PCS: A stolen election in a hijacked union

The Socialist Party website has published a quite muted report on the so called "re-election" of their boy, Chris Baugh as Assistant General Secretary of PCS. It will be interesting to see how they spin this in their boring newspaper The Socialist next week.

Meanwhile there was visible anger amongst members of PCS who had become aware of the antics surrounding the campaign run by the Socialist Party and their allies.

Lisa from Camden e-mailed me and said:

People will start leaving the union with these sorts of shenanigans, why should people pay their subs when there is no fairness, which is what the members want. To be honest I do not believe that those at the top give a damn for their members.

Quite so.

The Socialist Party control the PCS union through a series of fronts. The main body is called Left Unity which brings together most of the mad Trotskyist (and Stalinist types) together with Labour "lefts" and other non-aligned left wingers. They claim a membership of around 1,300, but only 80 of them bothered turning up to Left Unity's Annual Conference.

In turn they ally themselves with a group of supposedly Labour orientated individuals that run under the name of the PCS Democrats who Lenin would have described as his "useful idiots". They exist merely to perpetuate themselves as members of the National Executive (they have eight seats). Left Unity and the PCS Dems have a symbiotic relationship, the left provide "foot soldiers" and the PCS Dems lend an almost mainstream "respectability".

They claim (or at least their best known member, Ian Albert does) to be able to "provide a brake" on the excesses of the far-left.

Yes I know, I laughed out loud at that claim when he said it.

Except by all accounts at least one of their NEC members was allegedly in cahoots with the Socialist Party campaign to stop any opponent being nominated.

I haven't seen much evidence of them vetoing the excesses of either the Socialist Party or Mark Serwotka.

Actually speaking of Serwotka, don't you find it ironic that he and Left Unity gained control of PCS after fighting against exactly the same kind of antics initiated by Barry Reamsbottom when the court case was launched to stop Serwotka taking up his post as GS?

I didn't support the "coup" then and I certainly object to the more underhanded "coup" that has taken place in PCS now.

The far-left have been in power for so many years that they even claim criticism of them is criticism of the union. They think they are the union.

There's me thinking the members are the union. How "right-wing" of me to consider that members should control their own organisations.

So quite Lisa, what will fair thinking members say when they realise that an election has been "stolen" from them and isn't about time everyone woke up to see what is really going on in their name?

Over the next few weeks there will be a series of articles looking at how PCS is run for the the benefit of it's activists, particularly those of the Socialist Party, ask who really runs PCS and look to the future about how (and if) the union can be reclaimed for the benefit of it's members.

Watch this space!