14.07.2004

Marxism 2004: Change on SSP

SWP comrades were surprisingly critical of the nationalism of the Scottish Socialist Party - are they toying with the idea of extending Respect further north?, asks Ted Fraser

CPGB comrades who attended the 30-40 strong session on ‘The break-up of Britain and the realignment of the left’ - a debate between the SWP’s Huw Williams and the Scottish Socialist Party’s Allan Green - were struck by the apparent change in attitude.

The tone of comrade Williams’s remarks - as well as those of SWP contributors from the floor - showed a real shift. They actually attacked the SSP’s nationalism. A pleasing development, even if the comrades tended to simply counterpose an abstract ‘internationalism’ to Green’s crass plans for ‘socialism’ in one little country. While they were right to condemn the SSP’s advocacy of independence, they had little concrete to say about ways to address the real sense of national grievance in Scotland and (to a lesser extent) Wales.

Comrade Green did make some telling criticisms of the SWP’s flippant approach to left unity - for example, in the Socialist Alliance. The SA was “not given the opportunity to succeed”, being effectively shelved by the SWP at the time of the mass anti-war demonstrations last year. Such formations simply could not establish a base if they appeared only “at the time of elections”, he correctly noted. That said, he spent most of the session very much on the back foot, eventually resorting to the profoundly lame plea in his summing up that socialists from different countries should refrain from criticising each other: “We wouldn’t dream of telling you how to organise yourselves,” he maintained.

Of course, for comrade Williams this was a gift. Quite apart from the point of working class principle about our duty to criticise comrades who are making mistakes, there was the little matter of Wales, wasn’t there? Williams gently reminded Allan Green that the SSP had actually written to Respect in Wales telling it: “Just as the SSP would urge socialists not to stand against Respect in the elections in England, we urge Respect not to stand against Forward Wales” (Weekly Worker April 29).

Comrade Williams described himself as “semi-shocked” by Allan’s “blurring … of nationalism and socialism”. If this is true, then the comrade cannot have been paying too much attention to developments north of the border for quite a few years. At the very programmatic core of the SSP since its formation is precisely a commitment to a ‘national socialism’ which owes everything to nationalism and nothing to socialism. A fact the SWP and its co-thinkers have either ignored or minimised since they joined as a faction in May 2001. So why the change?

Perhaps the answer was hinted at in comrade Chris Bambery’s contribution, delivered with the characteristic machine-gun splutter that sometimes makes him very hard to follow. He bluntly announced that “left realignment” explicitly “did not mean shuffling the deck of the existing left”. It was a process that excluded the “old left who could not relate to the new movement” created by the fight against the Iraq war.

Not exactly conciliatory words and perhaps a hint that the SWP and George Galloway - who is well known as a vocal opponent of Scottish nationalism - are toying with the idea of extending the Respect remit further north at some stage. Be that as it may, it is clear that the SSP is no longer a happy home for the SWP’s co-thinkers in Scotland.