The Socialist Party (Militant) and a breakaway faction (Socialist View) are vying for the Left Unity nomination for their respective candidates for Assistant General Secretary and other leading positions in the union.
Briefly for newcomers to these affairs Mark Serwotka wants rid of his troublesome Assistant General Secretary, Chris Baugh and replace him with current President Janice Godrich. The problem was both belonged to the Socialist Party (Militant)so since the SP backed Baugh Janice had to split taking a number of leading hacks with her.
A well produced leaflet has been circulated by Socialist View showing Janice is standing for AGS along with Fran Heathcoat for President, Kevin McHugh, Martin Cavanagh and the mad poet Zita Holbourne for Vice Presidents.
The dispute between is well out on the open. Marion Lloyd (SP and PCS NEC member)wrote:
Socialist Party member Chris Baugh is up for re-election. He has been the Left Unity candidate on three successive occasions since 2004, and won the union's election each time.
Chris is being challenged by Janice Godrich, the union's president. This challenge was started and is actively supported by the general secretary, Mark Serwotka, supposedly because of personal dislike and alleged inability to work with Chris.
But as the election process within PCS Left Unity has got under way, the 'justification' for standing against Chris has turned into a campaign of slurs, half-truths and distortions.
Former leading Liverpool Militant Tony Mulhern opined on Facebook:
I attended a meeting last night to consider whom to nominate for the position of PCS Assistant General Secretary, a position currently occupied by Chris Baugh, whose stewardship of the position has been exemplary over a 14-year period. He has been elected and re-elected on three occasions.
Chris has been in the forefront of the fight to defend the members in the teeth of vicious attack by a government who are determined to destroy the PCS as a great fighting example to the whole trade union movement.
In a rational world, he would have been a shoo-in for the nomination. Not so.
Chris’s opponents are nominating lay officer PCS president Janice Godrich whose stewardship, in that capacity, has also been exemplary.
Chris’s record speaks for itself, so I listened carefully to those campaigning for his removal.
The case against Chris includes:
He doesn’t get along with the general secretary, so much so that, although PCS procedure, like all unions, rules that when the GS is indisposed, his duties shall be assumed by the AGS. When the GS was desperately ill this did not happen. Instead the procedure was ignored in favour of the GS’s choice.
I can think of one or two past general secretaries in the PCS and other unions where friction between the GS and his deputy would have been in the members’ interests and not to their detriment.
He briefed against the proposed merger between Unite and PCS. This charge is based on tittle tattle, and his body language. Apparently, according to a Janice supporter, he was seen smiling when the proposed merger was scotched. In addition, Len McCluskey has stated unequivocally that there is no truth in this assertion.
Apart from loud assertions that he was ‘not the man for the job’ the case against Chris was entirely unconvincing. Although thrown into the mix was that one or two Socialist Party members had referred in an uncomradely manner to Mark’s illness. This is obviously to be deplored, but I’d like to know who they were.
The case for nominating Janice was that she has carried out her President’s duties in an exemplary fashion. Quite so. But the caveat is that she gets on well with the GS.
It appears that the overriding consideration is that the two top officers of the union should be best buddies. It could also be argued that Janice’s excellent stewardship of the president’s position is a good case for her continuing in that capacity.
At a time when the unity of the movement is paramount to fight the crazed Tory government, it defies logic that a campaign is under way to remove an outstanding officer like Chris from a leading position on the most spurious grounds.
This opinion has been penned entirely off my own bat without discussion with Chris or his colleagues.
Meanwhile Left Unity's opponents in the Independent Left are not about to be sidelined and will run a candidate. In a three-way battle someone like Bev Laidlaw could well stand a good chance.
But it does say something about the current position of our union.
Left Unity has dominated PCS’s hierarchy for the better part of two decades. In that time, true believers have stuck to the party line. LU’s socialism, its leading role in the trade union movement, the correctness of its analysis was never in doubt – at least by those who didn’t want to put a target on their back.
Now, because Mark Serwotka doesn’t like Chris Baugh and has slid Janice Godrich across the board to replace him, a different message emerges.
The Chris Baugh camp tells us that unelected full time officers have too much power, that workers in struggle have had to fight for support, and that the Unite merger was being pushed for nest-feathering reasons with democracy an afterthought at best.
From the SWP, we learn that without Mark Serwotka the union would have been in constant retreat over the last few years and nobody else was willing to push for a national fight over pay.
Janice Godrich’s supporters tell us that the union has long sidelined organising for bargaining and this was a symptom of a layer of full timers who got their position through cronyism.
Mark Serwotka himself has even stated that in the past strikes were called as set-piece political protests, after the fact, and no real efforts were made to properly build leverage or negotiate.
There is truth in all of this. (And the personal attacks and bullying that pervade LU’s culture have been laid bare in the conduct of the debate).
But where each side blames the other, themselves conveniently committed to silence by a revolutionary discipline that can now be cast aside because the two most senior paid officials don’t get on, in reality the problem is Left Unity as a collective entity.
They conclude:
In PCS, that means ditching LU’s ‘broad left’ model which is focused only on getting ‘the right people’ into positions. Instead, we need to organise in such a way that those we elect are only there to facilitate rank-and-file activity – and the rank-and-file can act without them where they don’t.
In next year’s elections, the Independent Left will be standing a candidate for Assistant General Secretary as well as a slate for the NEC. If you want a union genuinely led by its members and fit to take the fight to the bosses, you should consider nominating and supporting our candidates as a first step.To be continued.....
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