11.11.1999

Hutchinson addresses SSP

Socialism 2000’ - organised in Glasgow’s Caledonian University by the Scottish Socialist Party over the weekend of November 6-7 - was well attended with 200 to 250 people coming along. As a whole it illustrated some of the strengths but also some of the weaknesses of the SSP. As did the most important debates: socialism and nationalism, drugs, Ireland and the question of whether you have to be red to be green.

The ‘Socialism and nationalism’ debate involved Alan McCombes, editor of Scottish Socialist Voice, Labour MP John McAllion and the Scottish National Party’s Kenny McAskill. McAllion said there was still a left in the Labour Party, and seemed to give the impression that he might consider the SSP if his position in Labour became impossible. I felt he was merely playing to the gallery. For his part, McAskill symbolised the rightward shift in the SNP in what he said. “Old-time religion” is all well and good, but most people favoured a “property-owning democracy”, according to him. Alan McCombes said nothing particularly startling, but did attack what McAskill said more than the statements by McAllion.

By far the most contentious debate was Ireland. This was mainly because Billy Hutchinson of the Progressive Unionist Party was on the platform and rank and file pressure - including agitation by Phil Stott - forced the leadership to include an anti-peace process speaker (John McAnulty of Socialist Democracy in Ireland was chosen). Hutchinson gave a pretty hard-line display of loyalism. He stressed his ‘British’ identity and quoted the slogan, ‘Ready for peace, prepared for war’, which is apparently the kind of thing the Ulster Volunteer Force paints on gable-ends in the North. He said he was a “socialist”, though he did not claim the same for the PUP. He was a good speaker and I fear he went down well with much of the audience.

The Sinn Féin speaker, Daithi Doolan, was from the South, and not a very senior figure. For much of his speech one would have thought SF was a Dublin-area anti-drugs pressure group. Towards the end he did call for a British military withdrawal from Ireland.

Linda Walker (Women’s Coalition) was very pro-peace process and specifically said the Women’s Coalition was not socialist, while Peter Hadden (Socialist Party in Ireland) said there was a basis for a “new politics”, which had long been the SPI’s cherished hope.

John McAnulty made some valid points in the workshop afterwards. He said that Hutchinson was the commander-in-chief of the UVF and that if it became normal for the SSP to invite people like him onto its platforms, there was a danger of the SSP going over to reaction. If the Quinn brothers (catholic children killed by loyalist arsonists) had been Asians murdered by racists, he wondered, would the SSP have given a BNP leader a platform?

Mingling with grassroots SSP members, I detected little sense of disapproval for the fact that Hutchinson had been allowed to speak, though a couple of visitors from the French section of the Committee for a Workers International had misgivings about it, which I found to be a healthy response. I think this one will run and run.

The range of opinion to be found in the SSP is positive. The trouble of course is that this mess of pottage contains some nourishment, but is also marred with some filthy weeds. It is up to the left in the SSP to organise better and counteract the influence of the right, or Hutchinson’s variety of ‘socialism’ will come to be seen as normal - and perhaps on more than the Irish question.

James Robertson