The PCS leadership never stops congratulating itself as the best possible leadership of all possible trade union leaderships. Its strategy is always correct, its tactics spot on, it is always well respected throughout the movement. The sun has never shone on more glorious heads and out of the backsides than those of the PCS leadership. The plain truth, however, is that PCS has lost every major battle of the last decade.

Instead of honest accounting we have had a decade and more of spin that misleads, disorientates, mis-educates and demoralises members and activists. Ultimately the spin deludes the PCS leadership itself, so that the only time they wake up to reality – in the shape of the Tories – when it smacks them in the face. Even then their default position is to defend their record, repeat the old tried and tested and bloody hopeless tactics, and cry words to the effect of, “don’t panic! We are a bold leadership and the envy of the movement!”

In the centenary of the First World War our thoughts inevitably turn to Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, “The General”:

Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did them both by his plan of attack.”

He “did for them” by his “plan of attack”: the Commander in Chiefs of PCS are guilty of this as well. Instead of people though, they are ‘doing for PCS’ and democracy.

Let members have a vote!!