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STOP PRESS: Bristol & District, Kent Invicta, South East Wales, Newcastle, Leicester South, Central No1, South East No.5, Essex, North West Central, Western Counties, Bournemouth & Dorset, Watford, Kingston, Southdowns – have all rejected the deal! Email in to add your branch to the growing list!
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As soon as the details of the Communication Workers Union leadership's recommended deal to end the postal dispute began to seep out, a rising tide of anger began to swell across the mail centres and delivery offices. Within hours of area and workplace reps being told, RoyalMailChat.co.uk, the unofficial rank and file website, had 11 pages of irate comments from militants disgusted at the deal. The officials, led by Billy Hayes and Dave Ward, had conceded on every single point to the employers' business plan.

The contradiction at the base of the CWU, however, is that this high level of awareness and militancy among the rank and file has no permanent organised expression. Twice in recent months, strikes, 95 per cent solid, broke the postal system, and wildcat strikes spread like wild fire. Twice Royal Mail and the Labour government took fright and agreed to negotiate a deal. Twice, the union bureaucracy - that caste of over-paid officials, whose function is to act as go-betweens for the capitalist managers to the workers - came to the rescue, calling off the strikes and entering into secret talks. While the wildcats could escalate the strikes, they did not have an independent organisation to combat the leaderships' demobilisation tactics.

The importance of the London meeting on Saturday 27 October was that it established such an organisation. As Dave Chapple (Bristol and District) made clear to the meeting, such an organisation is needed not only to maximise the "No" vote by ensuring as much debate at branch and workplace level, and as many members understand the implications of the deal as possible, but also afterwards:

"We haven't had an activists' network in the CWU for some time. There's 30 people in this room, but we represent 20... 30... 40,000 [who reject this deal]... We should set up a permanent network and immediately reconvene if we get a 'No' vote to campaign for resumption of the strikes. If not, we should still campaign to make sure it doesn't happen again - ever."

Spot on. There was no dissent on this perspective. Not only did the sell-out by the leadership necessitate a co-ordinated campaign, but the comrades in the room knew that they represented more than just themselves. They represented some of the most militant and best organised sections of the union: east London, south-east London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, and Rathbone Place and Mount Pleasant in central London. In addition, CWU activists from Leeds, Coventry, north and south-west London and Essex all spoke, while apologies were received from Scotland, Newcastle, Stockport and Luton.

Dave Warren (south-east London), one of only four members of the postal executive (PEC), who voted against the deal, also addressed the meeting. But unlike most trade union meetings, he spoke last, and emphasised that he was at the service of the campaign, rather than there to set its parameters.

The "No" campaign
A detailed and extensive discussion of the wording in the deal revealed the full extent of the sell-out. Workers Power has covered much of this in detail (Vote "No" in the ballot) and Dave Chapple and Pete Firmin (Rathbone Place) also brought a leaflet with their observations. Others uncovered further pitfalls.
• Any fight to bring posties' wages up to the national average (union conference policy) would be put off till April 2009
• The £175 lump sum, dangled in front of the members just before Christmas, is theirs, anyway - deal or no deal. It is part of the Employee Share of Savings (ESOS) scheme.
• April 2009's 1.5 per cent offer is contingent on postal workers achieving 100 per cent of the flexibility aims - otherwise we get nothing. But who will decide whether this has been achieved? Management!
• The reason for the pensions "crisis" is that Royal Mail gave itself a payments "holiday" (i.e. they failed to pay into it) for 17 years - though the deal fails to mention this fact.
• A settlement on pensions will be deferred while the union seeks "legal consultation" - but the union fails to mention its aim to fight for decent pensions, and has already conceded ground in principle.
• There is not a word in the deal about dropping disciplinary charges against reps, and reinstating sacked militants, not a word about Mail Centre closures. A return to work agreement like this would never be signed at local level.

A steering committee was elected at the end of the meeting to write a leaflet containing these points and others. The plan now is to get these distributed to as many areas as possible before branch and workplace meetings to discuss the deal take place. The campaign will also try and convene regional meetings - essential since branches loyal to the leadership, and those that simply write in to the CWU head office in Wimbledon will be allocated a pro-deal speaker. Dave Warren explained, "Even if I was the only PEC member available to do the meeting, they still wouldn't ask me to do it."

Where was Jane Loftus?
No one was under the illusion that this would be an easy fight, far from it. There was a working atmosphere to the meeting, as comrades put forward suggestions and asked questions about how to maximise the "No" vote. The campaign will go to Organising For Fighting Unions and the National Shop Stewards Network to ask for assistance. More surprisingly, a number of militants asked if anyone knew who was in charge of Post Worker, the supposed rank and file paper set up and controlled by the Socialist Workers Party. Although it has been dormant since the start of the strike, a new issue will now appear - thanks to the new campaign, rather than the SWP. If anyone had any illusions in Post Worker being more than another of the SWP's "united fronts of a special type" then their eyes will have been opened by now.

While there were a handful of SWP militants at the meeting, there was one noticeable party absentee: Jane Loftus, President of the CWU and PEC member. Andy Young rightly demanded that Loftus openly campaign for a "No" vote and called on SWP members and leaders - Charlie Kimber, the party's industrial organiser, was an observer to the meeting - to instruct her to do so. But Dave Warren seemed to suggest that this would now be difficult, since the union rules stipulate that executive members can only subsequently campaign against majority decisions if they immediately registered their dissent. Only he and Phil Brown (Newcastle) of the PEC minority had done so.

While many activists will be personally disappointed about Loftus' cowardly refusal to break ranks with the sell-out merchants, it is in fact another example of the SWP's policy of covering for the TUC (fake) lefts. Throughout the dispute, neither Socialist Worker nor any of the party's leaflets have openly criticised Dave Ward or Billy Hayes: not when they limited the action to sectional, rolling disputes, not when they called off the action and entered secret talks, not when they caved in before the high courts and the anti-union laws.

Sure, there were criticisms of some of the tactics "in hindsight", and jointly signed statements from "Socialist Worker supporters in Royal Mail" have demanded more action and warned against the sell-out. Not once has the SWP warned that the union bureaucracy will sabotage the struggle, and that the rank and file members at local and national level need to organise independently, be prepared to act without the leadership's approval, and take democratic control of the action and the negotiations. Even the party's bulletin issued after the deal came out fails to draw these crucial lessons.

The SWP's policy of providing uncritical support for the TUC "lefts" has in recent years replaced the previous emphasis on building at the base of the unions. Buoyed by having got most of the union leaders to appear on antiwar platforms in 2003, the party shut down any criticism of the lefts, and shielded them from any calls to action. The role of the rank and file was reduced to rallying support for the officials when they fought - and mildly regretting "mistakes" when they didn't.

An independent course was ruled out. Indeed, would the SWP have even supported this meeting, had not Dave Chapple and Pete Firmin via the NSSN, and Andy Young (Leeds) via OFFU not demanded it?

Now the party's cheerleading of the so-called "awkward squad" appears to have caught out another of the party's most prominent trade unionists, Jane Loftus. After the public sector pensions debacle two years ago, the party had a similar falling out with its members on the Public and Commercial Services union executive, who voted for a deal that sold away the rights of new entrants and reduced the benefits of the rest. While Sue Bond recanted and remains an SWP member, Martin John took the logical step, after years of being encouraged to support Mark Serwotka uncritically, and left the party. Will Jane Loftus follow the footsteps of Bond or Martin? Or will there be a fudge?

Vote "No" and re-start the strikes!
The "No" campaign is now up and running. Every effort must be made to ensure it wins. Postal worker support groups and public sector pay campaigns should put their resources at the disposal of the campaign, leafleting, for example, the 150 main delivery units where there is no CWU rep. Because Royal Mail - quite possibly in collusion with the union apparatus - will pounce on any activists campaigning in their workplaces, supporters can help dish out leaflets at the gates.

There is no dividing line between this sort of campaigning and strike action. Indeed, even while the meeting took place, wildcat strikes were off the leash in Carlisle and Belfast. More in the coming few weeks were expected. While the meeting agreed to support all unofficial strikes, and to point out that a resumption of industrial action could win more concessions, it did not endorse a call from Workers Power supporters at the meeting "to act without the approval of Billy Hayes, Dave Ward and the executive where necessary".

Activists with many years experience thought this was not necessary because they have the constitutional right to campaign for a "No" vote. Fine. But every rank and file grouping sooner or later comes up against this question - to fight without and against the union bureaucracy, or to submit. We believe that this new network of CWU activists will be no different. In fact, we are confident that the comrades can build on the CWU's magnificent tradition of unofficial action, and provide leadership to the wildcatters, so that the next time they bring Royal Mail to its knees, they - not the bureaucrats - control whether, when, and under what conditions, chairman Allan Leighton and chief executive Adam Crozier can get back up.