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, 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 later Labour leader of Dunbartonshire Council) were also elected as local councillors. This was a considerable achievement, and 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 therefore worse than useless. 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.

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 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 come), 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 and 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.  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

 

 

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Due to an oversight this report was not placed earlier on the ‘Emancipation & Liberation’ blog

 

The second Republican Socialist Convention was organised by the Socialist Alliance [1] in London on February 13^th.  In its initial conception it was ambitious. With a General Election looming in the UK, the organisers attempted to bring together figures from the Left who might be offering an election challenge this year.  Those invited included Bob Crow, General Secretary of the RMT and someone from the Socialist Party, both involved in the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition [2], Robert Griffiths from the Communist Party of Britain (and formerly of No2EU), Peter Tatchell of the Green Left, and Colin Fox, co-Spokesperson for the Scottish Socialist Party (as well as Tony Benn, now seen as somewhat of a ‘national treasure’ by the British Left). They were all to be asked how they saw the relevance of campaigning on political or democratic issues, especially the demand for a republic. The series of apologies given, some undoubtedly genuine, whilst others more probably sectarian in motivation, highlighted the over-ambitious aims held by the organisers.

The Convention Chair, Steve Freeman, introduced Peter Tatchell as a ‘republican in spirit’. He made a useful contribution to start the debate. Peter outlined his proposed ten points for the republican reform of the British constitution. As with most of the British Left, the ‘Six Counties’ was missing from Peter’s contribution. He did think, though, that a federal Britain could solve the National Question in England, Scotland and Wales.

There was a formalism about the republican principles Peter advocated. This was because Peter had not analysed the real nature of the British unionist and imperialist state we were up against, and the anti-democratic Crown Powers it had its disposal to crush any serious opposition. Nor did Peter outline where the social and political forces existed to bring about his new republic. In particular, he did not really consider the role of republican challenges to the UK state, emanating from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Unfortunately, Peter had to leave for another meeting, whilst time for further discussion was curtailed, so Colin Fox was then left to put the SSP’s socialist republican case in somewhat of a vacuum.

Colin pointed out how the MP’s expenses scandal has shown how unrepresentative they have become. James Connolly reminded those who aspire to represent working people ‘Rise with your class not out of it’. Some 650 MP’s or ‘representatives’ are elected to Parliament. So why are they so unrepresentative? It has been subverted by the neo-liberal consensus. Being an MP has become a career not a cause. Parliament is full of lawyers, businessmen, bankers, accountants and lecturers and that’s just the Labour side!

In 2005, the Queen opened her new £440m Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood in Edinburgh. The SSP MSP’s decided not just to boycott the event, but to organise an alternative. The SSP gave its support to the Declaration of Calton Hill. Socialist republicanism is at the heart of the SSP’s politics.

The Convention then moved quickly on to the last morning session, introduced by Mehdi Kia (co-editor of the Middle East Bulletin). Medhi provided an overview of the events in Iran over the last 8 months. Initially he addressed some of the myths surrounding the recent presidential election and provided reasons for rejecting them. These included suggestions that the election was not fraudulent, that the protestors are mainly middle class, that this is another “velvet” revolution orchestrated by the US, that it is led by the reformists, and that the Iranian regime is in some way anti-imperialistic.

He went on to point out that the protestors come from a variety of backgrounds, the slogans are continuously changing and becoming more radicalised, the movement is in its very essence democratic and anti-imperialist, and within it is a growing secular republican movement (rejecting the Islamic republic) with increasingly radical slogans. He concluded that under the immense repression of the regime the tactic of street demonstrations has only limited potential and unless the various movements (women, youth, nationalities and workers) co-ordinate more effectively and adopt different tactics the movement will not succeed in its more radical aims.

The afternoon session was meant to introduce the perspective of ‘Internationalism from Below’ – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales – which had united the contributors to the first Republican Socialist Convention held in Edinburgh on the 29^th November, 2008. The SSP International Committee had to apply some pressure for this issue to be taken seriously by the London organisers. They accepted, given the prevalence of Left British Unionism in England, that a debate was indeed needed between representatives of this tradition and speakers from both Left Nationalist and ‘Internationalism from Below’ viewpoints.  A mixture of the shortness of time, the lack of non-English contacts held by the Left in London, and various apologies limited the scope for this debate on the day.

Instead, Steve Freeman spoke about whether there was a National Question in England, beginning by considering the flags and anthems at the 1966 world cup, the Scotland-England rugby match in 1990 and the Euro football in 1996 when the flag of St George became prominent. The National Question involves issues of political institutions (parliaments etc) and identity. Whilst the National Question was recognised for Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the Left had not examined the related situation in England.

Steve considered that a British nation had been created after 1707 through the wars with France in the 18th century. He saw the UK as one nation and four tribes – the British-English, British-Irish, British-Scots and British-Welsh. Now the political institutions and the identity of the British English were being questioned. There was no British-English National Question in the past but now there were signs of an emerging crisis of politics and identity. From this a new English politics and identity could emerge. How should the Left relate to this?

Allan Armstrong, from the SSP’s International Committee (and a member of the party’s Republican Communist Network platform), then outlined some of the lessons socialist republicans could learn from the decades long republican struggle against the UK state in Ireland. He pointed out that there was now a National Movement in Scotland that is wider than the SNP. Indeed the SNP, like its equivalent parties in Quebec, Catalunya and Euskadi, is increasingly settling for Devolution-Max, and pushing the interests of local business within the existing corporate imperialist order.

Today, the British, American and EU ruling classes are united against any move towards Scottish independence. This is why any movement to win Scottish self-determination must be republican from the start. It must be prepared, in advance, to confront the Crown Powers that will be inevitably utilised against us. Because genuine and democratic Scottish independence represents such a challenge to British imperialism and the UK state, we need allies in England, Ireland and Wales too. We need to be committed to a strategy of ‘internationalism from below’. We are socialist republicans and link our political demands with social and economic campaigns. This was the course advocated by two great socialist republicans born in Scotland – James Connolly and John Maclean.

This session prompted the most debate, which has now continued on the RCN [3] and The Commune [4] websites, and in the pages of the very Left Unionist, Weekly Worker. It was a pity that enough time wasn’t given to air this debate more thoroughly on the day.

The last session was a bit of a damp squib, since the SA had obviously seen it as an opportunity to get the same sort of unity around demands over democratic issues in the forthcoming General Election, that the Left can sometimes achieve (on paper anyhow!) over economic issues. Instead it was left to Colin Fox for the SSP and Joseph Healey, for the Green Left, to outline the nature of their parties’ proposed electoral campaigns. The absence of the other Left forces contesting the election meant the SA’s aims could not be achieved in this respect.

It was good to have a Republican Socialist Convention organised in England. It was traditional Left in its mode of organisation (platform and audience), even when there were only about 20 present, but everybody who contributed did so in a constructive manner  - yes, including those from the ‘Brit Left’! I feel that more could have been gained though if the Convention had concentrated on the debate between Left Unionism, Left Nationalism and ‘Internationalism from Below’.  Maybe the next time!

 Allan Armstrong (member of SSP International Committee)

 

In Weekly Worker no 865 James Turley has attacked those who wrote an Open Letter urging no vote for George Galloway in the Holyrood elections on May 5th. The Open Letter was originally published on the Manchester-based blog, Infantile and disorderly (The Editorial Board of Emancipation & Liberation added its members’ names after the initial publication). So Turley’s response was not made with the Republican Communist Network in mind. However, since his letter addresses the situation in Scotland, and seems singularly misinformed about the situation, here is a reply.

Turley begins well enough, agreeing with many of the criticisms of Galloway already made by others. However, he soon reveals his ignorance of the situation in Scotland. He claims that Solidarity certainly did better under {Galloway’s} tutelage than Sheridan’s. In the recent 2011 Holyrood election, the Left unionist Galloway-fronted, Solidarity-backed slate received 6972 votes. However, in the 2007 election, the Left nationalist Sheridan-fronted, Solidarity slate received 8574 votes. On neither occasion were Galloway or Sheridan elected. Sheridan only managed to achieve this as part of the united socialist SSA and SSP slates in 1999 and 2003. Under their auspices he received 18,581 and 31,116 votes respectively.

Turley goes on to claim that the Open Letter signatories are misguided in basing their judgement on Galloway over Iran, because he is not standing for election in Tehran. One can find all manner of Labour Left or Morning Star-type candidates with extremely dodgy record of supporting dictatorial regimes abroad, but the CPGB’s intervention is about drawing a class line on the cuts issue.

This represents a fairly rapid retreat to a narrow British and economistic focus, especially in the context of the major ongoing democratic struggles being waged throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Galloway appears to have greater internationalist pretensions than the CPGB. He has very publicly extended his support to a Muslim revolution… because a very significant number of the population of Egypt support the Islamic Movement of Egypt and that Movement has no need to hide itself under a bushel. (Stop the War Coalition meeting in London on 2nd February). In the Guardian of the 12th March, Galloway wrote that, I welcome the imminent victory of the Islamic movements in Egypt and Tunisia, which I think will provide very good government on the Turkish model.

With the collapse of Mubarak, the US and UK states are looking to the Muslim Brotherhood to buttress their slipping imperial control in the area. The Erdogan regime in Turkey is an ardent promoter of global corporate interests including privatisation. It continues to oppress the Kurds. Faced with ongoing democratic revolutions, in which the most advanced participants currently desire not Muslim but secular republics, and oppose ‘their’ state’s wholesale handing over of resources to the global corporations, Galloway’s genuine anti-imperialist credentials begin to look rather thin.

However, the crux of Turley’s argument focuses on Scotland and the CPGB’s  class line on the cuts issue {which} involves  a vote for a) candidates of the workers’ movement who b) oppose, and (at least say they) will vote against all cuts to public services. We also argue that voters should prefer Labour candidates who meet the conditions to non-Labour, though this is irrelevant in the Galloway case.

Funnily enough, Weekly Worker has not been able to name a single Labour MSP candidate in Scotland who meets their anti-cuts criteria, despite their own turn to the Labour Party. Furthermore, this is not so irrelevant in the Galloway case. Anybody reading his Daily Record column over the last few years would soon realise that, not only is Galloway pro-Labour, but he has been selling himself as, in effect, another possible future Labour MSP. This was based on his (misguided) assumption that Labour would gain most of the FPTP seats in Glasgow in the 2011 Holyrood election, leaving less space for further Labour MSPs on the top-up List seats. So he pointed out that a vote for Galloway was, in effect, a vote for an extra Labour MSP.

It looks very like Galloway was trying to work his way back into the Labour Party in a similar manner to Ken Livingstone. First, however, he would have to show that he enjoyed enough electoral support. However, when Blair expelled Galloway from the Labour Party in 2003, he took very few people with him, unlike Livingstone. This is why he has had to seek the backing of those Trotskyist groups – in turn, the SWP, Socialist Resistance (they later abandoned him) and now the CWI and the SWP again (!) along with their Scottish breakaway, the International Socialist Group – all of whom he despises. Their role is to act as his unquestioning footsoldiers on the ground.

However, if we look to Galloway’s own stance over fighting the cuts he has no principled record in this regard either. He may verbally claim to be against all cuts to win the support of the gullible CWI and SWP. However Galloway is a member of Respect, which in East London is now little more than an Islamic communalist organisation. Respect councillors have voted through cuts in Tower Hamlets without a word of public criticism from Galloway.

Perhaps realising that a call to support Galloway as a principled anti-cuts candidate lacks a certain credibility, Turley points instead to his support from the Sheridan splinter group Solidarity {with} its two main activist bases, and later to the fact that Galloway remains reliant on support from willing left groups  – he means the SWP and CWI. Here Turley is retreating to another dubious aspect of CPGB politics – its belief that a principled Marxist Party can be built by uniting all the self-declared Marxist organisations in Great Britain into a single party. The ignominious break-up of the CPGB-initiated Campaign for a New Marxist Party highlights the futility of this approach. This collapse was more rapid than that of any other recent socialist unity initiative (the SLP, SSA/SSP, SA, Respect, CNWP), despite the much more limited range of Marxists involved.

If you are serious in opposing the cuts, you certainly have to confront Labour complicity in their implementation, along with their MPs’, MSPs’, councillors’, Party officials’ and Labour-supporting trade union officials’ opposition to any effective independent class action. But you also have to confront those Marxist sects, such as the SWP and CWI, which act as outriders for the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy when it comes to demobilising independent class action. They promote their own front organisations to derail and split any independent movement. This is strikingly obvious in the fight against the cuts. Here we have to confront the wrecking tactics of the SP-controlled National Shop Stewards Movement and the SWP-controlled Right to Work Campaign (whose very names demonstrate they were both created with a different Party-recruiting project in mind).

Turley’s resort to the SWP’s and CWI’s declared support for Galloway only demonstrates the dead-end nature of this particular course of action. With the impending demise of Solidarity, the parting of the SWP and CWI in Scotland can not be far away. Look to Ireland, where despite their coming together in the United Left Alliance (essentially an electoral non-aggression pact), south of the border, they still managed to stand candidates against each other north of the border in the Stormont election on May 5th. And we are often lectured about the superiority of all-Britain or all-UK organisations because of their ability to unite socialists and the working class!

However, Galloway has gone one step further in his attempts to promote disunity. Much of his campaigning has been on his own terms, with little regard to his CWI and SWP allies of convenience. Publicly he has placed a lot of emphasis on cultivating the sectional support of Catholics and Muslims. However, where Galloway has attended joint meetings he has played to the CWI and SWP gallery in his thinly disguised attempts to whip up verbal and physical abuse directed against prominent SSP members in the aftermath of the Sheridan debacle. Sadly, given the number of emotionally damaged, attention-seeking individuals to be found in our society, there are some people who have stooped to such attacks. However, the prime purpose, of resorting to the misplaced use of ‘scab’ accusations to encourage such behaviour, is to deflect attention from the CWI’s and SWP’s own roles in promoting socialist disunity.

They seem to forget that Sheridan was once prepared to hand over the names of Trafalgar Square anti-poll tax protesters to the Metropolitan Police. The CWI didn’t raise any criticisms then. Meanwhile some SWP members in Scotland had started to pay the poll tax, because they argued that once the STUC and Scottish Labour Party had withdrawn their backing from a campaign of defiance the struggle was over! They both have short memories!

So, if you claim that you support candidates of the workers’ movement who oppose and vote against all cuts to public services, who should you have been supporting in Scotland?

Turley mentions the fact that Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Party has regularly out stripped the SSP which has even less reason to exist than the SLP. Now certainly, the SLP did win considerably more votes in this Holyrood election than either the SSP or Solidarity. However, the mere accumulation of passive votes at an election count is of little more significance than the vote for similarly 9th placed Georgia in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. The number of new active SLP members resulting from their vote in Scotland, will probably be outstripped by the sales here of Georgia’s Eurovision entry, One More Day!

In addressing the anti-cuts struggle we have to look to the roles of Solidarity and the SSP, which Turley grudgingly concedes still has activists. In the last Local Council elections, held in Scotland in May 2007, both Solidarity and the SSP gained a councillor each. Solidarity managed to get Ruth Black elected in Glasgow. So how has she performed in relation to the anti-cuts struggle? Well first she defected to the Labour Party and soon became embroiled in accusations of financial irregularity – a prominent anti-cuts spokesperson on the Glasgow Council she certainly is not.

In contrast, Jim Bollan was elected SSP councillor in West Dunbartonshire on the same day. Here he has been to the forefront of the struggle against the cuts, putting forward a ‘No Cuts’ budget, opposed by all the controlling SNP and the ‘opposition’ Labour councillors. Jim has backed trade unionists and supported direct action by council service users. As a result of his staunch opposition to cuts, the SNP ruling group suspended him for six months in 2009. In the person of Jim, we have somebody who has gone considerably beyond Turley’s second voting criterion for giving electoral support – i.e. saying they oppose the cuts. If you add Turley’s first criterion -  support for someone from the Labour movement – Jim had the support of Clydebank Trades Council in the face of his earlier suspension from office.  Jim headed the SSP slate for the West of Scotland on May 5th.

In Glasgow, the most significant anti-cuts struggle at present is the continued Free Hetherington occupation at Glasgow University.  Once again the SSP has been prominent in this, particularly Scottish Socialist Youth.

Now, of course, it is easy for Turley to make a smug dismissal of the current voting support for the SSP. There is much that the SSP can be criticised for in this and other regards. However, when it comes to assessing the anti-cuts opposition on Turley’s criteria, then it Is Galloway, not the SSP, that is found wanting.

Here are 4 items relating to the current situation in Bahrain and Libya

1. SSP Conference motion, 3 April 2011

2. Article by Moshe Machover – The long road of the Arab revolution

3. Article by John McAnulty (Socialist Democracy – Ireland) the test of Libya

4. Article by Pepe Escobar – Exposed the US-Saudi Libya deal

Motion proposed by the SSP Executive Committee (before the UK intervention in Libya)

The Scottish Socialist Party stands fully behind the struggles taking place. We fully support the demands to create a new Arab world on the principles of democracy, secularism, civil rights and in particular the rights of women.

We support the demands for social and economic policies which promote equality and social justice and for the elections of governments which challenge imperialist ambitions in the region and which demonstrate active solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Amendment initiated by RCN members and proposed by Glasgow North East SSP branch

1 – Conference notes its enthusiastic support for the wave of mass protests sweeping through the Arab world, as people fill the streets demanding the end to entrenched dictatorships and the defence of democratic rights. So far, these protests have led to the toppling of Mubarek in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia. We look forward to more victories for the democratic insurgents throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Toppling dictators can only provide the first step in the creation of a genuinely democratic and just society. The SSP stands in solidarity with the progressive democratic forces in the Arab World as they organise to secularise these societies, advance the rights of the working class as it endeavours to form viable trades unions and narrow the vast differentials in income and wealth, and press demands that undermine the autocratic patriarchy that oppresses women and distorts gender relations for all.

2 – The occupation of Bahrain by troops from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States is an ominous development. Unable to suppress popular demands for greater democracy, the Bahraini elite, totally corrupt and discredited, has turned to the theocratic rulers of Saudi Arabia, with its sizeable military forces equipped by the US and UK. The SSP calls for the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Bahrain. We demand that the British government stop selling arms to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and any other government which has contributed troops to the occupation. We join with the people on the streets of Bahrain demanding the overthrow of the monarchy and its replacement by a democratic government responsible to all of the people.

3 – The SSP opposes the military intervention in Libya of the US, Britain and France in Libya, and will actively participate in wider coalitions that demand an immediate halt to the air strikes, while opposing the extension of military operations to the use of ground troops. Western imperialist powers have no interest in promoting democracy in Libya, or anywhere in the Arab world. Their sole goal is to obtain greater control over Libya’s oil resources.

At the same time, the SSP supports he struggle of the Libyan people to topple the Gadaffi regime. The Libyan government was an entrenched, brutal dictatorship and a corrupt one also. In these essential characteristics, it differed little from many other autocratic regimes in the region, which have become the target of popular insurgencies. Our opposition to military intervention in any form by the Western powers in no way implies support for the Tripoli regime.

Passed overwhelmingly by the SSP Annual Conference in Dunfermline on 3.4.11

The Long Road Of The Arab Revolution

by Moshé Machover, a long-standing international socialist now exiled from Israel

Libya: Saving the revolution killed the revolution

It is very difficult to talk in a coherent way about a process which is unfolding and where things are changing all the time. What I would like to do is to initiate a discussion and explore some ideas about where the revolution is going, and what we should expect in both the short term and longer term.

But, given the contention on the left, I think we should start with Libya. There is a lot of confusion, and I think that this is partly for understandable reasons. I am not referring here to the ‘confusion’ of those who effectively cheer the imperialist intervention. Groups like the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty are in my opinion simply social-imperialists.

I am actually talking about socialists – people I regard as comrades, such as Gilbert Achcar, who is not a social-imperialist and is very critical of western intervention and of this ‘coalition of the willing’ (and partly unwilling!) that is being sent to ‘protect’ the Libyan revolution.

There is a genuine problem, and it would be unfortunate to appear callous and uncaring about the fate of those in Benghazi who were penned in and faced the terrible prospect of being massacred. Given the despair they are in, I would not actually be too critical of them for calling on the so-called ‘international community’ for help.

We have to be clear that the ‘international community’ is itself an ideological construct, a term used in order to conflate the US-led global hierarchy of states on the one hand and global public opinion on the other. There is world public opinion – civil society – which has real humanitarian concerns, and then there is the so-called ‘international community’, which is the nom de guerre of the US and its followers.

Why Libya?

Why did they go for Libya and not other places? For me there are three main reasons. Firstly, there is the question of oil. Do not underestimate this factor. Of course, the quantity of oil Libya offers is next to nothing in comparison to Saudi Arabia, but it is its quality which makes them interested in it. It is just about the best oil you can find, particularly for aircraft fuel.

Secondly, they have been asked to intervene this time around, which is crucial in providing them with an ideological and political cover: nobody asked them in Egypt or in Yemen; nobody even asked them in Bahrain.

Thirdly, although Gaddafi’s Libya ceased to be a ‘rogue state’ from around 2003, there is some truth in the claim that, from the standpoint of the imperialists, Gaddafi is still a rogue. Why? Well he is obviously a little bit crazy and very unreliable for them. So, although he is ‘our friend’ now (or was until very recently!), he was never somebody who could be fully trusted, as he is unstable in every possible manner – including mentally. How anybody can take him seriously after hearing him speak is simply beyond me.

The Saudis are also cautiously in favour of intervention in Libya because they do not like Gaddafi either. They remember all his leanings towards Islamic Maoism, the Little green book and his own conception of jamahiriya (people’s power). The Saudi regime is very traditionalist and as such they find all of this stuff very unsettling. Gaddafi has created his own ideology – even his own version of Islam! This has also been a factor in ensuring that he has very few allies in the Arab world more generally.

Anyway, I would like to comment on Achcar’s remarks about Libya. Whilst he is wrong to lend support to the intervention, he has a few sensible things to say on the situation and I would recommend reading him.^[1]

But he omits some important things. It is my view that the Libyan revolution is already defeated. From the moment the Interim Transitional National Council felt it had to invite this intervention it became clear that it was unable to overthrow the regime. As Marx observed a long time ago, revolution is needed not only to overthrow the powers that be, but also to transform the people who are making it – the process of revolution is a transformative one which gives the masses confidence in their ability to change things and to be masters of their own fate. Once you call on other forces to intervene, all this is lost, and in this sense it is a defeat.

The second remark which I think I would add to Achcar’s analysis is this. It may well be that inviting these forces into Libya is the lesser evil, compared to being slaughtered. But it is still an evil. Sometimes one must accept and put up with the lesser evil, but one must never demand it. The people who are not only demanding, but cheering the intervention are renegades to the revolutionary idea. If it is a lesser evil but it comes to pass anyway, then you have to protest against it, you have to denounce it.

I have made the analogy before, but imagine that there is a group of people surrounded by the Ku Klux Klan and are about to be slaughtered. They then invite protection from the Mafia. The Mafia will, of course, give you protection – but will then install a protection racket if it can. The Mafia that is the so-called ‘international community’ is not even sure if it can institute this protection racket anyway; but it will do its damnedest.

Moreover, the no-fly (now no-drive?) zone is dangerous not only in its immediate effect on the outcome in Libya. It also sets a worrying precedent. Once you give these forces the legitimation to act as the global policeman, then next time they will use it as they please – not for the lesser evil, but the greater one. Giving such forces legitimacy is in the worst interests of revolution both in the Arab world and beyond – it is in the best interests of counter-revolution, because that is how they are going to use it. It is not simply this situation on its own, in isolation, but what it implies for the future as well.

Also, when our rulers make war it is very bad for us – this is a point made by Marx. Think back to Thatcher and the Falklands war – her government was set to lose the general election.

I think the reason why there was less opposition to Libya than Iraq was because the latter was obviously going to be a land invasion. A ‘no-fly zone’ appears to be a much safer, less risky version of war, which is more like a computer game than anything else, so it is more popular – especially if you can justify it on ‘humanitarian’ grounds – without the risk of getting bogged down in a long and drawn-out war.

Not only is the left divided in its reaction, but so too are the imperialists. In each of the countries where people are free to express divergent opinions you see some maintaining that this move is not a good idea and that one can never know how it will end. It is certainly going to be a messy situation.

Whilst I have claimed that this moment marks the defeat of the Libyan revolution, I have not said that it is the defeat of the Arab revolution. I certainly hope it is not! This is just one sector of it, but it is not accidental that this defeat happened in a country like Libya. The reasons are quite clear.

Libya is one of the largest countries in Africa, most of which is desert. But it has a very small population of around six or seven million people, most of whom are divided along tribal lines. This is important. Compare it, for example, to Iran. Both are oil-producing countries that receive a large revenue from oil. This has led some to characterise Iran as a kind of ‘rentier state’ that does not depend too much on tax revenues from its own people. This allows it to provide handouts and sweeteners. Yet its population is around 11 times that of Libya, so even with the inflow of royalties from oil it cannot bribe that many people. As we know, the economic situation in Iran is dire.

This is different in Libya, where the revenue (or some of it) is spread out amongst far fewer people and thus leads to phenomena like low unemployment, etc. Indeed, the fact that Gaddafi made peace with the imperialist order back in 2003-04 (who will forget that handshake with our very own Tony Blair?) actually increased his ability to use this enormous wealth, even after siphoning off much of it for himself and his family. After all, he is a kleptocrat – just like his colleagues, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ben Ali in Tunisia, etc. We should also mention the Saudi royal family, who do not even have to steal to get their wealth because there formally the oil is actually theirs – there is no distinction between the public purse and the private purse of the king. (In Britain this identity was abolished in medieval times.)

But even after deducting all of this kleptocratic rent, there is enough left over for Gaddafi to bribe enough of the population, to hire mercenaries and so on and thus try to prevent what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. Libya’s social structure is also less developed, less advanced than in those neighbouring countries. I think you can also notice this in the composition of the opposition – it is much more dominated by people who were tribally opposed to Gaddafi’s regime, and there is a much higher proportion of Islamists than in both Tunisia and Egypt.

It would be foolish to predict how exactly things will pan in out in Libya. There might be a situation where it is divided between east and west and there is a civil war of attrition lasting for some time. Or it could end one way or the other. But, to the extent that there was a popular uprising, I think the people have lost ownership of this process and thus the revolution is defeated.

Other hot spots

This is not so in other parts of the Arab world. There are still very positive dynamics in Syria, for example. Syria is the second most important Arab country after Egypt. If Egypt had, by virtue of its large population, been the leader of the Arab people up to the time when it made peace with the US and Israel, then Syria is now the claimant to this role.

In fact, I recently looked back at theses I had co-written in the mid-1970s, and what we said back then was that the Syrian Ba’ath was making a bid for the leadership of the Arab world. Iraq, the other large Arab country, has never managed to stake a claim on this role. Saddam Hussein had a project to do so, but for various reasons he did not achieve this.

Events in Japan and Britain have squeezed the reporting of Yemen, but things are going forward there too. And very few people mention Bahrain, which is in a catastrophic situation. What some feared would happen in Libya is happening right now. There the regime – aided by forces it invited from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states – has actually invaded the hospitals. So if you are wounded on a demonstration and taken to hospital you are likely to be killed. We are seeing a massacre of unimaginable cruelty.

Bahrain is the source of the pearls of Arabia. Now these forces have demolished the symbolic pearl in Pearl Square, where enormous demonstrations took place. This is a huge insult to the people who occupied the square – some still risk their lives demonstrating there. Here there are signs of the revolutionary process receding, whilst Yemen and Syria are still going forward. This is no coincidence: it can be traced back to social structure.

Yemen is the product of a forced union of the north and south – two areas with a vastly different social composition. North Yemen is tribal and very backward in its economic and social development. South Yemen is mostly made up of the former British colony of Aden. Politically it was also very developed. For a time there was a self-styled socialist republic here, which was then overthrown by an internal coup and external forces from other countries and from North Yemen. This localised would-be socialism had some very democratic ideas. In the heyday of socialist revolution in South Yemen it said and did a lot of things which went beyond Stalinism. There was a real struggle which took place there between Stalin-style communists and real communists. Of course, they were very limited as to what they could achieve and in the end they were defeated. But in terms of its political development, South Yemen was probably the most advanced country in the Arab world.^[2]

Whilst it is now merged with the very different North Yemen, we can still see this influence of working class struggle and organisation today: we see a radical intelligentsia and the heritage of a well-organised workers’ movement making its mark on the events unfolding there.

There were only a few countries in which there was a sizeable working class movement in the Arab world beyond South Yemen. The largest Communist Party, which was highly Stalinised, was in Iraq. But when the monarchy was overthrown in 1958 it was the only party to emerge intact from the underground. The coup to remove the monarchy was a military one, but on the civilian political scene the Communist Party almost had a monopoly. Of course, this was wasted because of its policies and so on. I am old enough to remember when Anastas Mikoyan came to ‘advise’ the Iraqi Communist Party following the fall of the monarchy in 1958-59. He actually told them not to rock the boat and to maintain the Soviet policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the west – a revolutionary policy in Iraq would have undermined this and was thus to be avoided. This marked the beginning of the decline of the CP, and what remains now is really shameful. It is not even an anti-imperialist force, let alone a force for socialism.

The third country where there was a strong movement, albeit a Stalinist one, was Syria. Syria had a fairly sizeable Communist Party led by the Kurd, Khalid Bakdash. It is a very mixed country with quite a lot of Christians, Jews, Armenians and all sorts. Again because of its Stalinist policies the CP declined. But, once again, traditions have been retained which survive to this day.

Those like me who had been in a Stalinist Communist Party will perhaps understand what I am trying to describe. These parties were tools of Stalinist foreign policy. Nevertheless, they organised the working class and a lot of their members were true, genuine working class militants who learned a little bit of Marxism (of course, in a rather doctored version). But they were called on to read some of the classical writings and this did leave something behind, in spite of all the betrayals and so on. Wherever there were powerful CPs there is a tradition which lives on today. This is not true of Iraq, but that is partly because of other factors, such as the complete destruction of the country following the invasion. So there is a sense in which these organisations have left behind them a heritage which is still worthwhile.

Qatar is a genuine exception in all of this. It is a very rich place and its ruling family is playing a very clever game. There have been calls for demonstrations there too, but very few people have turned up. There is opposition, of course, as there is everywhere. But for the time being business is business – and part of the business of the Qatari ruling family is Al-Jazeera! They are actually profiting from the Arab revolution and – for the moment at least – they do not feel threatened by it. Whether they will succumb to it or not remains to be seen.

As for Al-Jazeera itself, it is interesting to look at how in many ways it presages Arab unity. It is not a coincidence that what symbolises Arab unity is one of the most modern forms of communication. It is Arab unity in the form suited to the 21st century. It has Arab workers from all over the region.

It originally started as an offshoot of the BBC World Service, but the BBC turned out to be too conservative and restrictive, too bound up with American and British interests in the region. Al-Jazeera actually broadcasts much of what the Arab masses want. Let us not overstate this: the station is hardly the voice of Arab communism! Nonetheless, it is run by secular democrats whose coverage is not based on sound bites like the BBC World Service. On Al-Jazeera they actually have discussions, where people are allowed to develop their positions – not just those who support the Arab revolution, but also Israeli politicians and American conservatives, for example. This is very educational, making it in my opinion the most informative news service in the world (especially now that the BBC World Service is being cut).

Expectations

It would be foolish to prophesy. Things are still unfolding and numerous options are presenting themselves. But it would also be foolish to expect too much. I think it is unlikely that we will see even a progressive kind of bourgeois democratic regime emerge, or some kind of social democratic arrangement. These things do not come about with just one push. This revolutionary movement is only the first of a whole historical process, which is only in its infancy.

History is important. In 1848 there were revolutions throughout most of Europe, which on the face of things did not succeed: they did not actually overthrow all the reactionary regimes. Nevertheless, it did not come to nothing. It left a certain tradition and a certain heritage which was then taken forward in the next step.

Look at what happened in Portugal in 1974-75. The revolution took on a very left-wing and radical direction, but a lot of it was reversed. What we have in Portugal now is not that much different to what exists in many other European states. However, if you speak to people who took part in this revolution then you will notice that it lives on in their consciousness – it matters when you have experienced the overthrow of a dictatorial regime and lived through a period of people’s power, etc. It forms the basis of the next step.

So even the most realistically optimistic scenario is not for all the old regimes to be overthrown and replaced by liberal, social democratic administrations. It will probably be far short of this. But the longer-term effects will be more profound. The world has changed already in many ways. First of all, from the point of view of the US-led imperialist order the Middle East is no longer something you can regard as a safe zone. The whole policy of the US in the region – the most strategically important in the world due to oil and the Suez Canal – was based on the fact that, whilst US policy-makers were very clearly aware of the discontent of the masses, they believed in the ability of the rulers to keep it under control and repress it.

There was actually a non-conservative project to introduce the imperialist version of democracy to the Middle East. The neocons (not George Bush, by the way, who simply provided patronage for the whole project) realised that the Saudi Arabian situation was no longer sustainable and were thinking very far ahead. They knew that there would eventually be some sort of revolt or uprising there, and thus came to the conclusion that it would be better for them to instigate and control the impending transformation. This is certainly true. The whole project foundered because the first stage failed so miserably – Iraq proved not to be the beginning of a smooth transition to western democracy but a very bloody mess. The whole thing became discredited.

Conspiracy theory fans like the remnants of the Workers Revolutionary Party, who tend to uphold Gaddafi as some sort of ‘anti-imperialist’, actually infer from this that what is going on must be the product of neocon plans. But this is completely wrong. They were hatched precisely in order to pre-empt what is actually taking place – ie, instead of something driven by the initiative of the people, something they could instigate and manipulate themselves.

Indeed, this revolutionary wave was not without previous tremors – even in Libya. In 1995, for example, there was a local uprising in Benghazi – no coincidence, of course. It was drowned in blood. But there have been uprisings in every one of these countries – protests that the regimes were able to suppress. But that period is now over. Nothing is the same. This is also reflected in US lack of confidence in relation to the unfolding events. They are no longer sure if they can keep this region under control. With the exception of Syria, all of the countries gripped by revolution are allies of the United States and, at least implicitly, of Israel.

Although in the Egyptian and Tunisian protests you did not see many slogans such as ‘Down with the United States’ or ‘Down with Israel’, this was because the protests were dealing with the immediate task at hand – ie, overthrowing the regime. If you actually watch journalists talking to ordinary people, as Al-Jazeera did, then it becomes clear that they were not simply protesting about unemployment or the corruption of the various regimes, but about the fact that those like Mubarak are lackeys of imperialism, and the shameful conditions of the peace treaty with Israel imposed on them.

When you hear interviews with Syrians though, they assert that one thing they do not mind about the regime is the fact that it is opposed to the US and does not toe the Israeli line. It is hated because of repression and the state of the economy, but not for foreign policy. It is important to observe what people are saying, rather than just what is on their placards.

All-Arab

I would like also to point out that we are witnessing an all-Arab revolution. The Weekly Worker has been quite correct on this. Whilst I would rather call it an all-Arab revolution than a pan-Arab revolution, as the Weekly Worker does, this is simply a matter of terminology.

I am slightly puzzled by the fact that many from the Trotskyist tradition refuse to accept the idea of an Arab revolution. One good example of this is Stuart King of Permanent Revolution. Whenever I have spoken on Arab unity and he has been present he has raised a number of rather odd objections. On the one hand, he says, the Arab world is far too disparate and there are many national minorities (the Kurds, the Israelis and so on) and further nationalities which he invents, such as the Maronites (a religious denomination).

On the other hand, he then questions why we should be opting for Arab unity: why not opt for regional unity, which would include Turkey and Iran? Of course, in the long run we will have a united socialist world. But the affinity between England and Scotland, for example, is not the same as the affinity between England and Japan. You would not expect unification to proceed at the same rate everywhere. In the long run – and this will take many generations – the world will, of course, be one and there will be no national frontiers. But this cannot happen all at once. To bring in Iran, with a different history, language and some record of estrangement from and conflict with the Arab world, strikes me as rather strange. Further, it is ridiculous to bring in Turkey, which was the imperial master of the Arab world, as a partner on the same level as – let us say – Hadhramaut and Oman.

Given that the Arab revolution is an idea associated with Michel Raptis (Pablo), perhaps this hostility to Arab unity can be traced back to an old Trotskyist sectarian quarrel which has outlived its meaningfulness. To me it makes no difference whether the idea came from Pablo. He may have got one hundred and one other things wrong, but he was right on this question. He knew the Arab world very well and this idea was enthusiastically picked up. I got it from a comrade of mine, who was my main mentor on Middle Eastern matters. I am referring to the Palestinian Arab Marxist, Jabra Nicola, who died in London in 1974. He was a Trotskyist. I was and am not. But I learnt a lot from him.

Anyway, quite clearly the revolutionary contagion in the Arab world is far more direct and immediate than, for example, the spreading of revolutionary sentiment across eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Arab world is more like a single nation divided into sub-nationalities. If you want a rough analogy, then I would say it is like Italy, where there is the Italian nation, but within it there are the Sicilians, Tuscans, etc, who are akin to sub-nationalities. In fact, in the period of World War I, when there was the promise of uniting the Arab world, explicit comparisons were made with Italy. Many were arguing that the Arab world should be treated like Italy under Garibaldi and so on. The British actually mobilised support against Turkey using this very promise of Arab unity. Of course, this was later betrayed.

Even if you compare the Arab region with the Spanish-speaking part of Latin America, the historical and linguistic ties are much closer in the former. Indeed, many of the Latin American countries are historically not mainly Spanish – they have their own indigenous histories and cultures. Not so in the Arab world.

Today, one of the modern attributes of a nation is that it is a people who get their news from the same television station! In this respect, all the Arab world is one nation. Do not underestimate this! The rulers know this very well. Indeed, some of them have even blamed Al-Jazeera for the revolution, which is, of course, exaggerated. But it reveals a truth.

It matters a lot when people watch the same programmes and can communicate with each other in the same language – something which is increasingly done online, of course. And again, whilst we may not have seen placards addressing the question of Arab unity (beyond, for example, ‘Solidarity with Tunisia’ in Egypt and so on), when you actually talk to activists and hear them being interviewed then you notice a big change. The desire for and drive towards Arab unity was very much alive from the 1950s onwards, especially around the time of the Suez war. It lasted right through to the 1970s, but then it declined. And if you spoke to Arab comrades in the 1980s and 1990s then they would say that Arab unity was a lost cause, it was not going to happen, there was too much divergence, etc. But now if you speak to them it is clear that the idea is back on the agenda.

It is not simply the same language, culture and history which is important. It is also an economic need. This should be a very important consideration, especially for Marxists. Currently divided up into one big state, a few medium-sized states and then a lot of mini-states, the Arab world as it actually is does not make sense economically. The distribution of the population and natural resources is very skewed and uneven. The riches of Libya and Saudi Arabia, for example, could finance the extensive development which is needed in a country like Egypt. A country like Syria has a lot of fertile land which is underused. The dispersal of all these human and natural resources means that it makes no sense to keep them apart. The first step could be something along the lines of the European Union – first and foremost an economic union – but without the reactionary agenda.

Unfortunately it would seem that the Arab bourgeoisie is incapable of actually leading this transformation. Achieving such a union requires the mobilisation of the working class, and indeed the leadership of the working class. The bourgeoisie has tried to do this – and not just the Egyptian and Syrian bourgeoisie. Even Gaddafi had a Mickey Mouse project for Arab unification.

I think that a ‘Bismarck scenario’ is unlikely in the Arab revolution. Uniting Germany in ‘blood and iron’ was made possible by the particular role which Prussia played in relation to the other German states. It was a highly militarised state – one of the biggest military powers in Europe. On the other hand, the other German states were smaller and much weaker militarily. In terms of the Arab world today, it is not simply that a Bismarck does not exist, but that there is no Arab Prussia. Egypt is by far the largest country in the Arab world. But I think that the scenario of Egypt invading Syria and so on is a remote one. Saladin, for example, did invade and unify a large part of the Arab world, but that was in the 12th century, not the 21st. I do not think it is realistic now.

The bourgeoisie, of course, could achieve Arab unity by its own means, but I think this is unlikely. Recent historical experience suggests why. The United Arab Republic, for example, was initiated by the Syrian bourgeoisie, not Nasser and the Egyptian bourgeoisie. They thought it would protect their interests and that it would be better to work together with others of their class interest in the Arab world. But, when it actually came about, the Syrian bourgeoisie was not so keen because it found it was being competitively undermined by the much larger and more powerful Egyptian bourgeoisie. They found it was too bad for business.

This is a dilemma for the various national capitals, which base themselves on snatching a bigger part of the market and so on. It looks very unlikely that the bourgeoisie will transcend its immediate interests in order to unite the Arab nation. To do this you need a class which is not held back by competitive, immediate material interests, but can think in a more international sense: ie, the working class.

Of course, that would require the working class to organise, and for this a whole historical period will be required. That is why I am saying that in the short term we should not expect too much. We need a period in which the working class can actually organise and create its own political leadership, which can then start a new revolution aimed at uniting the Arab world.

Notes

For the interview, see www.zcommunications.org/libyan-developments-by-gilbert-achcar

See F Halliday Arabia without Sultans London 1974.

originally published in Weekly Worker, no. 859

The Test Of Libya

by John McAnulty – Socialist Democracy (Ireland), 3 April 2011

The revolutionary upsurges in North Africa and the Middle East should be serving as a revitalising jolt for revolutionary socialists elsewhere. After decades of isolation, finally they are able to contribute fully: to offer the tools of Marxist analysis, to offer the examples and lessons from earlier historical upsurges, to build solidarity from a working class perspective.In many cases this is what has happened. However, as in the case of circulatory diseases, the return of blood flow may simply confirm that the affected area is dead and allow the processes of gangrene and decay to set in. Such has been the case with Gilbert Achcar, a well-known academic with a long history of involvement with the Fourth International. Achcar, under the pressure of revolutionary upsurge, has completed a journey from revolutionary socialism to liberal commentator with a declaration of support for imperialist war in Lybia.

Achcar says:

The resolution is amazingly confused. But given the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal, no one can reasonably oppose it….. You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians. In the same way, even though we know well the nature and double standards of cops in the bourgeois state, you can’t in the name of anti-capitalist principles blame anybody for calling them when someone is on the point of being raped and there is no alternative way of stopping the rapists.

Achcar denounces dogmatism, a growing habit in the socialist movement by those who, after years of endorsing an amorphous anti-capitalism, find themselves uncomfortable when Marxist theory is applied to real events.

Yet his whole position is one of bombastic and pompous dogmatism. He asserts a scenario about Libya that, unless we bow down to his supreme authority as academic commentator, he cannot possibly know. Not only that, he asserts as gospel that future developments can only take one path without imperialist intervention and that there is no alternative to supporting this intervention.

However it would be a mistake to debate Achcar on these grounds. He does not know fully what is happening in Libya and neither do I. What we have to stamp upon is a deeper arrogance – an arrogance that sees the language of Marxism as something posed within exaggerated quotation marks – proof of the writer’s erudition and knowledge of the mystic texts, to be discarded immediately once we encounter the real world. When we examine Achcar’s text we find that Marxism is absent. What we are dealing with is a humanitarian argument, full of all the illusions of the bog-standard liberal shaking their head over the Sunday newspapers.

What is the alternative to humanitarian concern? For Marxists all struggles are the struggles of contesting classes. The imperialist powers, representing the highest stage of capitalism, have interests that are antithetical to those of the working class. The working class may not appear as an organized force, but that does not mean that it has no interests that will not be advanced or suppressed by the outcome of specific struggles. Finally Marxism tells us that struggles have a broader context. The interests of the workers are not restricted to a national stage, but have a regional and global dimension. So solidarity is not a way of applauding each other’s struggle at a distance, but a way of recognising that the workers in Europe, the US and around the world are involved in a common struggle against capitalism and imperialism and the task of solidarity is to bring our common interests to the fore. The significance of the cruise missile socialists is not that they are standing back from the struggle in Libya, but in rejecting the common struggle, they are standing back from struggle full stop. They then become subject to moralism produced by the whims and pressures of bourgeois public opinion which is often formed by the imperialists themselves. This is the significance of Achcar’s failure.  We are involved in a common struggle and he has moved to the other side, not in some far away country but in fighting the capitalist state in which he lives.

So what is the context of the struggle in Libya? The context is the wave of revolution sweeping across the region. This revolution is the spontaneous uprising of young people demanding democracy and also seeking social change that will deliver jobs and a decent life. Immediately these revolts are objectively anti-imperialist. The structures they are struggling against: The monarchies, the dictatorships, the Israeli state, the countries directly occupied – all these are sponsored by Imperialism and together constitute a mechanism of imperialist rule.

What is the response of the various regimes? They seek to directly suppress the revolts. Where necessary they offer minimal concessions also with the aim of demobilising the resistance. This strategy is also the strategy of imperialism. Where possible, force is used to crush the resistance, as it was in Bahrain with the direct involvement of the US in planning the counteroffensive and in Iraq where US occupation troops are still present. Where concessions have to be made elements of the regime are sacrificed rather than the regime itself. Attempts are made to shape the emerging opposition so that minimal changes are required.

The imperialists are struggling because for years they have argued that the only alternative to their client regimes is Islamic fundamentalism, yet the opposition that emerges is secular and democratic. The regimes have one overarching advantage. After decades of repression there are few democratic and working class movements in existence. The revolutionary forces urgently need time to develop programme and organization. That is the starting point for solidarity. Not to weep salt tears or to shout encouragement, but to pass on what we have learnt – that the class interests of capitalism within their movements will lead to their betrayal and defeat, that objective anti-imperialism must move on to become a conscious struggle, that that conscious struggle can only be based on the working class and that the only political basis for such a movement is socialism.

So, starting from the standpoint of class struggle we are able to take a general perspective on imperialist strategy in relation to the revolutionary upsurges. It is general, it lacks detail but it does give a framework for analysis and action.

So why the military intervention in Libya? Well there are a number of factors we can be sure of. One is that Libya produces oil and that the battles have ebbed and flowed around a massive oil production centre. Secondly the calls to arms have been led by France and the British, the countries who have in the recent past had the strongest ties with the Libyan regime. One analysis that has been offered was that these powers doubted Gaddafi’s ability to restore order and believed that either the overthrow of Gaddafi or partition was the best way to protect their investment.

It has been argued that the US is a reluctant participant in the Libyan adventure. The evidence does not support this. Obama deliberated, but he authorized covert operations in Libya at an early stage and when he did act, used overwhelming force and constructed a UN resolution that offered carte blanche to the imperialist powers.

The reason given for intervention by US defence chief Robert Gates was that continued unrest would destabilise Morocco and Tunisia. Having been caught on the back foot by the upsurge, the US was constructing a regional strategy. Being able to add military intervention to the mix greatly strengthens their hand.

There is one other element of importance. That is that French agents, alongside British and US covert forces, were in Benghazi from an early stage, that they were in contact with members of the Transitional Interim National Council, including people who had recently been members of the Gaddafi regime and that they very quickly recognized that elements of the council would be willing collaborators with imperialism. The military intervention against Gaddafi followed on the heels of this. It does suggest very strongly that imperialist powers received an offer they couldn’t refuse in terms of guarantees of imperialist interests in Libya.

When you put this alongside a constant drive to pull defectors from the regime, imperialist strategy in Libya looks remarkably like everywhere else in the region. Where you have to, sacrifice the dictator, then fight like hell to preserve the regime or install a close copy. What are the effects of imperialist intervention? Right away a mass uprising becomes a civil war. Gaddafi gains renewed legitimacy as the defender of the nation against imperialist invasion. Doubters in his own ranks are now traitors. Those in the uprising correspondingly loose political authority and the pace of events moves away from politics and mass action to the military decisions of the imperialist powers.

Within the opposition camp power moves away from the masses and becomes concentrated with those who hold the ear of the imperialists. The European powers meet in London to decide the future of Libya, for all the world like a colonial conference from past times lording it over Africa.

Marxists have a special role to play within the revolutions and in solidarity with them. We stand unconditionally for the democratic rights of the Arab and North African masses. We stand firmly against imperialist intervention, without making the mistake of endorsing Gaddafi or states such as Syria as in some way anti-imperialist.   We argue specifically for the self-organization of the working class and for a socialist solution in the understanding that a democratic capitalist society is not a possible outcome to the present struggles in a period when capitalism no longer supports even the limited democratic structures and freedoms of the past.

The revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa will constitute a defining moment in the revolutionary history of this century. The struggles they have initiated will continue for many years and will help define the politics and organization of the working class movement across the world.

For all these reasons it is essential that revolutionaries repudiate Achcar, the cruise missile socialists who stand with him, and organizations such as those in Denmark, Germany and Portugal who have voted to support imperialist intervention.

We must unite, both politically and organizationally, in defence of revolution, in opposition to imperialist intervention and in solidarity with the workers. A valuable start has been made by commentators such as Alex Callinicos and Pham Binh.In his defence Achcar argues that he would be the first to demonstrate for UN intervention and a no-fly zone if there was a further attack on Gaza. He will stand alone. Our task as Marxists is to explain that UN intervention is imperialist military adventure and that no-fly zones are simply a passport to war without boundaries or restraint. Our task is to overthrow imperialism, to defend the Arab workers by attacking it in its heartland, not to weave stupefying fairy tales about its ability to civilize or pacify.

originally published on:- Socialist Democracy

Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya Deal

by Pepe Escobar,
 Asia Times, April 2, 2011

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in
 Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck 
between the Barack Obama administration and the House
 of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations 
independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary
 of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi
 Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy
 movement in their neighbor in exchange for a yes vote
 by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya – the
 main rationale that led to United Nations Security
 Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a 
European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made
 separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. 
According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be 
disclosed. One of the diplomats said, This is the
 reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We
 were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar
 cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We 
maintain our official position that the resolution is
 not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent
 manner.

As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League 
endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of
 them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the 
US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which 
Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were 
against it. Saudi Arabia only had to seduce three
 other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab 
League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was
 essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab
 League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his 
CV with Washington with an eye to become the next
 Egyptian President.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab
 revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-
revolution.Profiteers rejoice Humanitarian imperialists will spin
 en masse this is a “conspiracy”, as they have been
 spinning the bombing of Libya prevented a hypothetical 
massacre in Benghazi. They will be defending the House
 of Saud – saying it acted to squash Iranian subversion 
in the Gulf; obviously R2P – “responsibility to 
protect” does not apply to people in Bahrain. They will
 be heavily promoting post-Gaddafi Libya as a new – oily
- human rights Mecca, complete with US intelligence
 assets, black ops, special forces and dodgy
 contractors.

Whatever they say won’t alter the facts on the ground -
the graphic results of the US-Saudi dirty dancing. Asia
 Times Online has already reported on who profits from 
the foreign intervention in Libya (see There’s no 
business like war business, March 30). Players include 
the Pentagon (via Africom), the North Atlantic Treaty
 Organization (NATO), Saudi Arabia, the Arab League’s
 Moussa, and Qatar. Add to the list the al-Khalifa
 dynasty in Bahrain, assorted weapons contractors, and 
the usual neo-liberal suspects eager to privatize 
everything in sight in the new Libya – even the water. 
And we’re not even talking about the Western vultures 
hovering over the Libyan oil and gas industry.

Exposed, above all, is the astonishing hypocrisy of the
 Obama administration, selling a crass geopolitical coup 
involving northern Africa and the Persian Gulf as a 
humanitarian operation. As for the fact of another US 
war on a Muslim nation, that’s just a kinetic military
 action.

There’s been wide speculation in both the US and across 
the Middle East that considering the military stalemate
- and short of the coalition of the willing bombing 
the Gaddafi family to oblivion – Washington, London and
 Paris might settle for the control of eastern Libya; a
 northern African version of an oil-rich Gulf Emirate. 
Gaddafi would be left with a starving North Korea-style 
Tripolitania. But considering the latest high-value defections from
 the regime, plus the desired endgame (Gaddafi must 
go, in President Obama’s own words), Washington,
 London, Paris and Riyadh won’t settle for nothing but
 the whole kebab. Including a strategic base for both 
Africom and NATO.

Round up the unusual suspects One of the side effects 
of the dirty US-Saudi deal is that the White House is 
doing all it can to make sure the Bahrain drama is 
buried by US media. BBC America news anchor Katty Kay
at least had the decency to stress, they would like 
that one [Bahrain] to go away because there’s no real 
upside for them in supporting the rebellion by the
 Shi’ites.

For his part the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin 
Khalifa al Thani, showed up on al-Jazeera and said that
 action was needed because the Libyan people were
attacked by Gaddafi. The otherwise excellent al-Jazeera journalists could have politely asked the emir whether 
he would send his Mirages to protect the people of
 Palestine from Israel, or his neighbors in Bahrain from
 Saudi Arabia.

The al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain is essentially a 
bunch of Sunni settlers who took over 230 years ago. 
For a great deal of the 20th century they were obliging 
slaves of the British empire. Modern Bahrain does not
 live under the specter of a push from Iran; that’s an 
al-Khalifa (and House of Saud) myth. Bahrainis, historically, have always rejected being 
part of a sort of Shi’ite nation led by Iran. The
 protests come a long way, and are part of a true 
national movement – way beyond sectarianism. No wonder 
the slogan in the iconic Pearl roundabout – smashed by
the fearful al-Khalifa police state – was neither
 Sunni nor Shi’ite; Bahraini.

What the protesters wanted was essentially a
 constitutional monarchy; a legitimate parliament; free 
and fair elections; and no more corruption. What they 
got instead was bullet-friendly Bahrain replacing
 business-friendly Bahrain, and an invasion sponsored 
by the House of Saud. 

And the repression goes on – invisible to US corporate
 media. Tweeters scream that everybody and his neighbor
 are being arrested. According to Nabeel Rajab,
 president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, over 
400 people are either missing or in custody, some of 
them arrested at checkpoints controlled by thugs 
brought in from other Arab and Asian countries – they 
wear black masks in the streets. Even blogger Mahmood
Al Yousif was arrested at 3 am, leading to fears that 
the same will happen to any Bahraini who has blogged,
 tweeted, or posted Facebook messages in favor of
 reform.

Globocop is on a roll Odyssey Dawn is now over. Enter
 Unified Protector – led by Canadian Charles Bouchard. 
Translation: the Pentagon (as in Africom) transfers the kinetic military action to itself (as in NATO, which
 is nothing but the Pentagon ruling over Europe). 
Africom and NATO are now one.

The NATO show will include air and cruise missile
 strikes; a naval blockade of Libya; and shady,
 unspecified ground operations to help the rebels. 
Hardcore helicopter gunship raids a la AfPak – with
 attached collateral damage – should be expected. 

A curious development is already visible. NATO is 
deliberately allowing Gaddafi forces to advance along 
the Mediterranean coast and repel the “rebels”. There 
have been no surgical air strikes for quite a while.

The objective is possibly to extract political and
 economic concessions from the defector and Libyan
exile-infested Interim National Council (INC) – a dodgy 
cast of characters including former Justice minister
 Mustafa Abdel Jalil, US-educated former secretary of 
planning Mahmoud Jibril, and former Virginia resident,
 new military commander and CIA asset Khalifa Hifter. 
The laudable, indigenous February 17 Youth movement -
which was in the forefront of the Benghazi uprising -
has been completely sidelined.

This is NATO‘s first African war, as Afghanistan is NATO‘s first Central/South Asian war. Now firmly
 configured as the UN‘s weaponized arm, Globocop NATO is 
on a roll implementing its strategic concept approved
 at the Lisbon summit last November (see Welcome to 
NATOstan, Asia Times Online, November 20, 2010).

Gaddafi’s Libya must be taken out so the Mediterranean
- the mare nostrum of ancient Rome – becomes a NATO 
lake. Libya is the only nation in northern Africa not
 subordinated to Africom or Centcom or any one of the 
myriad NATO “partnerships”. The other non-NATO-related
 African nations are Eritrea, Sawahiri Arab Democratic 
Republic, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Moreover, two members of NATO‘s Istanbul Cooperation 
Initiative – Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – are 
now fighting alongside Africom/NATO for the first time. 
Translation: NATO and Persian Gulf partners are
 fighting a war in Africa. Europe? That’s too 
provincial. Globocop is the way to go.

According to the Obama administration’s own official
 doublespeak, dictators who are eligible for “US 
outreach” – such as in Bahrain and Yemen – may relax ,
and get away with virtually anything. As for those 
eligible for “regime alteration”, from Africa to the 
Middle East and Asia, watch out. Globocop NATO is 
coming to get you. With or without dirty deals.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the
 Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble
Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad
during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does
Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at:- 
pepeasia@yahoo.com.

RCN BULLETIN

SEPTEMBER NATIONAL COUNCIL, 2009

Why we produced the motion on socialist unity 

This statement explains why the Republican Communist Network (RCN) produced the motion on socialist unity* which has been put on the agenda for the National Council.

Firstly, the statement was not initially intended to be a motion because we did not think that platforms were allowed to put motions to the National Council (NC). We have never done so before but because it asked the Executive Committee (EC) to reconsider their statement, the National Secretary advised that it was more appropriate as a motion.

It is also important to remember the political context of the motion. The European elections took place on 4th June. Working class people across Britain, despite the worst crisis of capitalism in living memory, saw a left which was fragmented and in disarray. The mainstream, bourgeois parties could offer no solutions and voters were looking for answers. The split left was decimated in Scotland (it fell back far more here than in England and Wales). The BNP and Christian Party overtook every left/ socialist party in Scotland. The economic crisis does not mean that people will automatically turn to the left. The dangers in such complacency are clear to all when the BNP were able to win 2 seats in the European Parliament.

Following these elections, tentative and in some cases, possibly cynical moves towards “socialist unity” were made. As well as invitations to meet from those involved in “No 2 EU”, local initiatives were springing up via social forums and Red /Green groups. Non party members were asking about the possibility of “unity candidates” or non aggression pacts for the imminent Westminster election and the questions around the Glasgow North East by-election was even more pressing.

The Executive produced a statement, which said, “Once all of the legal obstacles have been cleared from our path, we intend to initiate a full, open and democratic discussion around left unity in Scotland and the role that the SSP can play in achieving it.” This statement left many party members unsure which, if any, initiatives they could be involved in. We believed that this statement was too vague and that the “legal obstacles” referred to could potentially drag on for months if not years. We felt that comrades could not simply ignore the initiatives, which were taking place, nor could we refrain from discussion indefinitely and still claim to be the party of socialist unity.

The RCN felt there were real dangers for the party in adhering to the course of action suggested in the EC statement and brought forward our position in order to seek clarification and facilitate a debate in the party on the matter. We believe that such a debate could be held without breaching any legal advice.

We have to say that as a platform, which is made up of hardworking, committed party members, we have been dismayed at the reaction to our statement by some within the party. We recognise that it probably represents a minority viewpoint but we are a party who has recently overhauled the constitution to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated and that all shades of opinion are heard and dealt with in a comradely manner. We hope that this is a tradition the SSP will return to.

We want to sincerely emphasise that our statement was not intended to cause further distress to any party member who may be a witness in any legal case. We are also clear as a platform and have written at length in our magazine, where the responsibility for the split in the socialist left in Scotland lies. That for us is a political crime, which is unforgivable.

We are not under any illusions about what can be achieved in any left unity discussions. The process, which brought about the SSP, took years of joint work and building of trust between groups. That will be far more difficult after the events of the last few years. However, no one can deny that in the current global economic and environmental crisis, socialist unity is needed more than ever.

We welcomed members of the EC who came to speak with the RCN platform last week to offer some clarification of their statement and to seek clarification and explanation from us. We would also like to thank individual SSP comrades who contacted us directly seeking clarification of our position. It is so much easier to understand comrades in a face-to-face discussion rather than via e-mail tirades.

We were assured that local initiatives as we outlined were not forbidden. The content of the executive statement was to protect any potential party witnesses for being held in contempt of court or being accused of obstructing the course of justice which is a criminal offence. We have no wish to place any of our comrades in such a position. We were also assured that the legal obstacles referred to mean the trial which is likely to take place early in the new year.

Comrades the embargo on this discussion cannot go on indefinitely or we will become totally ineffectual as a political force in Scotland. The debate on socialist unity must take place in the spring of next year at the latest or we will lose support and members if we are perceived to be an obstacle to the progress of socialist ideas.

However, given the clarification from the EC, we accept their request to remit the motion to the earliest possible date after the trial.

*   see http://republicancommunist.org/blog/page/3/

 

RCN BULLETIN

JANUARY 2010

General Election 2010 – A short contribution to the debate

Should the SSP stand?

The RCN has generally advocated standing in elections to provide the electorate with a socialist alternative at the ballot box. In the 2009 European elections, we argued vociferously that we should stand as part of the European Anti Capitalist Left.

However, it is important that we continue to review our election strategy particularly in the light of recent election campaigns and results.  Therefore, we must consider whether or not we stand in the coming Westminster elections.

Within the RCN, there are a number of different

opinions (we never have an RCN line and do not practise democratic centralism) but the majority are in favour of standing in a limited number of seats with local branches having the final decision on whether to stand or not. However, we agree with others who say we need to have a clear idea of why we are standing (beating other socialist parties by a few votes is not a good enough reason) and we need to stand on socialist demands not populist slogans.

What was right about the Glasgow North East By Election?

We had a very good candidate who had considerable political experience and who is an excellent communicator. Comrades worked very hard over a long period of time and reported positive responses on the ground. Mobilising against the SDL was a particularly important and significant spin off. Given these factors and the horrible effects of the current recession, we should have been pushing at an open door.

However, we had to fight against celebrity politics and other socialist parties, the SSP having decided not to discuss the prospect of a socialist unity candidate.

What was wrong with the Glasgow North East By Election?

Instead of a campaign based on strong, socialist, agitational propaganda, we resorted to populist politics in order to chase votes. Kevin was never going to “Make Greed History!” Why did we not use our excellent record as the anti war party to good effect? What was our socialist response to the capitalist crisis and the environmental threat to humanity posed by climate change? If we are only going to get 0.7% of the vote, let’s get it for an explicitly socialist alternative. The politics of populism failed.

What should our election strategy be?

We should stand in a limited number of seats given our numbers and financial position. We should support those branches that want to stand candidates. We should throw our weight behind the areas that want to stand in the election, but should be arguing for a socialist campaign. Ditch ‘Make Greed History’ and adopt either the SSP’s own ‘Make Capitalism History – Make Socialism the Future’ or the New Anti-Capitalist Party’s ‘Make the Bosses Pay for their Crisis’. We need to stop policy being made on the hoof. We must develop our programme and outline in much more detail our socialist alternative to capitalism. This is a longer term project for the party than just for these elections.

Instead of chasing passive voters, our approach should be one of “making socialists” by producing educational materials and holding meetings on key topics – War, Recession, BNP, Climate Change - educating our membership in the process.

We should also be emphasising the importance of the Scottish independence referendum, on the democratic grounds of upholding the right to self- determination, not by raising any false belief that the SNP can deliver, or that we should enter into any popular front with them.

What about other left parties?

We need to combat any illusion that we are the only left alternative on offer in any election. Unpalatable as this may be, we should consider non-aggression pacts in specific areas. We could enter a non-aggression pact with the Trade Union & Socialist Coalition, without sinking ourselves into the bureaucratic, anti-democratic stitch-up that it constitutes. The BNP are targeting Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Jim Murphy’ s seats. These are areas where it would make sense to consider non- aggression pacts.

We need to integrate any election work into work we are involved in generally and not see elections as separate from our normal activity of developing ourselves as socialists. We should be building branches ensuring they are functioning in as many areas as possible. Political education and the democratic building of a socialist programme should be a priority for the party.

RCN BULLETIN

SSP SPECIAL CONFERENCE IN GLASGOW – FEBRUARY 5th, 2011

RECHARGING THE SSP

There has been a slow erosion of Labour Party dominance over the working class in Scotland since the late 1970’s. The first signs of independent Left organisation outside Labour’s ranks followed Callaghan’s decision to bow before the dictates of the IMF, and his failure to throw the Labour government’s full weight behind its own Scottish Devolution Bill. This contributed to the formation of the Scottish Labour Party, in 1976, led by Jim Sillars.  The SLP only represented a limited political break with the Labour Party. However, it highlighted two features of future breakaways to the Left – a questioning of mainstream capitalist economics and a concern for greater national self-determination.

However, the SLP had no clearly developed socialist alternative to capitalism.  It also accepted a devolutionary reform of the UK, ignoring the state’s anti-democratic Crown Powers and its ongoing war in the ‘Six Counties’. Most significantly, the initials SLP turned out to mean the Sillars’ Labour Party. The party fell apart when Sillars attempted to bureaucratically suppress anyone who questioned his leadership and policies. This negative aspect has shown itself to be a recurring problem.

The next significant breakaway was the Socialist Labour Party, formed by Arthur Scargill, in response to Tony Blair’s successful campaign to reject the Labour Party’s Clause 4, in 1996, thus consummating New Labour.  Whilst the SLP had a traditional Left Labour statist critique of neo-liberalism, its support for Scottish self-determination was virtually non-existent. However, the second SLP turned out to be Scargill’s Labour Party. It too fell apart when Scargill suppressed all those who opposed him.

When the Scottish Socialist Party was formed in 1998, things had obviously advanced politically since the 1970’s. The new SSP was avowedly socialist in its critique of neo-liberalism, advocated the break-up of the UK and opposed the US/British imperial alliance. However, it was less clear both on what a socialist alternative would look like, and the strategy to be supported to challenge the UK state (tail-ending the Nationalists or a republican socialist ‘internationalism from below’ alliance). Nevertheless, the SSP was able to unite Left nationalists, Left unionists, socialist republicans, socialist feminists, environmental activists and others in a single organisation – no mean achievement.

However, the SSP was also afflicted with the ‘great leader’ syndrome, initially promoted by comrades from the former Scottish Militant Labour and others. This contributed to the ‘Tommygate crisis’ in November 2004. Could the SSP maintain itself as an independent socialist party, or was it doomed to become Sheridan’s Socialist Party? In October 2006, that role was taken on by Solidarity-SSM (the Suck-up to Sheridan Movement) when it split away, after Sheridan’s earlier court ‘victory’.

However, the remaining SSP has yet to prove it can successfully reconstitute itself as the party of socialist unity. There are questions over whether the restriction of internal debate over the last four years on this issue went beyond what was necessary to avoid the legal problems caused by the state’s perjury trial.  Some members appear to believe that the letters ‘SSP’ now stand for the Stuff Sheridan Party, and that the decision of a bourgeois court last December means that we can just continue as before. The very welcome clearing of our leading comrades’ names by a jury majority, however, is not the same as the SSP still being seen as the party of socialist unity, either by the wider working class, or even just by those former members and supporters, most of whom never joined Solidarity.

Any party wanting to overthrow the existing order will be presented with unforeseen challenges. They can either try to ignore the unwelcome consequences of this, pretending that things can go on just as before; or they can use the experience to learn how to deal with such challenges. Everybody in the SSP would now accept that celebrity populist politics, built around the ‘great leader’, has to be rejected. We all share some responsibility for not dealing with this earlier – including the RCN. However, the SSP has still to address two other issues, which its founding members had not considered.

First, what is our attitude to the bourgeois courts? What chance have socialists got of bringing about socialism in the face of capitalist economic and state power, if we run to their courts to sort out our internal problems in the here and now?  The original November 2004 EC decision to allow Sheridan to go to the courts to take on the News of the World was misguided. When he rejected the unanimous EC decision to advise him not to, this was his first anti-party action. But this was disguised from the membership by the EC-Sheridan ‘deal’, with fateful consequences. Similarly, Frances Curran’s decision to go to courts for a ruling on Sheridan’s disgusting Daily Record attack highlights two things. There still remains a belief in some quarters that bourgeois courts are a legitimate arena for socialists to settle disputes with each other; and secondly, an unwillingness to criticise and bring leading office bearers to account – something that can and should be done in a comradely, political and non-personalised way.

Secondly, what is our attitude to the bourgeois media? We shouldn’t secretly resort to their media to criticise the conduct of other socialists, no matter how provocative their actions. Secrecy can lead to malicious rumour spreading, as we soon found out. Even worse is taking money to attack others. The fact that Sheridan first started this in the Daily Record provides no excuse for others. Any responsible jury member should reject paid-for evidence. George McNeilage’s tape threatened to undermine those SSP witnesses who had nothing to gain in court but maintaining their own personal integrity.

The traumatic post-split October 2006 SSP Conference was conducted in a genuinely comradely manner. It took many principled decisions, which still need to be upheld today. However, this means an end to the refusal to answer questions concerning elected office bearers’ public behaviour and the personalised attacks on those raising criticisms, which we have sometimes witnessed since. This post-trial Special Conference must re-establish that earlier tone once more.

Unless there is a shared agreement that have been some major misjudgements in the SSP’s handling of the whole affair, then we will go the same way as the two earlier SLPs. To avoid this means:-

1)       an unequivocal rejection of celebrity populism.  We are radically democratic and egalitarian.

2)       not having leading members beyond question and therefore unaccountable to the membership.

3)      a refusal to go to the bourgeois courts and media in an attempt to solve our own problems.  We need to develop our own socialist methods of dealing with such issues.

Whatever the outcome of today’s Conference, the now long-proven need for a united socialist organisation in Scotland (joined to others in an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance) will remain. How much better, if that organisation was to be a recharged SSP, showing that it can meet any challenges thrown at it in a principled and imaginative way.

 

RCN BULLETIN

SSP AGM IN DUNFERMLINE, APRIL  2011

 FACING UP TO THE CRISIS IN THE SSP

 The motions for this year’s Conference highlight the toll taken on the SSP over the last six years. Is the Scottish Socialist Party still a party, or we have we just become a loose alliance, looser even than the preceding Scottish Socialist Alliance?

AUTO-ELECTORALISM OR SLEEP WALKING TOWARDS MAY 5^th

Motion A1 from the Executive Committee on the Holyrood election only views the national election on May 5^th as a preparation for the Scottish local elections next year. It doesn’t address the political situation we currently face. Labour and SNP are vying with each other to be seen as the embodiment of ‘capitalist responsibility’, implementing the cuts programme demanded by corporate capital, the EU and Westminster; whilst hypocritically claiming to minimise effect of the cuts on the workers or people of Scotland. Nor does the EC motion take stock of the situation we face in the aftermath of the Sheridan Trial, with a split Left and the continued challenge the SSP faces from the supporters of ‘celebrity socialism’. Only now it is in the guise of that opportunist George Galloway and his cheerleaders in the CWI, SWP and Solidarity – when will they ever learn!

However, in order to rally the troops, at least until May, our leadership is also highlighting a recent opinion poll, which places the SSP on 4% in the Regional List. Yet, in the latest council by-election in Paisley, the SSP only received about 2% of the vote. This is in a solid working class constituency with an active branch and a locally well-known candidate.  But this is not enough. The SSP still has a lot to do to win back key sections of the working class in Scotland.  A ‘back to business as usual’ approach is unlikely to achieve this.

TAKING FULL ACCOUNT OF THE PROBLEMS CAUSED BY THE SPLIT

The court’s decision last December, in clearing the names of our leading comrades, was very welcome. However, the jailing of Sheridan for the non-violent crime of perjury does not constitute justice.  It also creates a false martyr. It still leaves Sheridan unaccountable for his offences against our class, and his courtroom and media attempts to drag sexual relations back fifty years.  Nor does the decision of a bourgeois court amount to a vindication of all the actions taken by the SSP over these difficult times. This is why we in the RCN have stuck by our motion remitted from the February Special Conference, which addresses these concerns. Until the SSP can publicly acknowledge our need to be self-critical and learn from our mistakes, we will not regain the confidence of our class. As a result, workers’ support will be directed elsewhere, or many will just retreat into apathy and cynicism.

Other Conference motions also acknowledge the continuing crisis facing the SSP. In particular, Motion B7 from Glasgow West argues that, “The SSP has suffered over the past 6 years because of our inability to discuss openly and candidly the experience of the party and its members surrounding the Sheridan court cases and the split in the party in 2006”. Furthermore, this motion goes on to make some useful proposals involving a structured discussion around important issues. There are a number of other issues which we think could usefully have been added – such as the role of trade unions and how socialists should relate to them; and an assessment of the ‘National Question’ and its impact on the UK – but these (and other) issues could still be added by future ECs or NCs. The Glasgow West motion deserves support.

So too does motion B8 from Edinburgh South calling for the SSP to initiate another Convention of the Left, to be held in Scotland.  This would probably bring along others who are now distinctly hostile to the SSP. However, we should not be afraid to publicly debate such issues as ‘celebrity socialism versus genuine socialism’, ‘tolerating sexism under the guise of  ‘class politics’ versus challenging women’s oppression and sexism as part of the struggle for human emancipation’. We also have a distinctive socialist republican approach to the ‘National Question’ to counter the British Left. Furthermore, if the SSP can show that we have learned important lessons from the trials and tribulations of the ‘Tommygate Affair’, we are likely to get a hearing once more from those who used to look to the SSP for a political lead.

Motion 3 from Scottish Socialist Youth recognises the slippage of the SSP from a properly structured party based on branches to, in effect, a loose alliance. Indeed, the SSY itself has increasingly become another semi-detached part of this federal mix, despite their key role initiating the independent Anti-Fascist Alliances and the continuing Free Hetherington Occupation. The SSP, as a whole, needs to learn from these valuable experiences, and seriously address our young comrades’ concerns.

PROBLEMS STILL UNRECOGNISED AND THE APPROACH NEEDED

There are other problems for the SSP accentuated by the current crisis, which are not the subject of debate at this Conference. The Scottish Socialist Voice has become another largely autonomous body, not subject to the control of a wider Editorial Board, responsible to Conference, ECs or NCs. Although we have a prolific Industrial Organiser, there is no regularly meeting Industrial/Trade Union Committee. Many of these problems have arisen, not through bad practice, but due to the loss of SSP members and the fall-off in branch activity, leaving smaller numbers of comrades trying to hold things together as best they can.

In conclusion, can this Conference fully acknowledge the nature of the crisis that has engulfed the SSP? Can we address our own ‘inner demons’ without acrimony and rancour, and in a spirit of shared comradeship? If we can do this, then we have a chance of reversing the current tendency to fragmentation and of becoming a party once more.

 

 

Trade Unions – Are They Fit For Purpose?

It was generally agreed by participants that the third Global Commune event, jointly hosted by the Republican Communist Network (RCN) and the commune, on Saturday, January 29^th, was a very worthwhile day. Once again, the event was held in the ‘Out of the Blue’ Centre in Leith (Edinburgh) and involved, as well as the organising groups, members of the Independent Workers Union (IWU) in Ireland, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Permanent Revolution, the Autonomous Centre in Edinburgh (ACE), current and ex-members of the SSP, and the Anarchist Federation.

The theme for the day was, ‘Trade Unions – Are They Fit for Purpose?’ There was a shared agreement that the traditional Broad Left strategy for working in trade unions had been shown to be wanting. By and large, Broad Lefts accept the existing union structures and concentrate on replacing Right wing leaderships. However, we now have the situation where new Broad Lefts have to contest old Broad Lefts, which have become as conservative as the leaderships they replaced. This highlights the flawed thinking behind their ‘capture the machinery’ approach.

Mary Macgregor of the RCN chaired the initial and plenary sessions.  The opening platform of speakers consisted of Allan Armstrong of the RCN and the commune, Stuart King of Permanent Revolution, Tommy McKearney of the IWU, Alberto Durango of the Latin American Workers Association (LAWA) and the IWW, and Mike Vallance of ACE. They each put forward different approaches, including organising within or outside existing trade unions, in TUC/ITUC-recognised or independent unions, and the possibility of a strategy involving a mixture of these methods.

Apologies for being unable to attend were given by Brian Higgins of the rank and file Building Workers Group, who is currently involved in the anti-blacklist campaign; and by Jerry Hicks, who has just campaigned on a rank and file platform for the post of General Secretary in UNITE. Therefore, Allan Armstrong, the former Scottish Teachers’ Rank & File convenor provided a rank and file perspective.

Allan used his experience in the Lothian and the Scottish Rank & File Teacher groups. He drew a distinction between a rank and file movement and a rank and file caucus. In 1974/5, the Rank & File Teacher group had been to the forefront of a three month long independent (unofficial or wildcat) rank and file movement of Scottish teachers organised through Action Committees. The central demand was for a £15 a week flat rate pay increase. The Action Committees organised weekly three-day strike action, street activities, large demonstrations, and an occupation of the EIS (the main Scottish teachers’ union) HQ. Negotiations were conducted directly between delegates from the Action Committees and representatives from the Scottish Office at New St. Andrews House in Edinburgh. The teacher delegates were backed by a demonstration outside of striking teachers, whilst the Scottish Office had the backing of the Special Branch (or some other state agency) cameramen on the roof!

The Action Committees held weekly open meetings of striking teachers, and sent flying pickets to other schools to draw them into action. They also worked within the EIS. Many activists were EIS school reps. Eventually there was a palace coup at EIS HQ. This enabled a rejigged union leadership to sanction its own official action. Negotiations were confined once more to union officials and the Scottish Office, much to their mutual relief. Nevertheless, the strength of the independent strike action was enough to force the government to concede the financial equivalent of nearly the whole rank and file movement’s £15 pay demand. However, with negotiations now conducted by EIS officials, the distribution of the money gained was massively skewed in favour of school managements.

The self-confidence gained by teachers meant that further action over the next two years, mostly official, but sometimes involving independent action, was able to win substantial improvements in teachers’ conditions. A new contract clearly defined maximum working hours and class sizes. In the process of these struggles, Scottish education and teacher trade unionism was turned upside down. The employers and union officials were unable to fully reassert their control until the McCrone Deal was implemented in 2001.

After the ending of the initial rank and file movement, around the action over pay in 1975, Scottish Rank & File Teachers continued as a caucus. They campaigned around a very wide range of issues, e.g. pay (for a single salary scale, for flat rate increases), improved conditions (smaller class sizes), for women’s and gay rights, against the use of the belt (the form of corporal punishment in Scottish schools), for the right of school students to organise, for egalitarian educational provision, secular education and support for Gaelic language teaching. They also campaigned to democratise the union – demanding head teachers out and directly elected and accountable union office bearers on the average pay of the members. Most importantly though, they championed the sovereignty of the membership in their workplaces, and defended, and when possible initiated, independent action.

The Scottish Teachers Rank & File caucus was sabotaged by the SWP in 1982, leaving only the Lothian Rank & File group. Later, a Scottish Federation of Socialist Teachers (SFST) brought together the Left once more. However, the SFST became a hybrid Broad Left/Rank & File caucus. Furthermore, the employers had encouraged division amongst teachers by creating a plethora of promoted posts. They also curtailed a vibrant culture of alternative educational thinking amongst classroom teachers, through the top-down promotion of tightly policed ‘educational’ counter-reforms. The Tories’ anti-trade union laws undermined independent strike action, massively aided by trade union officials. However, there was still limited independent action until as recently as the 2003, in protest against the war in Iraq.

Allan summed up by saying that he thought the rank and file approach was still valid in various unions. However, there had been a rapid decline of union membership in many sectors of employment, as well as new areas of work without any union organisation. Union leaderships were often more interested in suppressing any attempts to resist the employers, acting in effect as a free personnel management service for the bosses. Such leaders wanted little more than sweetheart agreements with the employers to ensure a tick-off system of subs collections, primarily for their own benefit. Therefore, socialists should think tactically, and consider when an independent union, or possibly dual official/independent union approach, may be more appropriate than a rank and file caucus approach.

Stuart King of Permanent Revolution then drew on the experience of the early Minority Movement in the trade unions in the early 1920’s. The CPGB’s work in the Minority Movement formed part of the wider work of the Third International, which had organised the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) in 1920 to conduct united front work within the international trade union movement. Although mostly associated with the official Communist Parties, RILU drew together wider forces within the unions, especially those from a Syndicalist tradition.

Stuart argued that there were some similarities in the early 1920’s to the situation we face today. In April 1921, the two leaderships of the NTWU (later the TGWU) and the NUR, failed to support the miners of the MFGB (later the NUM), in the face of employer imposed wage cuts, despite being part of the Triple Alliance. This ‘Black Friday’ climb-down led to a growing feeling of demoralisation amongst workers. Many left their unions. The Minority Movement launched a ‘Back to the Unions’ campaign, with the intention of getting workers organised to resist the growing employers’ offensive, and to bring the union leaders under the effective control of the rank and file.

Stuart said that we also face a period of retreat today, as existing union leaderships had joined social partnerships with the state and employers. There was also declining union membership. The ‘Awkward Squad’ had also turned out to be not that awkward when it came to effectively challenging the employers and the state. Nevertheless, workers still look to their official unions when it comes to taking defensive action – as recent strikes of civil servants, airline cabin staff and others have demonstrated. This means communists must be active within the existing unions and struggle to bring them under effective rank and file control.

Stuart’s contribution provided a counterpoint to others who emphasised the fundamental differences in the situation we face today, compared to the past. In particular, Tommy McKearney of the Independent Workers Union of Ireland highlighted the major challenges workers now face.

Tommy argued that thirty years of neo-liberal economics have finally done fundamental damage to the system it was meant to promote. Facilitated by globalisation, the enormous transfer of wealth from workers to capitalists has created a situation where consumers in the west no longer have the purchasing power to buy the produce of their own industry and the developing countries have not yet reached a level where they can take up the slack. The contradiction is explicable only by Marxist economists.

What has also happened, almost unnoticed by many commentators, is the collapse of social democracy in the face of the neo-liberal assault and the most recent crisis in capitalism. For a few years the social democratic movements of Europe disguised their collapse by stealing the clothes of the neo-liberals. Tony Blair, Schroder, Mitterand were in reality as far to the right as any Tory or Christian Democrat. In the face of economic collapse post 2008, they could only offer right-wing solutions.

Moreover, the trade union movement that had give birth to and thereafter sustained these parties for almost a century was as ideologically and organisationally bankrupt. There is no longer a viable middle way between socialism and capitalism.

The IWU recognises this fact and has decided to seek out new and more appropriate methods of organisation in order to meet the new challenge. Among other strategic options, the IWU is actively developing a policy of building community and/or social justice unionism. This concept is not new or devised by the IWU but it recognises the need to emphasise the struggle between classes and the need to promote the unity and solidarity of the working people.

Tommy summed up by saying that we are in a new era. There has been a fundamental change in social relationships in the west, and we must recognise this in our ideological analysis, in our policy decisions and in our organisations structures. The IWU may be small but we are confident in our analysis and in our strategy.

Then Alberto Durango gave a thorough and humorous account of his experience as a migrant worker from Colombia now living in London. Migrant workers often had more than one job to make ends meet. This sometimes meant that they could be in more than one union.

Alberto had started as a cleaner in a non-unionised office. First of all, his boss had resorted to Alberto for help, asking him to inform workers who did not speak English that they would have their hours cut and changed. Alberto brought the workers together and told them in Spanish  – “This fucking manager wants to… !” They began to organise, turning first to the T&G. The T&G (now UNITE) organised an official Justice for Cleaners campaign. There were some initial successes against large City of London and Canary Wharf companies. LAWA, which Alberto was very much involved in, was to the forefront of campaigning, and was provided with office space and money by UNITE.

However, there was a limit to how far the UNITE leadership was prepared to push. After organising some demonstrations, it contented itself with signing ‘no further action’ deals in return for minimum pay awards. The employers then started changing workers’ hours and conditions and pressured them over their immigration status. Alberto was sacked, arrested and had his home raided by the police.

UNITE’s leadership wasn’t prepared to challenge this. Therefore, workers had to organise their own independent Cleaners Defence Committee. This had led to an international campaign {including solidarity action in Edinburgh, following Alberto addressing the first Global Commune event}. The UNITE leadership, supported by the local Broad Left, then turned on the workers involved, smearing activists, refusing to back those without papers, and taking away LAWA’s facilities.

In order to organise, LAWA then turned to the IWW. A wider organisation was required to unite migrant workers from many countries. They needed an independent forum for organising, without being directly sabotaged by UNITE officials and the Broad Left. The new IWW cleaners’ branch provided this. However, some cleaners still worked within UNITE too, and had participated in the rank and file campaign to elect Jerry Hicks.

The last of the morning speakers was Mike Vallance. He explained how ACE, with its own premises, had been set up in the aftermath of the successful Anti-Poll Tax campaign. ACE became very much involved in claimants’ campaigns, providing a venue for meeting and socialising, organising support demonstrations and providing advocates to support people in their dealings with various state agencies. ACE also operated as a venue for a wider range of campaigns and various organisations, including the Anarchist Federation. It was also involved in the production and distribution of a number of bulletins and other publications, including the commune.

Currently ACE was involved in the Edinburgh refuse workers’ campaign which was challenging the City Council’s massive cut in pay and worsening of conditions. The Council’s attack was being made under the guise of bringing about ‘parity’ across their workforce. It had begun under the last administration led by the Labour Party, and was continuing under the present Lib Dem/SNP administration. The refuse cleaners’ union, UNITE, was in cahoots with the Council, and they had organised no effective backing, despite the campaign being official. Their main concern was to bring the current official work-to-rule to an end.

ACE had been involved in providing bulletins, posting support stickers, but most of all, in attempts through sit-down actions to blockade scab drivers employed by the Council to break the refuse workers’ work-to-rule. Workers fear that it is the Council’s intention to privatise the refuse collection service, and replace them with non-union workers on lower pay and worsened conditions. Yet, despite the almost total lack of official support, the workers had so far rejected any of the union-backed ‘offers’. In the light of this determination, ACE was hoping to draw others into its solidarity campaign.

This was followed by a short plenary session. Contributions ranged from one participant who said that social democracy had revealed its bankruptcy as far back as the First World War. Matthew Jones of the commune particularly welcomed Tommy’s appreciation that a new political trade unionism was needed after the now evident failure of social democracy and stalinism. In order to maximise participation, the meeting soon broke up into two workshops, with RCN and commune members acting as facilitators and recorders. The discussions stemming from these will be written up and posted.

After lunch, Paul Stewart and Patricia Campbell of the IWU presented the case for a community or social justice unionism approach. Paul showed a DVD drawing on the experiences of the Kanagawa City Union in Japan. This union organised migrant workers, especially from Latin America. It addresses not only workplace issues, but the wider problems workers face in the community such as racially motivated and domestic violence, sexual harassment, health, welfare and visa problems. It also calls on members to participate regularly in protests outside offending companies. Paul was going to make this DVD more widely available.

Patricia followed this up with a power point presentation (until the technology failed!) of the current work of the IWU in attempting to broaden out union organisation into the communities. The IWU had conducted a participatory survey into the issues that local communities wanted to address. It also sought to address the problems faced by migrant workers. The IWU had already challenged the strong-arm tactics of the PSNI (the revamped RUC) in Armagh City. It had also campaigned on the streets, with red banners, against the DUP/Sinn Fein government’s proposals to limit marches. These would prevent workers from organising their own demonstrations. The IWU had helped to force the authorities to retreat.

The two follow up workshops discussed the possibilities of wider community organising. They also returned to the issue addressed in the morning of whether unions were fit for purpose. The discussions stemming from these will also be written up and posted.

There was a final report-back plenary session with further discussion. The initial platform speakers were provided with an opportunity to say what they thought had been learned and gained from the day. The majority of those in attendance over the day were activists. However, the need for wider forums for strategic debate and discussion, which did not necessarily lead to immediate calls for activity, was nonetheless appreciated.

There was a wide consensus that there was no single approach to organising workers in the complex and changing situation we faced. The long period of working class retreat probably disguised some of the new methods of resistance that were emerging in the face of the current capitalist offensive. It was also acknowledged that learning from wider international experience, especially that of the IWU, had been very useful. There had been differences over whether the situation we now face is altogether different from earlier experiences, and over the longstanding issue of whether ‘to party or not to party’. However, these differences were all aired in a very comradely manner.

A good day was followed by the now traditional Global Commune social session in Wetherspoon’s  ‘Foot of the Walk’, where members from all the organisations present through the day continued their discussions till much later!

Allan Armstrong. 10.2.11

The RCN welcomes the vindication of those SSP comrades who refused to go along with Sheridan’s attempt to use his public and celebrity position to extract money for personal gain. Whilst fully recognising the political damage and personal hurt to SSP members resulting from this debacle, the RCN opposes the jailing of our former SSP comrade Tommy Sheridan and looks forward to the day when such issues will be dealt with within the organisations of our class not those of the bourgeoisie.  Lessons, however, must be learnt.

The rise of the Scottish Socialist Party to a position of influence and respect within the working class of Scotland, owes a great deal to the hard work and dedication of many comrades. No one can underplay the contribution made to this by Tommy Sheridan. He became the public face of the socialist movement in Scotland and inspired many people to become involved in class based activity. However, Tommy is a human being and is flawed like the rest of us. He grew to believe his own rhetoric; he courted the press on personal and family matters and set himself up to be the epitome of the clean-cut family man. He grew to believe that he was the SSP.

As we said at the time of the split within the SSP: The decision of Tommy Sheridan to pursue his court case against the unanimous advice of the SSP National Executive represented a rejection of inner party democracy and the accountability of party officials to the membership – an anti-party action, which has had dire consequences for the SSP. It was a gross political mistake.

The subsequent decision to form a new organisation, Solidarity, on little other political basis than personal support for Tommy Sheridan, represented a continuation of this anti-party action and heralded one of the most serious mistakes made by socialists in post war Scottish politics. It placed personality and individual egos above principled politics. It weakened the working class in the face of the current ruling class offensive.

The decision of the SWP and CWI to back this split, further demonstrated their own sectarian agendas. These organisations’ lack of commitment to principled socialist unity has already been clearly shown by their recent separate ‘unity’ initiatives in England and Wales, and in Northern Ireland.

The most immediate lesson for socialists is the incompatibility of trying to build a socialist organisation through promoting a celebrity leader. Furthermore, this has been highlighted, in the UK, not only by the example of Tommy Sheridan, but also of Derek Hatton (CWI/Militant), Arthur Scargill (Socialist Labour Party) Ken Livingstone (one-time Left independent) and George Galloway (Respect).

The consequences of the internecine warfare for the SSP and the working class movement have been catastrophic. Our credibility as an organisation, which can lead the struggles that face us and unite the left in Scotland, is severely diminished. However, we have survived and in pockets around Scotland have continued to work democratically and been leading fighters in various struggles.

Now is the time to learn the lessons of this tragedy. If we do so, then we can possibly rebuild as an organisation and once more play our part in forging socialist unity and taking forward the fight for a progressive and equal society.

Although we hold Tommy Sheridan responsible for the initial damage to the SSP, we also recognise the potential for subsequent and continuing damage caused by the misguided actions of a number of our own comrades, some of these actions in direct contradiction to Party policy. To avoid this, we must:-

• Encourage debates where political differences and attempts to make SSP office bearers accountable for their actions are addressed without acrimony and personalised attacks, either by those criticising or those criticised, and with understanding.
• Apply our constitution equally to all members.
• Insist that all officers of the Party adhere to Party policy.
• Not elevate any individual or group to the position of Great Leader/s. The party has democratic structures to ensure this does not happen and these must be adhered to.
• The membership of the party must be trusted. Some of the fallout from the court case could have been mitigated if the minutes of the EC had been dealt with in the normal manner and been made public to the membership. Only the RCN argued for the minutes to be open. This was a case of the party still treating Tommy Sheridan as more important than any other member and as such above the democratic scrutiny of the party.
• No resort to the bourgeois courts to decide political issues as per conference decisions at the October conference post the split.

Socialists should not go to the bourgeois courts for rulings on how we conduct ourselves. Such appeals should only be made to the democratic institutions of our class. What chance have socialists got of bringing about socialism in the face of capitalist economic and state power, if we have to run to their courts to sort out our problems in the here and now? Therefore, we need to re-emphasise the SSP Conference policy passed on October 20th, 2006.

• SSP members should avoid resort to the state’s courts when seeking redress for politically motivated attacks on their behaviour
• When SSP members are subjected to politically motivated attacks by the state or media, they should be able to call upon the support of the SSP National Executive to conduct a party campaign including the following tactics as deemed appropriate:-
  • articles in the party’s press
  • direct appeals to the trade union members in the state bodies and/or media responsible
  • calls for boycott actions
• SSP members should not resort to the non-party media when making allegations against other SSP members. Such allegations should be brought initially before the appropriate party body at the level concerned with the right to appeal to a higher level, the ultimate appeal being the SSP Conference.
• The elected press officer should be responsible for day-to-day responses to the outside media, when members are under attack. The press officer is directly responsible, initially to the National Executive, then to the National Council, and finally to the National Conference.

We accept that individuals found themselves in exceptional circumstances. However, in line with the above decision, the George McNeilage tape should have been seen to be dealt with by the party. This has been damaging for the SSP amongst the broader labour and trade union movement. The end does not justify the means.

Frances Curran’s use of the courts for a ruling being called a scab by the Daily Record was also a political mistake and against Party policy. Party members who handed minutes to police or who gave affidavits to newspapers must now see that however well intentioned, their actions were not helpful and once more were against party policy.

Once again, it is our contention that we must bring the continuing self inflicted damage to an end. The mistakes we made must be acknowledged, breaches of policy on the part of office bearers should be addressed and we must show ourselves to be a democratically accountable party.

Also, the Party must now seek to carry through the decision of the post-split 2006 SSP Conference which welcomes back former members without recriminations, especially now that they can clearly see the tragic implications of the misguided actions of Sheridan, Solidarity, SWP and CWI leaderships.

Principled unity is our strength. We have a duty to the working class and the cause of socialism to maintain socialist unity and to conduct ourselves in a combative, determined, confident, but friendly manner aimed at convincing thousands that the SSP’s principles and policies coincide with their interests. The future is ours, provided we collectively seize it.(Passed overwhelmingly 20th October 2006)

We must also try to win back the largest group of all – those former members who left the SSP and did not join Solidarity. They have raised criticisms, not only about egotism of Sheridan and the unattractive sectarianism and splitting tactics of the SWP and CWI, but also of some of the badly misjudged actions of the SSP in attempting to deal with these problems. This group currently forms an important bridge to those wider sections of the working class whom we need to win over once more to principled, socialist unity.

This should be read in conjunction with the RCN Statement to Conference.

Conference holds Tommy Sheridan’s anti-party actions to be responsible for the damage inflicted on the SSP and on the socialist movement in Scotland, aided, in particular, by the decisions taken by the leaderships of the CWI and SWP. The decision to split the SSP through the formation of Solidarity represented a major political mistake, which has left the working class severely weakened in the face of the current capitalist offensive.

We recognise however that to rebuild the party and this movement we must ensure that our own party structures, our constitution, conference decisions and internal, democratic procedures are adhered to. Therefore the SSP must:

Encourage debates where political differences and attempts to make SSP office bearers accountable for their actions are addressed without acrimony and personalised attacks

• Apply our constitution equally to all members.
• Insist that all officers of the party adhere to party policy.
• Not elevate any individual or group to the position of Great Leader/s. The party has democratic structures to ensure this does not happen and these must be adhered to.
• The membership of the party must be trusted.
• Reject any attempt to resort to the media or other bodies for personal financial gain, when information is sought about the conduct of people involved in the socialist and labour movements.

This conference re-emphasises SSP Conference policy passed on October 20th, 2006

• SSP members should avoid resort to the state’s courts when seeking redress for politically motivated attacks on their behaviour
• When SSP members are subjected to politically motivated attacks by the state or media, they should be able to call upon the support of the SSP Executive Committee to conduct a party campaign including the following tactics as deemed appropriate:
  • articles in the party’s press
  • direct appeals to the trade union members in the state bodies and/or media responsible
  • calls for boycott actions
• SSP members should not resort to the non-party media when making allegations against other SSP members. Such allegations should be brought initially before the appropriate party body at the level concerned with the right to appeal to a higher level, the ultimate appeal being the SSP Conference.

The elected press officer should be responsible for day-to-day responses to the outside media, when members are under attack. The press officer is directly responsible, initially to Executive Committee, then to the National Council, and finally to the National Conference.

Also, the party must now seek to carry through the decision of the post-split 2006 SSP Conference which welcomes back former members without recriminations, especially now that they can clearly see the tragic implications of the misguided actions of Sheridan, Solidarity, SWP and CWI leaderships.

The SSP continues to welcome members from other organisations provided they accept the aims and constitution of the SSP. Platforms and networks in the SSP exist to benefit the party as a whole by encouraging wider debate drawing on varied experiences. Principled unity is our strength. We have a duty to the working class and the cause of socialism to maintain socialist unity and to conduct ourselves in a combative, determined, confident, but friendly manner aimed at convincing thousands that the SSP’s principles and policies coincide with their interests. The future is ours, provided we collectively seize it. (Passed overwhelmingly 20th October 2006).

We must also try to win back the largest group of all – those former members who left the SSP and did not join Solidarity. They have raised criticisms, not only about egotism of Sheridan and the unattractive sectarianism and splitting tactics of the SWP and CWI, but also of those badly misjudged actions of the SSP in attempting to deal with these problems. These former members, many still active in their trade unions, communities and political campaigns, currently form an important bridge to those wider sections of the working class whom we need to win over once more to principled, socialist unity.

The split on the Scottish Left between celebrity populist and genuine socialist politics

On May 1st, 2003 six Scottish Socialist Party members were elected to Holyrood. From December 23rd, 2010, by far the best-known (former) member of the SSP, Tommy Sheridan, faces a jail sentence for committing perjury, following in the footsteps of Lord Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken. At a time of unprecedented attacks on the working class, led by a Tory-Lib-Dem government at Westminster, transmitted by an SNP government in Holyrood, and taken up by Labour, SNP, Lib-Dem and Tory councillors throughout Scotland, there is only one remaining socialist (SSP) representative – Jim Bollan, the councillor for the Leven ward in West Dunbartonshire.

How has this sad state of affairs come to pass, and is there anything socialists can usefully learn from all this?  Perhaps the most immediate lesson is the incompatibility of trying to build a socialist organisation through promoting a celebrity leader. Furthermore, this has been highlighted, in the UK, not only by the example of Tommy Sheridan, but also of Derek Hatton (CWI/Militant), Arthur Scargill (Socialist Labour Party) Ken Livingstone (one-time Left independent) and George Galloway (Respect).

However, the fact that the same mistake keeps repeating itself shows that a significant section of the Left in the UK is more attracted to populist politics, than to genuine socialist politics, where all members are treated as equals and are encouraged to think for themselves.

Sexual prudery or simple hypocrisy

Another shortcoming has been the failure of much of the Left in Scotland, following from Tommy Sheridan’s lead, to be able to deal with sexual politics. In the face of salacious newspaper attacks regarding their sex lives, Bertie Ahern and John Prescott, to name but two prominent politicians, have managed to handle the press far better. So what? or, People’s sexual lives are a private matter, should have been the obvious response by any socialist to the News of the World accusations.

Tommy could not do this because his populist politics had led him, at every media opportunity, to cultivate his own celebrity image. He portrayed himself as being part of ‘the perfect family’ – Tommy, Gail and my little princess, Gabrielle (which perhaps revealingly puts Tommy and Gail in the position of king and queen!)

This highlights how deeply bourgeois ideology, including their hypocritical ‘morality’, is embedded in our class. It points to the urgent need for a discussion amongst socialists as to what attitudes and practice, regarding personal sexual and emotional relations, we might positively promote. At the moment we appear to have few answers to such questions and it offers our enemies a permanent Achilles heel to wound us.

Socialists are not sexual prudes and should defend a person’s right to engage in any consensual sexual activity of their choice. They should not be drawn into the sleaze mongering of the tabloid press, whether it be the News of the World or the Daily Record. However, any socialist makes him or herself a hostage to fortune, if they demonstrate hypocrisy in their attitudes and behaviour in this particular arena. John Major’s public support for ‘family values’, whilst personally leading a somewhat different private life, had already demonstrated how the media would deal with such hypocrisy.

In both Sheridan’s ill-considered court case against the News of the World and the subsequent perjury trial, he attempted to appeal to the jury as a guiltless Daniel O’Donnell-type figure, whilst hitting out at the ‘sexual misdemeanour’s’, mental health and socialist factionalism of the other witnesses. Having abandoned any possible socialist grounds for fending off attacks by the gutter press or the state, Sheridan demonstrated the depths to which he was prepared to go to protect only himself – something his remaining political allies, and even friends and family would be well advised to take note of.

A populist Solidarity and a socialist SSP

The Left in Scotland is now clearly divided. It included those who promote populist celebrity politics. The majority of populist celebrity supporters are to be found in Solidarity, the Scottish Socialist Movement, which constitutes the Tommy Sheridan Fan club. Indeed that is about the only thing that unites this unprincipled political ‘marriage of convenience’. Sheridan also enjoys the support of a number of jaundiced journalists, sometimes former Left supporters, who are now bitterly hostile to organised socialist politics, but are quite happy with individual colourful celebrity politicians, who provide good press copy.

How much longer he will enjoy this support is another question. Sheridan’s adulatory celebrity soul-mate, George Galloway, is now rapidly back peddling, probably having calculated that the Sheridan connection will not help him win support amongst Glasgow’s Muslim community in the forthcoming Holyrood election. He is probably also positioning himself for a return to the Labour Party, if he can show he still has some electoral weight, a la Livingstone.

Opposing such populist celebrity politics are those, primarily in the SSP, who have learned from their earlier mistake of tolerating Tommy Sheridan as he transformed himself into an increasingly self-promotional celebrity figure. He is no longer reined in by any platform discipline, following the collapse of the International Socialist Movement, he was a member of, along with the majority amongst the SSP leadership.

Still a lack of clarity on the use of bourgeois courts on both sides

Unfortunately, though, despite there being a now deep divide amongst the Left in Scotland, there are still some remaining shared political characteristics, held at the two leadership levels. If these aren’t also dealt with firmly in the aftermath of the perjury trial, this will prevent any political recovery by the SSP.

In particular, neither Sheridan’s supporters, nor the majority of the SSP leadership, have learned one particular fundamental lesson when it comes to the advance of principled socialist politics. You do not go to the bourgeois courts for rulings on how socialists conduct themselves. Such appeals should only be made to the democratic institutions of our class. What chance have socialists got of bringing about socialism in the face of capitalist economic and state power, if we have to run to their courts to sort out our problems in the here and now?

The original unanimous SSP Executive Committee (EC) decision of November 9th, 2004, to advise Tommy not to proceed with his court case, was not taken on the grounds of principle, but on the tactical grounds that the truth behind the sexual allegations would likely surface at some time. Instead of Tommy being instructed to stand down because he was not prepared to take unanimous party advice, a deal was cobbled together, which allowed him to pursue his case as ‘private matter’. The consequences of this misguided decision (as if the media and state were ever going to treat Tommy Sheridan as a non-political private individual) soon became apparent.

Some among the populist wing of the SSP, which could not imagine the party’s existence without Tommy as leader, started to make their guilty annoyance known in leaks to the bourgeois press, before the November 27th National Council (NC) meeting. Later, Alan McCombes, now trying to disentangle an SSP leadership from its previous unquestioning public support for Tommy, responded to this provocation by providing an affidavit to the press, which explained the SSP leadership majority’s actions.

The people, who were effectively bypassed by both sides, were the ordinary SSP members. With the agreement of both sets of protagonists, members had been denied access at the November 27th NC meeting to the minutes of the 9th November EC meeting. Further down the line, the consequences of this became clear. On May 16th, 2006, the state stepped in. Lady Smith decided, at the Edinburgh Court of Session, to help the News of the World, by demanding the SSP hand over the minutes. Alan McCombes quite correctly refused to hand over the minutes. He ended up in Saughton Jail on May 26th as a consequence – a high price to pay for this earlier mistake.

Sheridan pulls the populists and the CWI and SWP behind his strategy of deceit, and his calls for members to sacrifice themselves for the ‘great leader’

This was the point at which Tommy should have stepped in and said that enough was enough. He should then have dropped his court case, now that the full consequences of his course of action had become apparent. Some of his remaining supporters, including the recently elected Convenor, Colin Fox, did realise that Tommy’s ‘game was now up’. To their credit, they moved over to the camp of those in the SSP leadership majority who were trying to disentangle themselves from a situation of the party’s own making, in the best possible manner considering the difficult circumstances they now found themselves in.

However, Tommy decided to adopt another course of action. He  began to group an unholy alliance around himself. This group consisted of the Sheridanistas (his unquestioning supporters in the party) and the hard-wired sectarians amongst the SWP and CWI (who had quite different and mutually antagonistic political agendas). With a jailed Alan McCombes now the centre of members’ and wider media attraction, Tommy helped to devise a scheme, which would put him back in the media limelight.

His supporters, now calling themselves the SSP Majority, decided to push for an emergency National Council meeting on May 28th 2006, which they packed. Here Tommy produced his hate-mongering ‘Open Letter’. This lead encouraged his supporters to reduce the meeting to a bear garden, in a marked break from previous SSP practice.

As a result, they won a National Council majority calling for Alan McCombes to hand over the minutes to the courts. However, Tommy’s allies had written up a false set of minutes, which they had already handed over. This action provided the state with the list of people who would be dragged before court to testify, whilst missing out the names of Tommy’s supporters, who had also given their backing to the original genuine set of minutes. From this point onwards, Tommy was able to publicly entangle his supporters in his own continued deceptions. These involved the concoction of an ever more bizarre set of lies.

The biggest of these lies was that it was the SSP leadership majority who were themselves lying over his revelations at the original EC meeting. Here there had been unanimous agreement for the course of action adopted.

Thus the heart of Tommy’s court case against the News of the World was to be the presentation of a completely false story, which involved the sacrifice of the SSP Secretary, Barbara Scott for doing her job, and of those leading SSP members, including four MSPs, Frances Curran, Colin Fox (until recently Sheridan’s ally), Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie, who refused to perjure themselves so that he could use his own political position and celebrity status to extract a substantial sum of money from the News of the World for his wife, Gail. The fruits of the politics of populism were made starkly clear. ‘Lesser’ members had to sacrifice themselves for the ‘great leader’.

The real role of SSP platforms and Sheridan’s playing to anti-socialist prejudice

Tommy also decided to appeal to the anti-socialist prejudice of the media, and hopefully, for him, of the majority of the jurors. This meant he conjured up a secret faction, which had always been out to get him. He called this previously non-existent organisation the ‘United Left’. The real United Left only formed, on June 11th, 2006, as a temporary platform, in self defence, after the antics of Tommy’s supporters in the SSP Majority platform, at the May 28th NC meeting.

Tommy’s own supporters did include the long-standing factionalists of the SWP and CWI, but even they had been forced to moderate their sectarian practices at earlier SSP gatherings, when a united SSP membership showed low toleration for such behaviour.

Back in November 2004, though, Tommy and some of his later supporters, such as Steve Arnott and Jock Penman, were in the same platform, the International Socialist Movement, as Keith Baldassara, Frances Curran, Catriona Grant, Alan McCombes, Richie Venton and others, who ended up on the opposite sides as the internal dispute developed.

However, many people, who came to oppose Tommy’s utterly wrong-headed course of action, were never members of the ISM, or the SSP Womens Network in 2004, and didn’t become members of the United Left in 2006. The accusation of a ‘faction-ridden’ party was a central component in Tommy’s case. The SSP could therefore be denigrated by cynical journalists and pilloried in front of the jurors. Such anti-socialist baiting may well have contributed to Tommy’s victory in his first court case. He certainly thought so, because he resorted to the same tactic in the perjury trial, where he made barbed comments about the CWI, some of whom were now his allies and supporting courtroom witnesses!

Sheridan, as a celebrity populist politician, does not want to be held accountable to any political organisation, whether it be a platform, party or ‘movement’. Appeals to a celebrity promoting media, or being seen publicly in the company of other celebrities, are the ways by which he now gains much of his political support. A backing party or ‘movement’ may provide additional help, but only if it is constituted as a ‘Tommy Sheridan Fan Club’, which never questions the ‘great leader’.

Sheridan and his allies make up excuses to avoid real accountability for their anti-party actions

When Tommy’s original case came to court, the jurors quite rightly dismissed the evidence of all those who had been paid by the News of the World. However, despite Tommy’s shameful personalised attacks, and the hyped-up accusations of factionalism, to appeal to anti-socialist prejudice, other SSP witnesses held back, not wishing to provide aid to the News of the World. (Sheridan was to shamelessly use the fact that SSP witnesses did not reveal his full duplicity at this trial, in his attempt to undermine them in the subsequent perjury trial; whilst also continuing with his anti-socialist diatribes in court). These witnesses had absolutely nothing to gain except their self-respect. They were looking to a post-trial SSP conference to hold Tommy to account.

When Tommy was acquitted on 4th August, 2006, SSP Convenor, Colin Fox welcomed his victory over the News of the World. Tommy’s wrecking anti-party actions could now be debated, along with any criticisms of the leadership majority’s handling of the case, where they always should have been – within the party itself. Tommy announced that he was standing for Convenor against Colin.

So members were now provided with a clear choice. On one hand were those who supported populist celebrity politics, and who thought that some party leaders held a privileged position, which it was the duty of others to uphold at whatever personal cost; and in which political sects could behave as they liked. On the other hand were those who wanted to build a principled socialist organisation, where all members were treated as equal, and where platforms worked for the greater good of the party, by using their different political experiences to lift party debate and action to a higher level.

However, this choice was such an obvious ‘no-brainer’ that Tommy and his allies, had to devise another course of action to avoid the immediate consequences of their actions, just as in the aftermath of the release of Alan McCombes from jail. On no account would Tommy face the accountability of the wider SSP membership.

Tommy was now confident that his own political supporters would never attempt to bring him to account. So he upped the ante, and wrote a disgusting and well-paid article in the Daily Record, attacking those SSP members who had opposed him, showing particular vehemence for the women involved. Just as the two sets of court proceedings have revealed a massive gap between Tommy, ‘the perfect family man’, and his secret sexual alter ego; so his press and courtroom attacks on women have highlighted the massive gap between Tommy, ‘the charmer of the ladies’, and his underlying misogynism. Some of his supporters quickly jumped to order.

However, the prime purpose of Sheridan’s ‘scab’ attack in the Daily Record was to create a smokescreen to justify not being held to account at the planned special SSP Conference. Instead, a new party, Solidarity, would be formed.  The condition for membership was unquestioning public support for Tommy, right or wrong. The ‘great leader’ was effectively ‘anointed’ at Solidarity’s founding conference, to the accompaniment of his mother Alice Sheridan singing The Impossible Dream! The leaderships of the CWI and SWP had already signed up. They demanded only that they be allowed to behave in an equally unaccountable way; but in their cases, not to promote any personal celebrity status, but their own sectarian ends.

Sheridan leads his followers into the political desert

Some claim that Sheridan has become such a victim of his own ego that he has started to believe all his own fabrications. If this is the case, then Solidarity’s  leaders also entered Sheridan’s fantasy world. They publicly claimed that Solidarity would overtake the six MSPs gained by the SSP in 2003, at the next Holyrood election in 2007. And his political advisors in the CWI and SWP were meant to be sharp Marxist politicians, able to see the balance of class and political forces! In the end, although every Solidarity candidate, whether at Holyrood or council level, stood under the ‘Tommy Sheridan’ brand label; but not even Sheridan was able to hold on to his Holyrood seat.

However, one Solidarity member, Ruth Black, had been indeed persuaded that Solidarity offered the best new political opportunities. She was elected in Glasgow as their sole councillor (in the same election as the very different and principled socialist, Jim Bollan in West Dunbartonshire). However, she soon came to realise that joining Solidarity was not her best career move. So she joined the Labour Party, quickly throwing her lot in with its corrupt leader, the now sacked Stephen Purcell!

The perjury investigations provide a cover for the state to conduct a massive intelligence-gathering exercise and to organise a socialist-baiting trial

The clearest indication that some Solidarity members had lost all sense of reality, and were ‘tripping out’ on a hyped-up sectarian triumphalism, was a new call made by certain of their supporters in the media. An article in the Edinburgh Evening News suggested that those SSP members, who had failed to back Sheridan in court, should face perjury charges, now that he had won his court case. This was not a smart move!  Quite clearly, the state, having already been provided with the opportunity to intervene in the internal affairs of the SSP, through Sheridan’s earlier actions, quickly took up this invitation. Furthermore, their perjury investigations weren’t confined to the SSP witnesses.

It was certainly the case that either one side or another had perjured itself in court. Perjury in court is an everyday event, which is normally ignored. However, when it involves elected public figures, who misuse their position for personal gain (or to publicly discredit and undermine another elected representative, if Sheridan’s accusations had been true), then the state is much more likely to step in. This is true whatever the politics of the accused, as the case of the Archer and Aitken, two Tories, had already shown.

However, there was an additional reason why the state was eager to finance this particular perjury case. The police investigation would be useful cover for a massive intelligence-gathering exercise on the Left; whilst the ensuing court case would provide the opportunity to set-up a piece of political theatre, in which socialists would publicly tear each other to pieces. The key SSP witnesses, and even a few of the Solidarity witnesses, tried to avoid falling into this particular trap in court, but Sheridan himself played to the anti-socialist and populist prejudices with great gusto. Therefore, from the state’s point of view, the £4M on the police investigation and the court case was well spent.

Politically responsible and politically irresponsible defensive actions from the SSP leadership

To their great credit, leading SSP and former SSP activists – including Barbara Scott, Alan McCombes, Richie Venton, Keith Baldassara, Frances Curran, Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie and Colin Fox, spoke truthfully and without personal animosity in court. It was their evidence, coupled to that of a number of completely independent witnesses, which vindicated the SSP in the eyes of the jury.

However, Sheridan’s provocative and calculated Daily Record attack on August 7th, 2006, had pushed some SSP members to politically indefensible actions, despite the SSP’s own 2006 post-trial Conference decisions. These made it clear that any resort to bourgeois courts or media to settle political grievances was unacceptable.

George McNeilage’s decision to take £200,000 from the News of the World for Tommy’s taped ‘confession’ completely undermined his credibility before any serious jury member, who would discount paid-for ‘evidence’. Worse still, it threatened to undermine those SSP members trying to clear their name with no personal gain, other than upholding their commitment to truth and integrity. Once the party conference had taken a decision on how members should conduct themselves, McNeilage’s actions should have been publicly disowned.

Sheridan’s Daily Record attack also provoked an understandably irate Frances Curran, now the SSP party co-spokesperson, to go to the court for a ruling against his completely false accusation of ‘scabbing’. Once again, this was against the 2006 SSP post-split conference decision opposing any such course of action. The hold of old CWI politics over otherwise very critical former members was surely demonstrated in Frances’ belief that a bourgeois court would find any accusation of ‘scabbing’ reprehensible. Scabbing is something that is actively encouraged under the law. The decision of the SSP leadership to let Frances go ahead, not with official party backing, but as a private individual, just repeated the earlier mistake made with Sheridan at the November 26th 2004 EC. But, at least, Sheridan was asked to stand down whilst he did so!

Furthermore, other leading members’ resort to grandstanding to prevent any meaningful discussion at Conference, EC or NC meetings on socialist unity, whilst the perjury case was proceeding, left many existing and former members, as well as supporters, wondering whether the SSP leadership is really serious about socialist unity. Or, did they want this to take second place to a permanent war with Sheridan and Solidarity. Once again, such a dead-end approach is in complete opposition to the unanimously adopted motion on socialist unity, taken at the 2006 conference.

Socialist unity can not be rebuilt through triumphalist posturing

Since the Sheridan perjury trial verdict on December 23rd, some SSP members’ contributions have taken a similar triumphalist tone to that of leading Solidarity members after Sheridan’s court victory on August 4th, 2006.

Sheridan now faces a jail sentence, which will have a devastating effect, particularly on his family. Although the misuse of an elected representative’s position for personal gain should indeed be recognised as an offence (just as socialists condemn MP’s financial corruption at Westminster), the SSP should publicly declare its opposition to Sheridan’s imprisonment. Socialists are against jailing for non-violent offences.

The recent Scottish Socialist Youth post-perjury trial statement displays some unwelcome triumphalist features, but is at least clear on opposing Sheridan’s jailing and the need for restorative justice. Sheridan and Solidarity leaders’ actions have wrecked the hard fought for socialist unity, which had shown its greatest strength in 2003. Neither the state nor the bourgeois courts have any interest in defending this legacy – indeed quite the opposite. It is for these crimes that Sheridan should face real accountability for his actions in democratic socialist and working class arenas. This is what he so assiduously avoided when he ran away from the planned 2006 post-trial SSP Conference.

Some people, though, ended joining up Solidarity for misguided reasons. This included lack of understanding of what was really going on (not helped by the SSP leadership majority’s later regretted, own ‘private deal’ with Sheridan), prior political allegiances and personal friendships. Many will now see the complete failure of the course of action pursued by Solidarity’s leadership, with the aid of the leaderships of both the CWI and SWP. This is why the SSP needs to re-emphasise its 2006 post-split Conference decision to welcome such members back without recriminations.

Rebuilding socialist unity on sound principles

However, all members, whether already in the party, rejoining again, or coming in as completely new members, should be informed that the organisation they are in, or coming to, completely rejects celebrity populist politics, treats everybody equally, and encourages independent thinking. It also refuses to resort to bourgeois courts or the media for rulings on how it, or any of its members, conduct their political lives. If these lessons are indeed leaned and taken on board, then socialists in Scotland (and hopefully elsewhere too) will be in a much better position to develop the sort of organisation, which still needs to be built. This is so we can begin to confront the rulers of the current crisis-ridden corporate imperial global order and UK state, and all those political parties, which continue to defend the completely indefensible. This would make a major contribution to rebuilding socialist unity.

Allan Armstrong, Republican Communist Network and SSP member, 2.1.11

The article above is Allan Armstrong’s follow-up to the article he originally wrote for Emancipation & Liberation, no. 13.

The official SSP statement in response to the jury’s decision in the perjury trial can be found below. The RCN welcomes and broadly endorses this statement.

There is undoubtedly much more to be said, and the SSP has already arranged that all matters arising
 from the trial will be addressed at a special post-trial Conference. Here the RCN will be following up the motions it supported at the post-split Conference. Some of the background and the issues raised can be found here.

The motions supported by the RCN at the 2006 post-split Conference can also be found after the official SSP statement.

Kevin McVey – SSP National Secretary

Tommy Sheridan’s conviction today for perjury was inevitable.

Six years ago, as leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, he proposed to sue a tabloid newspaper over stories he knew to be true and demanded that our party went along with his lies. All his closest friends and political allies of 20 years urged him not to take such a reckless course of action.

He will now be dealt with by the judge. We have no desire for vengeance.

What is more important is that all those who have been falsely denounced by him and his allies as liars, plotters, perjurers and forgers have been cleared.

The idea that there was a conspiracy involving Rupert Murdoch, Lothian and Borders Police and the SSP is nonsense and yet this is the narrative that Tommy Sheridan’s supporters publicly promoted for the past 4 years.

By his actions over six years, Tommy Sheridan has disgraced himself and negated his political contribution to the socialist cause over 25 years. History will now record that he did more harm to the socialist cause in Scotland than any good he ever did it.

That astonishing conclusion would not have been thought possible at the height of the poll tax struggle he led so well, or during his early period in the Scottish Socialist Party and Scottish Parliament.

The SSP reaffirms that its aim is to defend the interests of working people, the millions against the millionaires and to fight for a socialist transformation of society in the interests of the majority.

We now draw a line under this sorry saga and move on. The Scottish Socialist Party has been tested to the limit over the past six years and has proven it is a party of principles and integrity.

In this time of savage attacks by the rich against the poor, Scotland more than ever needs a strong left wing socialist party that can be trusted.

October 20th 2006 (post-split) SSP conference

Motion 1 put forward by the Executive Committee and Anniesland branch

Socialist Unity

This National Conference salutes the courageous, principled defence of the SSP and the interests of socialism by all those who have remained as SSP members during the recent crisis. We emerge stronger in our determination to sustain and build a united, democratic, party of solidarity and socialism, committed to fighting for an independent socialist Scotland.

Conference reaffirms our founding aims of building a broad, inclusive, united socialist party, based on class struggle politics, which simultaneously stands up against inequality and discrimination on grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or age.

We are proud to have developed policies that engage with the everyday needs, desires and struggles of working class people and others moving into action against the poverty, inequalities, injustices, racism, sectarianism, sexism, environmental destruction and war that are the offspring of capitalism – and which link these fighting demands with our broader goals of an independent socialist Scotland and international socialism.

We recognise that the project of socialist unity launched in 1998, with phenomenal growth since, has raised the hopes of hundreds of thousands in Scotland and of the left internationally. The wrecking tactics of a minority has damaged that project and those hopes, but we are confident that our unblemished principles, our unrivalled track record, our fighting socialist policies, and our dedicated, genuine socialist membership will rebuild the strength of the SSP around those founding principles.

We resolve to build the SSP as a pluralist party that respects different shades of socialist opinion within its ranks, with open democratic debate but which then aims for public unity in action around democratically agreed policies and campaigns.

This conference notes with regret the formation of an alternative socialist organisation in Scotland, with a political platform indistinguishable from that of the SSP.

Conference further notes that this organisation appears to be founded not on the basis of political difference with the SSP, but rather as the culmination of recent attacks on the SSP.

Conference further notes that some of the comrades have left the SSP for this new formation for different reasons, such as personal loyalty to individuals or platforms.

Conference believes that the interests of the working class in Scotland and internationally are best served by a united movement,

Conference therefore affirms that, despite the misguided actions of some, any individual who has left the SSP will, at any time in the future, be welcomed back as full members of the party without recriminations.

Principled unity is our strength. We have a duty to the working class and the cause of socialism to maintain socialist unity and to conduct ourselves in a combative, determined, confident, but friendly manner aimed at convincing thousands that the SSP’s principles and policies coincide with their interests. The future is ours, provided we collectively seize it.

(passed overwhelmingly)

Motion 2 put forward by Midlothian branch

Use of the courts and the media

This SSP National Conference agrees to adopt the following policies:-

• a) SSP members should avoid resort to the state’s courts when seeking redress for politically motivated attacks on their behaviour
• b) When SSP members are subjected to politically motivated attacks by the state or media, they should be able to call upon the support of the SSPNational Executive to conduct a party campaign including the following tactics as deemed appropriate:-
  • i) articles in the party’s press
  • ii) direct appeals to the trade union members in the state bodies and/or media responsible
  • iii) calls for boycott actions
• c) SSP members should not resort to the non-party media when making allegations against other SSP members. Such allegations should be brought initially before the appropriate party body at the level concerned with the right to appeal to a higher level, the ultimate appeal being the SSP Conference.
• d) The elected press officer should be responsible for day to day responses to the outside media, when members are under attack. The press officer is directly responsible, initially to the National Executive, then to the National Council, and finally to the National Conference.

(passed overwhelmingly)

Motion 45 put forward by Dundee branches

Adopting standard practice for SSP minutes

The SSP Conference agrees to adopt the following practice for minute taking at National Conference, National Council and National Executive meetings, and all sub-committees where minutes are usually taken.

• a) These minutes should confine themselves to:-
  • * names/initials of apologies, members present and who leaves the meeting
  • * key political arguments made
  • * decisions taken
  • * matters of a personal nature should be omitted, unless with the agreement of the person/s concerned
• b) Individuals or groups can submit position papers in their own name providing greater information if they feel it is required
• c) When a minute has been agreed by the next appropriate meeting of that body, it becomes part of the SSP’s historical record and should not be further altered (although bodies they are accountable to may disagree and make their own views clear in their own minutes)

(defeated in favour of an Edinburgh Central motion upholding existing practice)

Motion 15 put forward by the RCN platform

Citizens not Subjects

This Conference agrees to supplement the SSP’s economic and social manifesto and campaign for the 2007 Holyrood election, People not Profit, with a political and democratic manifesto and campaign, Citizens not Subjects.

Conference further agrees to include the following demands (which can be reworded or fine-tuned for agitational purposes) under this rubric, along with other appropriate demands agreed by subsequent National Council meetings:-

• 1. Defend our civil rights – Oppose state ID cards
• 2. Defend communities under attack – Support asylum seekers and migrant workers in the face of racist laws and attacks
• 3. Support workers’ freedom to organise – Oppose the Anti-Trade Union laws
• 4. Support people’s freedom to demonstrate – Oppose the Criminal Justice Act
• 5. Extend the franchise – Votes for over 16’s
• 6. Support the Calton Hill Declaration – Oppose the state’s Crown Powers
• 7. Support popular resistance to US and British imperial wars – Close down NATO’s military bases in Scotland
• 8. For a democratic and secular Scottish republic

(passed by a large majority)

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