A major battle is underway in the PCS civil servants’ union, to determine how the eighth-biggest workers’ organisation in Britain shapes up to the struggles ahead, including in the UK civil service. PCS vice-president DAVE SEMPLE writes, in a personal capacity.
Civil servants in UK government departments and agencies might have breathed a sigh of relief on 4 July, as a Labour government swept to power after 14 years of Tory rule. Tens of thousands of jobs have been slashed. Real wages have fallen precipitously. Pensions have been devalued. Trade union rights have been diminished. Office closures have forced civil servants out of local communities, with deleterious economic impact in deprived areas. Many had had enough.
Such relief, if expressed, was short-lived. On 29 July, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the first cuts across government departments “of at least £3bn”, including education, transport infrastructure, hospital construction, the winter fuel payment for pensioners and, inevitably, “two percent savings in [government department] back-office costs”. From start to finish, it echoed George Osborne’s early speeches in May 2010, piously declaring the necessity of cuts.
Yet at the same time as beginning again the tired cycle of public spending cuts, including a further Comprehensive Spending Review and the October 30 budget, Reeves made some placatory noises. ‘Misery’ from industrial action was blamed on the Tory government instead of on the unions. A settlement of the junior doctors’ strikes was touted. For civil servants, a pay remit of 5% was announced.
The subtext to the trade union leaders was clear; give the new government some breathing space. This reflects the extent to which the British capitalist political order is in crisis. The arming of Israel has provoked millions to fury. As a result, five independent candidates, including Jeremy Corbyn, were victorious at the general election. A Scylla and Charybdis of high inflation and high interest rates have rendered millions worse off. Anger has soared at the billions creamed off by ‘asset manager’ thieves who own utilities such as energy and water – the latter resulting in massive pollution of rivers and coasts.
New strike waves and political explosions are likely, when Labour fails to address the major drivers of anger, preferring to defend Capital and not working-class people.
Whither the civil service unions?
No earnest sigh of relief at the change of government should have been heaved by any trade unionist in the civil service, however, particularly in the largest of the civil service trade unions, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union. PCS has around 190,000 members made up of workers in UK government departments and agencies, in the devolved Scottish and Welsh governments, and on privatised contracts paid for by central government.
There is a long memory amongst PCS activists of Labour MPs braying in support of Gordon Brown’s announcement of 104,000 job cuts in the civil service. Every attack undertaken by the Tories was prefigured by New Labour cuts – to jobs, pensions, redundancy rights and so on. Hated Tory policies such as welfare sanctions were likewise prefigured by a Labour government. Concessions from any government only come from serious mobilisations and action by workers.
A generation of PCS activists threw themselves into the anti-cuts movement in 2010 and played a magnificent role in March, June and November 2011, joining a massive demonstration in London and then coordinating major strikes across the country to defend public sector pensions against planned swingeing cuts. Thousands of activists still remember that, in 2011, the austerity juggernaut faltered thanks to the work of the union, even if the struggle was eventually defeated by the decision of GMB and Unison to sign up to the Tory pension cuts.
Twin fights: to rebuild the left and resist austerity
The legacy of the 2011 strikes and demonstrations still exists in PCS. The ‘Left Unity’ grouping within the union, which is now led by the general secretary Fran Heathcote and president Martin Cavanagh, have benefitted from this legacy for many years. Their reputation was won by their opposition to the attack on pensions, and their willingness to organise national strike action, coordinated with other unions, against these cuts. The failure of that campaign, however, led Heathcote and Cavanagh to draw incorrect political conclusions that moved them to the right.
This process, of the general secretary, the president and their followers moving rightwards, has not concluded. But nor has the legacy of 2011 gone away. It was on full display when activists from across PCS came together to form a new and revitalised left which overthrew the ‘Left Unity’ leadership of the union in May 2024. This ended the majority Left Unity had enjoyed on the PCS National Executive Committee (NEC) for twenty years; a new majority left coalition was elected. The basic instruction of members and reps to the new NEC majority is one that should worry a new generation of Labour politicians hawking austerity policies: continue the struggle!
Decisions made by Heathcote and Cavanagh to shut down the union’s national campaign in June 2023 were widely perceived as a direct threat to continuing the struggle. After an offer from the Tory government of a one-time, pro-rata, non-consolidated payment of £1,500 to civil servants to address the cost-of-living crisis, Heathcote and Cavanagh cancelled strikes that had already begun, cancelled the re-ballots ordered by the union’s conference barely weeks before, and cancelled the strike levy that had paid for targeted action since December 2022.
Most dishonestly, to deflect criticism, they then launched a ballot of all union members covered by the campaign, urging them to ‘Vote Yes to Continue the Campaign’. Members duly voted yes, and were rewarded with ten months of inactivity, of literally no progress or campaigning actions, between June 2023 and March 2024. When struggle was called for, Heathcote, Cavanagh and their Left Unity allies were found wanting – and this lent credence to our criticisms of their other activities, such as their ambivalence on Trans rights, the infamous Heathcote attempt to filibuster a debate on LGBT+ rights at Conference 2023, and allegations of racially insensitive behaviour within Left Unity itself, leading to resignation by two prominent black activists.
Taking office from late May 2024, the new majority coalition consists of supporters of different left organisations inside PCS, including the Broad Left Network (BLN – in which Socialist Party members participate), the Independent Left (IL) and independent socialists. Our united programme is centred around building an effective struggle across all of those issues which we know matter to civil servants and other PCS members, but it also raises questions of internal union democracy, reflecting the obstructive way that the general secretary, the president and their allies have frequently acted, and the need for members of PCS to be able to overcome this.
This coalition did not drop from the sky. It has been years in the making and has been forged in the crucible of two struggles – against the austerity policies of the capitalist political establishment and against the deadening hand of the union’s bureaucracy.
Brief history of the new majority
In 2018 the Socialist Party was still part of Left Unity – in fact we had helped to found it, by uniting the broad lefts from the two unions that came together to create PCS in 1998. Attacks in 2018 by then general secretary Mark Serwotka against the incumbent assistant general secretary (AGS) Chris Baugh were the beginning of a process designed to free Left Unity from socialist influence, so that it could more easily serve the needs of a managerial elite within PCS itself – a bureaucracy whose material interests do not overlap with the needs of members.
Socialist Party members drew a decisive line against this attempt to turn Left Unity from an organisation of the left into an organisation of the union’s bureaucracy. After hard fought battles within Left Unity, Chris Baugh won the vote to become the Left Unity candidate for his own re-election campaign to the AGS position. Serwotka, Heathcote, Cavanagh and others, refusing to accept the decision of Left Unity members, endorsed an external non-Left Unity candidate. Socialist Party members exited Left Unity in summer 2019, recognising that the impunity with which Heathcote, Cavanagh and co broke with the democratic decisions of Left Unity signalled its end as a left organisation.
There followed a period of gathering those forces who were prepared to stand up for the ideal of a fighting, democratic PCS, against the trend being set by Serwotka, Heathcote, Cavanagh and their allies.
Socialist Party member Marion Lloyd’s stand as an independent candidate in 2019 for general secretary, securing almost 10,000 votes (30%), was an important step in popularising a programme of building struggle and extending union democracy. The political work of winning activists to this programme laid the basis for the founding of the Broad Left Network in January 2020.
For years we have undertaken the hard and thankless work of patiently explaining the fighting alternative to leadership complacency and incompetence. We opposed the decision by Heathcote and company to jettison the union’s 2020 pay claim in the spirit of ‘national unity’, putting forward much more robust demands on government and strategies to secure members’ safety during the pandemic. When the leadership launched a petition in 2021 and called it a pay campaign, we recognised that members would think this ridiculous – and so we went out to branches and members to explain the alternatives and the need for a fighting strategy.
As the result of consistently putting forward a principled political programme, we have been able to build bridges to those who do not always agree with us, but with whom we can agree on a minimum programme. This programme centres around building a fighting union that opposes capitalist austerity in deeds not just words. It insists upon the need for democracy within PCS as the necessary corrective to a leadership that is increasingly out of touch, defensive and arrogant in how it addresses the union’s members and activists.
The majority left coalition includes previous electoral opponents the Independent Left, a left organisation in PCS with whom we have political differences. Building a coalition is not enough, however; the coalition must deliver on the twin fights on which we’re engaged. That of defeating austerity policies no matter which government pursues them, and that of re-building a robust democracy in the union capable of rendering accountable any leadership or union officer.
Mobilising the union’s democracy
Since the new NEC met in early June 2024, these twin fights have been met with a hail of undemocratic vetoes by president Cavanagh, deliberately misinterpreting the rules to simply throw any item he disagrees with off the agenda. As the left coalition on the NEC does not have a two-thirds majority, it cannot override these undemocratic and unconstitutional ‘rulings’ by the president. These have been used to block action during the general election, as well as any coherent steps towards re-establishing a national campaign on pay or anything else. The result has been paralysis for the last five months.
Meanwhile Heathcote has continued to be the enemy of renewed struggle with the government. Following the 5% announcement on 29 July, Heathcote and her allies sought to ‘welcome’ the new pay remit and to immediately go into talks with each civil service department on how to implement it. This abandoned any pretence of a serious national campaign by the union and skipped over the uncomfortable fact that only 2% of the potential increase to pay is funded. The rest must be drawn from existing budgets, including potentially at the cost of civil service jobs.
The majority left coalition on the NEC resisted the straightforward capitulation proposed by Heathcote, but our freedom to propose a substantive alternative was denied through Cavanagh’s use of the veto power he has assumed.
To combat this, the majority left coalition has agreed to attempt the difficult task of calling a Special Delegate Conference (SDC), to override the president. The union’s rules permit the NEC to convene an SDC (steps towards this were vetoed by Cavanagh) or it can be convened if branches representing 25% of members write to the general secretary demanding a SDC be called. NEC members from the majority left coalition have been diligently at work visiting branches and extraordinary general meetings of members to explain why a recall union conference cannot wait until May 2025. By then, Labour’s cuts will be far advanced and difficult to reverse.
Socialist Party members, working with BLN allies and the wider majority left coalition, have produced a leaflet explaining the situation to members and reps, and have begun to distribute this across the union. This is the key task of the present: to wake reps and members to the danger that if the union goes back to sleep after departmental pay talks have concluded, as the general secretary and president hope, Labour will have won their breathing space to formulate and embed new austerity policies across the civil service. An SDC can avoid this and force a change of course.
It is also likely that if we manage to convene an SDC, and manage to have this debate in front of the activists of the union, it will open the path to a change of leadership in favour of those who are determined to continue the struggle. This is a task that goes far beyond the ranks of Socialist Party members; it is one that every PCS activist should be involved in – but it would not be possible without the socialist bulwark provided by the party.
Lessons for the wider struggle
Leon Trotsky, in his article, The Trade Unions in Britain, memorably characterised the position of the trade union bureaucracy. Describing them as the “economic policemen of capital”, he went on to say that the reformist leadership, which had solved its own social problem (ie of wealth and material comfort), transformed itself into a lieutenant of capital, in order to intensify the exploitation of workers. While the situation is not as sharply posed as in 1933, the basic role remains the same.
Behind Heathcote and Cavanagh there is, in the uppermost echelons of PCS management, a layer who regard the lay democracy of PCS with contempt. They are professionals, we are amateurs. When ballots fall short of the 50% turnout threshold, they blame members and the activists, and, like the East German bureaucrat of Brecht’s poem, they wish for the dissolution of the people and the election of another. They are responsible, serious figures. We are a rag-tag of radicals who voice members’ needs first and worry about the work for the beleaguered professionals second, if at all.
Promotions for Heathcote allies have rained down, re-creating a large managerial layer in PCS like that depended upon by the old right-wing ‘National Moderate Group’ leadership of Marion Chambers and Barry Reamsbottom, exposed by Paul Foot as taking money from CIA anti-communist programmes. The purpose of this managerial layer was to interfere in the activities of the elected lay reps of the union, in order to protect the unelected managerial layer. This interference has already begun anew in PCS, with the unilateral decision to disband the BEIS group and multiple refusals to issue messages from elected negotiators to the union’s members.
This managerial layer is subject to pressure from the capitalist class to restrain struggle, particularly struggle in the political sphere. Not for nothing that Mark Serwotka and his acolytes bitterly opposed any support for TUSC or any other independent working-class candidates – an echo of which was the veto by Cavanagh and Heathcote of support for Jeremy Corbyn’s independent stand at the recent general election, proposed by BLN supporters. The fight against this managerial layer, the fight for sound industrial strategy, the fight for a political strategy, and the fight for union democracy itself; none of these are unique to PCS. They will be experienced in every union according to the particular history and material circumstances of each, as the struggle intensifies.
Reflecting our transitional method, we must be class fighters putting forward the programme and strategy to win the immediate demands of the workers while always seeking to point towards the wider unity and wider economic, social and political needs of the working class as a whole. The need for an independent working-class political voice. The need for a revolutionary socialist party armed with a programme that can defeat capitalism and perspectives that can orient workers in that struggle. The watchword for now must echo Trotsky’s cry, as we prepare for the coming battles: All workers into the trade unions, all unions into the struggle!