The Popular Front for the Liberation of the C.P.S.A

ROUND AND ABOUT
BY JUDAS ISCARIOT - APRIL 2010

No Man's Land is an eerie sight at early dawn in the pale grey light. An uneasy calm hovers over our lines in the aftermath of the Spring Offensive. But down in the trenches the troops are grumbling about the cost of the Big Push which failed to attract much media coverage or force the Government to re-open discussions on the CSCS.

Chateau Falconcrest claims “up to” 200,000 members “took part” in the three days of national strike action implying a near solid response to the March and Budget Day strike calls. There was a good response in HMRC and a number of other departments. Community Police members walked out in London and the sessions of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament were disrupted. But members of the other civil service unions, which largely means Prospect, reported for work because they've already signed an agreement with the Government and turn-out was considerably lower in the DWP which covers a third of the entire membership of our great and glorious union.

This is not surprising. Though the DWP has many disgruntled front-line staff a third of them are now fixed-term non-unionised contractors and virtually all of them crossed the picket lines. Others chose to ignore the strike call simply because they didn't think the issue was worth losing three-days pay as it didn't affect them or because it was simply unwinnable in the run-up to the general election. Many wonder why the leadership chose to fight over pensions when it stepped away from a pay battle that could have united all the membership last year let alone pick a fight with a Labour Government now in caretaker mode which cannot reverse existing policy even if it wanted to.

Well the answer, according to the 4TM opposition, is that the Big Tent is dominated by Socialist Party grandees and led by Mark Serwotka, who shares most of their dogma. That their political hostility to the Labour government means that PCS will never get a fair hearing in the corridors of power and that the union is going to waste time and resources on futile leftist opposition platforms like Bob Crow's absurd TUSC Party. Yes, no, maybe…

The Socialist Party, though only a shadow of its former Mendicant past, retains a Trotskyist agenda that believes that strike action is the only way to build a strong union and win its demands at the bargaining table (largely true but it depends on the balance of forces at any given time) and that it would rather have a Tory government pursuing open Tory policies (which is what we will get if Cameron wins) than a Labour government pursuing Tory policies (which is how they see Brown & Co).

In fact it's not as simple as that. Frankly, PCS is between a rock and a hard place. A future Labour or Labour/Lib-Dem coalition will push through all the cuts they've already planned as part of their way out of the economic crisis regardless of who runs the union. A Conservative government will do all that and a lot more. TUSC, an irrelevant slate largely drawn from the Socialist Party, isn't in the running and they'll be lucky if they get more than 1 per cent of the vote in the constituencies.

So the question boils down to tactics and that's always been the grandees Achilles' heel. Discussion rarely goes beyond the rarified atmosphere of Executive Committee and Serwotka is surrounded by yes-men and informers like Ramsbladder of old who simply tell him what he wants to hear.

As for the “opposition” you may well ask. 4TM is largely irrelevant. They've got a fight on their hands to keep their one seat on the EC this time round and that's not surprising given that their entire campaign consists of stale Red-baiting and jibes at how much or how little Serwotka actually gives back to the union out of his wages. The same could be said for the Independent Left whose leaders come from even more obscure Trotskyist sects like the Alliance for Wankers Liberty and whose only “big idea” is selective, targeted strike action which didn't work during the Pathfinder dispute.

There's no doubt that the Big Tent will win another overwhelming victory in this year's elections. Serwotka will continue to speak “in a personal capacity” on radio and TV and all sorts of platforms around the country. The grandees and their satraps will keep their positions on the Groups. The ambitious careerists will continue to brown-nose their way to the juicy full-time posts at Falconcrest. But there's equally no doubt that the biggest victor will be apathy and that the turn-out will once again be poor.

At this point the armchair Marxist will reach out for their Lenin and rhetorically ask “What is to be done?” and then answer it with something else Marx or Lenin once said. But this isn't 1917 Russia and PCS members aren't starving peasants and brutalised workers who have just lost a war with Germany.

Perhaps the answer lies in making an effort to take the discussion beyond the activists and to the rank and file and to build democratic structures within the union – which did exist in part in CPSA days – so that the mood of the membership could be tested between Conference and to empower members in their own branch and the higher committees.

The war of attrition will continue and it can indeed strengthen the bargaining position of the union at the negotiating table but what we put on the table and how we relate to the other civil service unions is a debate that should be taking place now in the branches and at conference in Brighton. I wouldn't put a bet on it though…

There are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless.

Niccolo Machiavelli
1469 - 1527

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The House at McWHO corner

Until the day of the rally, few people knew Kevin kept his ladies knickers collection in his right ear

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