I cannot resist a comment about Labour’s “purge” of those who have been deemed to be not entitled to a vote in the current farce of the Labour leadership election. But first, a dig at the man who made this fiasco all possible: step forward Edward Miliband, who compounded his miserable legacy of leading Labour to a thumping defeat in May’s general election by devising a system whereby any man/woman and his/her dog could vote in a membership ballot and it would be left to unnamed bureaucrats to weed out those who could not vote. The word shambles does not do it justice.
Today, it was revealed that PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka has been denied a vote in the election. My question is simple: why was he allowed to donate £3 in the first place?
Let’s make no mistake, Serwotka is no friend of the Labour Party in any form you could possibly imagine. It may well be true that the great man has not belonged to a political party for many decades, but no one in their right mind would suggest his values are those of Labour. In the 1980s, when he was a local and regional official in the civil service union the CPSA, he was associated with Socialist Organiser. You were only allowed to hold office if you shared his politics. You were roundly attacked if you dared hold another view, as I did. Believe me, it was not pleasant being a lone voice in a sea of ultra left domination and, more importantly to Serwotka, hero worship. I well recall the nasty side of Serwotka, being ambushed frequently in the name of far left politics and having my name dragged through the mud by his close associates. I saw him as a nasty piece of work and nothing since then has changed my mind.
Serwotka seized control of PCS when the moderate executive committee overplayed its hand, trying to overturn his election victory for general secretary. Any opposition to Serwotka in PCS has drifted away because he and the comrades of the ultra left control every single aspect of the union from local branches, the power of Conference, right to the paid officials. The system in PCS means that the control of the ultra left simply can never be challenged or changed. I always accuse the Trotskyist left within PCS of wrecking tactics, and that’s true, but the control by the far left is more Stalinist by nature.
Members have left the union in droves, not just because “check off” has ended, but because the union has become a political party ruthlessly controlled by Militant tendency and Serwotka. And the union is almost bankrupt, to the extent that Serwotka and the ruling cabal cancelled executive elections this year to save money. (Naturally, the annual conference, which has become little more than a talking shop collecting tin for the Socialist Party (Militant) went ahead as usual.)
We need to be very clear about this. PCS is a weak, ineffectual union. Serwotka is praised by some for being this great union warrior but the reality on the ground is a union utterly destroyed by mismanagement and incompetence. Worse still, ordinary members have found their conditions under constant attack by a right wing government whilst the political grandees play their silly little games. I am certain that a responsible, realistic and forward-looking union would have been able to protect members from the worst excesses of Cameron and Clegg’s coalition – it did so under sensible leadership in the Thatcher era: I know, I was there – but the Serwotka years have represented a time of can’t talk, won’t talk. Sometimes, when you do not have a strong hand to play, you need to compromise in the interests of the many. In the 1980s, faced with the introduction of technology, the executive to which I belonged secured agreements that guaranteed no compulsory redundancies and no compulsory transfers. The ultra left – Serwotka and the comrades – demanded “no job loss” under any circumstances and denounced us as selling out the very members who were being protected. If they had been in power, many members would have been sacked or transferred to offices many miles away. And this is a matter of fact, a matter of record.
Can I just emphasise this bit? The executive committee on which I was a minor player was dealing with a Thatcher government in its pomp. People like the great Mickey Duggan, who was the executive chair and utterly despised by the far left, saved thousands of jobs by being a brilliant negotiator. I have never, once, heard Serwotka described as any kind of negotiator at all.
The Mark Serwotka I knew was none of these things. A poseur with a great line in slogans and rhetoric, who revelled in the adulation of ordinary representatives and with an ego the size of Canada.
And now Serwotka, with no history of supporting Labour but a lifetime of opposition to it, wants to pay his £3 to support Jeremy Corbyn and according to his wife Ruth he is being “purged”.
Well, welcome to the real world, Marky boy. The real world where you doled out union jobs in the old Wales and South West region of CPSA, not on the basis of ability but on how much they liked you and how they always supported you. The real world where you and the comrades carved up the best jobs and disregarded anyone who didn’t agree with you. Why, you also axed a member of the Militant tendency because she didn’t follow the Serwotka cult, remember? You poor martyr, Mark. You’re not being purged at all because you have always opposed Labour but you know a hell a lot about the subject because that’s what you did, all the time, and never forget it.
The exclusion of Serwotka from the electoral process is a timely reminder of the mess Labour has found itself in and a likely indicator that the man himself is not the only ultra left infiltrator in a wildly discredited electoral system.
And it’s a reminder of how Labour will look when Corbyn wins and the real purge of those who do not share his outdated doctrine will really begin in earnest.
A Labour Party led by Corbyn with Serwotka as a member would not be a party I’d want to be a member of and I find it hard to believe I could vote for it either.
