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The PCS Broad Left Network stands in solidarity with all those marching and protesting both in the UK and globally, against the barbaric military assault by the Israeli Government against the Palestinians in Gaza and the increasing threat of a land invasion. 

The Israeli state has been carrying out unprecedented levels of airstrikes on the densely populated Gaza Strip ever since the appalling Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians. Nearly 7,000 are reported to have been killed so far, a third of whom are children. Over half the 2½ million population has been displaced. 

We condemn the Tory government for their support for the Israeli state’s war on Gaza, which is a murderous collective punishment of poor Palestinians for the attack by Hamas on October 7th, including the horrific killing of Israeli civilians. The likes of Sunak, Biden and the rest of Western capitalist imperialism would have us believe that this crisis started that day with these terrible events, ignoring decades of brutal Israeli state repression and occupation. 

Disgracefully, this vicious bombardment on Gaza has been backed by Starmer’s New Labour. Outrageously, its representatives who join demonstrations against the attack on Gaza have been threatened with disciplinary action. This is a far cry from when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. Under his leadership, the Labour Manifesto for the last general election in 2019 committed an incoming government to “immediately suspend the sale of arms to Israel for arms used in violation of the human rights of Palestinian civilians”. It would also strive to “secure justice and accountability for breaches of human rights”, listing, as an example, “the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip”. And it also promised that “a Labour government will immediately recognise the state of Palestine”. 

The many PCS members who have been marching against the slaughter in Gaza, particularly those with friends and relatives living in Gaza, would expect PCS to take the lead in the mobilisation of the trade union movement against this war. 

The unions should seek to build massive union blocs on the anti-war demonstrations. Our members increasingly understand that a Tory government of the rich, that has inflicted the cost of living squeeze on our incomes and is bringing yet more anti-union legislation to restrict our right to strike, is on the opposite class divide to us, both at home and abroad. 

PCS members will also be disgusted at Starmer’s slavish support for the international interests of imperialism and big business and will want the union to base its political strategy on backing only those politicians who support our policies and members, including on the picket lines. 

BLN believes that the whole union movement should act collectively to ensure that any workers who refuse to manufacture, transport armaments, or supply related services to Israel for the purpose of attacking the Palestinian people are defended from victimisation by their employer. This includes any PCS members. 

Marion Lloyd said: “This is a brutal attack on Gaza, one of the poorest areas of the world by a military power supported by the Western capitalist governments. But the Palestinians have a friend in the millions of ordinary people all over the world, many of whom are on the streets demonstrating. We in the BLN stand in solidarity against this brutal assault and for the national, political and economic liberation of the Palestinian people. As a socialist and internationalist, I support the common struggle of working people, both here, in the Middle East and globally, for a present and future free from war, oppression, want and exploitation.”

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.

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!

The announcement of HMRC’s pay award has hammered the final nail into the coffin of the PCS NEC’s so-called pay “strategy”, rendering the outcome of the NEC’s face-saving ballot irrelevant in the process.

It has been clear since June that that the out-going General Secretary, Mark Serwotka, alongside his Left Unity NEC lackeys, believed that the Cabinet Office decision to increase the pay remit to 4.5% (in addition to awarding the controversial and non-consolidated Cost of Living Payment of £1500 for full-time staff) was sufficient to settle the pay dispute. PCS members from all factions and none overwhelmingly disagreed with this, such was the anger expressed in branch meetings, on social media and in the stage-managed PCS livestreams.

At this stage, if Left Unity truly believed that PCS is member-led, its NEC caucus would have accepted that it made a bad call and listened to PCS members, not only continuing the industrial action campaign, but also escalating it. However, despite what it says Left Unity does not believe in a member-led union – particularly so when members’ views chime with BLN demands. Instead, its response to members’ anger was to prevaricate for a number of weeks before launching a nebulous consultative ballot which has very little to do with the PCS pay campaign, but has a hell of a lot to do with Left Unity desperately scrambling for political cover ahead of the General Secretary election.

The BLN has argued throughout this pointless ballot that members should vote no, with one of the main reasons being that GECs have no capacity to push departments into meeting PCS’ 10% pay claim when departments are working within the Cabinet Office pay remit of 4.5%. PCS’ pay claim can only be met through sustained industrial action being taken throughout the Civil Service.

The DWP GEC has already rejected the DWP pay offer, meaning that a number of those same Left Unity members who voted for delegated pay bargaining at the NEC have now been forced to vote against its inevitable outcome at the DWP GEC. And now, their HMRC-based NEC comrades have been forced to do the same.

HMRC has announced the following pay award…

• 5.07% for AAs
• 6.27% for AOs
• 5.05% for Band Os
• 4.26% for HO to G6
• Non-consolidated pay for anything above the max for your grade
• Increased budget for one-off payments
• Introduction of increased pay for “critical roles”

Whilst the percentage value for each grade is about what we’d expect when working within the narrow-confines of the pay remit, the final pay award – which HMRC will impose without further discussion – is still a kick in the teeth for HMRC staff. HMRC has recognised that due to chronic low-pay, it cannot recruit into certain roles and in order to address this it will deem these roles to be “critical”, increasing the pay award for these roles in order to help recruit and retain staff.

Whilst this move is an admission by the department that pay is so poor that people simply do not want to work for HMRC, it has simultaneously diverted well-over £1m of our pay pot into its “Simply Thanks” scheme – effectively one-off non-consolidated awards, in the form of £20 shopping vouchers, that are occasionally given to PCS members who a panel has decided have went “above-and-beyond” their normal duties. This is horribly cynical – hard-pressed members should receive every penny available from the pay pot instead of being forced to do even more work for less pay, just to get a £20 voucher for Iceland.

Additionally, around 45% of HMRC staff are HO or above. This means that 45% of HMRC staff aren’t even getting the 4.5% set out in the pay remit – they’re getting 4.26%. That’s before even factoring in the non-consolidated aspect.

PCS members should direct a healthy dose of anger towards HMRC and the Cabinet Office, with a pay award which given the Cost of Living crisis can only be described as cynical and nasty. However, we should also remember that this award is a direct consequence of Left Unity NEC members’ decision to collapse PCS’ pay campaign. Indeed, in his last significant act as PCS General Secretary, Serwotka has obliterated PCS’ pay campaign in favour of a pay award which is less than half of PCS’ democratically agreed pay claim – and a pay award which in reality will see every single PCS member in HMRC receive a real-terms pay cut. This will be Serwotka’s legacy.

Whilst the BLN still urges PCS members to vote no in the NEC ballot, given the fact that PCS members in the largest two Civil Service departments have now received unacceptable pay awards, the NEC has no choice but to recommence PCS’ industrial action campaign – Left Unity cannot spin continued inaction at this stage as anything other than capitulation.

The BLN is absolutely convinced that, even after weeks of Left Unity dithering, a fresh industrial action campaign will deliver the pay rise that PCS members deserve – however based on their track record it is clear that PCS members cannot trust Left Unity to deliver. With pending elections, it now more obvious than ever that changes need to be made at the top of PCS which is why the BLN is urging all members, through their branches, to nominate Marion Lloyd for General Secretary and John Maloney for Assistant General Secretary.

Throughout this whole debacle, Marion and John have consistently argued for a continuation of PCS’ industrial action campaign in order to win the pay rise that we deserve and to avoid the consequences of Left Unity’s abject failure. If we have learned anything from this pay campaign, it is that Marion & John are the only candidates we can trust to deliver what PCS members want most – a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

On Monday 31 st July, a 7-page speakers brief enclosed in National Branch Bulletin BB-69-23 was emailed to all branch secretaries and all union reps across PCS. Officially from Mark Serwotka, the brief summarises the view of the majority of the union’s National Executive Committee’s (NEC) as to why people should vote yes in the ballot.

It is a staggering piece of sophistry and dishonesty. It misrepresents what the NEC have done. It misrepresents what those of us who oppose the NEC have said. It misrepresents how delegated pay bargaining works. It misrepresents what happens next in the campaign. In consequence, Broad Left Network are arguing that we must vote NO in the ballot.

So, what has the NEC done?

While the NEC seek to emphasise that “we have won significant concessions but the campaign must continue”.

First, we disagree that the concessions are as significant as the current NEC majority (a group called Democracy Alliance, made up of two factions, PCS Left Unity and PCS Democrats) are making out.

A £1,500 one-time, non-consolidated payment gets thinned down substantially by tax, national insurance contributions and for those in receipt of Universal Credit – estimated at tens of thousands across the UK civil service – will reduce any benefit entitlement.

Then we have the question of part-time staff; in the vast majority of civil service areas, the payment is being pro-rated, which means even before tax or anything else, some people are getting less, even though they’re unlikely to have a smaller mortgage or fewer bills.

Moreover, it is simply not enough when compared to inflation. Inflated prices are cumulative, adding up further and further year on year, whereas the £1,500 is one-off, paid and then forgotten, as prices continue to rise.

For most members this remains true even once Departmental pay awards are announced.

We aimed for a fully funded, 10% consolidated pay rise, with a minimum pay rate of £15 per hour, to eliminate the ridiculous situation of civil servants on the minimum wage, and a guaranteed, inflation proof increase for 2023/24. What has been gained falls dramatically short.

Second, and just as importantly, however, the NEC speakers’ brief declaring “the campaign must continue” is the kind of dishonesty we expect from Johnson, Sunak or Starmer – but not from the leadership of the union.

The campaign must continue, but we’re calling off the strikes.

The campaign must continue, but we’re calling off the re-ballots ordered by Conference.

The campaign must continue, but we’re cancelling the levy that feeds our strike fund.

The campaign must continue, but we didn’t bother submitting a revised pay claim for 2023/24 and simply relied on the previous claims, now outdated by cumulative inflation.

The campaign must continue, but they have told groups to enter departmental negotiations for 2023/4 pay within the limit imposed by Treasury but rejected by PCS Conference of 4.5- 5%.

Once all that is done, any rep is forced to ask, what campaign is left?

Reps should be aware that this stance from the NEC is utterly counterposed to the pompous and self-aggrandising manner in which Mark Serwotka moved his paper on 5th June, three days after receipt of the £1,500 offer, a paper which called off all campaigning activities.

At that meeting, Serwotka assumed the mantle of a wannabe hero, delivering from on high all that members could want. He openly spoke about the possibility of a ballot to settle the dispute, i.e., to accept the government’s offer as sufficient to end the national campaign.

Broad Left Network, Independent Left and even a small number of normally quiescent Left Unity supporters on the NEC bridled somewhat at this, and raised concerns that it was not enough and that the campaign should continue.

Nevertheless, all Left Unity supporters on the NEC voted for Serwotka’s paper, with a tiny number voting against a specific recommendation on the re-ballot in DWP, but all voting to suspend strike action. This demobilised the national campaign at a stroke.

The line that “the campaign must continue” is a recognition by the NEC majority that their position is precarious – they are at once trying to demobilise the campaign while posing as the leaders of the campaign. It is a trick stolen entirely from Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Cleverly, if utterly disingenuously, the NEC have recognised that “support the NEC strategy” is a line likely to be mocked in any room where the reps have a handle on what’s actually happening in the union. “Continue the national campaign” is different altogether, so they have married the two up and are utilising the mechanisms of the union to bludgeon their view through in a membership ballot, while blocking the democratic bodies of the union,
including branches and groups, from expressing legitimate dissent from the strategy.

Our hope is that all members will see clearly that you can’t “continue the campaign” by calling it off, which is what the NEC has done. We must vote AGAINST endorsing the NEC strategy. We must vote no.

What about delegated pay bargaining?

Central to the argument in the national bulletin is the view that we must pause our strikes while delegated pay bargaining begin. Essentially the NEC majority view is that it is nonsensical to be carrying out strike action when your negotiators are working out a pay deal with the employers.

Yet this ignores a crucial fact – one that is not mentioned by the national bulletin at all, almost like the NEC want reps to forget about it:

The Treasury Pay Remit cap of 4.5% (or 5% for low-waged) is still in place! Average pay rise across civil service areas must be contained under this figure.

This makes a mockery of some of the bulletin’s claims, such as how there are staff in the Home Office being offered 13%. This is true – but the bulletin doesn’t say how many relative to the entire 43,000 staff in the Home Office. The bulletin doesn’t admit that the overall Home Office pay offer will live under the Treasury cap: pay awards under this cap are robbing Peter to pay Paul, trading off inflation-proof pay rises for some against severe pay cuts for others.

When this Treasury Pay Remit was published in March 2023, the current leadership of the NEC railed against it. Now they are ordering Departmental pay negotiators into talks, and calling off strikes, without it being removed. What has changed?

The £1,500 one-time, non-consolidated, pro-rated payment is all that has changed. With this one change in place, the NEC have thrown out the demands posed by PCS Annual Delegate Conferences in 2022 and 2023.

Since the NEC have decided to use the Home Office pay award as a bit of a poster-child, it bears pointing out that thousands of PCS members’ pay awards in the Home Office will fall below the rate of inflation even when money made available under the 4.5% cap and the £1,500 one-time payment are added together.

Celebrating this as some kind of triumph is bizarre.

Our battle is not just with individual civil service employers. It is with the government, and their imposition of a Treasury Pay Remit that blocks a 10% pay rise for 2022-23 and an inflation proof pay rise for 2023/24.

We require the Treasury to be brought to the bargaining table, to cough up more money for all civil service employers. The consequences if we don’t are that, as announced recently in Ministry of Defence, job cuts will be imposed even to pay for a limited, sub-inflation pay award.

From the moment of the government’s offer, on 2 nd June, we should have called further strike action. We should have escalated by calling further national strike action. We should have re-balloted in DWP. And if the NEC had spent half the effort actually leading a determined campaign that they’ve spent trying to convince people that their naked emperor is lavishly dressed, we’d be in a vastly different position.

A strategy that can win!

The NEC argue in their bulletin that they have “made a careful analysis of the current position and considered in detail the tactical and strategic possibilities”.

Frankly we’re surprised that members of the NEC majority could spell all those big words but if you are attending a meeting, please ask them to produce this “careful analysis”.

It doesn’t exist.

Yet they have to claim this, to lend credence to their further claim that our call for the continuation of strike action “is made without any proposals on the tactics and strategy.”

Even this is dishonesty from the NEC – because we have quite clearly laid out what their strategy should have been, and what it should be now.

We must immediately launch a massive member-facing effort to whip discontent with the obvious problems with all delegated pay awards, many of which have been imposed during the months of NEC inactivity between June 5th and today. For some these awards might be sufficient – but for most they will fall significantly short.

The discontent over the pay awards, the discontent over the £1,500 one-time, non-consolidated, pro-rated payment, the discontent over the job cuts that are coming, the discontent over the continued refusal to move on our pensions and continued threat to our redundancy rights can be united with the battle over office closures into a coherent campaign based on demands already agreed by PCS Annual Delegate Conference.

We must put forward a coherent strategy that reflects genuine analysis about what is required to win our demand for a 10% pay rise for 2022/23, for an inflation proof pay rise for 2023/24 and for a £15 per hour pay floor to seriously tackle low pay in the UK civil service:

• National strike action, across all civil service employers with a mandate, at a faster pace than the three months of delay the NEC showed up until 1 st Feb 2023, and with sufficient determination to prove to members that their union is serious.
• Targeted strike action, across those areas where sustained action will resume
  pressure on the government to come to the table to bargain, not to dismissively
  throw us £1,500 and hope that this is sufficient to divide us.
• Hardship support for all branches – analysis must be undertaken of all hardship expenditures at branch level to calculate the pace at which we are spending money, compared to what action this more targeted approach allows us to deliver.
• Re-ballots in all areas where the mandate has lapsed or is lapsing, including the
  Department for Work and Pensions and Revenue and Customs Groups.
• A serious discussion, primed by an informed bulletin to all branches, on the potential impact of action short of strike action, in magnifying the industrial impact of strikes.

More can be added, and plenty of nuances exist as to how serious, socialist, campaigning reps would continue our campaign – but the reality is, had we been put in charge of PCS in the May 2023 elections, we would already have accomplished all of these, while the PCS Left Unity NEC has mostly dithered and dissembled.

They must be ousted, their continued subversion of our national campaign and our union’s democracy must be terminated. A socialist General Secretary at the head of a campaigning, democratic union could dramatically open the union up to the activist and membership base once more – which is why we are calling for all branches to nominate Marion Lloyd for GS, and to re-nominate John Moloney for Assistant GS.

Rebuild the PCS National Campaign – elect Marion Lloyd as PCS General Secretary

The union’s National Executive Committee (NEC) met on 12^th and 13^th July to rubber stamp the attempt by the Left Unity majority to end the union’s national campaign on pay, pensions, redundancy rights and jobs for 2023.

Broad Left Network supporters on the NEC, along with Independent Left NEC members, voted in wholesale opposition to these proposals, and insisted that the NEC must carry out its mandate.

Our view is very simple.

PCS National Campaign must continue – there is more to be won!

Annual Delegate Conference in 2022 and 2023 issued instructions to the NEC to demand a 10% pay rise for 2022/23, to fight to recoup the 2% we have overpaid on our pensions for years now, to defend the civil service compensation scheme and to demand a jobs guarantee.

ADC 2023 was told by NEC speaker Lorna Merry, also Group President of PCS in Revenue and Customs, that the NEC would also factor in an inflation-proof pay demand for 2023/24.

As we stand, very little of this has been achieved – indeed when it comes to demanding an inflation-proof pay rise for 2023/24 in addition to a 10% pay rise for 2022/23, there is no evidence that the NEC even bothered to live up to the promise given to all branch delegates assembled at Conference.

On pay, once the noise and fanfare from the NEC majority abates, members will have suffered an average pay cut in the last two years of approximately 10%, once our pay rises for 2022/23 and 2023/24 are compared with inflation, i.e., with the average rise in prices across the economy.

On pensions, not an iota of progress has been made. On our redundancy rights, the government is continuing to run their public consultation on cuts and plainly intends to implement those cuts in 2025. On jobs, no guarantee was achieved.

It is obvious, therefore, that despite the concession of a £1,500 non-consolidated, pro-rated, one-off lump sum payment in most Westminster areas, the campaign must continue.

As recently as May 2023, the NEC won a renewed mandate for strike action in an all-members ballot, in which tens of thousands of members and dozens of bargaining areas got over the line. This was confirmed later that month by the votes at PCS Annual Delegate Conference, where three motions were debated, all of which demanded continuation of the campaign.

Broad Left Network supporters on the NEC therefore argued that the NEC needs to carry out this mandate. Further, Annual Delegate Conference 2023 instructed the NEC to get on with the job of re-balloting DWP. Revenue and Customs Group Conference ordered a re-ballot for their group too.

Despite this, the NEC majority, led by President Fran Heathcote, has done everything they can to squander the momentum painstakingly built up, at the cost of millions of pounds, by the union’s national campaign since our first strike mandate was won in November 2022.

NEC majority delays and demobilises the National Campaign

When news broke in June 2023 that the government would offer a £1,500 non-consolidated, pro-rated, one-off lump sum payment to Westminster civil servants, Heathcote and her NEC minions immediately suspended strike action, including calling off in-progress strikes in DVLA.

Key NEC members, such as Deputy President Martin Cavanagh, dishonestly argued in meetings and on social media that we now needed to see what employers would offer for 2023/24, so they voted for the NEC to instruct pay negotiators in each area that delegated pay bargaining should now begin.

Pay negotiations are an arcane affair even for union activists, so it is important to understand the extent to which this decision – by an NEC with Heathcote in the chair and all of their “Left Unity” hangers-on attending – was a flagrant betrayal of union members and the national campaign.

At the time Heathcote and co made this decision, they knew with 100% certainty that employers would not be able to offer inflation-proof pay rises to PCS members. Pay across all Westminster areas is constrained by the Treasury insistence that average pay rises live within a cap of 4.5%.

Anything above 4.5% (with a small amount of wiggle room of an extra 0.5% for the low paid) would mean someone else’s pay would have to be held below 4.5%.

In that context, earnest delegated pay negotiations are a distraction, especially when happening at the same time as the NEC calling off strikes and demobilising the national campaign.

Instead, with the Tory government having blinked on pay, the NEC should have immediately gone out to whip up members to redouble our efforts under a banner of “More can be won!” They should have called further national and targeted strike action, as we proposed at the time.

Employers may ultimately have sought to impose pay awards for 2023/24 regardless, but had the NEC maintained momentum, members would have been well prepared to return to the picket lines to fight against the inevitable real-terms pay cut.

Instead of showing determined leadership, the Heathcote-led NEC called off our strikes, called off the re-ballot in DWP and failed to take any steps to prepare members to continue the campaign. They tried to hide this by arguing that the NEC needed a “consultation” amongst members.

To get the result they wanted, they published a Speakers Brief to branch secretaries across the union filled with distortion, misrepresentation and outright falsehoods, including attempting to demoralise reps with the view that at least PCS had now achieved parity with the public sector and if we fought on we’d be alone.

Both of these statements are untrue.

On 14^th July, the government accepted the recommendations of the public sector pay review bodies. Average pay rises of up to 7% are countenanced by this, compared with the average cap of 4.5% for the civil service – notwithstanding the fact that it has now come to light that senior civil servants will average 5.5%!

Other unions, including ASLEF, the RMT, the BMA for both junior doctors and consultants, the UCU and other unions with smaller numbers in the public sector, such as Unite members in ambulances and emergency call centres, have all undertaken industrial action in the last six weeks.

The NEC majority wanted to be let off the hook, and did everything they could to muddy the waters, so that members would not be given a lead to fight for more.

That the results of the “consultation” by the NEC, wasn’t even presented in full to the NEC meetings on 12^th and 13^th July is proof that the majority weren’t really interested anyway as they already knew what their answer was going to be – they always intended to end the strikes and shutter the campaign.

Even the partial consultation document that was presented, listing many but not all of the responses emailed in by branches, makes for fascinating reading. Lots of branches are unambiguously in favour of continuing the campaign. Those branches which are nominally in favour of ending the campaign have lots of questions, such as, “Can the NEC guarantee that we’ll all receive the £1,500 and a consolidated pay rise of 4.5%?

Of course, the NEC can’t guarantee that. The £1,500 and whatever consolidated pay rise is offered within the limits set by Treasury in March 2023 must both come from within existing budgets. This means that the money available will vary in each area, which is why the overarching aim of the campaign was always to force the Treasury to put more money on the table, and the Treasury have not done this. The NEC speakers brief, however, pretended that a pay award of 4.5% was a certainty.

Mark Serwotka, speaking after the announcement of the Treasury pay remit of a 4.5% cap to average pay rises, called the cap “insulting”. Yet it is precisely with this cap still firmly in place that the NEC majority under Fran Heathcote wants to declare victory. Their dishonesty and incompetence in the execution of the instructions given to them by the union’s democratic Conference is complete. 

Balloting on the NEC “strategy” instead of getting on with the job

To rubber stamp their failure, they now intend to hold a ballot of all members covered by the national dispute. This will be held from 3^rd August until 31st August.

Continuing the NEC majority’s attempts to muddy the waters – and reflecting the pressure they are under from activists and branches – the NEC will not hold a straight yes or no vote on whether members have received enough in pay to close the campaign for this year.

That would expose the real views of Heathcote and Cavanagh in particular at just the moment where they have their eyes set on becoming General Secretary and National President respectively.

The ballot will instead focus on whether or not members “endorse the NEC strategy”. Raucous jeers from all corners of the union retort, “what strategy?!”

Heathcote and co intend to argue that the national campaign hasn’t ended at all.

There will be no strikes. There will be no re-ballots. There will be no levy. But, says the NEC, the campaign continues! Perhaps the NEC majority are eager to hold another petition. Back in late 2020, when Broad Left Network supporters on the NEC urged ballots both on safety during the pandemic and on pay, the NEC instead put their effort into turning out 100,000 signatures to a Parliamentary petition. Such weakness resulted in a pay freeze for 2021.

A 14^th July email to all members gives further insight into the continuing flagrant dishonesty of the NEC:

“At this point in time, we need to go into talks with employers on pay for the 2023/24 pay round and demand at least the same increases as other public sector workers. It’s only when the talks are completed that the union will know what consolidated pay rises members will get for 2023/24. We can then judge that against inflation and against the pay review announcements made yesterday.”

Inflation, when judged by the lower estimate, is 8.7%. Higher estimates, using the Retail Price Index instead of the Consumer Price Index show inflation increasing by well over 10%. Even this higher figure is likely to underestimate the impact of rising prices. Price rises are often sharper for working class people. Food, for example, makes up a higher proportion of what we spend our salary on, and food inflation is around 19%.

There is not even the slightest chance that departments will make an offer that keeps up with inflation for most staff. Because of the 4.5% cap to average pay rises across departments (with the extra 0.5% for the low paid), any pay rise that exceeds 4.5% will mean someone else gets a pay rise of under 4.5%.

Despite the trumpeting of certain specific pay offers and high-sounding percentage pay rise figures, as recently in the Home Office, the NEC’s rush to get into delegated pay talks and lack of a strategy to force the Treasury to put more money on the table will either result in relatively flat pay rises clustered around 4.5-5% that fail to meet inflation or they’ll result in a small number getting high percentages while many others get consolidated pay rises well below even 4.5%. This is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

To argue, therefore, that strikes must temporarily abate so that employer pay negotiations can begin (i.e., so we can find out just how deeply members’ pay will be cut) is not just dishonest, it is utterly moronic. It is the further proof that the NEC majority under Fran Heathcote doesn’t want to talk genuinely about the next steps in our campaign – it just wants off the hook from running a campaign at all.

Vote NO in the strategy ballot – then vote Marion Lloyd for PCS General Secretary

Broad Left Network supporters across PCS will argue against the NEC strategy in the upcoming ballot. The NEC doesn’t have a strategy.

We will urge members to vote to continue the campaign, to call further strikes in those areas where we have a mandate and to re-ballot in those areas where the mandate is expiring or was not renewed in May by the tiniest of margins.

Serious work will have to be done to restore confidence amongst members. Given that pay rises will inevitably fall shy of inflation, we will be able to count on members’ anger. So long as we give members a clear lead and outline a coherent campaign of industrial action, we will be able to mobilise and win future strike ballots.

What recent events underscore, however, is how much damage is being done – to our members, to our campaigns, to the union itself – by a leadership that doesn’t have the first clue how to lead.

The dishonesty and Orwellian doublespeak in the union’s national communications to members is undermining confidence and fragmenting our national campaign – and the NEC majority then has the cheek to turn around and to try and blame anyone who disagrees with them for being “factional”.

Having thus disorganised and fragmented the national campaign by poor leadership, the NEC majority then want to ballot, in the hope that members being disheartened will let them off the hook of having to get out and fight a serious battle against the government. Things cannot go on like this.

We must get rid of PCS Left Unity and particularly of General Secretary-wannabe, Fran Heathcote, who still has not apologised for her recent underhanded and undemocratic attempt to keep LGBT+ rights motions from being heard whilst chairing Annual Delegate Conference this year.

For this reason, Broad Left Network supporters have endorsed Marion Lloyd as our candidate for PCS General Secretary. For twenty years Marion has been the voice of the members on the union’s National Executive. She is President of the union in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. At every step, she has put forward clear ideas on how to build the union’s National Campaign.

BLN supporters have also worked carefully with supporters of the Independent Left in PCS, to design a joint socialist programme on which Marion will stand alongside incumbent Assistant General Secretary, John Moloney, as they attempt to put the needs and voices of members at the top of the union’s agenda, and as they fight to restore momentum to the campaign that Fran Heathcote has stalled.

Union reps and union members: we need socialists in the top job in PCS – when the time comes later this year, ask your branches to nominate and mobilise all members to vote for Marion Lloyd for GS and for John Moloney as Assistant GS.

The fight must go on!

Statement from PCS Broad Left Network (BLN)

On Saturday 1 July, a special conference of socialist activists from across the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) trade union met to discuss the situation facing more than 400,000 civil servants on pay, redundancy rights, pensions and jobs.

BLN conference unanimously agreed that the government’s sole meaningful concession, asking departments and agencies to stump up a £1,500 one-off non-consolidated payment to staff, from within existing budgets, was not good enough.

Activists from across PCS condemned the attitude of the current PCS leadership.

The PCS national executive, led by a group known as Left Unity, has already taken steps to wind down the union’s national campaign, by suspending strike action in key areas such as the Driver and Vehicle and Licencing Agency (DVLA), and by indefinitely suspending reballots, including in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

BLN members have spent the last three weeks organising members’ meetings to discuss the government’s ‘offer’, which is already in the process of being implemented, regardless of what the union’s leadership decides to do with our national campaign.

Saturday’s conference heard clearly the overwhelming view from the union’s members that the fight must go on – because we need an inflation-proof pay rise. We don’t accept the Treasury’s published pay remit of 4.5-5% for 2023-24. We need to force the Treasury to put new money on the table, as so far all pay awards will come from within existing departmental budgets.

Several organisations have already announced that they can’t afford the £1,500. Others have announced that meeting the terms of the offer and any consolidated pay award under the 4.5% cap is likely to result in job cuts. Activists are not prepared to trade off jobs for pay, and members are ready to fight.

BLN activists have agreed that the current leadership has not exhausted our campaign options – having delayed national strike action by three months, from November 2022 until February 2023, and only calling three days of this action. Other options such as action short of strike action must also now be considered, despite the continuing fervent opposition of the union’s leadership.

Members’ strikes have partially succeeded despite PCS leadership failures.

These actions taken by the current leadership of PCS, particularly outgoing general secretary Mark Serwotka and current president Fran Heathcote, has demonstrated how thoroughly out of touch they are with the needs of members, who are overwhelmingly saying they want to fight on.

Under them, the union’s leadership has resorted to scare tactics to avoid serious discussion about how we could continue the campaign. In DWP, this has involved asking members about “more unpaid action” and “doubling [their] payments into the levy for the remainder of the year”.

From the beginning, BLN reps have been critical of the NEC for calling targeted action, punctuated by one day of national unpaid action per month, without ever analysing or making a case about how the action is contributing to forcing the government to retreat.

To jump straight to trying to frighten members about unpaid action or doubling a £3-5 levy, without concretely explaining why either option would help, is a deliberate attempt to elicit an unfavourable reaction. The union’s leadership has begun its own ‘Project Fear’ and is not fit to lead.

Elect a fighting general secretary and assistant general secretary to continue our campaign!

BLN activists have agreed to stand candidates in the elections due later in 2023 for general secretary and assistant general secretary.

Marion Lloyd, currently union president in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), has been unanimously agreed as the BLN candidate for PCS general secretary.

Fiona Brittle, who currently serves on the national executive and on the union’s Scottish government executive committee, has been unanimously agreed as our candidate for assistant general secretary (AGS).

Saturday’s BLN conference instructed the elected BLN steering committee to continue to seek agreement with the PCS Independent Left on a programme that would allow us to fight the upcoming elections on a joint slate, with BLN AGS candidate Fiona Brittle standing down in favour of IL candidate for PCS AGS, John Moloney.

Fran Heathcote and Paul O’Connor have been announced as the Left Unity candidates for general secretary and assistant general secretary. They are part of the current leadership and its record. We need to stop their attempts to end the pay campaign and defeat them in the election for general secretary and assistant general secretary.

Whilst the Left Unity-led NEC maintains its efforts to destroy PCS’ pay campaign, it is clear that the arguments being put forward by PCS’ Broad Left Network (BLN) to escalate the campaign are resonating with members throughout PCS. This was particularly evident in PCS’s recent Facebook livestream, a farcical affair which saw the President & General Secretary repeatedly trot out their line about canvassing members’ views, whilst completely ignoring the views of members commenting during the livestream – the vast majority of who were calling for the campaign to continue.

Evidently, members’ anger during the livestream was fuelled not just by the NEC’s obvious (if not directly stated) desire to abandon PCS’ pay campaign, but also by the speakers’ notes the NEC issued to branches ahead of branch members’ meetings. Activists throughout PCS not only saw through the NEC’s blatant attempt to control the narrative of the members’ meetings, but roundly condemned the NEC for producing a document so defeatist that it could have been written by the Cabinet Office.

In response to BLN calls for branches to ignore the NEC speakers’ notes and conduct open & honest members’ meetings, the Left Unity-led GEC within Revenue & Customs went even further than their NEC overlords. R&C Branch Briefing 026-23 saw the GEC patronisingly claim that it would be far too difficult for R&C branches to organise their own members’ meetings and instead undermined every branch within the group by organising these meetings instead of branches.

The format of these meetings consists of…

• 30 minutes of GEC members talking.
• PCS members being forcibly muted so they cannot speak during the meeting.
• PCS members being unable to communicate with each other via the chat function – instead only being able to send messages to a PCS administrator account.

Let’s be clear – these are not members’ meetings, but simply GEC talking shops which represent nothing more than Left Unity’s desperation to ensure that it remains in total control of the narrative. And if this wasn’t bad enough, by asking members to consider whether they believe we are in now in a position to settle, the GEC is falsely implying that members have to decide between accepting the Cabinet Office’s position or continue the fight. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What the GEC neglected to say is that the Cabinet Office hasn’t made a pay offer to settle the dispute – the Cabinet Office is unconditionally imposing the pay award & Cost of Living payment. In short, receipt of the pay award is not contingent upon PCS abandoning its pay campaign and were members to be informed of this, it would quite clearly have a massive impact on their views as to how we proceed.

Clearly – and as is now widely understood with the PACR agreement – the Left Unity-led R&C GEC cannot be trusted to tell members the whole truth – a lie by omission is still a lie. This is why all branches in R&C must organise their own members’ meetings. As democratically elected reps in R&C, we are obliged to represent the best interests of our members and given that the GEC has proven itself unwilling to do so, we must do this ourselves. The BLN calls on all branches within R&C to organise their own members’ meetings, tell their members everything the GEC withheld and let the NEC know what our members actually think of their desire to capitulate.

Let’s reject Left Unity defeatism and win the pay rise that our members deserve!