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.
PCS Broad Left Network 