If conference agrees there should be a strike ballot over pay then IL supporters will throw their heart and soul into winning the vote.

We should be clear though that if we win the vote and get over the 50% threshold it will be despite the current leadership, not because of them.

We have argued that once the results of the consultative ballot were announced in November last year PCS should have gone onto a war footing back then and made the call to be strike ready. Instead the leadership wasted months and only recently has it started to make more serious preparations for a ballot. We cannot get those lost months back.

It is looks as though now there will be frenzy of activity, compressed into a few weeks, to try and persuade the members to (a) vote (given the legislation, everyone who doesn’t vote is effectively a No vote) and (b) to vote Yes to action.

If this is the case, instead of implementing a  carefully worked out detailed plan – a plan that had been discussed and agreed by activists in advance – we are going to bet everything on the roll of the dice and ‘hope’ that it turns out OK.   This is not a serious way to run a campaign. In stark contrast the CWU spent seven months preparing for its strike ballot in Royal Mail. Their hard work was rewarded with a huge yes vote. They didn’t hope to win, they planned to win.

So if you want a union who also plans to win, which doesn’t waste months, in other words which is serious, then we ask you to vote for the Independent Left in the current NEC elections and in the DWP and HMRC GEC elections.