballot closed at noon on Monday 13 May, yet the General Secretary, the President, and the Vice Presidents – all LU supporters – chose to delay the publication of the results until Wednesday afternoon.

This cynical and undemocratic move restricted the ability of branches to move emergency motions. However, once the ballot result was published, we were able to get some emergency motions through in supportive branches calling for a massive campaign and laying out key next steps.

Fundamental to the new approach is the widening of the campaign. All of the issues previously included should remain included – something a Civil Service World article on the conference did not quite grasp, in its fawning coverage of Heathcote’s contributions in the rancorous debate – including pay, pensions, jobs, the civil service compensation scheme and terms and conditions.

To these the NEC can now add additional demands: implement genuine hybrid working, a halt to office closures unless agreed with the unions, recruit 100,000 new civil servants including for a new National Climate Service, and “reversal of the anti-union attacks since 2010”, including attacks on facility time, on the Civil Service Jobs Protocols and the implementation of Civil Service Reform terms which cut sick leave.

Now that an election has been announced for 4th July we need to determine how our political and industrial strategies should be linked . We need to discuss how to use the existing strike mandates won for 20,000 members. We need to agree when and on what basis we re-ballot the 100,000 members who we don’t at present have a strike mandate for. We must employ political pressure, especially in this election period – including putting  our campaign demands to the Labour leadership, All are now on the table. We also have the option of a dispute over the attack on civil service equality networks.

We will work with our left allies on the NEC to identify a serious and practicable way to develop the national campaign that LU have so mismanaged in their time in charge.

Equality – major defeat for LU

One of the centrepieces of PCS conference every year is the moving of the Organising Strategy. This document symbolised the defeat of the old Reamsbottom-era right wing leadership of PCS, as it moved the union away from a “servicing” model of offering cheaper car and holiday insurance to members and towards an “organising” model based on giving power to the reps and members in every workplace.

Reps and members do not feel powerful. They have been subjected to dismal and dispiriting pom-pom waving by the leadership of the union instead of reasoned, serious debate. When ballots have not achieved the 50% threshold, they have been roundly blamed by that same condescending LU leadership. They are routinely misled about the state of the union by a leadership that bleats about overall “activist numbers” rising when the number that matters is rep numbers, and this has been falling.

Reps know very well that the civil service has rapidly increased in size since 2016, while the union has not, meaning overall density has fallen, and they have been waiting since 2018 for a slightly less triumphalist, slightly more serious approach from what has until now been the dominant faction within PCS, Left Unity.

The card vote that defeated – for the first time ever – the Left Unity NEC’s Organising Strategy at Conference this year proves that a significant number have absolutely had enough and want the union to abandon gimmicky approaches and do the basics: back reps – within training, with legal advice, with bargaining support and with the confidence of the leadership of the union – to win things that make the union worth joining, and ask people to join it. We agree.

Leadership Defeated on Equality Rights

The Left Unity leadership could only muster one speaker on the conference floor to promote their divisive gender critical views – a speaker who had been given full remit to promote her views in an official PCS blog reducing female identity solely related to our reproductive organs and totally undermining and attacking trans and non-binary rights. This view jars with women who have been fighting for decades against being reduced solely to our bodily parts rather than being treated as individuals.  Conference allowed these divisive views to be put in democratic debate and dealt with them by overwhelmingly voting for motions A317 and A52

After a raft of conference defeats Left Unity hastily changed the NEC attitude on A317 from remit/oppose to support with statement -although the NEC speaker continued to deliver the same old gender critical opposition and presenting equality as competing rights. ADC delegates rightly recognised that we need to fight to defend equality rights of all our members however many or few they are. An injury to one is an injury to all and BLN will continue to stand up to defend all members facing oppression, discrimination, or attack.

Left Unity NEC censured again.

The nadir of the once-dominant Left Unity leadership, now deprived of their majority on the National Executive Committee by the 2024 elections, was reduced to supporting a censure motion against itself, moved by Scottish Government branches.

The NEC, ignoring Fiona Brittle, a Broad Left Network supporter and the only member of Scottish Government PCS on the union’s 2023-24 National Executive Committee, agreed to a Heathcote proposal to dissolve PCS Scottish Government’s elected Group Executive Committee without any kind of consultation with reps or members. When challenged, the NEC leadership claimed that emails had gone out asking for views…although during Scottish school holidays of course! 

The anti-democratic side of Left Unity was further on display during the conference however, particularly over the question of political strategy. An NEC motion, that essentially abolished the union’s political strategy in the middle of a General Election, was to be moved on Tuesday afternoon. This was overtaken by the massive debate on pay and the national campaign.

The Standing Orders Committee (LU-led but usually with a certain grumpy kind of common sense), no doubt after consultation with the President, as required under rule, decided to propose moving the political strategy motion to the guillotine section and abandoning a guillotine section entirely.

It will not have escaped notice of Conference veterans that the guillotine section in 2023 was where Heathcote’s dishonest attempt to filibuster a pro-trans rights conference motion was exposed and where the Conference delivered a stinging rebuke to the 2022-23 NEC by overturning their attack on a lone trans rep who had voted her conscience at TUC Conference and against Heathcote et al.

Some delegates were a tad wary about that decision – but political strategy was considered sufficiently important. In the end even this delayed debate on political strategy was dodged by Martin Cavanagh in his role as chair of Conference on the final Thursday.

The General Election had been called on the Wednesday, Chris Stephens MP, chair of the PCS Parliamentary Group had just that Thursday morning given his report to the conference on the work he has done for members over the last year…and the NEC reply was going to an NEC motion abolishing  the unions political strategy and barred PCS from supporting any political candidate regardless of how supportive they had been of our pay claim, our members’ jobs and so on?

Cavanagh’s relaxed chairing saw the entire section talked out, avoiding the absolute pasting the Left Unity majority on the outgoing 2023-24 NEC had set itself up for.

Support for Sacked HMRC Reps

Unanimous support and a standing ovation from conference was given to our victimised HMRC Benton Park View union reps, sacked for union activities. By carrying motion A355 conference supported the call for “a union-wide campaign to secure the reinstatement of the victimised reps.” This will be a priority for the incoming Executive.

Lay democracy 1, Left Unity 0.

Conference 2024 was a resounding victory for lay democracy in PCS. The patience of reps, which had stretched at Conference 2023 to endorsing an attempt by the Heathcote/Cavanagh-led NEC to water down the principle of all-member annual elections, finally snapped – and not before time.

The pledge of the Broad Left Network supporters elected to the National Executive Committee for 2024-25 is that we will work hard to build a serious campaign, we will work hard to re-open the union to lay control, we will work hard to ensure the full weight of the union is put behind members and reps.

We want you to be part of that fight. If you stand for a socialist-led, fighting, democratic PCS, then we want you to join the PCS Broad Left Network.