07.06.2006

Defend SSP's Alan McCombes

Earlier this week the Scottish Socialist Party's press and policy coordinator Alan McCombes was found guilty of contempt and fined £500. But he will have to pay costs of around £45,000 in total

Last month comrade Alan McCombes spent a long weekend in Saughton jail for refusing to hand over minutes of the November 9 2004 SSP executive meeting which forced Tommy Sheridan to resign as convenor. Comrade Sheridan insisted on his right to bring an action for defamation against News International, publishers of the News of the World, after alleged details of his private life were published. News International, in defending the action, demanded to see the minutes, believing they would contain information that would aid its case.

Comrade McCombes and the EC majority refused to comply with the decision of the Edinburgh court of sessions that the minutes must be handed over on the grounds of their confidentiality. This position was overturned by the highly charged and bad-tempered May 28 national council meeting, when comrade Sheridan himself called for the document to be given to the court. While the EC was prepared to let comrade McCombes languish in jail in order to shame Sheridan into dropping his action, the latter was equally determined to deny McCombes his martyrdom.

The Sheridanites won the vote - thanks in part to the Committee for a Workers' International and the Socialist Worker platform - and the next day the minutes were released and so was Alan McCombes. But the judge had sent messengers-at-arms to search SSP offices and comrades' homes in a vain attempt to find the required document. Costs for this first legal round come to £45,000.

While both sides of the SSP dispute have behaved foolishly, not to say recklessly, that does not give News International and the state carte blanche to financially wreck the party - while comrade McCombes is personally liable, there is no doubt that the SSP will assume responsibility for raising the money. There is a deliberate agenda on the part of sections of the media and no doubt the secret state to see off the SSP.

We communists have not been reticent in slating both wings of the SSP for their opportunistic and abject surrender to nationalism. Both have been equally guilty of dividing the working class movement in Britain and thus weakening our ability to resist the very forces that are now intent on killing the SSP.

But when a section of that movement, for all its faults, comes under attack, we know which side we are on. We will do all in our power to defend Alan McCombes and the SSP, while continuing to relentlessly criticise their failings.

Tommy Sheridan was targeted in November 2004 by the News of the World. The smutty allegations and innuendoes had all the signs of being inspired by the secret state. The SSP was becoming a nuisance for New Labour, as it contemplated the 2005 general election and a much thinner majority.

However, the executive committee of the SSP urged Sheridan not to fight the thing out in the courts. It voted unanimously to tell him to fight using other, political, methods. Events so far have tended to indicate this would have been the best course.