Our union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) met on 2-3 September, to discuss key matters of importance to members across PCS, including the outstanding national campaign on pay, pensions, jobs, office closures, hybrid working and more besides.
General Secretary Fran Heathcote’s National Campaign paper on the national campaign, carried a total of zero recommendations on how to achieve the aims set by PCS Conference. This was approved by the NEC majority.
Heathcote proposes no strategy, does nothing to build the mood for action amongst members, and does not project the confidence that members need to be given to decisively fight and win on the key issues.
For the avoidance of doubt this means that there was no decision to call a ballot in September, thereby abandoning the instructions of A383, without deciding any plan for what to replace it with or even to notify members. In an even more cowardly move, the NEC majority has simply and quietly refused to do what members told it to.
The paper notes a low turnout to a hastily called activist meeting, after three months of silence following the Annual Delegate Conference in May. The paper offers no solution to improve engagement or build towards the fight we know is necessary if we are to increase the pitiful pay remit figures and win proper raises for members.
Neither does it consider whether few people turn up because there’s nothing new on offer at these meetings to build a winning campaign beyond the same old obscure instruction to “get ballot ready and data cleanse”. Perhaps it is because when activists do express a view (on a special delegate conference, for example) they get ignored and accused of disunity.
This low turnout is in fact repeatedly used by the General Secretary in subsequent reports to the NEC, where the lack of activist engagement in Left Unity’s limp version of a pay strategy is used to prove the alleged lack of a mood or will to fight overall.
Further comments from the General Secretary amounted to little more than premature defeatedness and hoping to be rescued by talks with the Cabinet Office.
In the meeting, the President and NEC majority lamented that they’d all love to be on strike, if only the mood would allow. This sums up the attitude of the arch-bureaucrats at the top of PCS, both elected and un-elected. So they blame the members and the reps whilst sitting idly by doing nothing. An emergency NEC has now been called for the 21st October so we’ll see….
For socialists, this is a question of leadership.
Socialist leadership: actively build a campaign
It is almost never the case, no matter the issue, that hundreds of thousands of civil servants are ready to strike at the drop of a hat. Striking – and potentially losing money – is the last thing any worker, hard pressed by inflation, wants to do.
Socialists understand that, despite this, strike action may be the only way to achieve the necessary objectives. For the UK civil service in 2025, it’s better pay, a defence against job cuts, the halt to office closures and better flexible working to name a few.
Leadership is the ability to know which weapon is required, in the struggle with the employers. When strike action is needed, leadership is the ability to mobilise the union to accomplish this end. Heathcote and Cavanagh have neither ability.
The pressure on civil servants by Starmer’s Labour is mounting.
Job cuts are gradually finding their way to every government department, and a programme of office closures, begun in the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, is likely to expand to other government departments.
There could not be a more important time for genuine leadership at the top of PCS, but the recent NEC – following a by-now standard pattern – is, with honourable exceptions, incapable of providing it. As always, BLN supporters – Marion Lloyd, Fiona Brittle, Bobby Young and Rob Ritchie, between them representing UK civil servants, devolved civil servants and private sector members – proposed a much-needed alternative by way of a motion with actual instructions, committing to building a mood, of linking up the disputes across government departments.
In a return to form from last year, it was vetoed by the PCS President, Martin Cavanagh, so wasn’t allowed to be debated.
If the NEC won’t act, reps must
We have already signalled our unwillingness to simply wait. Across several areas where BLN sympathisers and allies hold senior union posts, disputes have begun or are about to begin. Faced with the abdication of the NEC, we must coordinate these struggles.
If you are in dispute at the moment – from MyCSP to Ofgem, from MHCLG to Houses of Parliament (all disputes actively supported by Broad Left Network supporters) – we need to work together to unite these struggles, and to coordinate with struggles that are emerging – in DfE, in Scottish Government and beyond.
An emergency NEC has now been called for the 21st October so we’ll see….
Contact the Broad Left Network (pcsblnetwork@gmail.com) to discuss how we can work together to build the broadest possible dispute, and just perhaps force the NEC to live up to its responsibility to accomplish the policies set by PCS Conference.
Trans+ Liberation motion to NEC finally heard
At Conference in May this year, President Cavanagh blocked the attempt by a clear majority of delegates to reverse the deletion of motion A57 from the agenda.
Motion A57 expressed strong support for trans members in the face of the ridiculous judgment of the Supreme Court in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, and the way it has been misused by the Equality and Human Rights Commission since, to start a row about who uses what toilets.
BLN supporters, working with members of PCS Proud (the union’s LGBT+ network, which has an independent existence in PCS for exactly this reason), submitted a motion to the NEC back in May, just after the events at conference. It denounced the censoring and silencing of trans, non-binary and intersex members by Cavanagh. The motion to the May NEC also sought to overturn and force the withdrawal of a statement made by Heathcote and published on the union’s website on 17 May that required trans women to use male toilets and trans men to use female toilets while at Conference. Non-binary and intersex people weren’t even mentioned.
BLN supporters criticised the way legal “advice” had been mis-used to shut down debate.
Concern was also voiced about the decision by Heathcote to unilaterally review all previous PCS policy to make sure it is compliant with a particularly narrow reading of the Supreme Court judgment, without seeking a mandate from Conference to change policies previously set by Conference, as the democratic heart of the union.
There are so many problems with how the union’s leadership has dealt with this issue – not least in responding “no comment” to national press enquiries about the attempt by the Christian Institute to have rainbow lanyards banned in the civil service.
In short, the motion demanded closer working with PCS Proud and with the union branch at EHRC (where members have been deeply unhappy about the EHRC interim guidance following the Supreme Court ruling), to repair the damage done by Heathcote, Cavanagh and their coterie who just nod through anything they do.
All four BLN supporters currently on the NEC voted for, as did the two Independent Left supporters, and the one independent socialist – but the motion was defeated by the NEC’s Left Unity/Democrat majority.
One positive – PCS condemns the decision to proscribe Palestine Action
The union’s NEC unanimously agreed to sign an open letter condemning the decision by the government to proscribe Palestine Action.
Hundreds of people are being arrested in Parliament Square each weekend because they refuse to acquiesce in this proscription by the Home Secretary, which makes any statement of support for Palestine Action a criminal offence.
Sat beneath the statues of Millicent Fawcett and Mahatma Gandhi, these demonstrators carry signs expressing their support for the proscribed group, who damaged military property in order to stop its use in sustaining the genocide in Gaza.
Hundreds have been ungently arrested by the Metropolitan and City of London police, whose press departments lean towards suggesting the arrests are nothing short of heroic work by the police in the face of an angry, violent mob – which is just untrue.
BLN’s steering committee firmly puts on record its opposition to the proscription of Palestine Action, and will continue to support and participate in mobilisations to oppose the genocide in Gaza. In conclusion there is still business not reached or running over time including the crucial question of political representation. Importantly our motion setting out an approach in the context of political developments around Jeremy Corbyn, yet again was not reached.
PCS Broad Left Network 