27.03.1997

Choosing the executioner

It is now official - Scottish Militant Labour continues to call for a vote for Labour. This is despite continual personal assurances by individual members of SML that their organisation’s support for the Labour Party was a thing of the past.

The front page article of Scottish Socialist Voice (March 21) makes it absolutely clear:

“The Scottish Socialist Alliance has rightly called for Scotland to be turned into a Tory-free zone. In Tory marginals like Stirling and Ayr, people should vote Labour to oust the Tories.” But wait, two paragraphs later the article compares the choice between the Tories and New Labour to “the choice offered to the second wife of Henry the Eighth, Ann Boleyn. She could choose to be burned at the stake or beheaded”. So which form of political death for the working class is SML calling for - a slow burning or a swift beheading?

There is a further contradiction in the arguments on this matter. The SSA’s election bulletin for Glasgow carries a personal message from leading SML member Tommy Sheridan, in which he states: “In this coming general election let’s get rid of the Tories. But let’s also reject the new Toryism of Labour - and the watered down tartan Toryism of the SNP” [my emphases - NC]. The contradiction is obvious, as is the solution - if SML wants to make Scotland a Tory-free zone, but the SNP and Labour also represent “Toryism”, it should not call for a vote for any of them - and that goes for the Liberal Democrats as well.

The SSA will make an impact on the political landscape by standing 16 candidates in Scotland. This is a good start, but to advocate a vote for the Labour Party of Blair and Rupert Murdoch shows that SML has still to make a complete break from the politics of Labourism.

Nick Clarke