I AM so proud to be attending the PCS conference for the first time this week since I was elected general secretary. I love this union to bits, and it has got such a brilliant story to tell from the past 12 months.

We’ve been winning on bread-and-butter issues for members and we’ve been fighting on behalf of people all over the world. We’re going to need this determination and fortitude more than ever as this union and the country enter a new era.
 
Our conference this week gives us the chance to reflect on our national campaign and the historic gains that came from it. Our members took a record number of strike days in a winning strategy that included highly effective targeted action and all-member national action.
 
It was because of this action that we drew unprecedented concessions from the government. For the first time, the Civil Service pay remit, which covers the pay of our members, was increased. It wasn’t just increased; it was more than doubled.

We put more money in our members’ pockets, as the pay model also included a cost-of-living payment of £1,500. Elsewhere, the government dropped plans to slash redundancy pay by an eye-watering 33 per cent. It was a stunning victory and shows what this great union can achieve when we unite and fight back.
 
With our union and others taking record levels of strike action and winning, there’s an insatiable appetite from this rotten government to put a stop to it.

Readers might assume that the best and easiest way to head off strike action would be to give workers what they are owed. Well, you’d be wrong.
 
Rather than address the material needs of workers on strike, this government is trying to remove the right to strike itself, with the minimum service levels legislation.

It’s an astonishingly brazen attack on a fundamental human right. I can’t think of a more appropriate manifestation of the Tories’ ideological revulsion at the notion of organised labour than this: issuing work notices to trade unionists and forcing them to cross the picket lines and break their own strikes.
 
It is shameful, and PCS members in the Border Force face the most severe restrictions of the lot. Strikes are now required to have no impact on strike days, which for all intents and purposes is an outright ban on strike action.

That’s why we began legal proceedings and we were recently granted permission by the High Court to pursue a judicial review of the government’s decision to impose minimum service levels. If this government, a government that is in its death throes, thinks it can do away with such a basic human right, it has got another think coming.
 
As grave a threat as this is to our movement, we’ve been here before. Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher wanted to prevent workers at GCHQ from even being a member of a trade union.

Fourteen brave workers stood firm and refused to relinquish this fundamental human right. Their defiance cost them their jobs, and what followed was one of the longest and most high-profile disputes in our movement’s history.
 
We’ll be remembering the 40th anniversary of this dispute here at conference this week. It’s an important and poignant event because four decades on, here we are again: a rotten Tory government taking a sledgehammer to our members’ rights. Minimum service levels are an unprecedented assault and we’ve got to fight it with everything we’ve got.
 
This week we will also be reflecting on the almost certainty that we will have a Labour government before the year is out. Our message to Labour is clear: tinkering around the edges just isn’t good enough and a metaphorical lick of paint at Number 10 from blue to red won’t do. Fourteen years of Tory rule has left this country in ruin, with people poorer, more hopeless and more miserable than ever.
 
Nothing short of bold, radical change from a Labour government will do. And that starts with repealing every single piece of anti-union legislation. While they’re at it, they can fix the completely broken delegated pay system in the Civil Service. It’s a system that entrenches low pay and the inequalities within it.
 
Our class needs drastic change, with economic and industrial power put back in the hands of ordinary people. If not, there is a real danger that five years of a Labour government that doesn’t improve people’s lives, or even makes it worse, will leave the door open for a Tory Party that has shifted even further to the right. The prospect of a far-right government led by fanatics like Suella Braverman should worry us all.
 
What this union has shown over the past 12 months is that for every issue, large and small, we are there fighting by our members’ side and fighting for what’s right. As we look to the future, in what will be a new political era, we will never stop being that beacon of hope for our members and people around the world.

Follow Fran on X @FranHeathcote.