How did Jane Loftus vote?

The postal CWU does not have a rank and file movement, or even an organised left like many unions. However it does have Jane Loftus, CWU president, Chair of the Postal Executive Committee, and member of the Socialist Workers Party.

The problem is, the CWU website states “The Postal Executive unanimously endorsed the attached agreement.” Loftus is on the PEC – did she vote for the Interim Agreement, and pulling the national strike for a fake period of calm?

If instead she was absent, then she ducked a fight on the key issue on which the CWU’s fate hinges, the strike going forward. She dropped the opportunity to lead a union-wide resistance against this betrayal from her high-profile, national post – hardly better.

The SWP is silent on the question, even though Loftus wrote a piece in the paper as recently as the 24 October edition. As the SWP calls on postal workers to join them, they need to explain where their leading PEC member stands.

Loftus has never actively organised against any of the crap agreements that the CWU leadership have cut over the last few years, signing away our jobs and conditions for a bit of extra pay. But SWP members have always defended Loftus, stressing she has at least voted the right way and is able to argue on the PEC against sell-outs and backward steps.

But just sitting and voting on committees is what a left-wing bureaucrat does. The Socialist approach, as the slogan goes, is to “Educate, Agitate, Organise” for workers’ interests and against those who would sell them short, not just vote the right way. And this isn’t the first time Loftus has voted the wrong way, since she voted for the 2003/4 Major Change agreement.

Along with the stop-start failure of the SWP front Postworker over the years, the failures to hold Loftus to account shows up the holes in the SWP’s strategy. Without consistently fighting for rank and file control of the strike and the union, they fall into a broad left strategy and an uncritical bloc with leftwing officials – and their own member turns into one.

For instance, not once over the last year of Royal Mail executive action have they sought to use their base to call a conference of the fighting wing of the union, so that we could develop an alternative leadership and avoid just this sort of sell-out occuring.

Now the SWP says nothing about Loftus, and lamely argues that “The only course of action is for union activists to put up the most determined resistance at a local level, while arguing hard for the return of national action.”

In 2004 when two SWP members on the civil servants PCS union executive voted with the Socialist Party to accept a rotten pension deal, the SWP demanded they disown their vote or get kicked out. Loftus is no different.

Of course we should argue for a return to action in our branches, regions and at the upcoming National Briefing for local officials and reps. But these structures are not enough, the militant wing needs to organise itself nationally, and decide on a course of action. Will the SWP and Loftus use their leverage to call and build a conference of every member, rep and branch against the Interim Agreement?

Such a national meeting could debate a strategy to restart the national strike and take it out of the hands of Hayes, Ward, the PEC – and Jane Loftus too unfortunately. The Anticapitalism event next weekend is one place to start such a debate.