Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

PCS - Politically Correct Socialists?

by Paul McGowan  |  Socialist Resistance no18  |  page 7-8

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

The PCS has not a political fund as stated in the last issue of SR. The 2004 Union Conference supported a motion to ballot members on a political fund that will not be used to support political parties. My original article suffered under the editor's knife.

However the union desperately needs a party political fund to put political pressure on a Labour government that has declared war on civil servants. PCS Branches should be able to back candidates like Oli Rahman, the PCS Branch rep who was recently elected as a Respect Councillor in East London campaigning against attacks on the civil service and welfare state. Also they should also be able to back the few Labour MPs like John McDonell who have done sterling work raising the union's interests in parliament.

Gordon Brown's announcement of 100,000 job cuts across the Civil Service has politicised civil servants. However the Left Unity leadership of the PCS (dominated by the Socialist Party) has not build on this. It has no confidence that the membership will back a party political fund. Although the

OFFICIAL DISPUTE Socialist Party claims it wishes to build a new working class party, its comrades in the union leadership are not arguing the PCS should help develop it.

With a few notable exceptions like Mark Serwotka, Left Unity leaders don't want the Union or themselves to be seen as too political ie. socialist. They stand as part of a "democracy" slate in union elections not a "socialist" or "left" slate. They talk up the cross party PCS parliamentary group, cuddling up to Liberal and Tory MPs.

Now they have refused to call a national one-day strike of all Civil Servants during the Labour Party Conference, because they believe the Union can't win an all

out political fight with New Labour. But this is the only way we can defend jobs. And in this fight, we need to politically support parties to the left of Labour like the SSP and Respect. Civil servants are supposed to "serve" all parties and have no politics of their own. Civil servants are not meant to be party political or even political. This is ridiculous nonsense, propagated by Governments and the ruling class to silence opposition from an important section of the working class. Unfortunately, the PCS leadership doesn't challenge head on this view of what civil servants should be like.

In this day and age tens of thousands of civil servants must still seek their Line Manager's approval before they can even canvass in a local election. The PCS's left leadership should be fighting to get rid of such restrictions on basic freedom and asserting the rights of civil Servants to be party political. Their refusal to rock Blair's boat leaved their ship rudderless in a rough sea.