Emancipation & Liberation

INTRODUCTION

The rise and initial success of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), between 1998-2004, was a significant historical event, not only for the history of the Left in Scotland (with knock-on effects in the UK and Europe), but also in the wider world of Scottish politics. It is therefore vital that we account for this success, despite the SSP’s subsequent fall from grace. This record can not just be left to cynical media and academic figures who have claimed that the SSP project was always doomed from the start, so we should all just accept the current world order and make the best of it.  Nor can we leave the accounting to those Jeremiahs in their ‘revolutionary’ sects, who cover their own inability to grow significantly, by issuing their anathemas and pouring scorn on those who try.

Before the First World War, Rosa Luxemburg said that the choice facing humanity then was ‘Socialism or Barbarism’. Istvan Meszaros has modified this for today’s crisis-ridden world of corporate imperialism, with its austerity drives, mounting environmental degradation, and the continued threat to humanity posed by weapons of mass destruction. He claims that the choice we face now is  – ‘Socialism or barbarism if we are lucky’!

Therefore, to provide new hope, we must account for the factors that contributed to the initial success of the SSP, and see what can still be useful in the future. However, any meaningful accounting also means identifying those weaknesses, which contributed to the SSP’s decline, so that these are not repeated.

Many, from either side of the ‘Tommygate’ divide, still hold fond enough memories of “the good old days” before the split, to hope that something like the SSP can be built again. Recently, some have even been tempted to say, “Let us forgive and forget”. This may sound attractive, in the face of the current unprecedented attacks on our class. However, such a stance would just lead to the repeat of earlier mistakes, perhaps in more desperate situations.

This contribution, which is also based on a strong desire to rebuild that lost unity, argues that to be successful in such an endeavour, we need instead to ‘listen, learn and then move on’. Then we can indeed recreate socialist unity, but on a higher basis. We must take account of those challenges, which the SSP failed to meet, to better prepare ourselves for those that we will certainly meet in the future.

1. THE STRENGTHS OF THE SSP

a)          Politics

The drive for greater socialist unity in Scotland originated in the experience of the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign. This drew together socialists and communists from diverse backgrounds in a successful struggle against the Tories and their official Labour Party helpers – one of the very few.  Later campaigns against water privatisation, the Criminal Justice Bill, and in support of the Liverpool Dockers, also brought socialists and communists in Scotland together in common campaigns.

Militant, a section of the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), led by Peter Taffe, had learned, through the bitter experience of the Liverpool Council Fightback and the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign, that conducting a successful major struggle was incompatible with membership of the Labour Party (LP), and that Labour is an anti-working class party that acts as a block to socialism.

The CWI majority (1) formed Scottish Militant Labour (SML) to challenge Labour more effectively. However, SML went beyond this, and drew upon the experience of those earlier working class campaigns. With the help of others, they initiated the wider Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA), in 1996, to draw in these forces, as well as those members in the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP) concerned about their parties’ rightwards drift. In the process, the CWI in Scotland changed from being the organisationally independent SML to becoming the International Socialist Movement (ISM), a platform in the new SSA. They called for the unity of socialists in Scotland.

The size of SML/ISM was important. Others had called for socialist unity before the SML had been able to ditch its Labour Party entrist past, and to seriously consider such an initiative.  However, it needed an organisation with a certain critical mass to make any such unity initiative gel.  In Ireland, for example, there have been a number of politically experienced people who were inspired by the example of the SSA/SSP. They formed the Irish Socialist Network to bring about such socialist unity there. However, they have not had the critical mass to create an Irish Socialist Alliance, then to build this up into an Irish Socialist Party.

The ISM wanted to build a wider organisation, which was not just a front for its own tendency – something that proved a stumbling block with the Socialist Alliance in England. This problem was highlighted there by the competitive sectarianism of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the CWI/Socialist Party (SP) (as Militant later became in England and Wales).

The ISM also wanted the SSA to move quickly beyond being an alliance, which might end up as little more than an electoral non-aggression pact between different participating organisations. Today, in Ireland, this remains a strong danger with the recently formed United Left Alliance (ULA). The ULA is heavily constrained in any attempt to move forwards to a new united party by the desire of its two major components, the CWI/SP-Ireland and People before Profit (an Irish SWP front), to preserve their own control above all else. The SSA, however, was able to move on and become the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in 1998.

When it was founded, the SSA drew in other political groups or some of their key activists. Allan Green had pushed from the start to get the Socialist Movement (socialists in the LP) signed up, whilst Bill Bonnar of the Communist Party of Scotland, and George Mackin, former member of the editorial board of Liberation (socialist Republicans in the SNP) joined up.  Members of the Trotskyist United Secretariat for the Fourth International (USFI) in Scotland joined, although they did not constitute themselves as a platform. The Red Republicans, who emerged from the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle in the Lothians, and the Dundee-based Campaign for a Federal Republic also joined. These two organisations later merged, on a new political basis, to form another SSA platform, the Republican Communist Network (RCN). The SSA soon threw itself into activity in support of the Glacier workers’ occupation in Glasgow, then in a variety of actions to save schools and other council facilities.

By 2002, all the major political groups in Scotland were in one political organisation (2) – the SSP. The SSP eventually included left Scottish nationalists, e.g. the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM), many in the ISM, and some ex-SNP’ers; left British unionists, e.g. the CWI, SWP, Workers Unity (3) and some ex-Labourists; and socialist republicans, e.g. the RCN and others. Key figures from the Labour and SNP Lefts joined, e.g. John McAllion and Ron Brown (ex-Labour MPs), Hugh Kerr (ex-Labour MEP), Lloyd Quinan (ex-SNP MSP). The SSP included socialist and radical Feminists, and a small number of green Socialists (4).

Tommy Sheridan (former SML) was elected to Holyrood in 1999. He was re-elected, along with Frances Curran and Colin Fox (both former SML), Rosemary Byrne (former president of Irvine Trades Council), Carolyn Leckie (prominent Unison activist and strike leader) and Rosie Kane (environmental activist), in 2003. An impressive 117,709 votes were gained in this election. Keith Baldassara (former SML) and Jim Bollan (former CP member and Labour leader of Dunbartonshire Council) were also elected as local councillors. This was a considerable achievement. It showed that the SSP had become an important force amongst a significant section of class-conscious workers in Scotland.

SSP MSPs were seen to give public support to workers in struggle, including nursery nurses and working class communities occupying threatened public services. Tommy had been very publicly arrested in 2003, whilst Rosie was jailed for failing to pay a fine in 2005, as a result of the protests they made at the Faslane nuclear base. This highlighted the SSP’s policy of committing its elected representatives to taking direct action when it was deemed appropriate. The SSP policy of having a worker’s representative on a worker’s wage was actually implemented by the SSP MSPs between 1999 and 2007.

The SSP provided inspiration for the Socialist Alliances in England and Wales, and for the Irish Socialist Network. It also formed a part of the new European Anti-Capitalist Left (EACL). The SSP inspired the USFI, including its largest European section, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) in France. They later went on to form the wider New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) in 2009.

After the split in 2006, the SSP continued to form part of the EACL, standing candidates under its banner in the Euro-elections of 2009, whilst the breakaway Solidarity retreated into the left British chauvinism of the No2EU campaign (5).

The SSP played a prominent part in the build-up of the Anti-War Movement, beginning in October 2001 with its principled and active opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and culminating, on February 15^th 2003, with the massive Anti-Iraq War demonstration in Glasgow, led by the Stop the War Coalition (6). The many marches, held all over the world on that day, formed the largest international demonstration yet witnessed.

The SSP played the leading part in organising the wider European Left opposition to the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in July 2005. Four of its MSPs, Carolyn, Colin, Frances and Rosie organised a protest in Holyrood against its failure to stand up to US/UK security force attempts to severely curtail the right to protest at Gleneagles. The four MSPs were suspended and the party was heavily fined. This led to international solidarity, including support from the acclaimed black poet, Benjamin Zephaniah (7).

The SSA and SSP leaderships recognised that there is a National Question in Scotland and that socialists should consciously address it. Although left Scottish nationalism remained a strong pull on the leaderships of the SSA and later the SSP, republicanism made considerable inroads. The party backed the Calton Hill Declaration, and the successful protest at the royal opening of the new Scottish Parliament building on October 9^th, 2004. This was the last SSP big event to gain favourable wider publicity (8).

The SSP contained a well-organised Feminist element with articulate women prominent in the party. The hotly debated and controversial 50:50 rule, addressing the issue of women’s representation at all levels of the party, was passed at the SSP’s 2002 Conference in Dundee. This contributed to the election of four women out of a total of six SSP MSPs in May 2003 – the highest percentage for any party in Europe.

The SSP was also able to draw support from influential cultural figures, e.g. the Proclaimers, Belle and Sebastian, Peter Mullen and Ken Loach.

At the height of its success between 1999 and 2004, the SSP enabled socialist politics to gain a public visibility. This meant that the ideas put forward by openly declared socialists became the topic of conversation, discussion and debate in workplaces and communities throughout Scotland.

b)          Organisation

With the founding of the SSA in 1996, the CWI/SML committed its resources and experienced organisers, at national and local level, to the new organisation. As ISM platform members, they took responsibility for developing the SSA, and later the SSP. However, in many areas, particularly where there was little or no ISM presence, other experienced socialist and communist activists played a key role in developing local branches, and exerting pressure to ensure that democratic practice became more embedded in the SSA and SSP, and to encourage the development of an open, non-sectarian culture.

A majority amongst the ISM, who constituted the SSA and SSP leaderships, appreciated the need to exercise a less tight political control over the SSA and SSP membership than the CWI leadership had desired. The ISM was more prepared to listen to suggestions from people who came from other political backgrounds, and with these comrades’ help, the SSA was able to develop open active branches and democratic structures.

Thus, the ISM majority (9) made a considerable contribution to building a wider more inclusive SSA (later SSP). This provided a striking contrast to the behaviour and unity initiatives undertaken by their original CWI mentors. The CWI/SP walked out of the Socialist Alliance in England, when they could not dominate it  (that role was left to the SWP!). Their Campaign for a New Workers Party has proved abortive, because of its inability to attract or hold on to wider socialist forces, whilst the Trade Union and Socialist (electoral) Coalition is turned on and off according to the needs of the CWI/SP. The CWI (and SWP) treats any unity initiative either as a ‘party’-front or as a recruiting ground. Therefore, the ISM’s support for developing an inclusive multi-platform party did represent a considerable achievement, and a big break from the Left’s past sectarian practice.

Platform rights were allowed and respected to a considerable degree. The SSA and SSP constituted a united front of self-declared revolutionaries and left reformists. Comrades could openly state their support for revolutionary politics. A real culture of debate and comradeliness developed in the SSA and SSP, which for a time was even able to rein in some of the sectarian practices of the CWI and SWP (10).

Despite some undoubted remaining problems, the SSA and SSP were more democratic than all previous left groups in Scotland and the wider UK. SSA and SSP conferences were organised where genuine debates took place in a largely comradely fashion. Attractive ‘Socialism’ events, with outside speakers, were also organised.

SSP branches were soon formed in every part of Scotland, including the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland. This represented the most extensive support for socialist politics in Scotland that had been achieved so far.

 2)      THE WEAKNESSES OF THE SSP

 a)         Politics

The development and handling of ‘Tommygate’ turned out to be the most public failing of the SSP. One effect of this was to disguise some other weaknesses, which would undoubtedly have emerged more clearly after the election of its six MSPs in 2003. The political conditions, which led to these other problems, were created by the international Left’s inability to prevent the Iraq War in 2003, and the decline of working class action in the UK, including Scotland.

The electoral setbacks of the European Left in subsequent (pre-2007 Crash) elections, including those in Italy, France and Ireland, demonstrated this. The Scottish Greens also lost five of their seven MSPs in 2007. If ‘Tommygate’ had not happened then the SSP would still probably have been reduced from six to one MSP in that election – i.e. Tommy. And he thought he was smart in helping to create Solidarity as his own special fan club to further advance his own celebrity politics!

Yet, there had been no prior public questioning in the SSP of the promotion of the Tommy ‘myth’. This failing was to have dire consequences. When ‘Tommygate’ erupted in 2004, the leadership was left floundering over how to deal with a ‘Tommy’ who had been their very own creation. This confused many members and supporters who began to look elsewhere – often either to the SNP, or even back to the Labour Party.

Remarkably, as Tommy had moved further and further into the world of celebrity politics (aided by his new wife, Gail, whom he married in 2000), the SSP leadership allowed him to build up an entirely new public image for himself as the Daniel O’Donnell of the Left. (He later utilised this in court to claim his leisure activities were largely confined to playing Scrabble with Gail!) This involved publicly turning his back on his pre-marriage image as the Errol Flynn of the Left (which he wistfully recalled in his chats with Coolio on Big Brother).

Key SSP leadership figures knew from early on that this new public image was false, but did not challenge Tommy’s hypocrisy. However, even if Tommy had been able to make a ‘Doris Day’ (11) like conversion, socialists should still not have been involved in allowing the public promotion of such a conservative, 1950’s, family man image.

When Solidarity was formed in 2006, it became, in effect, the Continuity Sheridan-SSP. Celebrity politics were enshrined at its founding conference, with the virtual anointment of Tommy by his mother, Alice Sheridan.  With Tommy in prison for the 2011 Holyrood election, Solidarity sought a new celebrity candidate in the form of George Galloway, accountable to nobody but himself.

The resort to celebrity politics was not, however, rejected in principle by the SSP leadership after the split. An attempt was made by the SSP International Committee to highlight this wider problem amongst the Left in Britain (e.g. Derek Hatton, Ken Livingstone, Arthur Scargill and George Galloway), in a leaflet for the 2008 Convention of the Left in Manchester. However, a section of the SSP leadership suppressed this because it might have upset Galloway and his supporters (12).

Celebrity politics, however, are just one aspect of a wider populism, which avoids the open promotion of socialist politics. Promoting populism is a quite different matter to promoting popular politics in order to extend openly socialist ideas beyond their traditional narrow organisational confines. Populist politics, which downplay the centrality of the working class, have often revealed themselves in the SSP. Although the SSP stood as part of the EACL in the 2009 Euro-elections, it ditched the EACL’s own slogan, ‘Make the Bosses Pay for their Crisis’, and retreated to the vacuous, non-class specific, ‘Make Greed History’ (13).

This resort to left populism, though, was not as bad as Solidarity’s support for No2EU’s, ‘No to social dumping’ – a right populist, thinly disguised racist attack on migrant workers, reminiscent of the NF/BNP/Gordon Brown call for ‘British jobs for British workers’.

One reason for resorting to populism is the fact that those coming from the CWI tradition never developed an adequate understanding of what constitutes socialism/communism. Up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CWI largely equated socialism with nationalisation. Although the weaknesses in this position have been recognised by those who have moved away from the CWI, there has been no real attempt to develop a new clearly articulated socialism/communism, which could effectively challenge a capitalism very much now in crisis since the 2008 Financial Crash.

Part of the problem lies with the CWI’s long sojourn within the Labour Party, where they began to adapt to the reformist milieu they were working with. Whereas Marx had viewed the state as a machine designed to perpetuate the rule of capital, backed by “a body of armed men”; those from a CWI background tended to see the existing state as being in the hands of the wrong people – the capitalist class – instead of the representatives of the working class. In particular, they had looked forward to a future elected Labour government, pledged to socialist policies, ‘capturing’ this state, passing an Enabling Act and nationalising the top 200 companies. But the capitalist state can not be equated with its ‘representative’ institutions – behind these lie the ruling class’s ‘deep state’ with its military, security, judicial and other bodies, all beyond our effective accountability, ready to bypass parliament, and to take ruthless action against any fundamental challenges from our class.

Therefore, the solutions offered by the leaderships of SSP and Solidarity (where the SWP also avoids offering any socialist strategy), to meet the current crisis of capitalism, tend to be national reformist. They stretch from a call for neo-Keynesian state economic intervention to demands for nationalisation  - i.e. from left Labourism to old style, orthodox Marxist-Leninism. The call for nationalisation is sometimes relabelled ‘public ownership’, or supplemented with an unspecified, ‘under democratic’ or ‘workers’ control’.

There has been little appreciation of the international economic integration of the corporate imperialist capitalist order. This places very real restraints on national ‘solutions’, and makes the development of an internationalist strategy and international organisation vital. The massive anti-(corporate) globalisation, anti-Iraq war, anti-G8 and Occupy protests have shown that millions of people already understand the need for an international response. Yet there has been little indication that the Left can build on this by creating a new International (14).

The EACL is very much constrained by the limitations of the ‘socialist diplomacy’ practised between its two dominant political groupings – the USFI and International Socialist Tendency (SWP). There is clearly a glaring need for concerted international action in the face of the EU leaders’ austerity drive, which has led to unprecedented attacks on Greek, Portuguese and Irish workers. These will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the European (including the UK) working class.

There has been no real debate in the SSA or SSP over socialists’ participation in parliamentary and council elections. Are parliament and local councils vehicles for bringing about socialism through accumulative reforms; or do socialists participate in elections to these bodies to support independent class activity, and to put forward the case for socialism/communism?

Again this confusion arises because a significant section of the Left tends to see the state machine as neutral, and just requiring a different hand at the helm, rather than a capitalist state, shaped to meet the capital’s needs. The existing state machine is  worse than useless as a means of socialist transformation. Indeed it is a trap for the working class.  What should be recognised is the need for the state’s destruction and its replacement with a commune-like semi-state, intended to wither away as the lower phase of communism (socialism) gives way to its higher phase.

We never got near this kind of debate about a Maximum Programme within the wider SSP.  This was perhaps understandable in the context of the long debt-financed consumer boom, which coincided with the first ten years of the SSP’s existence. Efforts were concentrated instead on developing and implementing elements of an Immediate Programme. Now capitalism is once more in deep crisis. Attempts to buttress each national economy through superficial reforms can only lead to intensified international competition, with a downward pressure on pay and conditions, and an even greater likelihood of wars, possibly extending to the imperial metropoles themselves. Therefore, it has become imperative that socialists/communists outline their alternative society and the means needed to achieve this.

The SSP became too election focussed, particularly after winning its six MSPs. This sucked prominent regional or trade union activists into the parliamentary centre. The decision to spend so much money on parliamentary support workers for the newly elected MSPs was an indication of this creeping electoralism. A three way split developed between the SSP’s MSPs – 1) Tommy and Rosemary, 2) Caroline, Frances and Rosie and 3) Colin – as to how to relate to Holyrood. There was little effective party control over these MSPs. The parliamentary ‘tail’ sometimes wagged the SSP ‘dog’.

If ‘Tommygate’ had not erupted, a strongly electoralist wing would probably have emerged in the SSP, offering the party’s MSPs as coalition fodder in the event of a hung Holyrood parliament (15). Former Labour MEP, Hugh Kerr, was already suggesting, before the 2003 Holyrood general election, that the SSP stand down in favour of the SNP in first-past-the-post seats, anticipating such coalitions and a more parliamentary focussed politics (16).

Those who learned their initial politics in the British Left have shown little understanding of the UK as an imperialist, unionist and constitutional monarchist state, and the role of the Crown Powers in maintaining British ruling class control. Nor do they appreciate the real nature of the current British and Irish ruling classes’ ‘New Unionist’ strategy of promoting the ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’, aided and abetted by trade union leaders locked in ‘social partnerships’ with the bosses and politicians. This is done to ensure that the UK and the Twenty-Six Counties remain safely subordinated to corporate capitalism and US/British imperialism.

In reaction to their earlier left British unionist training, the majority amongst the SSA and SSP (and later the Solidarity) leaderships have shown a strong tendency to be pulled towards Scottish nationalism, and have become sentimental Scottish republicans rather than militant socialist republicans. Although the 2005 Declaration of Calton Hill represented a partial break from this, the SSP leadership has gone on to tailend the proposed constitutional reforms of the SNP in their proposed Scottish Independence Referendum (17).

After the split between the SSP and Solidarity, some members of the now defunct ISM became divided between the Frontline supporters found in the SSP, and the Democratic Green Socialists (DGS), who played a similar role in Solidarity. It was these two organisations’ initially shared break from the CWI, which had led them to move on from much of the old left British unionist politics (although long retaining elements of such politics over the issue of Ireland), only to court left Scottish nationalist politics as an alternative.

As a result, the ISM/Frontline’s and the DGS’s politics, with regard to Scotland, have not been drawn from the major contributors to anti-imperial/anti-UK state politics prior to Poll Tax, e.g. the Workers’ Republican tradition of James Connolly and John Maclean, but to a bowdlerised version of Labourism/Trotskyism inherited, but still not fully questioned, from the CWI. This is sometimes topped up with a little sentimental Scottish history and the use of the saltire in the Scottish Socialist Voice.

Those from a CWI tradition also have a poor understanding of the conflict in Ireland. They have been unwilling to address this issue in case any accusations of ‘sectarianism’ affected their electoral campaigns, particularly in the Central Belt. In the SSA’s preparatory stages, the one group, which CWI members went to considerable lengths to exclude, was the James Connolly Society (JCS). It also took years and years to get one-time CWI/ISM members of the SSP on to the JCS’s annual Connolly march in Edinburgh. The CWI’s left unionism was carried into the ISM. This led to their joint agreement to invite Billy Hutchinson of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) as a ‘socialist’ Loyalist, with a background in the UVF, where the British state recruited its death squads (18), to ‘Socialism 2000’ (19).

Despite the 2002 SSP Conference’s 50:50 debate, there was insufficient follow-up debate about the nature of women’s exploitation and oppression, and how women’s emancipation and liberation contribute to wider sexual liberation and to socialism/communism. In the aftermath of the split in the SSP, a marked division remained between those former ISM members in Frontline, who wanted to take on board a more Feminist agenda, and those in the DGS, who retained an opposition to “gender obsessed politics” (many of them had opposed the 50:50 arrangements back in 2000).

In the case of ISM/Frontline members this led to a blurring between socialist and radical Feminist politics. In the case of DGS members this led to a slippage away from any socialist understanding of the role of women’s oppression, and to a schizoid split between holding to libertarian views on sex (e.g. believing prostitution is just another form of wage labour, not recognising the women’s oppression involved), or to a toleration of very conservative sexual relationships (e.g. not questioning the promotion of the ‘perfect celebrity couple’ in the never-ending ‘Tommy and Gail Show’). The political division over the role of Feminism, between the two wings of one-time ISM members, very much added to the acrimony during ‘Tommygate’ (20).

The SSP and Solidarity leaderships, following on the old CWI tradition, have remained wedded to Broad Leftism in the trade unions. This involves a ‘parliamentary’ industrial strategy, which sees sovereignty as lying in the trade union conferences (‘parliament’), when effective control really lies in the union HQs (where the bureaucracy forms the ‘Cabinet’). Broad Leftism concentrates on getting left wing union leaderships elected to replace right wing ones. This is countered to a Rank and File ‘republican’ industrial strategy of democratising and transforming trade unions to make them combative class organisations with sovereignty residing amongst the union members in their workplaces, who are prepared to take independent (‘unofficial’) action when required (21). There has also been no debate on possible new methods of organising workers, e.g. social unions.

There have been illusions around existing Broad Left trade union leaderships, and a failure to extend the principle of a worker’s representative on a worker’s wage in parliament, to campaigning for all trade union officials being on the average wage of the members they represent.  The SSP’s relationship with the RMT was focussed on its General Secretary, Bob Crow, and its Broad Left leadership (22), rather than its rank and file members.

Cultural developments can anticipate wider social and political developments, even during periods when the working class is in retreat. Whilst an effective struggle against exploitation and oppression needs confident economic/industrial and political organisation, attempts to go beyond the alienation we experience under capitalism often takes on a more disparate cultural form, which the ruling classes find harder to discipline and police. Despite the wider vibrant cultural debate found in Scotland, and signs of support from several significant cultural figures, there was no organised attempt to intervene in this debate and to encourage its development in a Scottish internationalist rather than a Scottish nationalist direction.

b)          Organisation

From the beginning, despite wishing to create a wider organisation, which brought in others, the CWI/SML still wanted to remain the leadership group. This in itself is not a problem. The issue is how do you go about achieving this aim – by encouraging the maximum democracy or by political manoeuvring?

The CWI/SML sought to bring about wider unity, not primarily on the basis of an agreed Immediate Programme (23), but by courting specific groups and individuals, whilst playing down the revolutionary side of their own politics. This involved a resort to diplomacy, rather than holding an open debate between some of the more advanced positions held by the CWI/SML (and others) and the undisguised left reformism and electoralism of those coming, in particular, from Labour and SNP backgrounds.

Of course, any such open debate, may well have resulted in the SSA adopting openly left reformist positions anyhow, given the historical weight of reformism in Scotland and the wider UK. This is why it was so vital to create and maintain the SSA and SSP as open democratic organisations, where such ideas could be challenged and changed in the light of experience.

The SSA and SSP depended overmuch on the initial political training given to its members from other political organisations before they joined up. There was no comprehensive political education programme put in place for new members. There was an attempt to produce an SSA magazine, Red, but it was short-lived.

When the ISM split into majority and minority CWI/IS factions, the majority ISM kept to the old strategy of trying to remain the leadership by making openings to certain individuals. An ‘Inner Circle’ coalesced within the SSP leadership, which consisted of Tommy Sheridan, Alan McCombes and Alan Green (he represented those from a non-CWI tradition) with a close periphery of Keith Baldassara and Frances Curran (she provided a link with the leading influential Feminists, such as Carolyn Leckie). The ISM used its position as the largest platform to ensure that this emergent ‘Inner Circle’ was given wider support in the SSP (24). As long as the ISM continued to exist, there was still some platform accountability.

The ISM also used its numerical strength to get sympathisers into key positions, whether or not they were up to the job. Paid organisers, who were not transparent or accountable, sometimes built their own fiefdoms either in areas of particular activity or geographical areas.

The ‘Inner Circle’ kept things from the membership (either with tacit ISM acceptance or without their knowledge), e.g. how many real paying members there were, and the fact that the SWP did not pay their subs (although some of their members did join as individuals). Therefore, the activities of the ‘Inner Circle’ were neither transparent nor fully accountable.

Many members of the ISM began to doubt the need for a distinctive platform to advance their specific politics. Instead, they increasingly relied on giving support to those experienced former members of the CWI, and founder members of the ISM, who had steered them through the difficult transition from the CWI/SML to the independent ISM platform in the SSA and SSP.  ISM members began to drop out of their platform, whilst still giving their support as individuals to the ‘Inner Circle’.

In engaging with new political forces, ISM members found themselves questioning some of their previously held beliefs. This is, of course, a good general principle for all socialists. Individual ISM members formed friendships and alliances with other individuals and tendencies, e.g. amongst the left Scottish nationalists and the radical Feminists. This led to a process of adaptation that left individual ISM, or former ISM members, strung out at different points along various lines of thought over a number of key issues. That made it increasingly difficult for the ISM to maintain a unified public position on these political issues.

This was demonstrated most spectacularly over ‘Tommygate’. However, over the issues of 50:50, ‘internationalism from below’ republicanism versus left Scottish nationalism, Ireland (particularly the Connolly march), and secularism versus support for specific identity (especially faith) schools, different ISM members also found themselves on differing sides (25).  As the ISM platform began to fragment, this left the ‘Inner Circle’ as the real SSP leadership, since they were no longer restrained by any remaining ISM discipline.

After 2003, those newly elected MSPs, who had their own trusted personal contacts in the party, also had to be acknowledged by the ‘Inner Circle’. That opened up the prospect of personal, rather than platform differences arising, which could bring about a more dysfunctional leadership, in the absence of either any platform discipline, or of effective wider party accountability.

The ‘Inner Circle’ was unable to successfully address the crisis in the SSP, when ‘Tommygate’ split them, along with their close personal and parliamentary supporters. Both sides put more trust in the bourgeois courts and leaks to the bourgeois media than in the SSP membership. Neither side confined its appeals for support to bona fide working class and socialist organisations. Initially a cover-up ‘deal’ was made between the SSP Executive Committee and Tommy, under which the reasons for his mutually agreed resignation were hidden from the membership. The minutes were not circulated. This sowed further seeds of confusion, adding to those created by the leadership’s shared responsibility in constructing the Tommy ‘legend’ in the first place.

This legacy of personalised politics very much added to the ensuing acrimony, which contributed to the split between the SSP and Solidarity. The two respective leaderships centred on Alan McCombes and Frances Curran on the SSP side, and Tommy Sheridan and his family on the Solidarity side. Supporters were expected to show uncritical loyalty for their leaders’ respective stances in the virtual civil war that developed. Those trying to put forward a more critical viewpoint found themselves subjected, not to real debate, but more often to misrepresentation, and sometimes to vilification.

Prior to the split, the SSP leadership had tolerated the existence of sects, in particular the SWP and the CWI. These were able to take advantage of the SSP’s recognition of platforms (26). The CWI and SWP saw themselves as having all the answers in advance, with nothing to learn from others, when important questions were debated. They were organised as alternative leaderships-in-waiting, ready to take over.

However, instead of establishing firm platform guidelines, diplomatic deals were also made between the SSP leadership and these sects. The SSP leadership did not openly and politically challenge the sectarian practices of these organisations’ leaderships (27). Such an approach could have won over some of their rank and file (albeit not their leaderships, whose sectarianism is hard-wired), attracting them with more open and democratic politics.

 3. THE CURRENT SITUATION – FACING UP TO REALITY

There has been no real attempt by either of the two post-split leaderships (SSP and Solidarity) to draw up a balance sheet of the strengths and weaknesses of the original socialist unity project, or to make any honest assessment of where socialists and the wider working class now are in Scotland. The SSP leadership’s main remaining hope, after ‘Tommygate’, seems to be that, “Things can only get better”! And, is Solidarity now on hold until Tommy gets out of jail?!

Solidarity launched itself, in 2006, with the claim that it would soon overtake the number of pre-existing SSP MSPs. However, it failed even to retain its celebrity leader, Tommy, despite his loudly proclaimed court ‘victory’ that year. Solidarity’s leadership took refuge in its ability to garner more votes (31,066 to the SSP’s 12,731) in the 2007 Holyrood election. Yet Ruth Black, its sole elected councillor, soon defected to Labour after an acrimonious internal spat (28).

The SSP leadership believed that there would be an upturn in SSP fortunes, once they were legally vindicated in the Perjury Trial. However, the SSP’s vote fell from the lowly 12,731 gained in 2007, to the abysmal 8,272 in the 2011 Holyrood election, despite the December 2010 court judgement, which upheld the SSP leadership’s version of the ‘Tommygate’ events. This electoral result showed the leadership’s wishful thinking.

Although the Tommy/Solidarity-backed Respect/George Galloway celebrity candidate only received 6972 votes, in the May 2011 Holyrood election (compared with the still unsuccessful Tommy’s 8544 votes in 2007), whilst Solidarity’s own vote plummeted to 2,837, this could hardly provide the SSP leadership with much comfort, considering that both the phantom Socialist Labour Party, and more worryingly, the British National Party, gained far more votes than the SSP.

Indeed, the fact that the BNP’s vote exceeded the combined vote of the SSP and Solidarity was not publicly acknowledged by either leadership, despite the BNP’s and SDL’s ongoing attempts to gain a foothold in Scotland, particularly amongst British Loyalists in the Central Belt. Indeed there had been more concern at leadership levels, to see that the SSP and Solidarity slog it out against each other in certain Glasgow seats, than to ensure that the BNP were opposed everywhere.

What remains of the SSP has become a much looser alliance than the old SSA. Work is left to individuals, the Scottish Socialist Voice has no Editorial Board, the SSP website (29) is Eddie Truman’s sole responsibility, Richie Venton is the SSP’s industrial organiser without any accountability to a committee of SSP trade unionists.

The Scottish Socialist Youth and the SSP International Committee have taken good initiatives, e.g. the Anti-Fascist Alliances (30) and the Republican Socialist Conventions. However, these have not had real united leadership backing (although individual leaders have sometimes given their support, particularly Colin in the latter case).

The SSP leadership does not necessarily follow through conference decisions (e.g. the principled support given to ‘No One Is Illegal’ at the post-split 2007 Conference, which would have meant working closely with the Glasgow Unity Centre). Part of this is due to exhaustion of leading members, but another factor is the continued SSP legacy of having the remnants of this unaccountable ‘Inner Circle’. Whilst no longer necessarily having the vigour to politically oppose initiatives, which they do not fully support at conferences, they can still ensure that any such agreed initiatives receive little effective national leadership promotion or coordination.

The current SSP leadership is divided over the way forward. Some from the old ‘Inner Circle’ are showing signs of abandoning the pretence of that the SSP is still a real party, and of retreating instead towards the formation of a socialist ‘think tank’, somewhat to the left of that recently formed to commemorate Jimmy Reid. This SSP initiative appears to be Glasgow based.

Colin Fox and Richie Venton, however, argue that the existing SSP can be revived if only the correct campaign can be found (e.g. Fighting Fuel Poverty, or Fighting the Cuts), or if members fully throw themselves into a continuous ‘hamster wheel’ of activity. Both work very hard and lead by example. They can always point towards a model branch out there to show that such activity is the way forward. The current example given is the new Ayrshire branch, built with the help of the party’s latest prominent recruit, Campbell Martin. He is a former SNP and Independent MSP. He remains a strong advocate of a left Scottish nationalist approach to the constitution, coupled with some support for populist politics (including the SNP’s minimum alcohol pricing and their misguided anti-‘sectarian’ bill (31).

Mounting campaigns is indeed an important activity for socialist organisations. However, without a proper assessment of the class forces involved, or of how a particular campaign links up with the organisation’s wider Immediate Programme and the struggle for socialism, then any such campaign will either run out of steam; or, it will be taken under the wing of the larger parties. Then, instead of contributing to the building of independent working class organisation, the campaign merely ends up buttressing these parties’ political position, by providing them with some cover for the cuts, or for the other counter-reforms they are imposing elsewhere. The Free Prescriptions Bill, initiated at Holyrood by the SSP parliamentary group, was only enacted by a subsequent SNP government, after the SSP ceased to have any MSPs.

In contrast to the SSP, Solidarity was formed as an alliance (calling itself a movement) and not a party. John Dennis of the SSP South Region made the original proposal for a breakaway, because he thought that internal relations had become too toxic to be contained in one party. However, Solidarity quickly constituted itself as a ‘marriage of convenience’, between Sheridan and the Sheridanistas of the DGS, CWI and SWP. It now has even less political cohesion than the currently loose SSP alliance.

The DSG website is showing signs of wishing to reunite the Left, but largely on the basis of ‘forgive and forget’ (32). The recently formed International Socialist Group (ISG), a Scottish breakaway from the SWP, also involved in Solidarity, seems to be adopting a similar path. Its co-thinkers in Counterfire, in England and Wales, have already drawn Socialist Resistance (33) into their Coalition of Resistance (CoR) against the cuts. Whilst CoR is all too willing to bow before Broad Left trade union bureaucrats and left-talking politicians, it constitutes the most punchy campaigning organisation fighting the cuts at present (as shown by its contingent on the STUC’s October 1^st demonstration in Glasgow).

CoR and ISG have even attracted some SSP members, despite their strong antipathy to those from an SWP background. However, any such unity is also likely to be on the shaky ground of ‘forgive and forget’, rather than ‘listen, learn and then move on’. Ironically, this would just repeat the ‘diplomatic’ approach the ‘Inner Circle’ adopted taken towards the SWP (the tradition from whence the ISG came), back in 2002.

Both wings of the current SSP leadership remain reticent about becoming involved in other political organisations’ unity initiatives, or even in wider campaigns where they might meet up. An exception is made in the case of the Scottish Independence Convention (SIC), which does bring the SSP into contact with Solidarity and ex-Solidarity members. Furthermore, the various struggles impose their own similar joint work, particularly in trade unions. Just as a shared left Scottish nationalism has led to common work inside the SIC, so a shared Broad Leftism has led to joint electoral slates in some unions (e.g. the Public and Commercial Service [PCS] union).

Some SSP and Solidarity members and former members, who have become disillusioned with these organisations, have called for their virtual dissolution into the various campaigns, e.g. Anti-Cuts. They hope that the experience of working with new forces, or ‘knocking heads together’ (i.e. of mutually suspicious SSP and Solidarity members or ex-members) will eventually provide a new basis for unity in the future. Whilst this path can seem attractive, it means glossing over the real political differences that have arisen, and the challenges neither side addressed. Such a course is also likely to lead to more public ‘diplomatic manoeuvres’ (usually accompanied by personalised put-downs in private), in order to bring about a superficial unity, mainly for electoral purposes. This is never a solid basis upon which to build.

Meanwhile, the CWI and SWP continue to slug it out with their own front organisations – the (now defunct?) Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and the National Shop Stewards Network for the CWI, and the (about to be abandoned?) Right to Work Campaign and Unite the Resistance for the SWP. Neither of these sects is likely to commit itself to building a real united party. They prefer to go no further than forming electoral mutual non-aggression pacts like the United Left Alliance in Ireland (which is likely to flounder, if it fails to develop further, after its initial electoral success this year). The prime political purpose of the CWI and SWP is still to build their own sects.

In 2003, a united SSP showed it had gained a definite foothold of support amongst members of the working class in Scotland. The abysmal 2011 (combined SSP and Solidarity) electoral result is an indication that, not only that most politically conscious workers, but also many socialists in Scotland, have moved on from the SSP and Solidarity.

 4) WHAT WE NEED TO DO -

LISTEN, LEARN AND THEN MOVE ON

The inspiring legacy of those successful working class campaigns in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, along with the recognition of the need for the working class to organise outside the Labour Party, and to address the National Question in Scotland in a serious manner, provided a sufficient political basis for the successful launch of the initial SSA and SSP project. However, the major challenges the SSP has faced since then mean that new lessons have to be learned if any successful socialist unity project is to be developed in the near future.

We need to acknowledge that the current SSP project is over. We can see that the attempt just to hold things together, hoping things will get better, has not worked. There has been little recognition, at the leadership level, of the need to face up to the new challenges, which the working class has faced; or of the necessary self-criticism about the handling of ‘Tommygate’. The SSP leadership had put the addressing of ‘Tommygate’ on hold between 2006-10, ostensibly for legal reasons during the Perjury Trail.  The 2011 Conference in Dunfermline took a retrograde step by overturning those self-critical decisions, which had been made at the first post-split SSP Conference in Glasgow in 2006.

In pursuing this ‘head-in-the-sand’ course, the SSP will end up as little more than another sect. The leadership’s refusal to develop a strategy to win back the more critical elements of Solidarity (using the Perjury Trial as an excuse), which would have involved some self-criticism, was the first step on this dead-end road. When the SSA was being set up, the SML/ISM understood the futility of trying to build a new organisation solely around an unquestioned and unquestioning CWI leadership. They actively sought wider support, and just as importantly, were prepared to be self-critical and to challenge some of their old shibboleths in the light of recent experiences. Those in the SSP today, who wish to re-establish socialist unity in Scotland, need to recognise that real answers have to be given to those challenges the SSP failed to meet.

Socialist unity, which has the capacity to address the many pressing issues the working class currently faces in a crisis-ridden world, can only be formed on a new and higher political basis. Such socialist unity will also involve those outside the SSP’s ranks. Such unity can not be built on the basis of ‘forgive and forget’ (which will just lead to a reoccurrence of previous bad practices), but must be done on the basis of ‘listen, learn and then move on’.

a)           Politics

To meet the new challenges the Left has faced in Scotland, we need to clarify our views over:-

-            What we mean by socialism/communism and how (and if) the immediate struggles we support promote this aim.

-            The promotion of internationalism, through building wider international organisation on the basis of ‘internationalism from below’ and by participating in international actions.

-            The rejection of populism and the creation of an ‘Immediate Programme’ that both enhances the position of our class, and encourages the development of  independent working class organisation and struggle.

-            An understanding of the reasons why socialists participate in elections to state bodies.

-            An understanding of how socialists participate effectively in trade union (and other working class) struggles.

-            Moving on from a left Nationalist approach to the National Question in Scotland, by adopting a serious commitment to socialist Republicanism.

-            A deeper understanding of Feminism (how to achieve women’s liberation and emancipation), and how this links with the transformation of sexual and social relations between the sexes, which socialist men (who should also have a vision of a realisable better society) have a real interest in achieving.

-            A serious approach to Ecology which takes into account the meeting of the human need for water, food, fuel, shelter and transport, but in an environmentally sustainable way.

-            An imaginative approach on how we relate to other areas of struggle, e.g, culture.

b)          Organisation

To learn from the mistakes of the SSP (and of Solidarity), and become more effective we need to:

-            Emphasise the vital importance of democracy, transparency and accountability in all the organisations of the working class.

-            The role of leadership

-            Reject the lure of ‘celebrity politics’.

-            Acknowledge that neither the bourgeois courts, nor the bourgeois media, are appropriate places for socialists to get rulings on how they conduct themselves, or to conduct their internal disputes.  We must confine our appeals to democratic working class and socialist/communist organisations and media. How can we convince the working class of the case for socialism if we have to run to the ruling class’s courts over how we handle our own affairs?

On November 30^th, two million public sector workers went on strike (including 300,000 in Scotland), thousands joined picket lines, and tens of thousands went on demonstrations throughout the UK.  However, there is no chance of defending our pensions, when the ruling class and its supporting parties are determined to roll back our class’s gains, and we remain divided between unions and a plethora of different pension schemes. Trade union leaders will all too soon be jockeying for sectional concessions. Only a class wide political offensive, which links up all struggles against the ruling class’s current austerity drive (and this must extend across the EU), has any chance of undertaking a successful defence and then moving on to make real gains.

Nor can the working class be left to the ‘tender mercies’ of a future Miliband (34) -led Labour government.  The Con-Dems may demand an immediate ‘arm and a leg’ from every worker in the UK; but New Labour also wants to saw off our ‘limbs’ – only more slowly. The SNP wants a Scotland that is a low tax haven for corporate business and a playground for the ultra-rich.

Socialists and communists must offer something better.  So let us ‘listen, learn and then move on’.

Allan Armstrong, Bob Goupillot, Iain Robertson, 20.12.11

Part One – the Meaning of the May 5th Elections

A good kicking for the Lib-Dems disguises the wider impact of the National Question on May 5th

On May 5th, the Lib-Dem-initiated referendum proposal to introduce AV to Westminster elections was massively rejected in every nation and region of the UK, including Northern Ireland. In the English Local Council, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament elections, all held on the same day, former Lib-Dem voters used the opportunity either to punish Clegg and his allies for entering into a coalition with the Tories, or to vote for the real thing. This took precedence over any vote ‘Yes’ recommendations on AV by the other parties. In the absence of meaningful resistance, voters turned to revenge instead.

In the English Local Council elections, Labour routed the Lib-Dems in the north, whilst the Tories routed them in the south. Elsewhere in the UK, though, the impact of the National Question pushed the Lib-Dems’ decline to being a secondary issue.

In the Welsh Assembly election, the Lib-Dems also lost out to both Labour and the Tories. However, the main loser was Plaid Cymru, recently in coalition with Labour. Plaid’s recent efforts, throwing all of its weight behind the  Coalition’s successful referendum campaign to devolve law-making powers to the Welsh Assembly, seemed to represent the culmination of its political ambitions.  Yet, all the mainstream unionist parties supported this liberal unionist measure too.  With Plaid less relevant, and the Tories very unpopular in working class South Wales, Welsh Labour advanced and has formed its own single-party government, thus making more posts available for its own careerists.

In the Northern Ireland, the Lib-Dems officially support the moderate unionist Alliance Party. However, the lack of any wider appreciation of this fact, along with Alliance’s different name, meant that, despite its Lib-Dem type politics, it was able to make limited gains in the Northern Ireland Assembly elections, as the old UUP continues to sheds its more moderate voters (remembering that ‘moderate’ is a relative term in Unionist politics in Northern Ireland!)

But this too was a side issue when the DUP and Sinn Fein made small gains, despite their joint implementation of public sector cuts. They were able to take their first Stormont Coalition into a second term. Voters threw their weight behind competitive sectarian pleading for Westminster resources, in a Stormont that has a constitutionally recognised divide between Unionists and Nationalists. Voters rejected any return to possible armed conflict, or to a class based opposition to the Con-Dem cuts to the Northern Ireland budget.

On the Unionist side, the tentative move to the centre, marked by the growth of the Alliance Party, was matched by a move on the Right towards the rejectionist, Traditional Unionist Voice. However, the possibility of voting for either of these constitutional Unionist options was underpinned by the continued desire for stability. This was highlighted by the electoral demise of the Progressive Unionist Party, linked to the redundant (for the moment) Loyalist UVF death squads.

However, the most sensational result on May 5^th occurred in the Scottish Parliament election. Here the previous minority SNP government was able to increase its number of MSPs from 46 to 69, an absolute majority forecast by no one. Furthermore, the SNP’s votes came at the expense, not only of the Lib-Dems, but of the Tories, Labour and the small Socialist vote too. Only the Greens managed to hold on to their vote and their 2 MSPs. They made a calculated Left appeal, now that their moderate leader, Robin Harper, has retired. They hoped to woo former disillusioned Socialist voters. Labour only managed to increase its vote in two constituencies, Dumfries and Eastwood. Here they were the main challengers to the Tories, who by their own admission remain “toxic” in Scotland.  Very few people in Scotland held street parties to celebrate Will’s and Kate’s royal wedding on the 29^th April – many are saving these for Thatcher’s funeral!

How socialists fared throughout the UK

In the English Local Elections, three Socialist councillors, now standing under the CWI-initiated, Trade Union & Socialist Coalition (TUSC) banner, lost their previous seats (including both SWP councillors), despite these and a few other candidates still getting a credible vote. Elsewhere though, the TUSC vote was small. It will be interesting to see whether TUSC can survive as a wider Socialist unity project, or whether it will just follow that other CWI initiative, the National Shop Stewards Network and become a complete CWI-front.

In Wales, Socialists only stood on the List vote in the Assembly elections, under the banner of Scargill’s SLP, the Communist Party of Britain, or TUSC. They made little headway. Indeed it is an indication of the decline of the Left, that it was the moribund SLP that attracted most Socialist votes as a purely passive electoral gesture.

In Northern Ireland, those Socialists who contested the Stormont election, either under the banner of People Before Profit (SWP front), the Socialist Party (CWI), the Workers Party or Socialist Democracy (USFI), sometimes competed against each other. They were marginal outside Derry/Foyle, where the SWP’s well-known Eamonn McCann made a credible showing. Republican socialists and traditional pro-armed struggle republicans did not stand in the Stormont elections, but confined their activities to the Local Council elections held in Northern Ireland on the same day (unlike Wales or Scotland). A couple of breakaway former Sinn Fein councillors held their seats, whilst Patricia Campbell of the Independent Workers Union and the republican socialist, eirigi and the IRSP all made a credible showing, despite some mutual competition between these last two in West Belfast. The traditionalist republican, pro-armed struggle, 32 Counties Sovereignty Movement also made headway in Derry, a reflection of the lack of any meaningful ‘peace dividend’ in the most deprived Nationalist communities.

In Scotland, Socialists, who as recently as 2007, held 6 seats at Holyrood, were fatally crippled in the aftermath of the Sheridan affair. As in Wales, they only stood for the List seats and were split between Scargill’s SLP, the SSP and Solidarity. And, as in Wales, Scargill’s phantom SLP gained the most Socialist votes in the Left’s equivalent of ‘bald men fighting over a comb’. In the absence of Solidarity’s leader, the Left nationalist, Tommy Sheridan, they also decided to back another celebrity socialist, the left Unionist, George Galloway. He had parachuted into Glasgow as the George Galloway/Respect candidate after being rejected by electors in East London last year. Glasgow voters recognised an opportunist carpetbagger when they saw one, so knowing he was going to lose, he just picked up his bags and left before the count. The SSP vote continued to fall from its poor 2007 result, whilst Solidarity’s declining vote went into tailspin. This raises the question in both organisations about the prospects of future meaningful Socialist unity.

The meaning of the SNP electoral victory

So, what does the SNP victory in the Holyrood elections represent? Ever since the banking crash, which saw the SNP and its charismatic leader, Alex Salmond, too closely associated with the failed Royal Bank of Scotland, the party had been unable to win any Westminster or many council by-elections. During the 2010 Westminster general election, the Labour Party, amazingly and also unpredictably, increased its vote in Scotland, retaking a seat previously lost to the SNP in a pre-crash by-election. Labour’s electoral appeal was almost entirely based upon playing up to the fear of the Tories.

As recently as the beginning of the year, polls were anticipating the return of a Labour-led government to Holyrood, in the face of the SNP’s betrayal, after the economic crisis, of its 2007 electoral promises. Labour thought that they could just repeat their ‘No back to the 1980s’, anti-Tory appeal in the run-up to the May 5^th. However, that card had been played out in 2010.  Despite voting Labour, Scotland now faced the hated Tories once more, supported by the increasingly despised Lib-Dems. Yet Miliband’s Labour Party, consigned to ‘opposition’, was making absolutely no difference.

Salmond was able to repeat Gordon Brown’s 2010 pre-election trick, and postpone major Holyrood cuts until after the election. Although he lowered the electorate’s sights, abandoning many earlier SNP promises, those still remaining aimed higher than any made by Labour. The relentlessly negative Scottish Labour leader, Ian Gray, believed that Scottish voters would automatically return to their ‘natural’ fold, and that the Holyrood gravy train would once more be at Labour’s disposal. He slept-walked towards May 5^th. When Labour’s poll support started to ebb away, his response was once more to raise the separatist bogey (it had failed in 2007 with its effect neutralised by the SNP’s promised referendum on independence), and then, in panic, he adopted virtually every other SNP policy.

Meanwhile, Salmond had been assiduously building-up the backing of Scottish businessmen, including Brian Souter, the homophobic owner of Stagecoach, Sir Thomas Farmer, the Con-Dem cuts-approving owner of KwikFit, and Sir David Murray, the Unionist owner of Murray International Metals and recently of Rangers FC.  Donald Trump, the controversial American tycoon, given the go-ahead to build a luxury golf-course and gated housing project in Aberdeenshire, also enjoys the support of the SNP government. Both Murdoch’s Sun and Tommy Sheridan (http://tommysheridan.wordpress.com/ April 22^nd) backed the Scottish populist nationalist, SNP. The SNP obviously gained far more by way of support from the former, given the evidence of the latter’s failure to persuade many Glasgow voters to back his other recommended choice – the Left British unionist, George Galloway.

SNP success in inverse proportion to working class confidence and Socialist success

Underlying the large electoral drift to the SNP is the current lack of working class self-confidence. This reflects the lack of fightback against the Con-Dems’ austerity drive, following on workers’ earlier disillusioned acceptance of Brown’s and Darling’s proposed Westminster imposed cuts. The STUC is every bit as wedded to social partnership deals with the employers and the state as the TUC.  The effect of these has been to turn trade unions into a free personnel management service for the bosses. Added to this is the sorry demise of the Left in Scotland in the aftermath of the Sheridan fiasco. The attraction of Socialist unity in the face of massive cutbacks was demonstrated earlier this year in the Irish elections when the United Left Alliance was able to pick up 5 Dail seats.

However, much of the SNP’s electoral support is superficial – a clutching at straws. As long as workers remain acquiescent, the SNP government will openly pursue its real aim – making Scotland a haven for Scottish businesses and global corporations. Earlier this year, to show where the SNP’s loyalties lie, John Swinney, Finance Minister, allowed the lapse of Holyrood’s income tax raising powers, voted for in the 1997 Devolution Referendum. The SNP have extended their council tax freeze for another five years to force Local Councils into privatising services. The Lib-Dem/SNP coalition running Edinburgh Council has brought in consultants to prepare for such measures. This follows their attack on cleansing workers’ pay, preparatory to possible privatisation. The SNP government has even attacked the Con-Dem’s recent proposed levy on North Sea Oil. It’s not to be ‘Scotland’s Oil’, but will remain the petroleum corporations’ oil!

The SNP has entered negotiations with Cameron over Westminster’s proposed Scotland Bill. This is based on the miserable additional devolutionary powers recommended by the Calman Commission to dish the SNP, in advance of any possible Independence Referendum. The SNP’s over-riding concern is to get the political power to cut corporation tax. Up until 2008, the SNP’s very mild reforms were dependent on building up Scotland’s ‘buoyant’ finance sector – a trickle-down ‘social democracy’ courtesy of the Royal Bank of Scotland! Now, any such reforms are meant to be financed by a very limited tax on corporate profits – if their boards agree to play ball!

Constitutional crisis or a SNP negotiated ‘Devolution-Max’ cop out?

The media has made much of a possible constitutional crisis due to the SNP’s commitment to holding a referendum on Scottish independence in the last years of its office. The novelty of a Nationalist victory in one of the UK’s devolved assemblies should not prevent people looking to other comparable examples in Spain and Quebec. Here Catalan Convergence and Union (CiU), the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and Parti Quebecois (PQ) have also formed majority administrations in devolved assemblies. Both the CiU and PNV have settled for greater measures of devolution within the Spanish state, whilst the PQ initiated referendum on Quebec independence was narrowly defeated and has not been attempted again.

Meanwhile, ‘over the water’, the former revolutionary nationalist Sinn Fein has settled very quickly into helping to run the UK’s devolved administration in Northern Ireland.  All the indications are that the very constitutional nationalist SNP is quite willing to settle for ‘Devolution-Max’. Salmond doesn’t have the excuse that he had in his last government of being in a minority, and hence being unable to put forward the SNP’s promised Independence Referendum Bill. In reality, however, significant forces in the SNP, including rightist Education Minister, Michael Russell, and former leftist, Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill, never wanted a referendum, and nor do many of the SNP’s current business backers.

Salmond is publicly ditching more and more attributes of meaningful political independence. The SNP recognise the continued role of the monarchy (which fronts the British ruling class’s draconian anti-democratic Crown Powers), the City (which sets financial policy), and the UK’s armed forces (which would be able to use Scottish military facilities). The SNP supports UN-backed (i.e. US-dominated Security Council approved) imperial wars, and has campaigned vigorously to maintain Scottish regiments, and British and NATO bases in Scotland.  There may still be some commitment to abolishing the unpopular Trident bases and hence for Scotland to step down into NATO’s second tier, non-nuclear ‘Partnership for Peace’. However, there are also signs that the SNP would be prepared just to lease out military facilities here, creating, in effect,  ‘Guantanamac’ bases.

‘Independence-Lite’ represents the height of SNP leadership ambitions, although a considerable section would settle for ‘Devolution-Max’.  Most of the existing institutions of the British unionist and imperial state would remain in place but be given a lick of tartan paint in Scotland. The SNP is no more able to deliver meaningful political independence, than Labour was able to deliver political devolution in 1979. A considerable majority of the British ruling class was against Scottish devolution then, but the overwhelming majority of the British ruling class is against Scottish independence now.

The British ruling class opposes Scottish independence and backs ‘Devolution-all-round’

The British ruling class is currently prepared to go no further than a few more limited devolutionary concessions, based on Blair’s 1997 ‘Devolution-all-round’ and Peace (in reality, pacification) Process settlement. This settlement is designed both to buttress wider British imperial control over these islands (emphasised by the recent royal visit to Ireland) and to create the best political conditions for corporate profitability.

Furthermore, despite the SNP’s overtures to Americans of Scottish descent (many of whom are on the US Right), it is the UK government, which enjoys official US state backing. Indeed the UK is such a reliable junior partner (with military forces that can be deployed more widely than Israel’s) that successive US governments have granted the UK state the imperial franchise in the North East Atlantic. The UK also acts as a useful spoiler to contain any independent French-German Euro-imperial ambitions. The USA is unlikely to switch its backing to the SNP. Furthermore, EU leaders will not step on UK governments’ toes over this issue.

Realising the SNP is isolated in the UK and wider international arena, Salmond is likely to offer a second ‘Devolution-Max’ option in the SNP Government’s proposed Independence Referendum. This would satisfy his most ardent business supporters, as well as important sectors of his own party.  Those rank and file Scottish independence supporting SNP members could be left to get on with campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote for what is, in effect, ‘Independence-Lite’ under the Crown, the City, the British armed forces and NATO.

However, the SNP leadership would itself be riding two horses, with different members providing their personal support for whichever option they really backed (in a similar manner to Labour in the 1979 Devolution referendum). SNP ‘Devolution-Max’ supporters might hope to get influential backing from those amongst Labour (e.g. Henry MacLeish), the Lib-Dems (e.g. Charles Kennedy) and even the Conservatives (e.g. Murdo Fraser), who are committed to further liberal unionist measures.  The SNP’s worried rank and file independence supporters would be fobbed off with the promise that ‘Devolution-Max’ was but another stage on the road to independence – an argument that could have some purchase, given that some SNP supporters also see ‘Independence-Lite’ as but a stage towards ultimate Scottish political sovereignty.

Those actually campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote for Scottish ‘independence’ (i.e. ‘Independence-Lite’) will soon be subjected to all the dirty tricks available to the British ruling class and its political representatives under the UK Crown Powers, since they are currently implacably opposed to such a course of action. The membership of the impeccably constitutionalist SNP is no more prepared for these, than it was in 1979, when the British ruling class was at least split, not united as it is today, over how best to maintain the Union. Meanwhile, the SNP government will be forced to impose the cuts demanded by Westminster and its business backers. This will highlight just whose class interests the SNP’s advocacy of ‘independence’ are meant to serve.

Salmond has just had his own 2011 equivalent of New Labour’s ‘things can only get better’ 1997 election. This is likely to lead to a similar let down in the future. Socialists today appear to be in as much of a mess as they were after Thatcher defeated the miners and Liverpool Council in the mid-80’s. By 1987, the triumphant Tories had decided to introduce the poll tax and face down the growing ‘National Question’ in the UK. However, Thatcher was defeated by mass independent class action and continued Irish republican opposition. Independent class action and a socialist republican strategy based on the promotion of ‘internationalism from below’ is the precondition for our advance today.

Allan Armstrong. 7.6.11

Part  Two – the  SNP follows Labour 

Social democracy SNP-style and the lessons it has learned from Labour

The long-term decline of the Labour Party in Scotland has enabled the SNP to pose in social democratic colours, particularly in the Central Belt. The SNP’s social democratic commitments are not that great, and like New Labour compete inside the party with another distinctly neo-liberal economic agenda. However, the SNP has skilfully positioned itself, so that it appears to promise more reforms than New Labour  – not a very difficult task! However, as with New Labour, any social democratic reforms are only made as election promises when they are compatible with the interests of the major financial institutions, well represented in Edinburgh, and of other global corporations and Scottish businesses engaged in constant lobbying at Holyrood or Bute House.

The last SNP government (2007-11) soon abandoned its election promises of improved teacher/student ratios in schools, the cancellation of student debt, and the abolition of the regressive council tax, in order to prioritise meeting the costs of the bankers’ bailout. This highlights the limitations of the SNP’s social democratic reforms. The SNP pushes much more consistently for reduced corporate taxation and other pro-business measures, highlighted by its courting of prominent Scottish businessmen, e.g. Brian Souter, Sir George Matthewson and Sir Tom Farmer, as well as international tycoons, e.g. Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch.

Furthermore, the essence of any social democratic reforms today, whether under Labour or SNP, is that they only represent ‘sweeties’, selected and handed down by those liberal capitalist parties representing the ruling and middle classes, in order to win votes from what they hope will remain an otherwise passive working class. The conservative capitalist parties (the Conservative and UKIP) oppose state financed, social democratic reforms, and only accept their continued existence as a price to be paid to prevent greater social upheaval. Since the post-1975 ruling class offensive, any new reforms have rarely come about as a result of independent working class campaigning or action. This is why they have proved to be so ephemeral under the current conditions of capitalist crisis.

The notion of what constitutes social democracy has been successively diluted since the late nineteenth century. Then it meant the politics of those who organised the working class to fight for an alternative socialist society. Later it meant the politics of those who represented the economic and social interests of the working class within capitalism and who sought a welfare state  – termed Labourism in the UK. Nowadays it means the politics of those who argue for a vague commitment to some state regulation and social reforms, something that also appeal to sections of the middle class, especially those employed in the management of the public sector. However, today’s social democrats everywhere subordinate their proposed social democratic reforms to first meeting the ‘needs of the market’, i.e. global corporate capital.

The SNP has become, in effect, a ‘tartan’ social democrat party, in the current political sense of the term. This chimes in very well with the dominant cultural values found in Scotland. However, when workers take their own independent action you can see the real class face of the SNP. The SNP control West Dunbartonshire Council and have imposed cuts here upon some of the most deprived working class communities. They suspended Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) councillor, Jim Bollan for six months following his consistent backing for workers and service users resisting these cuts. In the City of Edinburgh Council, the SNP are in coalition with the Lib-Dems. Here they have spent more money on hiring private refuse collectors to break the industrial action of the council’s in-house refuse workers resisting a major pay cut, than it would have cost to settle the dispute. This is because the council is preparing for privatisation of services, as a way of making public sector cuts, and of winning business support.

The SNP remains, in effect, a federally organised party, advocating different policies in different regions to appeal to different classes and sections of the Scottish population. It has a somewhat different face in the Western Isles, the north-east and the Central Belt. However, for a long time, a dominant Labour Party was able to limit the SNP’s growth in the major cities and the Central Belt, with its characterisation of the SNP as ‘Tartan Tories’. This was never an entirely accurate label, although the SNP undoubtedly has a right populist wing, where most remaining ‘fundamentalists’ are still to be found.

However, under Jim Sillars and later, Alex Salmond (significantly both from the former Leftist 79 Group), the SNP has made huge efforts to win over the Labour Party’s working class electoral base. They have been mightily helped in this by New Labour’s drift to the Right, and by the current demise, after the Sheridan debacle, of the once promising Socialist alternative, which developed in Scotland in the aftermath of the successful anti-poll tax struggle.

The SNP and the Labour unionist precedent in abandoning a consistent secular approach to society

The SNP has learned more from the Labour Party, though, than the necessity to advocate social democratic reforms to win working class support. Because the Labour Party developed within, and increasingly adapted to the existing UK state and British Empire, with its constitutional monarchy and its established church, it departed from the earlier Radical, and never adopted the continental Social Democrat tradition, which then championed a republican and secular society, as the best means to integrate people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds.

In the nineteenth century, as those rising middle class members, who owned industries and other businesses, joined and broadened the traditional British ruling class, their Liberal principles became increasingly compromised. This was because they began to fear more Radical challenges from the ‘lower orders’. They sought their own rapprochement with the existing British unionist and constitutional monarchist order with its established church.  This became especially clear in their attempts to deal with those challenges they faced in Ireland.

The majority of the British ruling class decided that, rather than push for a secular Ireland, which might bring together ‘lower order’ Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters  – the old republican ideal – they would look for influential allies who would help them maintain their overall control. The widening of the franchise, first to the middle class, then later to tenant farmers and workers, meant that they could no longer rely on the old ‘Anglo-Irish’ Protestant Ascendancy alone. They found a powerful ally in the Catholic hierarchy.

However, winning the hierarchy’s support also meant granting it significant concessions.  These included the recognition of the papacy’s right to appoint bishops in the UK, and giving the hierarchy control over educational and elementary social provision (hospitals, children’s homes, etc). This was consistent with earlier Liberal capitulation to Protestant denominations over the provision of education and social provision in Ireland (particularly the North), England, Scotland and Wales.

In Ireland, both Daniel O’Connell and later, Charles Parnell went along with the Catholic hierarchy’s demands for a greater political say, in return for support for more political recognition of Ireland within the Union. The hierarchy also ensured that its full weight was thrown behind the suppression of the Radical alternatives represented by Young Ireland, the Fenian Brotherhood and the more Radical wing of the Irish Land League, and that loyalty to the Queen, UK and British Empire was upheld.

This ruling class attempt to broaden the base of ‘Britishness’ by making political concessions to the religious and ethnic leaders in particular communities has become the hallmark of a top-down state managerial approach to win the loyalty of people from different religious and ethnic groups in the UK. Today, this is officially promoted as ‘multiculturalism’, at the same time as the UK constitution and state retains a hierarchy of religious and ethnic privileges. This is highlighted by the continued existence of an established church (the Church of England, with semi-established status for the Church of Scotland too) and the state promotion of ‘British values’ (first developed in and heavily influenced by the context of systematic clearances, enclosures, various types of forced labour, brutal punishments and the worldwide imperial looting of the planet). State promoted multiculturalism is not based on the idea of universal equality of the members of those ethnic and religious groups living in the UK, but by the recognition of a hierarchy of privileges meted out to ‘their’ state-approved representatives [1].

In the nineteenth century, by departing from a consistent secular approach, the Liberal party, helped by the Catholic hierarchy, was able to win the vote of the majority of immigrant Irish. It was the passive votes, not the active participation of the ‘lower orders,’ that they wanted. In the twentieth century, the Labour Party increasingly adopted this approach too, but took it much further. It was also able to gain the support of many Catholic members of Irish origin, once the Catholic hierarchy had been won over and offered its lead. Labour accepted the state funding of specifically Catholic schools, which were placed under the immediate control of the hierarchy.

Several things helped the Catholic hierarchy in their endeavours. First the ‘non-denominational’ state schools were, in effect, still dominated by the different Protestant churches found in England, Scotland, Wales and what soon became Northern Ireland. The Conservative and Unionist Party, and the Church of Scotland still had strong Orange Order connections. They publicly displayed strong anti-Irish prejudices.  Therefore, it was argued that separate schooling would shield Catholics from the entrenched discrimination, which was certainly still prevalent, particularly in Scotland, in 1918 (and until much later), at the time such schools were set up.

However, the other side of this was the acceptance that religious (or anti-Irish) divisions were a permanent feature of society and could not be overcome. This gave the Catholic hierarchy exclusive control, not just over religious education, but over most other aspects of education and pastoral care for children in their crucial formative years. Unlike the Loyalists and Orange Order, particularly in Northern Ireland, the Catholic hierarchy did not push for other measures of segregation, e.g. to cover employment and housing, to further entrench their influence. Such measures would just confine those of Irish Catholic origin to the worst jobs and homes and not have been popular. Therefore, the hierarchy went along with the majority of Catholics who fought against discrimination by demanding proper access in these economic and social arenas.

The best way to promote wider social integration is to adopt a similar secular and non-discriminatory approach to education too. Few people (apart from Loyalist bigots in Northern Ireland) want separate provision of housing and jobs. A secular approach would mean ending the church establishment, and removing any remaining privileges by eliminating the existing Protestant aspects of ‘non-denominational’ schools. Of course, those Protestant bigots, who campaign for the ending of Catholic schools, don’t wish to end such Protestant privileges. They want to reassert Protestant British supremacy. This why they also call for the promotion of royal events, by celebrating the British Protestant monarchy in schools.  In contrast, secular schools would provide education about religions and other world outlooks, rather than permitting any religious indoctrination. However, such an approach is also still vehemently opposed by the Catholic hierarchy, which would lose the privileges it currently enjoys. In upholding this stance they have the backing of the Labour Party, particularly in Scotland.

Labour attacked the SNP, for much of its history, for wanting to create a Presbyterian Scotland. Labour strongly suggested that Scottish independence could only lead to the creation of a new ‘Stormont’-type regime here. As recently as 1994, Labour accused the SNP of anti-Catholic sectarianism in the Monklands by-election. However, just as the SNP has been able to out-social democrat New Labour, so, under Salmond, it has become as adept as Labour in courting the support of religious leaders, including the late Cardinal Winning and the current Cardinal O’Brien.

To win their influential support, the SNP has carefully politically positioned itself to appear less tolerant of gays and abortion rights than Labour, without officially adopting anti-gay or anti-abortion stances, which could lose it liberal support. Furthermore, the SNP has managed this, whilst at the same time courting such prominent Protestant fundamentalists as the homophobic Brian Souter, owner of Stagecoach.

Labour too was long able to play to such seemingly contradictory galleries. Prominent anti-Catholic bigot, Sam Campbell, member of the Orange Order, was the one-time Provost of Dalkeith and prominent Midlothian Labour councillor. Furthermore, Labour also currently enjoys the electoral support of the Orange Order, since it is seen to be the largest and most effective pro-unionist party in Scotland. Labour certainly doesn’t loudly trumpet this, preferring, if challenged, to appear as a mediating influence between religious or ethnic ‘extremes’.

In the recent past, Labour has extended the approach, initially adopted towards the Catholic hierarchy, by seeking the support of Muslim religious leaders in order to win the electoral support of mainly Asian migrants (particularly from Pakistan and Bangla Desh). Following this particular precedent, Salmond has also developed close relations with such people as Osama Saeed of the Scottish Islamic Foundation (which went on to receive state funding under the post 2007 SNP Holyrood government). Saeed became an SNP Westminster candidate in 2010 and he advocates ‘faith schools’. Just as the earlier Labour/Catholic hierarchy rapprochement helped to long cover up persistent child abuse in Catholic institutions, so SNP/Muslim religious leader rapprochement, especially if it were to lead to the setting up of ‘faith schools’, would likely provide cover for the sexist treatment of girls and women.2

Only a secular approach to society can guarantee the right of individuals to practice the religion of their choice without imposing their values on others, and at the same time guarantee universal rights to women, children, gays and lesbians, often granted fewer ‘rights’ or facing real discrimination under religious rulings. Following the earlier path adopted by the Liberal and Labour Parties before it, the SNP has not chosen a principled secular approach.

This is because the SNP, despite having a paper commitment to political independence, has also been very much moulded by the legacy of British unionism and imperialism. This can be seen in the party’s acceptance of the Crown (which fronts so many of the anti-democratic features of the UK state), the United Kingdom (the Queen would remain head of state), its support for Scottish regiments (serving US/British imperial interests) and of sterling (which means recognition of Scotland’s economic subordination to the City).

The SNP leadership does not really offer us a political road to effective Scottish self-determination. Instead it offers itself to both overseas and Scottish business leaders as the best potential management for declining British imperialism and the UK state, in the territory ‘north of the border’. It accepts the continued dominant role of US/British imperialism and corporate capital in the north-east Atlantic. It wishes to uphold this order, but preferably through a saltire-flagged, non-nuclear, military contribution to NATO.

The SNP leadership does hope though that there will still be enough small change left from government revenues to provide a few social democratic reforms, after meeting the continually increasing costs of maintaining a crisis-ridden capitalism. To win wider support for this strategy, it is trying to paint as much of the inherited machinery of the UK state with a good lick of ‘tartan paint’ as possible, beginning with the British Army’s Scottish regiments.

The SNP’s current confident stance is designed to offer a somewhat brighter future than the grim prospects offered by the present Scottish Labour leader, the well-named Iain Gray. However, committed first to meeting the needs of the banksters and other corporate spivs, the SNP’s illusion-mongering can only work as long as workers lack the self-confidence to organise and to take action to meet our own needs.

Real Scottish political self-determination can only be won through the consistent upholding of a democratic secular approach, which strives for the equality of all those currently living in Scotland, in an alliance with others in England, Wales and Ireland to break up the UK state and the US/British imperial alliance on the basis of an ‘internationalism from below’ strategy.

Such a strategy can not be separated from the need to develop a new socio-economic order to replace an increasingly crisis-ridden capitalism. To achieve this means breaking from all those who have become trapped in the web of institutions bequeathed by the successive phases of global capitalism both under the dominance of British and now US/British imperialism. In the nineteenth century, the Liberals succumbed to these pressures, as Labour did in the twentieth century, and as the SNP do  today. This is why it is so important that we begin to learn deeper lessons from the most recent failed attempt to do this – the Scottish Socialist Party. There is so much at stake.

Allan Armstrong, 10.8.11

1]           However, just as social democratic economic and social measures are being  scrapped to meet the needs of crisis-ridden capital, so too, have Cameron’s Conservatives decided to  undermine ‘multicultural’ state backing for selected  ethno-religious leaders (particularly Muslim), the better to promote old-style racist divide and rule policies amongst the working class.

2]             Of course, this is not to imply that such reactionary thinking and practice are confined to these particular religions or denominations. Neither the ‘liberal’ leadership of the Church of England nor the Church of Scotland is prepared to face down the homophobia of influential sections of their churches. The Church of England is committed to retaining its own denominational schools in England. The Church of Scotland has ostracised one of its own female ministers, Helen Percy, after she was raped by a church elder.

This was issued by the Manchester-based blogger, ‘Infantile and disorderly‘, on May 2.

On May 5, George Galloway will be standing for election to Holyrood. The former Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin is heading the George Galloway (Respect) – Coalition Against Cuts list. He has the backing of Solidarity, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party in Scotland. On his election website, Galloway pledges to “oppose every cut to schools, hospitals and public services” and “fight for a parliament with the powers to tax the rich bankers and big business to help pay for jobs and decent public services”. It sounds fine, but there is no way those on the left can extend any level of support for George Galloway.

Galloway is a supporter of the Islamic Republic of Iran. When questioned at a recent public meeting, Galloway denied ever supporting president Ahmadinejad and even offered £1,000 to anyone who could prove his support. However, while interviewing the Iranian president on his Press TV show, The real deal, last August, Galloway stated that he requires “police protection in London from the Iranian opposition because of my support for your election campaign. I mention this so you know where I’m coming from.” In fact, while Iran’s 2009 election is widely accepted to have been rigged, Galloway has stated in his Daily Record blog that the electoral count “was awesome” and the million-plus protesters took to the streets because “too many people were allowed to vote” (his emphasis).

The Iranian regime incarcerates, tortures and executes political opponents, including leftists, trades unionists and leaders of the radical students’ movement. It does the same to those found guilty of “war against god”, a charge levelled at political dissidents.

Confessions are extracted under torture and duress and at times broadcast on state TV channels, including Press TV. Those found guilty of adultery and homosexuality can face the death penalty. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani (called “the so-called stoning case” by Galloway on Press TV) was sentenced to death by stoning in a court speaking a language she didn’t speak herself. George Galloway denies that homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran. On The Wright show, Galloway stated that “the papers seem to imply that you get executed in Iran for being gay. That’s not true.” He then inferred that the boyfriend of gay Iranian asylum seeker Mehdi Kazemi had been executed for “sex crimes” against young boys and not for being gay.

It’s unsurprising that Galloway publicly supports the Islamic Republic. He is an employee of Press TV, the Iranian state propaganda channel. While serving as a MP, Galloway was forced to declare his earnings from Press TV, which ranged from between £5,000 and £20,000 for his various shows.

As pro-democracy protests engulf Syria, it’s worth remembering that Galloway has previously heaped praise upon the Syrian regime and authoritarian ruler, Bashar al-Assad. Addressing Damascus University in late 2005, Galloway said: “For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs.” Galloway has expressed approval for other dictators too, once describing Pakistan’s general Musharraf as an “upright sort”. Far from a consistent democrat, after the 1999 coup brought Musharraf to power Galloway told The Mail on Sunday that “Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together … Democracy is a means, not an end in itself and it has a bad name on the streets of Karachi and Lahore.”

Galloway’s Christian beliefs have influenced his views on abortion and stem cell research. He doesn’t believe in evolution. In The Independent on Sunday in 2004 Galloway said: “I’m strongly against abortion. I believe life begins at conception, and therefore unborn babies have rights. I think abortion is immoral.” He was absent from all votes on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (which included attempts to reduce the abortion time limit in the UK). His notable absenteeism extends to many LGBT issues and euthanasia. Then again, Galloway always had fairly lamentable levels of parliamentary participation. As a Respect MP, Galloway only participated in 98 out of 1,288 votes. In 2006, he claimed more expenses than any other backbench MP in parliament.

Galloway’s egoism has always been astounding. While most socialists consider it standard for workers’ representatives to be elected on a workers’ wage (not an impoverishing amount, but the salary of a skilled worker), Galloway has declared he couldn’t possibly live on “three workers’ wages”. And what else other than pure vanity can have driven an appearance on Big brother, which discredited whole sections of the left?

Finally, it’s worth remembering that Respect’s own councillors in Tower Hamlets have voted through cuts to public services.

We call on socialists to offer no support for Galloway’s election campaign.

Moshé Machover (Israeli socialist)
Torab Saleth (Workers Left Unity Iran)
Mehdi Kia (co-editor Middle East Left Forum)
Charlie Pottins (Unite and Hands Off the People of Iran steering committee)
Rosie Kane (Scottish Socialist Party)
Nima Kisomi (Iranian socialist)
Sahar G (Iranian socialist)
Suran Badfar (Iranian Socialist)
Vicky Thompson (Hopi)
Tami Peterson (National Union of Students LGBT committee)
David Broder (The Commune)
Steve Ryan (The Commune)
Barry Biddulph (The Commune)
Sinead Rylance (Communist Students)
Ustun Yazar (Communist Students)
Reyhaneh Sadegzadeh (Communist Students)
Alex Allan (Communist Students)
James O’Leary (Communist Students)
Sebastian Osthoff (Communist Students)
Komsan Duke (Anarchist Federation)
William J Martin (Batley and Spen CLP)
Elsie Wraight (Manchester Labour Students)
Rachael Howe (Love Levenshulme Hate Cuts campaign)
Karen Broady (Unison)
Ste Monaghan (GMB)
Edd Mustill (NUJ)
Dan Read (NUJ)
Pete Cookson (NUT)
Joe Broady (Bectu)
Raphie De Santos (‘The left banker’)
Andrew Coates (socialist blogger)
Michael Leversha (student activist)
Beth Marshall (student activist)
Nima Barazandeh (student activist)
Democratic Socialist Alliance (organisation).

Allan Armstrong, Nick Clarke, and Bob Goupillot, editors of Emancipation & Liberation would like to add their names to this Open Letter, but with the following reservation regarding phrase the He doesn’t believe in evolution.

Galloway does support evolution as scientific fact – see article below from ‘Daily Record‘.

http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2009/02/student-critic-creates-a-fuss.html

The one thing that does not appear in the letter of protest is Galloway’s public incitement to violence against those who failed to support Sheridan in court in his attempt to use his political position for purely personal gain. We are pleased to see that Rosie Kane, who has been the subject of particularly foul abuse and attention from this quarter, has signed this letter.

George Galloway has decided, with the backing of Respect in England and Wales, to stand as an MSP in Glasgow in next year’s Holyrood elections. This decision would apparently have been taken with or without Respect’s support. It amounts to little more than an attempt at carpet-bagging, following his removal from the celebrity spotlight, when he failed to retain a Westminster seat last year.

Galloway’s articles in the Daily Record show his likely political trajectory. He hopes to follow Ken Livingstone and be re-accepted into the Labour Party. He is selling himself to Labour voters in Glasgow as somebody with a high personal profile in contrast with existing Labour MSPs. Galloway’s most likely obstacle is probable jealousy over his celebrity status amongst the existing lacklustre leaders of the party in Scotland.

The attempt to promote socialist projects around celebrity candidates, whether Ken Livingstone, Arthur Scargill, Tommy Sheridan or George Galloway, has done nothing to advance principled and deep-rooted socialist organisation in these islands. Galloway’s particular claim to fame on the Left has been his spirited opposition to US imperialism. However, he has a record, not of being a consistent anti-imperialist, but of holding an ambivalent relationship to various regimes (e.g. Saddam’s Baathist Iraq and Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic of Iran), which are not opposed to imperialism in principle, but only to their lowly position in the current global order of things.

Domestically, Galloway has placed far more importance upon cultivating links with Islamic communal leaders, than with being held accountable either to socialist or working class organisations. Notoriously, he rejects the idea of  ‘a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage’ and believes that MPs should be paid twice as much.

Politically Galloway is opposed to ‘a woman’s right to choose over abortion’. Through his deeply entrenched Left British unionism, Galloway opposes any meaningful self-determination for Scotland. He still nostalgically hankers over the fate of another unionist and imperial state – the USSR – which still, in many ways, provides his ideal model.

Galloway has every right to stand in the Holyrood election next year. Genuine socialists have every reason to oppose him.

Socialist Resistance

The RCN has criticised Socialist Resistance in the past for its failure to address George Galloway’s articles in the Daily Record supporting the Labour Party in the Glasgow East by-election in 2008. Therefore, we welcome the principled stance Socialist Resistance has now taken over Galloway’s decision to stand in Glasgow in next year’s Holyrood elections.

Republican Communist Network, 15.11.10

Socialist Resistance on the issue:

Why we are against Respect organizing in Scotland

After a week in which George Galloway said he was under pressure to stand in next year’s elections for the Scottish Parliament, Respect’s annual conference on November 13 voted, 59 to 15, to organise in Scotland. That resolution, published below, makes Socialist Resistance’s position inside Respect untenable. Resistance supported the establishment of Respect in England and has been central to the party’s leadership and work since then. As we explained in the leaflet distributed to the conference, because Resistance supports the Scottish Socialist Party the decision to organise in Scotland in competition to the SSP is a deep error by Respect, one which weakens Respect’s democracy and neglects the importance of Scotland’s struggle for self-determination.

The following amendment was passed by a large majority at Respect’s annual conference on November 13.

Conference notes that:

1. There will be elections to the Scottish Parliament in May 2011
2. These elections will be conducted under a form of proportional representation in which some MSPs are elected from a list
3. Respect has not organized in or contested elections in Scotland in the past because of the hegemony of other parties to the left of Labour
4. This hegemony no longer exists
. In the context of unprecedented cuts by the Condem Coalition and disappointment with the Labour and SNP, there is now an opportunity for Respect to contest elections to the Scottish parliament with a realistic prospect of success

Conference therefore believes

1. National officers should start preparations for Respect to contest elections to the Scottish Parliament
. Preparations should include immediately registering Scottish Respect as a description that can be used in Scottish elections and seeking to recruit residents in Scotland to Respect.

This is the text of a leaflet distributed by supporters of Socialist Resistance in Respect who now feel that our situation in the organisation is now untenable.

We are strongly opposed to the proposition that Respect organise in Scotland, as proposed in amendment E to Motion 1

Socialist Resistance has supported Respect since its inception in 2004 and previously supported the Socialist Alliance. We supported George Galloway’s letter which sought to democratize the leadership of Respect and backed the majority in the ensuing split in the organisation in 2007. We put the resources of our newspaper at the disposal of Respect. We understood that George and Salma, given their role in the anti-war movement had a vital contribution to make in building a political alternative to New Labour.

But were a resolution to organise Respect in Scotland to be passed at this Respect Conference this would make our situation in the organisation untenable. We are against such a resolution being adopted on a number of grounds:

1) A controversial change of a long-held policy that Respect does not organise in Scotland should not be introduced a week before the conference and with no discussion at the National Council or in the branches.

2) The only purpose in organising in Scotland would be for Respect to stand candidates in next May’s Scottish Parliament elections and in subsequent parliamentary and local elections. Respect has no policy positions on the specific situation in Scotland, particularly the issue of devolution and self-determination an issue around which there would be several different positions. To go into a Scottish election with no debate on key political issues would be fundamentally wrong.

3) There are already two left parties in Scotland standing in elections and they intend to continue doing so, namely the SSP and Solidarity. The SLP also stands in elections in Scotland. The last thing the Scottish left needs is another left party standing in those same elections and dividing the left vote still further.

4) In Respect there have always been different views on which party to support in Scotland. We support the SSP. If this conference were to adopt a position on organising in Scotland and to fight elections SR members would be in an impossible situation. For a party to have members who advocate voting for a different party would be untenable – both for Respect and for SR.

5) Underlying this issue is an important political question; namely the right of the Scottish people to self-determination, including the right to independence. Therefore we reject the idea of English based parties organizing in Scotland.

6) We still haven’t managed to build Respect on an England-wide basis – a decision to stand for election in Glasgow will inevitably lead to the de-prioritisation of Tower Hamlets.

We therefore urge the leadership and membership of Respect to avoid this course of action and to reject the proposal to organise in Scotland, avoiding both the undemocratic nature of such a decision and its consequences for the unity of the organisation.

Socialist Resistance, 13.11.10

Ed Walsh, (Irish Socialist Network) gives his personal views on the recent split in Respect

Originally printed at http://www.irishsocialist.net

The British Left has now experienced two acrimonious splits in the space of eighteen months. After the grim transformation of the Scottish Socialist Party into two bitterly-divided camps (The SSP split has been covered in back issues of E&L including an article by the Irish Solidarity Network entitled Crisis in the SSP, Emancipation & Liberation No. 14, Spring 2007), their comrades south of the border now have their own feud to manage.

Whatever else happens, it seems clear that the two factions emerging from within the Respect coalition will not be working together in the same organisation for a long, long time.

57 varieties – still unfit for human consumption

If you listen to the Socialist Workers Party, it would appear that the vitriolic parting of the ways between themselves and virtually every other prominent figure in Respect is the result of a left/right divide. The SWP are the left wing, while George Galloway and his allies represent a rightwards-moving, communalist, electoralist tendency that had to instigate a witch-hunt against Britain’s largest Trotskyist grouping in order to smooth the path for their own march towards the centre ground.

Unfortunately for the SWP, very few people outside their own ranks give this theory the least bit of credence. It’s quite true that there are notable political differences between George Galloway and the SWP, and you’d expect that any group chiefly shaped by the thinking of Galloway would be quite distinct from one in which the ideas of the SWP played a dominant role. But that doesn’t seem to have been what provoked the falling-out.

Rather, the immediate cause of the split was organisational. Questions of organisation are themselves deeply political, of course, but not always in the sense that one faction is more radical, less given to compromise in the pursuit of left-wing goals than the other. In this case, former allies of the SWP in Respect have levelled accusations of authoritarian control-freakery against the organisation – they claim that the SWP would have preferred to destroy Respect rather than give up total control over its structures. Previous experience with the Socialist Alliance in the UK counts against the furious denials of the SWP leadership (as does the track record of numerous campaigns in Ireland).

This article is not going to waste much time on SWP-bashing (you can find plenty of it in the community of leftist bloggers if that’s what you’re looking for). It’s more useful to ask what political conclusions might be drawn from a trail of broken alliances and wrecked campaigning fronts. It doesn’t seem very plausible to assume that the SWP (or any other far-left group with a similar record) does this sort of thing for the craic, because they really enjoy sabotaging political initiatives.

The root cause appears to be the lack of democracy in the ranks of so many Trotskyist organisations. All too often, we find radical groups to be dominated by a permanent leadership faction which marginalises or co-opts dissenting figures within the ranks. Without a healthy culture of debate and disagreement inside the party, it’s going to be very hard to establish a good working relationship with non-members – chances are, the leadership is going to import the same high-handed, autocratic methods and try to establish its own hegemony through manipulation. This sort of behaviour is made all the easier when the average member is unable to challenge the approach of the leadership without exposing themselves to the threat of expulsion.

Theoretical arrogance

Along with this democratic deficit, you would have to include as a factor an odd kind of theoretical arrogance – the belief that one group (be it the SWP or anyone else) represents the vanguard-in-waiting, already armed with the correct ideas to lead the working class to victory. It can’t be said often enough – nobody active on the Left today has worked out the perfect strategy, otherwise they would have settled accounts with capitalism long ago. We all have an awful lot to learn, the best we can manage is to set out with a fairly solid set of guide-lines based on the experience of the past and keep our eyes and ears open for new trends as they emerge.

Anyone who believes they know all the answers already and can trace the path to be followed in advance is going to be sorely tempted to take authoritarian short-cuts – if we know what conclusions people should end up drawing, why not save the time and trouble and do the job for them? The best safeguard against this tendency is the firm conviction that all the bother of thrashing out political differences and contending with views you consider mistaken is not a tiresome distraction from the real business of socialist politics – on the contrary, it is a vital and indispensable part of the socialist project, which requires that millions of people learn to think for themselves and shed the passivity nurtured by the power structures of capitalism. Any project of radical change which is steered to victory by a handful of infallible leaders will simply replace one system of elite rule with another.

Wrong direction

If you’re familiar with socialist history, and appreciate how closely the modern day Trotskyist groupings model themselves on the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky, you’ll find it very hard not to think of the critical points made against Bolshevism by Rosa Luxemburg and other socialists of her day so many years ago. The evidence that far-left authoritarianism can be traced back to its roots in the Leninist tradition appears very strong. This is not to say that every group which comes out of that tradition is bound to be authoritarian – the French LCR, for example, practices genuine pluralism, and many sincere opponents of undemocratic chicanery in Respect and the Socialist Alliance come from a similar background. But more often than not, the influence of Bolshevik theory and practice has pushed radical socialists in the wrong direction.

Some readers may be starting to groan at the prospect of yet another discussion of 1917 and all that, so don’t worry, this is not the time. It’s frustrating that we still have to spend time debating issues that appear very remote from contemporary politics – there’s so much in the modern world that demands hard thinking from socialists, and it seems more useful to spend our time discussing recent events in France, Bolivia or Palestine than rehearsing old arguments about Red October and its aftermath. Leninism still casts a powerful shadow over the organised radical left, though, and can’t just be ignored.

New directions

It’s far too early to say what will emerge from the fracturing of Respect. The SWP has pledged to carry on with its own version of Respect, despite having lost all its significant allies – how long they will persist is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t seem as if the modus operandi of the party will change. Its top-down, ultra centralised style of organisation will continue to frustrate its own potential and antagonise its would be allies. Ken Loach’s remark that the SWP leadership want subjects, not comrades cut right to the heart of the matter.

Unpredictable

The Respect Renewal current, which gathers together the likes of Galloway, Loach, Salma Yaqoob and the Socialist Resistance group, is more unpredictable. A lot will depend on George Galloway himself. Galloway does not have a good track record when it comes to matters of democracy and accountability. He has been saying the right things on this score since the faction fight exploded over the summer, but it’s not at all clear if he means it, or if he’s just saying what he thinks people want to hear. As the best-known public face of Respect, he can do a lot of good or a lot of harm.

To be very cynical, the socialists in Respect who have lined up with the Scotsman had a simple choice. They could trade off the very real possibility of being shafted by Galloway at some point in the future, against the certainty of being shafted by the SWP right now. The choice they made was understandable, and they can reasonably argue that Respect minus the SWP is not just a Galloway vehicle – it includes other figures like Yaqoob and Loach with a high public profile, and might now be able to reach out to left activists unwilling to work with the SWP.

One common denominator between the left-wing crises in Scotland and the rest of Britain was the involvement of a leader who became a media personality and ended up making a complete arse of themselves in the public eye. While Tommy Sheridan appears well-set for a career of undignified but lucrative clowning-around (reports of his stand-up show left people gasping in disbelief), Galloway has gone some way towards repairing the damage inflicted by his turn on Celebrity Big Brother. It’s not clear though if he’s really acknowledged what a disaster it was.

Tabloid fodder

The experience of Sheridan and Galloway shows the dangers for the Left inherent in a heavily mediatised society. Not only do we have to worry about the hostile propaganda of right-wing newspapers, we also have to reckon with the possibility that prominent left-wingers will end up becoming tabloid fodder if they don’t watch themselves. The record of Joe Higgins as a TD suggested one way to avoid this peril – he earned plenty of column inches by coming out with great quotes in the Dáil, while projecting a rather austere, puritanical image that seemed to protect him from being lampooned. The lack of a permanent tan did Higgins no harm either.

While clearly not as radical as Sheridan, Galloway or Higgins, Ken Livingstone is another left-winger who has learned to handle the media in his own way, after finding himself one of the tabloid hate-figures of the 1980s. Ironically for someone who earned himself the undying hatred of New Labour, Livingstone’s media image has endured better in the long run than the spin-obsessed Tony Blair. The Left needs to spend time studying examples like this, and figure out the best (or the least worst) way to use the mainstream media as a platform without allowing it to suffocate our movements in a haze of glib, personality-driven nonsense.

As long as Galloway remains the best-known figure in the re-organised party, we can expect to hear plenty more talk about his notorious visit to Baghdad. It’s only fair to point out that much of this criticism has come from hypocritical pro-war commentators – their own champion Tony Blair has a much grosser record of cosying up to tyrants, from Suharto of Indonesia to Karimov of Uzbekistan, yet that doesn’t appear to bother them.

Nor is Galloway the only progressive figure who has demeaned himself in such a manner. The Sandinistas supported the Polish military dictatorship of Jaruzelksi, while Nelson Mandela offered a fawning tribute to General Suharto during a visit to Jakarta while the murderous occupation of East Timor was still in progress. More recently, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales have done their reputations no favours by exchanging compliments with unsavoury figures like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

But there’s only so far you can go with qualifications and caveats of that sort before acknowledging that Galloway’s Iraqi performance will always be a black mark against his name. The key point, surely, is that his current position and reputation owes so much to his role in the anti-war movement. Arthur Scargill supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was shameful, but it wasn’t directly relevant to his leadership of the miners’ union during its titanic battle with Thatcher. Galloway has opposed the Iraq war all along and put himself on the line to do so – it’s bloody tragic that he has tainted that creditable record of activism by a compromising appearance in pre-war Iraq.

The best hope for Respect Renewal seems to be that Galloway will take a step back and allow other figures to take a leading role. His behaviour in the past encourages scepticism – but Galloway does have strengths as well as weaknesses, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that his better side will win out. Only time will tell.

Islamophobia and the Left

One of the most striking things about Respect’s development to date has been its ability to win support from a significant layer of British Muslims – both in terms of its voting base and its activist cadre. This has also been the source of much criticism. In the more ludicrously over-charged rantings of some journalists, Respect has been presented as an alliance between Islamo-fascists and the far left, akin to the BNP. More restrained critics have spoken of communalism, or accused Respect of watering down left-wing principles and forming dubious alliances.

There is more than a grain of truth in such criticism (at least in the more balanced stuff, not the hysterical diatribes). Socialists who have always opposed imperialism and the war on terror, and who recognise the need to combat Islamophobia, have been critical of the approach taken by Respect in its efforts to win Muslim support – Gilbert Achcar and Tariq Ali being two notable examples.

But critical comments need to be qualified by recognition that left-wingers can make even more damaging mistakes in the opposite direction. The French radical left has totally failed to mobilise support from Muslims in France who are at the sharp end of racist discrimination, harassed by the state and demonised by the far right. It sat on the fence while the Chirac government introduced its hijab ban with hypocritical calls for Muslims to “integrate” into a society that largely treats them as second-class citizens. The LCR section in Saint-Denis even turned down an application for membership from a young Muslim woman, because she wore the hijab and that would have been bad for the party’s image…

So while it’s important not to compromise with conservative and reactionary tendencies that undoubtedly exist in Muslim communities, it’s equally vital that the Left doesn’t adopt its own version of mainstream prejudice and see all practising Muslims as fundamentalist bigots. Christianity has more than its fair share of bigotry, but that hasn’t stopped leftists from embracing Christians in all kinds of progressive struggles. The same principle should apply to Muslims.

The achievements of Respect deserve to be stressed as well as its errors. British society is saturated with anti-Muslim racism. The recent controversy involving Martin Amis, one of Britain’s best-known novelists, showed how bad things have got. Amis made a number of explicitly racist comments directed against Muslims, advocating their persecution by the British state. He treated his audience to smug lectures on the superiority of western civilisation of the sort that should have died with Rudyard Kipling. When left-wing academic Terry Eagleton tackled Amis for his racism, he was booed and hissed by a large section of Britain’s literary intelligentsia, who were quite happy to let the novelist off the hook after he slithered his way out of responsibility for his comments and responded to Eagleton with vulgar abuse.

From the high-falutin’ literati to the dregs of the tabloid press, it’s become acceptable to say things about Muslims that would never be tolerated if Jews, black people or homosexuals were in the verbal firing line. A study commissioned by Ken Livingstone recently established that over 90% of references to Islam in the UK media were negative. Muslims in Britain and other European countries form one of the most impoverished and down-trodden sections of the working class, and the Left badly needs to connect with their experience. Nor should it be a question of enlightened socialists bringing their ideas to the benighted Muslims – we have at least as much to learn as we have to teach.