18.05.1995

Left impotence in CPSA

SINCE 1979 the Civil Service has lost 250,000 jobs. In the next three years a further 100,000 jobs are intended to be cut. Next year, despite the six-month delay announced this week, the Job Seekers Allowance will be introduced, which will lead to a massive assault on the unemployed, civil service jobs and conditions, and the welfare benefits system in general. Against this background the 1995 conference of the largest civil service union should have been an organising centre for resistance. Instead it brought to the fore the arrogance of the bureaucracy and the impotence of the ‘Broad Left’ opposition.

For eight years the National Moderate Group has dominated the CPSA as one of the most entrenched, rightist bureaucracies in the British trade union movement. The CPSA today has a fighting fund of over £4 million, yet there is no action, no campaigns. Of course, it is the nature of the bureaucracy to retard and betray struggles. The CPSA is just a more extreme case.

The Job Seekers Allowance is an attack on the entire working class, so the current position of the CPSA is of strategic importance for what is potentially a major class battle ahead. This conference should have been the launch for such a fight by the left not only to remove this leadership, but to defend our class as a whole.

Instead the 1995 conference has seen the left, Militant Labour in particular, truly sink into a political gutter. For years the tradition of the left in the CPSA has concentrated on ‘unity’. Not unity based on mobilising the rank and file in defence of its own interests against the bosses and the bureaucrats. No, unity of left ‘leaders’ in smoke filled rooms, drawing up election strategies. This electoralism has led to self-imposed isolation.

This year Broad Left/Militant Labour turned to the capitalist state in the form of the Commissioner for the Rights of Trade Union Members, which was established so that scabs could take their own union to the High Court.

The so-called Left Unity has responded to rightwing electoral manoeuvring, not by campaigning amongst members, but by using the bosses’ own state bodies.

The 1995 conference was flooded with fudge motions dressed in radical rhetoric. The only significant section of the left in the CPSA to distance itself from this rightward shift has been Socialist Caucus and its magazine Rank and File.

In the face of an entrenched bureaucracy, and the failure of the left, the way ahead was shown by Rank and File. “There are no quick fixes,” the magazine states. We added: “The solution to the problems of who runs the CPSA, in whose interests, will only be solved when we have a powerful workplace organisation at our disposal.”

It is a task which grows ever more urgently each day.

Chris Ford (Chair CPSA, West London and Uxbridge BA, Personal capacity)