04.11.2010

SSP chickens come home to roost

Where did it all go wrong? asks Sarah McDonald

The much postponed perjury trial of former Scottish Socialist Party convenor Tommy Sheridan and his wife, Gail, which began on October 4, continues to make the headlines in Scotland. As readers will be all too painfully aware, the Sheridans are accused of lying in court during the former MSP’s successful 2006 defamation case against News International’s News of the World over allegations in that paper over his sex life.

It is likely to be the longest perjury trial in Scottish legal history, predicted to last 10 weeks. Whatever the outcome, it has already proved to be a thoroughly unpleasant experience to follow, as erstwhile friends and comrades attempt to denigrate and belittle each other, trying to persuade a jury of 13 women and two men that it is the supporters of the other camp, not themselves, who are the unprincipled liars.

Just as in the defamation case, many of Sheridan’s former comrades in the SSP have been called to give evidence against him. While some may have relished the opportunity for pettiness and grand-standing, it is worth bearing in mind that failure to respond to a citation to appear as a witness could land those involved with a two-year prison sentence, over an issue surrounding a comrade’s personal life.

After the first week of the trial Sheridan dropped his lawyer, Maggie Scott QC (who defended Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, convicted of the Lockerbie bombing) and decided to represent himself - once again, just as in the defamation case. Then he sacked his entire legal team, while in the lead-up to the current perjury trial he dismissed the high-profile defence lawyer, Donald Findlay QC. In 2006 the ‘one man against the system’ tactic brought him success, but whether it will work in Tommy’s favour this time remains to be seen.

There has been no shortage of vitriol, as several leading SSP comrades have taken the stand. Much of the trial has been concerned with details of an emergency SSP executive committee meeting in 2004 after the NotW published claims about an unnamed MSP’s private life. It is alleged by EC members that Sheridan admitted to this meeting that he attended Cupid’s swingers’ club in Manchester. According to the BBC coverage of the trial, Allan Green, the SSP’s national secretary, told the jury that Sheridan had described his own behaviour as “reckless” and had apologised to the EC. Green went on to say that Sheridan had accepted that the claims were true, but “wanted to prove them false”. In relation to the disputed minutes of that meeting that the EC had tried to keep confidential (resulting in Alan McCombes going to jail for defying a court order to hand them over), Sheridan asked the witness: “I put it to you the so-called minute is as genuine as a 10-bob note, isn’t it?” - to which Green responded: “No, Tommy, you know it is true”.^[1]

Allan Green is not alone in stating that Sheridan admitted at the November 9 2004 EC meeting to the News of the World’s claims. Of the 15 SSP comrades so far called to the witness box who attended the “9/11” EC meeting, only Jock Penman said that the then convenor denied the allegations. In Sheridan’s cross-examination of the SSP’s leading theoretician, Alan McCombes, he claimed that McCombes had gone to jail over a false minute to give it added credibility. According to the BBC News online, McCombes responded that he had refused to hand over the minutes to the court because he wanted to protect the SSP “from being dragged into the toxic legal quagmire that you had created with your reckless and suicidal mistake of going to the court of session” against the NotW.^[2]

The following coverage from The Scotsman gives SSP co-convenor Francis Curran’s account of events:

“Ms Curran yesterday told the court that she heard him make the admissions during the emergency meeting at the party’s Stanley Street headquarters on November 9 2004. The following day, she said she met Sheridan and fellow SSP MSP Colin Fox for tea and biscuits in an Edinburgh hotel and asked him to resign.

“She told the court: ‘The court action was the big problem for us. We couldn’t get the party locked into lying in a court action. We were trying to decouple the party from the court action. He could stay as convenor if he was prepared to either put his hand up or shut up.’

“She added that they told Sheridan ‘he was on his own’ if he decided to sue the newspaper: ‘We said to Tommy, are you going to take the court action? He said, yes.’”^[3]

Sheridan is also charged with suborning a witness (Sheridan’s successor as SSP co-convenor, Colin Fox) to give false testimony. The two are said to have met in an Edinburgh Beanscene café on June 18 2006. Sheridan says the meeting never took place and there is no record of it in his diary. Fox told the court that he remembers it accurately, as it is said to have happened on both Tommy Sheridan’s wedding anniversary and his own birthday.

The fact that so many of Sheridan’s former comrades have taken the stand to give evidence against him (too many to go into all of the details) has understandably resulted in a heated and emotional atmosphere at times, Sheridan has found himself in trouble with the judge for shouting from the lectern, while Carolyn Leckie was asked by Sheridan to stick to answering questions, not asking them, as a witness. When Sheridan began his questioning of Catriona Grant by asking, “You don’t like me, do you?” she agreed … at some length. Alison Kane told the court that if, as Tommy Sheridan claimed, everyone who spoke against him was lying in court, then he was a very unlucky man indeed.

However, he has adamantly defended his and his wife’s innocence throughout. Sheridan has alleged that this is a smear campaign to tarnish the reputation of a prominent socialist. He maintains that his former comrades are part of a conspiracy against him, plotting to undermine him politically, and that they have taken the side of a reactionary rag against that of a principled class fighter; and for doing so he has labelled them “scabs”.

One of the most unpleasant features of the trial (of which, let’s face it, there are many) is the ‘McNeilage tape’, a 40-minute video recording of two men talking (one predominantly, while the other occasionally interjects). One man is seen briefly and the other makes fleeting appearances. The two men are alleged to be Tommy Sheridan and George McNeilage (a former close friend of Sheridan’s and best man at his wedding). This tape was in the possession of the News of the World in 2006.

“T” (allegedly Tommy), makes several incriminating statements on tape, which was rumoured to have been sold to the NotW for a considerable amount of cash. Irrespective of any amount of alleged money, and whether or not the tape shows a confession, McNeilage should have been instantly booted out of the SSP once he had handed over the tape to the NotW, thus crossing class lines. In Sheridan’s cross-examination of Carolyn Leckie, he suggested that she and her partner, Alan McCombes, helped McNeilage write the script for the tape - a suggestion they vigorously denied.

NotW journalist and salacious author Anvar Khan was one of those who told the court she attended the swingers’ club with Sheridan. However, she admitted to the court that the original story published by the paper about an unnamed MSP, with which she cooperated, had contained false dates and details. When cross-examined by Sheridan she agreed that she had fed the News of the World “deliberate lies”.^[4] But Khan insisted she had attended the club with Sheridan.

The court was shown an email exchange between the then NotW Scottish editor, Bob Bird, and Khan suggesting that she had been asked by the paper to entrap Sheridan by getting him to confess in a taped phone call in exchange for “doubling her dosh” while negotiating a new freelance contract with the paper.^[5] David Cameron’s media advisor, Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World at the time the allegations were made in 2004 and also during the 2006 defamation trial, is due to give evidence for the defence.

Failings

There is lots of similar material out there for readers to peruse at their … pleasure would be the wrong word. But I would like to leave the disagreeable minutiae of the court proceedings for now and look at the political failings that brought the left in Scotland to this sorry state of affairs in the first place.

The formation of the Scottish Socialist Party in late 1998 resulted from a natural evolution from its predecessor, the Scottish Socialist Alliance, a group dominated by Scottish Militant Labour, then the Scottish face of Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International. After the Militant Tendency - later to become the Socialist Party in England and Wales - ceased its entryist tactics in (ie, were kicked out of) the Labour Party there was a turn to open work. Just as we have seen repeatedly over the last 15 years or so of the far left, the accepted wisdom was to attempt to build an alternative to Labour by putting itself across as an old Labour/slightly left of Labour-type organisation, whose soft, reformist politics would be warm, cuddly and not at all frightening to the working class. But despite the SSP’s thoroughly reformist and programmatically confused beginnings, the SSP had a different character from the Socialist Alliance (England and Wales), Respect and all of the other failed unity projects.

One of the defining characteristics of the SSP was its Scottish nationalism, initially a policy born of naked opportunism. It was supposedly designed to cash in on a rising desire for independence, which Alan McCombes contended was particularly strong among the working class and youth. This tailist approach later became a canon of the organisation. Support for Scottish independence became integral to the organisation’s campaigns: on every leaflet, poster and press statement was the demand for “an independent socialist Scotland”. Conferences voted to enshrine the policy to make it almost impossible to overturn (not that any motions for all-Britain left unity got much support).

Those softer advocates of Scottish independence used the right of the Scottish people to self-determination as justification for their position (obviously, this is a democratic demand that must be championed by socialists/communists, but supporting the right to self-determination is not the same as advocating separation - hardly a point of nuance, one would have thought). More hard-line nationalists were comfortably at home in the SSP, where they wrapped up their nationalism in republican colours and their, often abhorrent, views were accepted within the wider organisation.

That said, it is important to recognise the step forward that the SSP represented for the left from 1998-2004. It was more than a loose alliance led by one of the larger left organisations with the sole aim of recruiting individuals into its own ranks. The SSP united almost the entire left in Scotland at one point within the same organisation (including, eventually, the Socialist Workers Party). Not only that, but it allowed these groups to continue to operate as open factions, maintaining their own publications, holding their own meetings, etc. Of course, it was hardly a model of democratic perfection - there were increasingly restrictive guidelines on publications and the independent organisation of the left groups within the party. It was not a revolutionary organisation, not a democratic centralist organisation. In fact it was a far cry from the type of organisation needed for the working class to take power, but it was by and large democratic.

The other progressive characteristic of the SSA-SSP was the fact that it was a partyist project. Its comrades, whether members of other left groups or not, worked to build the organisation, attended their branches, did street work and sold the god-awful Scottish Socialist Voice (though rarely read it). In better branches there were political lead-offs at the start of meetings, local and regional educationals and a degree of healthy debate.

So where did it all go wrong? Leftwing humour is full of self-satirising jokes about the far left’s ability to rupture and split - but few would have anticipated the SSP’s demise taking the form it did. The problem goes back to long before 2004. The problem was that the SSP was too much about the politics of personality and that eventually led to a very public and embarrassing end. Militant groomed its boy, Sheridan, during the anti poll-tax moment to be a public face, a motivational speaker and ‘rabble-rouser’. Sheridan became rather good at it, developing into a well known personality, and the SSP took the Sheridan personality cult to new levels.

Posters and leaflets carried his photograph, ballot papers gave the organisation’s name as ‘Scottish Socialist Party - convenor: Tommy Sheridan’. Scottish Socialist Voice even ran a double-page feature covering his wedding. The image that was put across of Sheridan as a clean-living lad, who does not smoke, does not drink - his only vice being to dabble in a bit of artificial tanning. To the media and to a lot of working class people Tommy Sheridan was the SSP. The allegations over his sex life, irrespective of their truth, threw all that into doubt - Alan McCombes told the court that because of Sheridan’s “squeaky clean” image the party itself stood to suffer badly if it did not engage in some “damage limitation”, when allegations about Sheridan’s sex life surfaced. So in many ways the SSP was itself complicit in creating the ego that is Sheridan, and in unwittingly preparing the ground for its own downfall. The chickens came home to roost when the News of the World allegations broke.

Of course, there will always be charismatic and influential figures within our movement - people who can motivate and inspire others. Hopefully there will be many of them. But to pander to personality politics opens up opportunities for just this kind of farce. Comrades’ private life should be exactly that: private. Whether the allegations about Tommy Sheridan are true or false, it should have remained his own business and that of those close to him. Unfortunately, for the SSP Tommy Sheridan’s ‘conventional family life’ was an inextricable part of his political image.

Notes

1. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/5194588.stm
2. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-11674631
3. The Scotsman October 28.
4. The Independent October 28.
5. The Guardian October 29.