04.11.2010

How did it come to this?

Nick Rogers examines the tragic results of the SSP split

The trial of Tommy and Gail Sheridan (see report, 'SSP chickens come home to roost') throws into stark relief the present-day fragmentation of the Scottish left.

The high water mark of the Scottish Socialist Party was just seven years ago: six MSPs elected in the Scottish parliamentary elections of May 2003. The SSP had stormed a highly visible arena from which to agitate for their politics. From Colin Fox hurdling the barrier at his Edinburgh count to Rosie Kane’s republican message displayed on the palm of her hand at the swearing-in ceremony, the new representatives who joined Tommy Sheridan’s previously solo sojourn at Holyrood were soon making a mark on the consciousness of millions of Scots.

Today the same individuals now face each other as antagonists across a courtroom, fighting to assert differing versions of the slow-burning, 18-month split of the SSP between the autumn of 2004 and the summer of 2006. Still household names in Scotland, but now more akin to reality TV celebrities than militants of socialist principle. A metaphor which Tommy Sheridan made into reality when he entered the Celebrity big brother house in January 2009.

If nothing else, the departure from the SSP of the Committee for a Workers’ International, the Socialist Workers Party, Tommy Sheridan and a majority of the party’s regional organisers in August 2006 has proven that a united socialist movement - even on the basis of an opportunistic petty nationalism - is worth more than the sum of its separate parts.

Over the last four years, in election after election, the results for the SSP and Solidarity have generally been equally derisory - although the handful of results edging above 1% (or 2% in the case of Tommy Sheridan’s forays back into electoral politics) have been hailed as the glimmers of the new dawn. The SSP does have a single councillor, Jim Bollan, in Scottish National Party-controlled West Dunbartonshire (he has suffered two periods of suspension from the council, having been accused of swearing).

The single Solidarity councillor, Ruth Black - elected in Glasgow in the council elections of May 2007, the first conducted under PR - defected to the Labour Party a few months later. She, as it happens, is currently suspended by the Labour Party - not, as in the case of Jim Bollan, for the pursuit of class-struggle politics using colourful language, but for “financial irregularities”.

The number of activists of the two organisations has also shrunk compared with 2006. True, the SSP’s claimed membership of 3,000 back then did not really reflect the number of individuals prepared to stump up a regular membership fee, let alone deliver leaflets or stand behind stalls. Nevertheless, the party was able to mobilise sufficient forces to maintain a public presence across the central belt and to a surprising extent even as far afield as the Highlands and Islands.

In 2010 the combined membership of the SSP and Solidarity is probably not much more than 500. Unsurprisingly, neither is able to project itself as effectively as before. A partial exception needs to be made for the youth wing of the SSP, which was involved in a lively picket of the Vodafone office in Glasgow last Saturday protesting against the tax-dodging antics of the transnational.

The tragedy of the SSP split is magnified in the face of the coalition government’s assault on public services and public sector workers. Edinburgh’s 20,000-strong demonstration against the cuts on October 23 was the largest by far across Britain. However, the size of the turnout owed very little to the organised left. It was the Scottish TUC that called the demonstration and the STUC and public service unions that mobilised support.

The SWP promotes the Right to Work campaign in Scotland in a rather lacklustre fashion, including a meeting addressed by Chris Bambery after the October 23 demonstration. It at least lists contacts for Glasgow and Edinburgh on its website. The National Shop Stewards Network - supported mainly by the Socialist Party in England and Wales and its Committee for a Workers’ International - has an even more limited profile north of border, with only a couple of Scottish representatives on its large steering committee.

More effectively, the October 23 demonstration was supported by the parties that in effect constitute the Scottish political establishment - the Scottish Labour Party and Scottish National Party. The backing of these parties also speaks to the lack of militancy of the mainstream anti-cuts campaign. Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray was there in person - in marked contrast to Ed Miliband’s failure to take part in the much more sparsely attended London equivalent.

The SNP, running a minority administration in the Scottish parliament, is arguing that independence would shield Scotland from the worst effects of the cuts. But SNP leader Alex Salmond has been unable to get a bill for an independence referendum through the parliament. In any case, support for full independence in polls has slumped to only 25%.

Those same polls lead most political commentators to conclude that Labour is set to return to government in Scotland come next May’s elections. A Labour administration will then confront the reality of a cuts budget. If the experience of the earlier Labour Scottish administration and Labour councils serve as a guide, the Scottish working class will hardly be able to look for leadership from that quarter - a Labour Party, after all, that is arguing for gentler cuts, rather than opposing them outright.

Nor does the Labour left in Scotland show much evidence of revival. Some left-leaning representatives and activists have backed the rather uninspiring People’s Charter - promoted most enthusiastically by the Communist Party of Britain’s Scottish committee.

The Campaign for Socialism - the organisational centre for Scotland’s Labour left over the last dozen or so years - appears to lack even the barest pulse of life. Its website has not been updated for over a year. Apparently, the organisation’s most recent AGM took place in February 2009.

What prospect then for the non-Labour Party left? Cooperation in next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections is not on the cards. The SSP has already selected its candidates for the regional lists.

In the 2009 European elections and this year’s general election Solidarity joined respectively the No2EU formation and the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition. As you would expect, given the driving force behind these initiatives in England, the CWI’s members in Scotland have been far more enthusiastic about them than the SWP. To be fair, the SWP in Scotland - as in England - did lift more of a finger when it came to Tusc.

In some ways Solidarity is not much more than a shell organisation. Only a few score of its members are not associated with either the CWI or SWP - factions that in England are rarely on speaking terms. The fact that Solidarity remains in existence at all probably owes most to Tommy Sheridan’s presence at the helm and the depleted stock of political gold dust he has been able to sprinkle over those gathered around him.

CWI members have undergone a rebranding, relaunching in June as the Socialist Party Scotland. They are therefore making less of a pretence of being a mere platform within a wider organisation and are establishing the basis to go it alone if circumstances dictate that development.

For next May’s elections it is very much looking as if a Tusc-like formation standing in competition with SSP candidates is in the offing. The RMT organised a meeting in Glasgow on October 2 on the crisis of working class representation, with the specific goal of fighting Scotland’s May elections. The SSP has attended conferences of this type in London, but it was not present on October 2.

Without a united slate the left cannot hope to make any impact at all in May - either in terms of votes or in terms of using the elections as a platform to mobilise working class resistance to the coalition’s assault. There are no political differences worth speaking of between the SSP and Solidarity. Both campaign under a virtually identical list of a half dozen or so immediate demands. Both raise the slogan of an independent Scotland - thereby insisting on dividing the working class north and south of the border, as well as within Scotland.

In December 2008 Tommy Sheridan called for an electoral truce between Solidarity, the SSP and Arthur Scargill’s rump Socialist Labour Party. For its part, the SSP in June of last year issued a statement, which read: “The SSP was founded on the principle of left unity in Scotland. We continue to have that as our goal. In 2006 a split from the SSP fractured that unity. Once all the legal obstacles have been cleared from our path we intend to initiate a full, open and democratic discussion around left unity in Scotland and the role the SSP can play in achieving it.”

In reality, however, there is no way the SSP and Solidarity can reunite in the foreseeable future. The split was over personalities and certainly not over policy differences, and the mutual recriminations are sure to continue, whatever the result of the Sheridan case. Yet bringing together the factions of the left on a principled basis - both in Scotland and in Britain as a whole - is a precondition for launching a successful working class fightback against the most severe assault on the interests of our class in a generation. The question is whether necessity can trump the political facts on the ground.