In their first election leaflet, Left Unity (LU) claim that their opposition in the NEC elections, which is us, is ‘right wing’. They further claim that the opposition, which is us, supported the coup many years ago to remove Mark Serwotka from being the General Secretary.

When challenged, their leaders say a mistake was made and parts of last year’s leaflets (which is more or less the same as the year before, and the year before that etc) were used. But despite that, they have not withdrawn the leaflet, or printed a retraction. Therefore they are content for the falsehoods to circulate.

Of course the irony is that the frequent charge against us is that we are ‘ultra left’, rather than right wing.

Moreover, the LU leadership know that Mark Serwotka used to be ‘one of us’.

Before we launched Independent Left, many of us were in the Socialist Caucus (SC). Before he was elected General Secretary (GS) Mark Serwotka was a member of the SC. It was the SC and the SWP in PCS who lead the campaign to get Mark elected as GS in the first place. Those in the leadership of today’s LU opposed him standing.

Of course all of this is little known. We keep meaning to publish the true story of how Mark Serwotka got to where he did, including publishing the email from Janice Godrich calling on him not to stand as GS but that is a story for another day.

So when Mark was threatened by the ‘real’ right wing, we as SC, fully backed him.

Of course this whole affair says a lot about the state of the union. LU, who run the union, cannot get their facts straight and even when they admit a mistake, don’t act on it and retract a falsehood. To to get away from this toy town stuff is why are standing.

So if you want a serious union, Vote PCS Independent Left.