10.06.2009
End of SSP dream
Sarah McDonald reports on a terminally sick moralistic campaign
Just as in the rest of Britain, the European elections in Scotland were disheartening for many on the left. Class-conscious workers were faced with a choice of voting for the Socialist Labour Party, Scottish Socialist Party, ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ or Labour.
The SLP was present on the ballot paper, but, as has been the case for the last decade, not on the streets. However, it did pull the biggest result left of Labour with two percent of the vote. The SLP managed to beat the combined vote of No2EU and the SSP - doubtless to the delight of King Arthur. Still, best not to get too excited by this ‘mass’ vote, comrade Scargill - two percent is hardly impressive. Even the BNP polled half a percent higher, though it was regularly out campaigning (and on most occasions quickly sent packing).
The SSP project is, of course, dead and it is unlikely any phoenix will rise from its nationalist ashes. Its 0.9% - down more than four percent from 2004 - shows this. However, No2EU, which included the Tommy Sheridan-led split from the SSP, Solidarity, did marginally worse.
Deciding on the chair’s casting vote against opening talks with No2EU, the SSP conference in March opted instead to run its own (sickeningly moralistic) campaign based on the slogan, ‘Make greed history’. Surely even the leadership of this deeply opportunist organisation understand that ‘greedy’ bankers and politicians is not the point? One would think they might have grasped the fact that it is the system of capital itself that caused the economic crisis. Not the personal traits of individuals, no matter how much money they have in their portfolios. It is capitalism that forces its personifications to take higher and higher risks in the search for profits. A system that also causes poverty in the midst of overproduction, and, for that matter, lies behind MPs’ expenses scams and ministers with their fingers in the till. Would ‘Make capitalism history’ not have been a better slogan?
Standing on a platform calling for “a 10% ‘greed tax’ on the super-rich” provides no political, strategic solution for the working class. The SSP was correct to criticise No2EU on the grounds of its British nationalism. However, its own advocacy of Scottish nationalism, combined with a lack of any serious political platform and any credibility following the Sheridan farce, ensures that voting SSP is no longer even considered by most class-conscious workers.
What of No2EU? Its political platform - that of the Morning Star - was identical in Scotland to elsewhere. So, while it must have been problematic for Peter Taaffe to swallow its British nationalism, for Tommy Sheridan and the Scottish separatists of Solidarity it was doubly so. The Socialist Workers Party was placed in an uncomfortable position too. Excluded from No2EU by Bob Crow diktat, along with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the CPGB, in Scotland the SWP belongs to Solidarity (at least in theory). Despite that, its position in Scotland was a fudge: ‘Vote left and keep the BNP out’. I assume, however, SWP comrades here voted No2EU rather than SLP or SSP.
Comrade Sheridan, who occupied second place on the No2EU list in Scotland, was considerably to the left of the CPB’s international secretary, John Foster, who was number one. They both made much of the fact that the EU has “capitalism enshrined in its constitution”. But when I asked them at the June 1 Glasgow meeting of No2EU if they viewed the UK capitalist state as being more progressive, it was clear that John Foster considered that this was very much the case. By contrast comrade Sheridan was embarrassed by the question. He answered: “Only marginally so”.
On the question of republican democracy comrade Sheridan was stronger. He readily agreed with the abolition of the monarchy, the unwritten constitution, the unelected second chamber, annual parliaments, the lowering of the voting age to 16 and elected representatives receiving only the average wage of a skilled worker. Comrade Foster was not so enthusiastic and preferred to waffle on about the wonders of socialism in one country. Just when it seemed that the bottom of the political barrel had been scraped, both he and comrade Sheridan held up Cuba and Venezuela as inspirational examples of socialism in practice.
What then, of Labour? Labour took a kicking in Scotland, but instead of losing to the Tories, it finished second behind the Scottish National Party, which, of course, is the largest party in Holyrood and runs the Scottish government. This rise of petty nationalism, in contrast to what many on the Scottish left argue, is not a positive development.
I recall a little under a year ago, during the Glasgow East by-election campaign, comrade Sheridan arguing in an interview on Newsnight Scotland that he would rather see a victory for the SNP than Labour (as did the SSP’s Richie Venton on the same programme). The SSP’s chief ‘theoretician’, Alan McCombes, takes exactly the same view. In a recent article on the Euro elections he wrote: “…the call for Scotland out of Britain is a leftwing, progressive idea. The SSP has many criticisms of the governing party of Scotland, the SNP. But in contrast to the big Westminster parties, it rejects nuclear weapons, resists racism and opposes privatisation. The SNP is not and never will be a socialist party; but unlike New Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems it is a left-of-centre social democratic party. The balance of class forces in Scotland is overwhelmingly tilted towards the working class - a process which will be accentuated in the years to come as a consequence of the collapse of the country’s two major capitalist institutions, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland” (www.scottishsocialistparty.org/new_stories/issues/little-britain-politics-and-the-left.html).
Of course, Alan McCombes is quite wrong in his assertion that advocating the break-up of a historically constituted working class along national lines is a progressive idea. We should always argue for the greatest possible voluntary unity of people. And the notion that class forces in Scotland are “overwhelmingly tilted towards the working class” is blatantly false - just look at the election results. The fact that Labour lost more ground to the petty nationalists and those to the left of Labour got nowhere actually proves this, despite what a deluded comrade McCombes says. The trajectory in Scotland, as in Britain as a whole, is clearly rightward and more and more nationalistic.
This brings us to the issue of the class nature of the Labour Party and the SNP. The SSP and Solidarity are wildly mistaken in their preference for petty nationalism over Labourism.
Because of its organic and historically established links with the organised working class, the Labour Party remains a bourgeois workers’ party. What of the SNP? It is a middle class-led, petty nationalist party which fully accepts existing capitalism - till recently it wanted to model an independent Scotland on Ireland, Iceland and Norway. Whether the SNP has individual policies which might be regarded as marginally to the left of the Labour leadership is neither here nor there.
Yes, the Labour leadership stands for the interests of big capital and the capitalist state - and that has certainly been the case since 1914. But it retains its traditional working class base and the majority of trade union affiliates. In that sense the Labour Party is the party of the trade union bureaucracy. However, when working class people vote Labour, they do so, in the main, because of a perception that Labour is the party that represents their interests as workers. Voting Labour, on a very basic level, is an echo of the attempt by workers in Britain to establish political independence from the bourgeois parties - of course, partial and highly compromised. When workers vote for the SNP they reject this shadow class politics for petty nationalism.
Voting Labour in last week’s election was the tactically correct position, in my view - forced upon us following a long series of opportunist failures and missed opportunities.