The key topic of discussion for us at conference is obviously the national dispute that we’ve got going with the government. The motion we’ll be debating is not whether we carry on, but it’s how much escalation is now appropriate.  

Our message is that the government doesn’t even deny it is treating our members worse than other public sector workers. We were offered two percent last year. Now they’ve moved to four to five percent. There is no offer of backdated pay and no lump sum, so we’ve been treated worse than everyone else. We will not stop until that is put right. 

In the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), we narrowly missed the threshold for strike action, and we’ve already agreed to quickly move to re-balloting the DWP group. We’re extraordinarily confident that we will get over the threshold, which will add another 40,000 for the national action as soon as possible. 

We had an eve of conference rally last night. We had Eddie Dempsey from the RMT, we had a junior doctor, we had an Amazon worker who was leading a campaign for unionisation in Amazon. It was a big meeting, and the mood was fabulous. This is the biggest industrial dispute there has been in the civil service for decades. We’re gearing up to keep that going unless the government changes its mind and agrees to talk and puts money on the table. We’ll keep sustained action going until Christmas. 

We’re conscious that the Prospect union is taking action and that the FDA union is now balloting for strikes. Having Kevin Courtney from the NEU [National Education Union] here is also a signal that we’re talking to the other unions still in dispute. To shift the government on its five percent offer for 2023 requires quite a lot of cross-public sector coordination. 

The negotiation process in the civil service is like amateur hour. There just aren’t negotiations in the way that the other unions have had; these intense talks where they were locked in for days. None of that goes on with us. In every meeting I’ve been with them, I can tell you their opening line is that this is not a negotiation. It is almost like a little script that they have to give us. You can’t have a negotiation if you haven’t put money on the table. 

If they carry on, they’re going down the road of imposing four and a half or five percent. And I tell you now, the strike will carry on regardless. It doesn’t even make sense from their point of view. You’d think they’d want to find a resolution. We’ve just won a re-ballot for further strike action, and we’re almost certainly going to be escalating action over the summer. If I was in their shoes, I would say it’s time to talk. 

The government has taken an ideological view because they’re the direct employee. They use the civil service to set an example for other workers. My reading was that Jeremy Quin MP [the government’s Paymaster General] had felt the pressure of constantly being bombarded and asked how he sits there knowing the government treat their own staff worse than anyone else. I met Jeremy Quin, and I put it to him directly: Why don’t you come with me now to the job centre or to the passport office and explain how you can look people in the eye and explain why everyone else apart from them is worth a cost-of-living payment? He looked very uncomfortable. You can see everybody else getting something, but you’re getting nothing. My take is that it was a political decision taken somewhere in the Treasury that overruled them. 

Over the period of austerity and everything else, they wanted to set a shocking example for others to follow suit. That ideology has been very hard for them to ditch, particularly when you see minister after minister just trashing the civil service. They have created a real maelstrom of anger. Just look at Jacob Rees-Mogg with his post-it notes on people’s desks when civil servants were working from home. It’s infantile, but actually, it’s designed to undermine the civil service. 

The government is playing with fire by demonising and undermining the civil service. They don’t understand the effect that has on low-paid frontline workers. I’ve just been in the job centres talking to people being forced to work Saturdays, people claiming the same benefits they administer. There is a real crisis of people’s living standards, and the government attacks them every couple of months. They still have an agenda for lots of outsourcing and privatisation. That has a chilling effect of trying to undermine the concept of the state.

I think that speaks to the problem we all have; when people think of a civil servant, they will think of a pinstripe man. People think of Yes Minister. 

We took out advertising when we had one of our first strikes. We went for this very hard-hitting public advertising campaign making the point that every single person in the UK needs a civil servant from cradle to grave, whether that is registering a birth or claiming child benefits. We need to do more to explain what it is we do. 

I’ve been on a lot of picket lines during strikes. You hear bus drivers and passing vehicles beeping their horns in support outside the British Museum and job centres. Solidarity does exist in that way but isn’t reflected in opinion polls because people don’t quite know what civil servants do. We’re not all in Whitehall. From East Kilbride to Newcastle, many of our members are rooted in their communities and do have that support. 

There’s been decades of outsourcing. We’ve adapted and are getting better organised. In a lot of the private companies we were, ironically enough, often winning quicker and better settlements than we are with the government. And then you look how slowly the wheels turn when it’s the government. That said, we do want to campaign on bringing outsourced workers back in house. Not only does that provide a better service, but actually in the long run, that is you will have better pay and conditions.

So, if you look at our rally the other night, Beth Winter [the Labour MP for Cynon Valley] came and gave a brilliant speech. She has worked tirelessly for us; she’s had a debate on civil service pay in Parliament. So, there are good people in the party. What I personally have an issue with is a leader making a dozen pledges and then breaking them. As somebody who makes pledges myself, if you stand on such a platform, you should at least try to implement your pledges. My fear is actually that Labour is potentially hoping to win the election on the back of the Tories being unpopular. And I always think that’s a very risky strategy. They should enthuse people to vote for them with a vision, including a strong vision for public services. Even though Keir Starmer has not agreed to have a meeting with us or responded to our letters, we have met Angela Rayner, and she did put out a very supportive briefing for our last strike on the 28th of April. That was welcomed. I would like them to be much more forceful about support for public services and public service workers.

We would definitely be in favour of mobilising. We are in discussions with the FBU about it. It’s obscene, the idea you can get workers, as Mick Lynch says, conscripted. The law is only as effective as when they’re able to use it. And when they use it often depends on what level of opposition they think there is going to be. We support maximum mobilisation. 

I think we should be doing everything. We’ve had some effective legal victories, and that’s a good part of our armoury. I think alongside that we need a big mobilisation. We need to hold Labour’s feet to the fire on this too. The unions need to get together quickly when all of this stuff becomes a reality, to work out what we can do. The more you’re on the front foot, the better. We’re with the FBU on this.

There is no doubt that if you look at trade union membership, the split between private and public sector is extraordinary. There’s no substitute for getting the union in workplaces, getting a shop steward or a reps structure. And what you find is that if you’re successful, success breeds success. I made the point that we found it easier to win in the private sector than the public sector, but that’s not reflected in union membership across the board. There needs to be less inter-union competition. I have seen areas where a union has a recognition agreement but doesn’t have any members. It’s absurd. There needs to be much more cross-union belief that we’re actually all in it to benefit working women and men, not just grow our own numbers. And I think the trade union movement has got to look itself in the mirror over how it often squabbles over where twenty members in a workplace lie without asking yourself why there are two-hundred workers not in any union at all. So to me, it is getting into the workplaces, which is why I think this Amazon stuff is so exciting. At the end of the day, for the success of all unions, it’s got to be based on the most important thing: having a rep in the workplace who can deal with those issues and support workers properly.