We have deliberately kept quiet following the High Court decision on 31 July to allow the predictable triumphalism of Mark Serwotka's Hard Left supporters to blow itself out. Well they are still at it and, quite frankly, we can't stay silent any longer. Otherwise, myth and fiction will take root over truth and reality.
But let's set one issue to rest straight away. We do not in any way blame Mark Serwotka for any of the shenanigans surrounding the disgraceful, underhand campaign to oust Barry Reamsbottom, which began at HQ and on the NEC almost from the day PCS was formed in 1998. Of course, like all Hard Left/ Trotskyist (Trots) activists he shared the virtually paranoid dislike of Barry because of his long-standing, always publicly declared Moderate stance, and fully supported the behind-the-scenes constructed motion that appeared at the 2000 PCS Conference. But he was unaware, we believe, of the tricks that the now virtually defunct Membership First faction, which, in alliance with the Hard Left Unity faction dominated the NEC of our union for the first 4 years of its existence, were up to.
Of that, more in a minute, but let us say why we do still oppose Mark Serwotka. What we firmly believe is fundamentally undemocratic about him and his election in December 2000 is that he kept the real truth about his unrepresentative politics from PCS members he asked to vote for him in the General Secretary election (Nov/Dec 2000). In his 1000 word election address, mailed to every member/voter, he described himself cosily as a socialist. Nobody gets alarmed about that these days - lots of the middle-of-the-road MPs in Tony Blair's New Labour Party happily describe themselves in that way!
Yet within weeks of getting elected, with we suspect lots of moderate voters, who could not stomach voting for the Trotskyist nominated Assistant General Secretary Hugh Lanning*, he was quite happy to finally come upfront with his real politics. He addressed rallies and meetings of the Hard Left groups in PCS, urging them to unite - Trots are notoriously fractious- to defeat the Moderates in the 2002 NEC elections! All this was reported in the columns of the thinly read Hard Left Press (The Socialist and the Socialist Worker ). Worse, he blithely admitted to The Observer in February: "I would describe myself as from the Far Left”!!! What a pity he could not find space for those crucial 9 words in his 1000 word election address! But we all know why he could not afford to be so honest with the PCS electorate, don't we? And that is why we will always oppose Mark. Of course he is fully entitled to support his extreme brand of politics - he lent his name and GS of PCS position to the Socialist Alliance (The Trotskyist Party) 2001 General Election manifesto- but it flies in the face of our democracy to keep this from members when you seek their votes.
*(FOOTNOTE: Mr Lanning is held in contempt throughout the PCS for his total absence of political principle. He has proved that he will go with anyone to get the top job - a triumph of naked ambition over principle and competence, you might say. In 2000 Mr Lanning, the full-time officer leader of the Membership First (MF) faction, was the favourite for the GS job - what with the biggest Trot grouping nominating him and the devoted, if lazy and vain MF, campaigning full throttle he seemed a cert. Oh Dear!)
Now, back to the plotting and planning of Lanning and the MF. We are sorry if some find history boring, albeit recent history, but it does explain why we ended up in the High Court in the summer of 2002. As in all mergers, the leadership of the 2 unions (CPSA and PTC) met regularly for almost 2 years and thrashed out a new rulebook, and PTC NEC meetings minutes show that arrangements were made to protect the employment of all senior officers, including General Secretaries. In fact the GS of PTC John Sheldon retired never having stood for election for 8 years! He and all the other leading lights of PTC accepted a transitional rule in the rulebook that both unions accepted gave similar rights to Barry Reamsbottom. Barry should have retired in April 2004, seven years since his second successful CPSA GS election in 1997.
But once Lanning and the MF realised that he actually wanted to lead the union and would not compromise with the Far Left they set out to oust him, making, disgracefully for people who posed as moderate, common cause with Trots, who in one year of power in the CPSA had almost reduced that great union to a battered, smoking ruin.
Essentially, Lanning/MF seem to regard the union as a private company, referring to full-time officers as senior managers and spending lots of your money on outside consultants, seminars that achieve nothing and whose outcomes are forgotten within weeks of them being held. And the whole union suffers from death by committee, with decisions being endlessly postponed or fudged. Many of the staff, which, in the main, do not get involved in the union's political battles get extremely frustrated at this immobilism.
But, incredibly, the Trot leading lights - Mark, Janice Godrich, narrowly elected President in April this year- go along with all this. Strange behaviour for the former scourges of all full-time officers, who they, for years, sneeringly referred to as bureaucrats! One wonders what their "feed us red meat" supporters in the Socialist Caucus and the other grouplets of the Far Left would make of all this if they knew.
Of course the explanation for this odd behaviour is that the not-so-smart Janice and Mark are totally dependent on the daily advice and guidance of Lanning and his legal brain, Stephen Cavalier of Thompsons, who they used to plot a legal way of getting rid of Barry Reamsbottom. Incidentally, one of the matters we are trying to get to the bottom of is: who signed a contract to give Thompsons the lion's share of PCS's legal work and with whose authority? Under the previous MF dominated NEC, a legal review was conducted. It was a classic example of the Lanning/ MF style that we complain about. We went through a highly expensive tendering, exercise, tying up the Senior Officers of the PCS for days on end, and 2 years later we still had not made a decision!! Then magically, without the old NEC, or for that matter its Honorary Officers Committee, agreeing it, Thompsons got the big contract. Very unhealthy. And we will not rest until we get to the bottom of it.
Anyway, as we said earlier, a motion was drafted, with legal assistance (all done secretly) for branches to submit to Conference 2000. It only came to light this May that MF supported President, Peter Donnellan, had privately got a QC's opinion, without telling the QC that such motions were a breach of rule 6.22(g)! Donnellan said in a High Court statement in July that he did this because he was concerned about the fact that there had been no GS election since the PCS was formed! But he did not feel that he should have consulted GS Barry Reamsbottom, who was most affected by all this. Indeed, Barry was not even shown the QC's opinion!!
Worse, they went to ex-PTC Joint GS Lord Clive Brook (He voluntarily retired at the end of 1998) to seek his support in their clandestine actions. Clive's reaction was to say: "No, a deal is a deal. We got Barry to agree a merger, with him being on the same footing as John Sheldon." It is wrong now to renege on it, that's what Trots do he told them.
For reasons that we cannot understand Clive would not swear an affidavit in support of Barry when he contemplated legal action back in 2000 and had he done so in the action brought by Mark and Janice this year, it would have been very significant, because Barry's case was founded on that very point. There was an agreed arrangement that he would be dealt with in exactly the same way as all his other senior officer colleagues. And here you would have had one of PTC's joint GSs testifying to Barry's position.
So that is the wrong that was done to Barry Reamsbottom, which he referred to in a statement he made to the Press after the High Court judgement.
Just ask yourself this: why is every other Senior Officer/ National Officer allowed to stay until retirement age, or in a number of cases beyond that age, and heaven and earth was moved to push Barry out 20 months before he reached his retirement age? It could not be plainer - it was nakedly political. And to strike the political deal and feed the over-weaning ambition of Lanning, who couldn’t wait another 20 months to have his chance at the GS job in early 2004, many of the gains that we made in making the union member-centred have been sold out to the Trots.
Lanning and MF have smoothed the path for the trots back to annual NEC elections and an annual National Conference, in return for their support for his bid for General Secretary. Indeed, in the Trot website after the 2000 Conference, one of the more odious leading Trots admits this. It was he who led the charge to stop giving highly respected CPSA President for 10 years, Marion Chambers, a Distinguished Life Membership - she was a Moderate, you see. The same guy used to pride himself on walking out of IRSF (Lord Clive Brook's old union that merged to form the PTC in 1996) conferences when they were saying goodbye and thank you to retiring IRSF Senior Full- Time Officers. Anyway, he boasted about the deal he and MF had struck to roll the new union back to the 60s. But the world has moved on when annual elections and annual conferences were necessary. Why, for example, shell out £1/2 million on an annual conference to discuss whether PCS should affiliate to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign or, as we did for 45 costly minutes this May in Brighton, the Woodcraft Folk!?
Have you ever heard of the Woodcraft Folk? Probably not. And do you really think it merits all this focus on it by the PCS?
But like the Trots it is rooted in the Thirties and Forties, it was devised as an alternative to the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, for parents who didn’t like allegiance being sworn by the kids to Queen and country.
But it also provides a good litmus test of what makes us Moderates different from the Far Left. We believe that you expect your union to concentrate on negotiating with our employers to improve your pay, terms and conditions and protecting you in the workplace against the excesses of senior managers (real ones, that is) who from time to time abuse their power. Rather than trying to change the World in a revolutionary, Trotskyist way.
THE APPEAL
We are totally unsurprised that the Far Left is attacking us for supporting Barry's appeal. Well, as we have explained above, he was wronged and dealt with uniquely unfairly as a result of all the politically motivated shenenanigans 2 years ago. But in addition to that, you know you were not given the truth. When the NEC asked you to vote on the rule change to get rid of Barry they did not tell you that the end result would be another 2 years of Joint General Secretaries. That's 2 years of double salaries; 2 years of double personal assistant salaries; and 2 years of double Personal Secretary salaries. Members, we are sure, were prepared to tolerate that situation until John Sheldon's retirement in January 2001 but why was it necessary to have Barry's successor sat on his shoulder 22 months before he was to be forced out?
Now one member puzzled over this and wrote a letter for publication in the PCS magazine. And what did the great democrats of MF do? Why one of their leading lights walked into the Editor's office demanding: "That's not getting published!" So you were kept in the dark. And that is the point of the appeal.
And so worried are the Lanning/ Far Left about the outcome that they instructed their QC to offer Barry, through his legal reps, that if he did not seek leave to appeal they would not attempt to stop a pension payment and the normal early retirement compensation that was agreed back in 2000. We say Barry is entitled to the same legal rights and pension arrangements as any other citizen/ PCS member.
And, worse, how does this latest stance square with the fact that the real brain behind John Sheldon/ Hugh Lanning / Mark Serwotka was given early retirement at 50 with a package worth £250,000 in June this year. This was given without Barry Reamsbottom's - still at that time Establishment Officer of PCS - knowledge and worse, if it's possible, without clearing it with us the elected majority of the NEC! Again we are demanding answers but are being obstructed by the Lanning/ Godrich/ Serwotka alliance. And as though that were not enough we have just learned that two other full-time officers have been given generous pay-offs and again the L/G/S alliance have not even told us, let alone consult us!
Yet they have got the gall to charge us with wasting the union's money by supporting one Court action that, had they not been so underhanded, would never have arisen. If Peter Donnellan really, genuinely believed that members were all worked up about Barry Reamsbottom not having to stand for election for his last 20 months of General Secretary-ship, despite he and his MF/Far Left pals being quite comfortable with John Sheldon going 8 years without an election, and as a consequence he had to secretly get a £3000 QC's opinion, why didn’t he raise the "problem" with Barry? A sensible solution could have been arrived at.
But the truth is Mr Donnellan and MF/Far Left "concerns" were all hogwash. It was all a cover for a determined campaign to get rid of a tough, hands-on GS who made decisions and wanted to see the union move forward.
And that is why we got into this unholy mess. So it really is a bit rich for the architects of this shambles to blame us for the consequences of their folly and deceit. You can love or loathe Barry Reamsbottom, but one thing you cannot deny: he is a fighter. He was always going to fight any injustice and he would have been pretty poor fighting injustices against PCS members if he flinched from fighting against such an obvious injustice aimed at him.
THE REAL MONEY WASTERS
We believe we won the NEC elections back in April because we battled against the spendthrift ways of Mark Serwotka and the old MF/Far Left majority on the 2000-2002 NEC. We exposed the money they were wasting during the election, and exposed the unrepresentative Far Left nature of their politics and members then voted for 25 Moderates and only 12 Far Leftists.
So, let us just remind you of how the balance sheet shapes up.
The old NEC let Mark Serwotka lead us into, and through, a dispute that cost £7Million, virtually all our Fighting Fund, leaving precious little else to support any other section of the union in dispute with the employer. Now, we supported the dispute but when we saw we had got all the protections required for members out of the employer we wanted to put the agreement to a vote of the members affected. Mark and his MF allies who were then in the majority threw this out and we were plunged into this totally pointless, ultimately failed dispute. We settled 5 months and £7 Million later with no more than we had negotiated 5 months before.
And, that, quite frankly is what will always happen with Far Leftists like Mark Serwotka and Janice Godrich et al. They always prefer war-war to jaw-jaw. They've always got, as revolutionaries, a, usually hidden, agenda. So you may vote for them thinking their tough rhetoric will produce results but in reality the employer, the government will dig their heels in. But one of the worst other features of the Far Left approach to industrial relations is their propensity to launch into disputes not knowing how they will end them- there is never any exit strategy. And so it proved in that Dispute.
When we point this out, Mark tries to cover his failure by creating a smokescreen, saying we are criticising the members. Nonsense. It is his and his ilk's strike first, think later approach that causes the real damage!
He also makes much of the £12,000 he pays back to the union. We say he should accept the trade union negotiated rate for the job. But leave that to one side for the purposes of our balance sheet argument.
The PCS gains £12,000 from Mark and his gang but what do they cost us?
INCOME EXPENDITURE
Failed Dispute: £7,000,000
Pay Offs to non redundant officials: £500,000
Mark’s pay back: £12,000
TOTAL Net Loss: £7,488,000
Do you honestly believe that is a great deal?
AND FINALLY
We are getting increasingly frustrated with the anti-democratic behaviour of the Lanning/ Godrich/ Serwotka alliance that are trying to rule the union with their 12 NEC seats to our 25. At the August meeting we tabled a series of motions to sharpen up the work of the union so it is more effective on your behalf and to make sure that the Far Left minority do not rule the Moderate majority and also to ensure that Janice and Mark do not abuse their positions by pushing their minority opinions and posing them as the authentic voice of the PCS.
What is happening is that their guide Mr Lanning advises Janice to pass all our resolutions to Mr Stephen Cavalier of Thompsons Solicitors (see above), whose firm was awarded the contract we know not how. He very predictably gives them a letter saying, the rules, contracts of employment, custom and practice - take your pick - mean that principal rule 8 which says that The NEC is responsible for "managing the whole affairs" of the union; and supplementary rule 8 which says that all full time officers are subject to the "control and direction" ( strong and definite words, not open to interpretation) of the NEC don't mean that at all. The Far Left minority can run the union and we the majority are powerless to stop them. The same firm gave the opposite advice when Barry Reamsbottom was GS and Mr Cavalier gave opposite opinions in the space of 2 years on the Limitations rule for the NEC. His first opinion in 2000 had the effect of keeping 2 Moderates off the NEC, no surprise there then.
No wonder Barry Reamsbottom used to refer to him at that time as the Deputy General Secretary!
We, meanwhile, have 2 choices: we can lie down to this travesty of democracy or challenge these anti-democrats in the courts. Stuart Currie, Leader of the Moderate Group has already started the ball rolling by going to the government- appointed Certification Officer on one point. This is a fairly cheap way of doing it but it can take longer. But if we are forced to go down the Court route then the blame will lie at the door of the Far Left. So please, let us have no bleating about the cost and damage of it all.
Our message to the Far Left is: stop preaching to all and sundry about democracy - accept the democratic wishes of the PCS membership expressed in April this year and let the majority run the union.
Those who can do, those who can't - are employed as Executive Team Members in the Department for Work and Pensions.
