On 11 June the PCS General Secretary (GS), who always acts as a leader of Left Unity (LU), sent an all-member’s email, and uploaded a video and branch briefing to the PCS website, giving a highly inaccurate and factional account of the 11 June NEC meeting.

The GS gratuitously attacked the democratically elected President and National Executive Committee (NEC). She has put herself in sole control of our union, in place of the NEC you elected.

The NEC is denied access to PCS comms or control of the union machine and is scandalously prevented from communicating directly to members to reply to the allegations against them. You can elect the NEC you like as long as it is LU.

Yet under “PCS Rules” it is the members who run the union through our delegates at ADC and our lay representatives on the National Executive Committee (NEC). The contract of the GS explicitly subordinates the GS to the direction of the NEC, another reason for her locking out the NEC.

The background

On a pretext around the issue of Standing Orders (SOs), which was the subject of debate and voting on 11 June, the GS invited ‘all those who believe in democracy’ to leave the meeting. No doubt planned, the LU NEC minority did so, leaving many full time staff bemused, still in attendance. Just to ensure that your NEC got the GS’s message that she runs the union, the Zoom meeting was then closed down. A quorate NEC reconvened on another Zoom link, inviting all the original participants of the meeting to rejoin there. The GS and her allies did not. Their behaviour was disgraceful, when members are facing so many challenges on so many fronts. It is part of a long emerging anti-democratic pattern.

What the GS is “protecting” you from

The GS’s subsequent attack on the NEC was focussed on the NEC wishing to adopt particular SOs. But she chose not to explain to you what they were and why she is objecting.

Your elected NEC wants to:

• Set up additional sub-committees, for example a pensions committee to action Conference policy to improve members’ pensions and tackle inequalities in those schemes and a committee to ensure PCS better supports our FM members.
• Ensure that progress against conference motions are a standing item on the agenda of subcommittee meetings, ensuring Conference decisions are acted upon.
• Hold more regular NEC meetings to ensure speedier decisions on issues important to members.
• Issue NEC minutes and records of decisions to Branches to increase transparency.
• Allow motions to be discussed and voted on at the meetings, enabling the NEC to respond to emerging issues.
• Remove the gagging clause which prevents NEC members speaking to reps and members about NEC discussions, which undermines membership engagement.
• Ensure papers are issued to NEC members in good time (unless the NEC itself agrees to consider late papers), so that there is adequate time for lay representatives of the NEC, who are working members of PCS, to properly consider proposals put forward for discussion / agreement.
• Allow NEC Standing Orders (SOs) to be adopted by a simple majority of the NEC.

GS’s claims of wilful breach of rules are factional, gratuitous, and false

The GS falsely claims that there was a wilful attempt by the PCS President and the NEC “to break union rules [LU’s SOs] designed to protect members’ interests from organised factions.” Quite obviously LU did not design their SOs to protect members from…LU. So she must mean that they were designed to obstruct NEC majorities she and LU disapprove off.

Where the Rules are to be found according to the PCS Rules

The published PCS Rules state at Principal Rule (PR) 12, “The Union’s Rules shall consist of the Principal Rules, the Supplementary Rules, and the Appendices thereto”, i.e., PR 12 states that the Union’s Rules are only to be found in these places. The GS did not claim that the democratically elected NEC sought to break a single one of these PCS Rules and it did not: the NEC relied upon and upheld them.

Claimed rules not covered by PR 12

Contrary to PR 12, the GS argues that there are other rules outside of the PCS Rules: the 2025-26 SOs approved by the previous NEC and that it is these that the NEC allegedly breached. It is unfortunate, therefore, that over her many years as President and GS, she never sought to inform members, representatives, or even NEC candidates about these “rules” and never once sought to add them to PCS Rules by constitutional amendment. That would have been the democratic course.

President decides on on the meaning of rules

The President, Bev Laidlaw, has conducted herself well. She did not denounce the GS or make accusations about her or deny her the right to argue her viewpoint regarding the SOs. She merely exercised her own constitutional right as President, under Supplementary Rule (SR) 7.12, to make a ruling when the Rules are silent or ambiguous or in conflict. She ruled that the PCS Rules should prevail over the “old” SOs and that the SOs to be adopted by the NEC should be settled democratically by majority voting.

We are not seeking to make a constitutional case here, but the President and NEC were entitled to rely upon the “PCS Rules”, including PR 12. For example:

• PR (1)(j), which sets as an objective of PCS to do anything which the NEC determines as being conducive to promoting the achievement of PCS’s other objectives.
• PR 8, which vests the management and control of the Union, and the handling of its whole affairs, in the NEC, to be conducted in accordance with PCS Rules (as defined by PR 12) and policies determined by Conference or by membership ballot.
• PR 14, which states, “In the case of conflict between a principal rule and any other rule of the Union, the principal rule shall prevail.”
• Supplementary Rule (SR) 7.11(b), which empowers the NEC to make, vary, suspend or rescind regulations governing the conduct of the union’s business.
• SR 7.23, which stipulates that issues before the NEC shall be decided by a majority of the total votes cast, apart from where the Union’s Rules (IE according to the PCS Rules) or an agreement or contract state votes should be conducted in a special manner.

12.2 of the 2025/26 SOs

The GS insisted that the 11 June NEC meeting was required to adopt the SOs of the dissolved 2025/26 NEC before considering any changes. It was not required to do so, even in the terms of those SOs. They state at 12.2:

“Adoption of these Standing Orders, or changes to the Standing Orders will be the first item of business for the NEC at its first post– election meeting and if agreed, will take effect immediately. A two-thirds majority of the votes cast will be required.”

Legal advice

Initially, the GS repeatedly refused to permit the President to have a copy of early and readily available legal advice and has never shared it with the NEC, despite it bearing on this and other NEC issues.

The GS had had plenty of time ahead of the NEC to agree a legal brief about SOs with the President and to obtain legal advice concerning all the questions that concerned them separately and jointly. But, instead of acting as the “civil servant” at the direction of the NEC, the GS very belatedly sought legal advice on her own terms without telling the President. She subsequently repeatedly refused to give the President her own copy of that 8 January legal advice ahead of the NEC.

Instead she belatedly “allowed” your elected President (the democratic implication is astonishing) to briefly read the two pieces of legal advice on two separate days in her presence, spent most of the time challenging her to accept LU’s SOs, gave her no time to study, and refused to “allow” her to take copies away with her.

The GS issued the 8 January legal advice to the President and NEC less than an hour before the NEC meeting began on the afternoon of the 11 June. That was obviously tactical and designed to prevent meaningful reading, discussion, and interrogation of the advice.

To be clear, legal advice is only that, advice. Intelligent people always question legal advice, if necessary, obtain further advice, and make a judgement about the advice. Representatives have received confident legal advice for cases that were lost; have been advised to withdraw cases that were in some way later won; have challenged a senior lawyer’s advice and had that challenge endorsed by Counsel. When Barry Reamsbottom sought to block Mark Serwotka from taking up post as GS he prayed in aid his strong legal advice. He lost. 

The real reason for the attack

The GS wants to run the union with a LU NEC. She does not accept that members, by their votes, have decided otherwise.

But the GS and LU do not have answers to the key issues facing members. They have, for example, been in charge of national and departmental talks through years of declining real pay by grade. They have overseen the disaster of DWP AAs and AOs being placed on the minimum wage. The GS and LU are adrift. They have opted for passivity and “peace” with the Government’s agenda – mandatory office attendance, job losses, AI without membership benefits, pay decline. All they have to cling to, with all its benefits for them personally, is control of the PCS and for that they will fight tooth and nail and without democratic scruple.

What can be done

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