We’re meant to be organising for a ballot right now. But Left Unity doesn’t want to.

The pay remit was announced in May, as ADC was closing, another real-terms kick in the teeth of 3.25%. At Conference, motion A383, supported by the IL and its (then incumbent) NEC members was passed. This acknowledged that the pay remit was likely to be crap, set out a model claim/list of demands to aim for, and instructed the NEC to engage with members immediately to “re-win” support for our key demands and prepare for a ballot by mid-September if there was not satisfactory progress made to meeting our demands. 

Have you heard from the NEC about the national campaign since May? No, me neither, unless you count the General Secretary telling delegated negotiators to go and get what they could, without any meaningful support or guidance.

At the 23/24 July meeting of the NEC, something (at least), seems to have happened. White smoke emerged Falcon Road: the NEC, divinely instructed by Fran, were beginning the national campaign in earnest, ‘a comprehensive ballot-ready strategy to be put in place over the summer’. 

On 11 August a branch briefing relating the proceedings of the NEC was released and telling us that we would be treated to NEC speakers at members’ meetings (that we were to arrange), and that there would be two installments of an “activists’ forum” (find someone who looks at you like Left Unity look at a vaguely named meeting with no democratic locus, etc. etc.) on 19 August. This is all quite late in the summer, particularly given that we are meant to be balloting in one form or another in a month. 

What follows below are my reflections, as an activist of over a decade’s standing, a current branch secretary, and a former member of the NEC, of the afternoon edition of the the activists’ forum. To summarise – it was very disappointing and confirmed to me that Left Unity are not serious about balloting.

The meeting began with Fran speaking (as is her wont in such ‘consultative’ fora) for about 30 minutes (half the allotted time). She detailed motions A383 and A2’s demands, her talks with the Cabinet Office, our academic research and the fiscal as well as moral case for pay restoration, and detailed some of the pay settlements which delegated bargainers have achieved.  Effectively this section of the meeting was a dramatic reading of the 11 August branch bulletin on the subject (BB-29-25).

Fran also talked about ballot-readiness. The meeting was all about, she said, getting activists’ opinions on whether their branches and groups were ready for a ballot, although there was no way to indicate other than by asking a question. She touted the ballot ready schools that activists were encouraged to attend, with a week’s notice, in the middle of the summer holiday. But she cautioned that the NEC were unsure of the ballot-readiness of the union for September. I’m sure if you ask Left Unity, this state of affairs is the fault of the activists, and of their political opponents.

Then we moved on to questions. Several people raised the functionalities lacking in PCS Digital around contacting their members – the same old answers about ‘data protection’ and vague promises of a solution were provided by the national President, Martin Cavanagh. 

There were a fair few comments about how there’d been very little communication about the campaign until now, and why we were holding these fora and the strikes schools in the same week in the middle of the summer holidays, at 7 days’ notice. In response to this, Fran seemingly blamed A383 for setting an unrealistic time scale, while Martin noted that the overlap of the Scottish and English summer school holidays means that there about 9 weeks of comparative quiet. You’ve had since May, comrades! 

One activist asked why we had entered delegated negotiations when we were also saying the remit was crap. The General Secretary said it was necessary to prevent other civil service unions grabbing up cash at PCS members’ expense. If meetings such as these were not designed to ensure that the General Secretary and President always get the last word, by prohibiting meaningful dialogue, someone might have pointed out that if Left Unity had not presided over a precipitous decline of PCS’ density and bargaining power, we could prevent delegated negotiations from going ahead without us by threatening industrial action.

An activist in DWP made the point that AA/AOs can’t take national action cos they’re paid so little, and requested targeted action be utilised instead. in the case of successful ballot. To this, Martin seemed to suggest it was too expensive to have targeted action in DWP. Perhaps he should have allowed one of the IL’s many motions to the 2024/25 NEC about building a sustainable fighting fund to be heard… 

Constructive answers were not forthcoming. “How will we contact members?”, someone asked – you’ll have to go to a different meeting about that, or talk to your as yet assigned dedicated ballot FTO, came the answer. We closed with Fran admonishing us for the low attendance, and instructing us to engage our members more.

It was a very boring and disheartening way to spend my lunch break, if I’m honest. It felt as if nothing had been done to organise or agitate since ADC. Seeing the pictures of the General Secretary, President, NEC members and senior FTOs (who are mostly Left Unity members) living it up at the Big Meeting, the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival and the other big events of the labour aristocracy’s summer calendar, I wondered how much actual work they’d been doing. Not much, on this evidence. 

I could not help but think throughout that the subtext of all of this is that quite soon the NEC will conclude that we are not ballot-ready. And this will precipitate no reflection on their part, because they don’t want to have a ballot.