Tuesday 19 February 2013

Why is my union (PCS) involved with this nonsense

Thirty years ago the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist group buried inside the Labour Party had amongst other things taken control of Liverpool Council. They made a right bloody mess of it too! Will anybody forget Neil Kinnock's famous speech;

'I'l tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-dated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council! – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, and you'll listen, you can't play politics with people's jobs and people's services.

This marked the beginning of the end for the Militant inside the Labour Party. For nearly two decades or more Militant (real name the Revolutionary Socialist League) had been practising the trotskyist policy of "entrism" trying to turn large sections of the Labour Party into a Marxist organisation. At the time of Kinnock's speech they had taken control of the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) , had control of a number of Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and had three MPs.

Along with the rest of the so-called Labour Left, they had made Labour unelectable. The situation in Liverpool however got out of control for the Militant comrades as their Liverpool Council was forced to lay off its' workers using taxis to deliver the redundancy notices.

Today the Militant tendency is a lot smaller than it was then and has changed its' name to the Socialist Party. It does have a presence in some trade unions, in particular the PCS civil service union, which it dominates in conjuction with Mark Serwotka and the Socialist Workers Party. The union is often used by these groups for the benefit of their projects.

The latest wheeze is to sponsor an Exibition devoted to the lunacy of the Militants time at the helm of Liverpool Council. The PCS website promotes the following meeting;


Exhibition: Liverpool Socialist Council 1983-1987

27 April 2013
This exhibition marks the 30th anniversary of the election of the Liverpool Socialist Council in May 1983.  The exhibition shows that in the three years prior to 1983, some £120 million had been slashed from Liverpool City Council's budget by the Tory government.  The socialist Labour council of 1983 refused to implement Tory cuts and instead led a mass campaign of resistance.
Meeting will commence at 10:30am at the Adelphi Hotel, doors open at 9:30am to view the exhibition.  Speakers include Len McCluskey (General Secretary of Unite the Union), Janice Godrich (President of PCS) and Tony Benn.

You can find the flyer for the meeting here:

http://dontmentionthe47.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/liverpool-exhibition-flyer/

What any of this has to do with our union is anybodies guess. If the comrades want to celebrate the failure of socialism I'd rather they didn't drag PCS into it. Perhaps Janice can tell us how much the union is spending on this ridiculous event. I'd love to know, because as far as I'm concerned its not worth a penny of anyones subscriptions.

PCS have also been promoting their own alternative to the current economic crisis. If this is an example of their socialism god help us.

Still the nations taxi drivers might make a few quid!

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