02.05.1996

Strengths and weaknesses

Mary Ward is a member of the SLP Scottish steering committee. Here she emphasises the need for workers in the Scottish Socialist Alliance to join the SLP

In Scotland the SLP is unfortunately yet to demonstrate the dynamism that has typified the Scottish Socialist Alliance.

Despite Arthur Scargill’s recent meetings on the west coast, there is a real lack of a Scottish leadership and sadly a suspicion of those who are prepared to take on organisational tasks - if they support the ideas expressed in the Weekly Worker, that is.

The Scottish Socialist Alliance appears at this time to be an altogether more serious organisation. It is acting far more like an embryonic party than the SLP in Scotland. The difference lies in openness and debate. The Alliance is unafraid to get its hands dirty in community politics, and will not hide behind the need for ‘respectability’ that bourgeois parties crave. The strength of the Alliance is that it represents a real movement of the class in Scotland. Its main weakness is that it does not as yet take a pro-Party position.

The SSA should have stayed with the SLP, for all its faults, and fought to make it the Party that the working class of Britain needs.

It may be cosier to stick within a Scottish context, but ultimately as socialists, the Alliance will surely want more than just fraternal relationships with the working class in the rest of Britain. We will want to challenge the British state.

The Alliance in Scotland is, I believe, still way ahead of any other organisation in Britain in terms of left unity in action. It therefore can lead the SLP forward, rather than take an isolationist approach. The SLP itself is mistakenly trying to ignore the SSA. The Scottish steering committee refuses to move forward organisationally until the May 4 conference ‘settles’ various constitutional questions.

It is reluctant to even go along to Alliance meetings, never mind participate in them, and seems to have a quite pathological fear of Militant Labour domination (too many years of Labour Party bans and proscriptions).

The task for revolutionaries in Scotland must be to work within the SSA to bring its members to recognise the need for a party; and within the SLP to prevent it from becoming the property of the leadership and turn it into a Party of class fighters.