A Tale of Two Serwotkas

Having spent near on two decades in the largest of the civil service unions fighting the far left led by Mark Serwotka and then both changing unions & retiring you'd think that one would be able to escape the mad antics of the comrades. Yet here we are once again addressing Serwotka's destructive intervention inside the Labour Party.

The PCS union was once not just the largest but also the most influential of all the civil service unions. Then the left under Serwotka managed to gain control and it all went downhill from there. Today the union is barely just over a third of what it was at it's height and the left has spent more time fighting over the plum jobs and roles provided by the union rather than doing things for their actual members.

The shenanigans over who got the assistant General Secretary post and the subsequent falling out between the comrades splitting into opposing camps made the union a laughing stock.

Even at a local level this has broken down in some areas as I was reminded by speaking to an old colleague who had worked in an office without heating between Nonmember and January and said the local reps had been useless. This in a branch long considered to be one of the more "right on" left wing ones.

The Balham office closed with members left to their own devices for the most part despite requests for assistance. PCS came far too late and did too little according to members I spoke to shortly before closure during a visit.

Yet once Serwotka was lauded as the "great white hope" by the left and managed to unite the left behind him for a while in PCS to succeed in gaining hegemony over the union. Despite opposition the stagnation of recruitment and cuts meant that there was little change in the personnel of the union and as people retired the sole mainstream group in the union simply wound up.

Serwotka oversaw the turning of the PCS into a political vehicle for the far left and it's finances and activists were utilised to pursue causes well outside the unions actual raison d'etre and prioritised seeking links to build a new political party. There was Make Your Vote Count which morphed into surreptitious support for Respect and then the short lived Trade Union & Socialist Coalition run b the Socialist Party  with input for a while from the SWP and financed by the RMT.

These projects failed and eventually along came another messiah for the left in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. Serwotka joined the Labour Party with the open intent of deselecting existing MPs and replacing them with hard left activists.

As Labour flounders in the wake of a thorough defeat at the last General Election rather than accept political reality the ideologues including Serwotka himself are attempting to steer Labour in the same disastrous semi-Marxist direction as Corbyn & McDonnell tried.

In a recent interview with Socialist Appeal (one of the fragments of Militant which remains inside the Labour Party) he declared:

The worst thing that could happen is that we turn the defeat in the election into a double defeat. In that we would move rightwards, believing that it was the radical proposals in the manifesto that were defeated.

I think it is critical that we identify the main cause of the defeat. We must certainly conclude that it was not because Labour wanted to renationalise parts of the economy; scrap the anti-union laws; give public sector workers pay rises; deal with climate change, etc. These radical policies were not rejected by the electorate.

According to Serwotka despite all evidence to the contrary:

Walking away now would therefore be a double defeat. It would be giving up on the radicalism that I think is there to be won.

I see the Labour leadership election as important. Personally, I am backing Rebecca Long-Bailey. She is the candidate who is most openly saying that she stands with the radicalism in the manifesto. She has gone further in arguing for essentially mandatory reselection. The opposition that she faces from the right of the movement and the press, shows that she is the candidate reflecting the fact that Labour still needs to be radical.

From this it remains perfectly clear and Serwotka spells it out bluntly that there is no room for compromise the purge of those who do not follow the "party line" for want of a better expression must be purged. Of course at the time of writing RLB looks like losing badly to Kier Starmer but the winner will still need to pander to the likes of Serwotka as the left remain i control of the party machinery and are still grabbing control of Constituency Labour Parties.

It's clear that the days of a broad based Labour Party are over. The far left will not tolerate dissenters from their cause so the other factions must unite to drive the likes of Serwotka and the infiltrators like Socialist Appeal out of the party and establish a modern social democratic party.

Serwotka has wrecked a union., he must not be allowed to destroy Labour the only viable alternative to the Tories which the left has currently made unelectable.

At the same time I am forced by circumstances to support via Women's Place UK (and others) the work of his wife Ruth Serwotka as she defends along with other feminists women's sex based rights from being undermined by the intolerant and quite belligerent trans activist movement.

An unexpected turn of events but such is politics.

However in the long term neither of the Serwotkas or the far-left of which they are both apart belongs in the political mainstream. The time is coming Labour to purge itself of these political deadbeats because only then will it be in a position to actually help the people it was created for. That means making Labour an electable force once again. The far-left are part of the problem and never the solution.