The Friday joke: civil servants win legal battle against boss Eric Pickles

I was tickled to see this week that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles was taken to the High Court by his own departmental staff over attacks on their union PCS. And that he lost.

I have a friend or two in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and I know they have had a very hard time recently trying to represent the interests of their members at the same as they are no longer given time off work to do union duties, and the union has been banned even from meeting on the premises.

In the same way that Pickles offered his own departmental spending as a sacrificial lamb in the Spending Review, promising savage cuts to local government spending, for example, for which we are all paying now in reduced and privatised services, he has also dumped on his very own departmental staff.

The main dispute that the union went to the High Court over is the plan to stop "check-off" whereby union dues are collected at source from wages. 

Pickles prides himself on representing the interests of local taxpayers. In Barnet he has had, albeit obliquely, to apologise for the sneering attitude towards democracy of the local Tories. I give credit where it's due, and I acknowledge Pickles' solicitude for the rights of the little man and woman against Town Hall bureaucrats, where the Town Hall does act like bureaucrats.

Pickles, apparently, was a socialist in his youth but he abandoned socialism when the Russian tanks went into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring democratisation movement. When we organised our Barnet Spring march in the snow earlier this year, that was one of the echoes that gave our protest more poignancy.

However, just like many a leftist who ended up backing and apologising for vicious dictatorships just because they weren't Western imperialists, the politics of the Cold War seem to have disorientated Pickles and he went over to the right and joined the forces of Conservatism.

I would argue that it is a mistake to conclude that your enemy's enemy is your friend but, as far as I can see, that is what Pickles has done. From siding with the working class, he went over to the enemy, and has been batting for the rich ever since.

Now Pickles needs to remember that the people working in his own department are little men and women as well, who deserve to be supported against their own species of bureaucrat - their bosses. Trade unions serve such a purpose and always have - and always will. You can't kill the spirit.

Arguably, the key force that began the process that led to the collapse of the Soviet empire was the inspiring Polish Solidarnosc (Solidarity) trade union.

Alas, there is every likelihood that Pickles will appeal against this week's court ruling.

I would urge everyone who has drawn some comfort from Pickles' well-aimed jibes against Barnet's Tory Council to help him see sense over this issue. Send a message to Pickles via Twitter - @EricPickles - and watch for developments on the PCS website. Tell Pickles - hands off PCS!

1989-2009 - truly an anniversary to celebrate

It started with a trade union? The Polish Solidarnosc (Solidarity) trade union was founded during strikes in the Gdansk shipyard in 1980-81 and continued underground after being repressed. In 1988-89 it played a vital role in ending the Communist regime in Poland.

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I think socialists - and you should know by now that I am one - need to say where they stand on 1989, the year the Berlin Wall was torn down, the clearest symbol of the end (almost) of east European and Russian Communism. The most recent and possibly grimmest 20-year anniversary was that of the execution, on Christmas Day, 1989, of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife.

For me, then as now, the end of Ceauşescu's brand of political and economic rule is something to celebrate. That doesn't mean that I have to approve of everything that has followed in its wake. It doesn't make me a fan of rampant capitalism to say that I hate Stalinism.

I won't go into detail, as readers are probably not interested in the internecine struggles of the far-left. But I can tell you that the group I was associated with in 1989, and still am, was far-left and called itself 'Trotskyist', but had recently come to the - to most people obvious but to the left decidedly awkward - conclusion that Russia and the Soviet bloc countries did not represent, in however 'deformed or degenerated' a way, an advance on capitalism. Indeed, we believed that in many ways they were - gasp! - regressive compared to capitalism.

Shortly after and obviously quite independent of this 'change of line' by a tiny British Trot group, the whole east European Stalinist edifice came crashing down.

Much of the left actually mourned this. Militant, forerunner of the Socialist Party, cheered Romanian miners, supporters of Ceauşescu's regime, when they were mobilised to beat up 'petty-bourgeois' students demonstrating for democracy. Socialist Action, with whom the recently deceased aide to Ken Livingstone Redmond O'Neill was involved, wrote in 1990:

"The destruction of at least some of the workers' states in Eastern Europe, and the imperialist reunification of Germany are both the greatest defeats suffered by the working class since World War 2..."

I think such attitudes were wrong, thought so then and think so now: 1989 was a great revolution, a liberation from a terrible tyranny.

OK, you might charge, I want my cake and eat it? Since 1989 it has been easier than ever for those who think capitalism is the best economic and political system humanity can devise to point to the great, failed 'socialist' experiment as negative proof they are right.

Of course, you can't sum up 200-odd years of history in a blogpost (what fool would try?), but my simple answer is: socialism is a creation of capitalism, it grows out of capitalism. There is nothing inevitable about it, but it is, in many ways, a natural development of capitalism. It certainly isn't possible in conditions of scarcity. Yet, for historic reasons, because socialism was attempted in the impoverished east rather than the affluent west, it failed. If you were to look for a simple explanation for this error, it would be the failure of the German revolution (yes, I'm going back almost 100 years) and the failure of the Communist parties of western Europe to stand by the Communist parties of the east, leaving the socialist 'experiment' isolated, and, during the Russian Civil War, besieged by capitalist powers.

What is very clear is that there can be no socialism without democracy.

All of this might seem completely whacko and beside the point to readers - who are possibly somewhat interested in my views on the sheltered wardens cuts or Barnet 'Future Shape' - but I thought I must, before 2009 is out, give a basic outline of my thinking on these matters; or, in a sense, excuse myself from the failure of east European communism.

On a personal note, if for no other reason than that it (almost) ended the horrendous Cold War, which cast a  shadow over my own life as I grew up, along with everyone else's, 1989 is a year I remember with relief and joy.