PCS assistant general secretary and Socialist Party member Chris Baugh (third right) visiting striking driving instructors, photo Tracy Edwards

PCS assistant general secretary and Socialist Party member Chris Baugh (third right) visiting striking driving instructors, photo Tracy Edwards   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Why we support Chris Baugh for re-election as PCS assistant general secretary

A reply to the SWP

Rob Williams, Socialist Party industrial organiser

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has issued a statement to explain its decision to support Janice Godrich in the PCS Left Unity election process for Assistant General Secretary (AGS).

Janice is standing, with the support of PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka, against the incumbent since 2004, Socialist Party member Chris Baugh.

In addition, two SWP NEC members have signed up to ‘Socialist View’, a new group to promote Janice’s candidature.

Their statement fails to draw the conclusions from much of their analysis of what faces the union. In reality, their starting point is to maintain their relationship with Mark Serwotka at all costs as well as to seek to damage the Socialist Party – “We believe that Janice Godrich is the candidate who is best able to work with Mark Serwotka”. This is despite a whole number of examples where they have disagreed with him.

Equally contradictory is the only other reason the SWP give for supporting Janice Godrich – which is because they say she has promised to reinvigorate Left Unity! Janice Godrich was chair of Left Unity in 2016 and had other officers who are now in Socialist View in support of her.

There was a growing tendency for LU to come to life only at election/ballot time or when the PCS leadership was in need of support. In 2015, when there was no PCS elections, little if anything was issued by LU – even though there had been a general election that year.

Since 2016, with Marion Lloyd, a prominent supporter of Chris Baugh, as chair, LU has been more active and has asserted its independence as a rank and file organisation, for example over the Gender Recognition Act controversy.

Threat to Left Unity

This decision to stand against Chris without any industrial and political reasons put forward, is a serious threat to Left Unity, which was formed 20 years ago, to take on and defeat a vicious right-wing leadership when PCS was formed.

The SWP know how this campaign against Chris and the Socialist Party has been waged, totally against the traditions of Left Unity. Instead of open debate and discussion, he has been subject to a one-sided character assassination, without the chance to defend himself.

One of these utterly unfounded allegations is that Chris whipped up calls by some smaller sectors of the union for extra resources to build the union and represent members in order to launch a ‘coup’ against Mark Serwotka.

Mark had handed his powers to allocate resources to unelected officers when he was ill. One of the leading SWP members on the PCS NEC, Candy Udwin, is from one of these groups, the Culture sector. She actually lobbied the NEC and senior national officers for these resources! Yet the SWP completely ignore the lessons from this debate over how union resources are allocated and the role of lay member democracy in that.

The Socialist Party had an open and democratic debate about the AGS election after being given an ultimatum by Mark Serwotka that if we selected Chris as our candidate, he would stand someone against him.

Chris was endorsed by a unanimous vote of our National Committee and with the overwhelming support of our members in PCS. Despite this, Janice Godrich declared her candidature a few days before this year’s PCS conference in May. This shocked delegates, who were aware of Chris Baugh’s outstanding record fighting the right wing and building the left in CPSA and PCS – something the SWP statement entirely omits to mention.

For many, her declaration unjustifiably overshadowed the union’s launch of the pay ballot. Despite a heroic effort from reps and members, it fell short of the required 50% turnout threshold stipulated by the new Tory anti-union law, meaning that despite an 86% yes vote, disgracefully the union couldn’t move to a legal strike.

The SWP mention ‘acrimony’ and ‘allegations’ but without honestly stating that this divisive method and approach was initiated by Mark and Janice.

The Socialist Party, on the contrary, sought to discuss the broader political and industrial issues behind this spilt in the PCS left, as shown in our article in Socialism Today (PCS: the real issues at stake, Socialism Today no.221, September 2018).

What do the SWP say on the issues we raise there? Even at this stage, we urge them to look again at the real issues at stake and reverse their decision to back Janice Godrich and Mark Serwotka’s divisive move.

But if they don’t, the SWP will share responsibility for the crisis that this is causing within the left in PCS.

Inconsistencies

The SWP raise the threat to “democracy in the union leading to a heavier reliance on paid officials rather than rank and file activists” but these developments have occurred under Mark’s leadership and it is Chris’s challenging of this that is actually one of the main reasons for the attack on him.

The SWP also admit that they disagreed with the Unite merger and the DWP Employee Deal – both of which were supported by Mark and Janice as well as Chris and the Socialist Party.

The SWP along with the Independent Left outside of Left Unity, opposed the Left Unity leadership of DWP over the Employee Deal. It was undoubtedly a deliberately divisive offer by the employer. But the calculation that was made was that in the midst of a decade-long pay freeze, in a department of many low-paid members, significant new money was found to deliver substantial pay rises for many members.

But all this is seemingly forgotten. The same SWP are now ‘comrades-in-arms’ of leading members of the DWP group that they waged this campaign against.

The Socialist Party saw the potential of a merger with Unite, providing it was on terms that protected the gains of lay democracy in PCS won by the left. Within our ranks, Chris Baugh raised with Janice and others that the merger process was being rushed with insufficient discussion with the ranks of PCS, without reassurances on how the democratic gains would be protected.

He warned that this could lead to the merger being defeated by PCS members who had legitimate concerns.

In our opinion, Chris was deliberately and scandalously kept off the NEC merger sub-committee by Mark Serwotka and others. But yet again, despite this, the SWP are unwilling to face up to these facts – “Mark Serwotka’s policies are the ones that are most likely to lead the union to successfully fight back against the attacks we face.”

To attempt to justify this, they state that “Mark Serwotka has been a driving force behind all of the national industrial action taken by PCS in recent years.” The implication is that the Socialist Party (including those who now support Mark) has been a conservative drag on him. This myth has been raised by them before and was as incorrect then as it is now.

Refuting myths

In 2007, they argued that we had prevented Mark from coordinating action with the CWU. Their new-found ally John McInally answered at that time their dishonest assertion that “The Socialist Party dominated executive of the PCS pressured Mark Serwotka to back away from such a move, and he felt he had to go along with them” (The PCS, the CWU dispute and the struggle for public sector workers’ unity, Socialism Today no.116, March 2008).

In a similar vein they complain at our criticism of their pay motion at December’s Left Unity AGM. They suggest that we opposed them calling for the union to ‘go it alone’ if necessary which they claim “was subsequently proposed by Mark Serwotka and then agreed by everyone in 2018.”

It is true we thought it correct to seek a basis for a united fight against the pay cap. But we also actually did face up to the reality that PCS may have to strike on its own if, as seemed entirely possible, unions in other parts of the public sector accepted Tory pay offers.

What we opposed was that their motion called for PCS to immediately look to ballot as soon as possible in the New Year. There was an understanding by delegates that this would have been premature and insufficiently prepared and therefore not likely reach the required voting threshold.

As we said at the time: “This reckless position won no support from delegates who understood the need to get behind a serious strategy put forward by Socialist Party members.”

Our members, at the July NEC, following the failure to achieve the 50% threshold, argued for continued and coordinated support for those Groups prepared to fight the pay cap.

We also argued at the NEC for a special delegate conference that would allow the lay members to properly debate and discuss the lessons of the ballot to prepare for next year’s pay claim and how best to support groups like the MOJ and others who are in dispute now. However, this has been opposed by Mark and Janice and the SWP.

The attack on Chris and our party in PCS is rooted in the complex industrial and political terrain that faces the union and the wider labour and trade union movement.

Despite its best efforts, PCS has had to fight in retreat, often alone in the public sector.

Our role over decades

We are proud of the central role we have played in the left in PCS and its predecessor union CPSA over four decades and more.

PCS was key in building the 2 million strong N30 2011 public pensions strike and was to the fore in trying to maintain it in the midst of the likes of Prentis and Barber moving to halt it.

While under our leading role, PCS Left Unity convened a conference of the union left of over 500 in early 2012 for this purpose.

Yet the SWP, although in Left Unity, organised a Unite the Resistance event a week later to deliberately compete with it, much to the understandable annoyance of many PCS members at the time, including the likes of Janice Godrich and John McInally.

But as we warned, the ending of the pensions struggle emboldened the Tories to roll out their austerity offensive. In particular, they targeted PCS with withdrawal of ‘check-off’ deduction of union subs. It has taken a valiant effort to maintain the union, its membership and finances.

Chris Baugh has been the union’s treasurer through this period, as PCS has striven to stabilise itself.

But it also requires constant attention by the rank and file to ensure that lay democracy remains strong in the union.

The election to Labour’s leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has in the main been extremely positive. In particular, his general election manifesto gave an alternative to the neoliberalism of the last few decades of Tory and New Labour governments.

But how does a non-affiliated pro-Corbyn union like PCS engage with the struggle to win the fight within Labour and defeat the Blairites? It’s clear from their statement that this question doesn’t really exist for the SWP.

They also caricature our position. While as part of the TUSC coalition the Socialist Party has challenged the Blairite pro-cuts councillors in local elections, we recognised that the general election was different – we didn’t stand candidates and we called for the election of a Corbyn-led Labour government.

Incidentally, the SWP themselves stood local election candidates under the TUSC banner against Labour in the Scottish council elections in 2017.

But it is absolutely correct that PCS, alongside a similar general call, should only put its limited resources behind those Labour candidates that actually support the union’s policies as well as Corbyn himself! Unfortunately, because of the process that was used by the union leadership, it is estimated that half the candidates that the union supported were involved in the 2016 attempted coup against Corbyn! We can only presume that the SWP approves of this.

It’s ironic that the SWP produces this statement at the very time that John McDonnell tweets about Blairites plotting to set up a new party by using the contrived antisemitism issue.

Under such brutal assaults, the lay members at all levels need to continually act to maintain lay control and leadership of the union. We believe that if this move against Chris and our party in PCS is successful, it will open the door to weakening lay democracy in PCS.

We will fight this; but the SWP, unless they reverse their decision, and despite their attempt to give it a militant sheen, is lining up on the wrong side of this struggle.