30.07.2008
Another nail in the coffin
After Glasgow East, Jim Moody looks at Scotland's marginalised left nationalist twins
Labour’s devastating defeat at the hands of the Scottish National Party was not the only Glasgow East horror story. The July 24 by-election also emphasised the marginalisation of the left in Scotland, confirming the demise of the Scottish Socialist Party project following the wipe-out of the SSP and Solidarity, the Tommy Sheridan-led breakaway, in last year’s Scottish parliament elections.
While Labour’s vote fell by 19% compared with the 2005 general election, the two remnants of the formerly united SSP were not the beneficiaries. The SSP’s Frances Curran saw her party’s vote reduced to 555, taking its share of the poll down to 2.12% from the 3.54% it got at the general election. Tricia McLeish of Solidarity lagged a little behind on 512 votes (1.96%). It was no consolation for either that the combined votes of the ‘I hate Tommy’ and ‘I love Tommy’ SSP fragments produced a slightly higher share of the poll than the party’s previous result in this Westminster constituency.
What was more significant was the virtual identity of the two rumps’ left nationalist politics. Working class voters are not stupid - they could see that the platforms of the two wings differed in no significant political respect. The fact that they attempt to justify their separate existence by standing against each other virtually guarantees that both will sink further into disrepute.
Both openly flaunt their left nationalist credentials. The SSP promotes a “12-point plan for a Scottish socialist republic”, under which “Scotland’s wealth” would be “shared out more equally” (www.scottishsocialistparty.org). Alan McCombes’s article, ‘Imagine a socialist Scotland’, also featured on the website, promises that “a Scottish socialist government could at least begin to move in the direction of socialism by taking control over key sectors of the economy, by introducing workplace and community democracy, and by implementing radical and popular reforms which would set an example for other countries to follow.”
In pre-New Labour times, moving “in the direction of socialism” was something that even rightwing Labourites found they could promise without too much difficulty. Reformism McCombes-style differs in that a top-down socialism in one country is even more absurd for Scotland than it was for Britain.
According to comrade McCombes, “Such far-reaching change could not be carried through without full political and economic independence” - as if it were possible for even a major power by itself, let alone tiny Scotland, to achieve “full political and economic independence” from global capital. Nevertheless, on this basis he berates both the Holyrood parliamentary structure and the SNP for not being independence-minded enough.
The SSP leaders utterly reject the basic Marxist principle that the working class must unite to defeat its ‘own’ ruling class - in this case the UK constitutional monarchy state. Instead, we are presented with a separatist strategy that would split the British working class in the name of a hopeless scheme that would merely weaken the UK state - even if a “Scottish socialist republic” alongside a capitalist England and Wales, France and Germany were possible. In reality the SSP line serves to further stoke up national antagonisms and hold back an effective, united challenge to the UK state.
Solidarity (“Scotland’s Socialist Movement”) is just as nationalistically deluded as its former SSP comrades - the slogan, “For an independent, socialist, nuclear-free Scotland”, dominates the home page of its website (www.solidarityscotland.org). And, of course, both the SSP and Solidarity imagine that the further advance of the SNP would be a step towards making that slogan a reality. Tommy Sheridan, Solidarity’s co-convenor, while disappointed at the poor vote for his own organisation, nevertheless sees the result in a positive light: “This is a historic victory in Glasgow East for the SNP and I congratulate John Mason. Let us be clear: it is a victory for a party to the left of Labour.”
Comrade Sheridan states: “Of course, in this close election the socialist vote was squeezed and many Solidarity voters no doubt voted SNP to help defeat Labour.” Leaving aside the fact that it is now almost obligatory for the left to claim that its vote was “squeezed” whenever it stands, I wonder why it does not occur to Tommy that the SSP split and the presence of two rival left nationalist candidates might also have had a detrimental effect on the “socialist vote”. And, yes, both the SSP and Solidarity have helped deliver extra votes to Alex Salmond’s party by constantly promoting the ‘progressive’, “left of Labour” credentials of the pro-privatisation, anti-working class SNP.
However, both SSP fragments downplay or ignore the SNP’s neoliberalism in their embrace of nationalism and independence. Not that this was a pro-independence vote - the question hardly featured at all in the Glasgow East campaign. Nevertheless, this victory represents yet another nail in the coffin of these left nationalist groups - if independence is the main strategic question, why not vote for the party best able to deliver it?
The only consolation is that their national socialism has been so badly tarnished by both sides’ handling of the Sheridan affair and their subsequent divisive sectarianism that there is now no chance whatsoever that either can revive. Hopefully the whole experience will serve as a warning to our class that the opportunistic adaptation to an alien ideology can only end in disaster.
Although still not yet in the majority in the Scottish parliament, the SNP is understandably cock-a-hoop about gaining another UK MP. This “democratic left-of-centre political party committed to Scottish independence” asserts: “With independence Scotland will be free to flourish and grow. We can give our nation a competitive edge” (2007 Holyrood election manifesto). The SNP wants to promoteScottish, as opposed to UK, capital. This they say will benefit everyone in Scotland.
The SNP’s promises remind me of Robert Burns's words in ‘To a mouse’:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy!
As extreme democrats, communists fully support the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including secession. This applies as fully to Scotland (and Wales) as it does to nations elsewhere. But that does not indicate our support for secession itself in most circumstances. Although we support the right of Scots to decide to take that path, if a majority so decide, the duty of revolutionaries is nonetheless to maintain the strongest possible unity in the working class in order to fight our class enemy to the fullest of our collective abilities. This means that revolutionaries must argue in the strongest manner against the exercise of the right of secession. And that includes revolutionaries in Scotland.
Only those infected by the worst kind of opportunism would imagine that calling for and supporting Scottish independence provides a short cut to working class rule. Honestly believing in such nonsense is bad enough, but dishonestly introducing it into the labour and revolutionary movement on the grounds of its ‘popularity’ among workers and youth, as McCombes did, is nothing short of a betrayal of our working class project for the liberation of humanity.
The sooner the working class in Scotland finally rids itself of the SSP and Solidarity national socialists, the better. Revolutionaries in Scotland need to take their place alongside those in Wales and England fighting to build an all-Britain party of Marxism that alone can take on and defeat the UK state.
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