First SSP statement after the election

Thanks to Korakious for publishing the first statement from the SSP since the election.

The day Scotland’s rainbow parliament turned grey

Alan McCombes writes:

By any standards this was a massacre for the left.

The red-green presence in Holyrood, represented by the Scottish Socialist Party, the Greens and Solidarity was slashed from 15 to two.

Of the six-strong group of independents, only Margo MacDonald was left standing.

May 3rd 2007 was the day that Scotland’s rainbow parliament was turned a drab prison grey.

The wipe out of the socialist left was made all the more bitter by the final electoral arithmetic of the new parliament.

Last Thursday marked the end of Labour’s monolithic stranglehold over Scottish politics at national and local level. The emergence of the SNP as the biggest party in Scotland by the narrowest possible margin will not lead to instant independence, the removal of nuclear weapons from the Clyde, or even the demise of the Council Tax.

But it is likely to open up a new, turbulent phase in Scottish politics, a time of strife, which could accelerate the ultimate break-up of the United Kingdom and pave the way for the resurgence of socialism.

After the horrendous internal strife within the left over the past year, and with the socialist movement bitterly divided, the SSP went into this election in a brutally realistic frame of mind. This was a damage limitation exercise. At best, the party hoped to maintain a fragile toehold in Holyrood in preparation for better days to come.

Yet no-one expected the sheer scale of the collapse of the socialist vote, down by 100,000 votes from 2003. The final tally of votes appeared completely out of synch with the attitude of voters on the streets and at polling stations, which was open and receptive to the politics of the SSP.

The Greens too were stunned by the scale of their losses. On the morning after the election, shell-shocked Green MSPs admitted that they had been expecting to win nine seats.

Although Solidarity polled more votes than the SSP, the failure of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow was the biggest shock result of the night, leaving Solidarity activists visibly traumatised.

At the start of the campaign, the bookmakers William Hill had offered odds of 100-1 on Sheridan being re-elected - the kind of odds that might be offered on rain falling in Glasgow sometime in the next six months.

Every media and academic commentator predicted that Tommy Sheridan would retain his seat in Glasgow, while the SSP would be wiped out.

As the political pundit, Professor Bill Miller, admitted on Scottish Television the day after the election, “We all expected the SSP to lose all its seats, but none of us expected Tommy Sheridan to lose.”

Sheridan, the most famous celebrity politician in Scotland, even enjoyed the open sympathy of the mass circulation local newspaper in Glasgow, the Evening Times.

As well as forecasting his certain victory - and the defeat of the SSP - the paper even carried a sycophantic double page spread in the final week, headlined the House of Sheridan - festooned with photographs of the Sheridan family.

This election has been a serious setback for socialism; it would be futile to pretend otherwise. It is also a tragedy for the thousands of people who had come to rely on Scottish Socialist MSPs to deal with their problems.

In Glasgow, for example, Rosie Kane and her caseworker met with queues of asylum seekers facing deportation. These cases are often a matter, literally, of life and death.

Other MSPs have tended to hide behind the coat-tails of Westminster, refusing to deal with asylum because it is a reserved issue. Sadly one of these MSPs was Tommy Sheridan, who refused to dirty his hands with asylum casework after leaving the SSP to form Solidarity.

Within the parliament too, the SSP has provided a voice for workers in struggle, and for others who were too poor or marginalised to be of any interest to the big mainstream parties. Holyrood will be a poorer place without the Scottish Socialist group of MSPs.

There is no single explanation for the debacle of May 3rd. The incineration of the left was the product of a combination of inflammable ingredients.

In the first place, all of the smaller parties and independents were mangled in a classic political squeeze, in which two parties were running neck and neck. In this election, the drama was heightened by the fact that one of the two parties stands for dissolution of the
United Kingdom, thus polarising Scotland into two camps: pro and anti-union.

These two juggernauts had vast propaganda resources at their disposal. While the SSP was forced to fight this election on a shoestring budget of just £30,000, the SNP had a war chest of £1.5million - ploughed in by big business, including a £500,000
donation from the reactionary Stagecoach tycoon, Brian Souter.

Labour, meanwhile, was gifted literally millions of pounds of free advertising from Scotland’s mass circulation tabloid press, notably the Sun and the Daily Record.

Despite the party s cosy rapprochement with elements of Scottish big business, many left wing voters - including it appears most of those who voted SSP in 2003 - swung behind the SNP in this election.

Alf Young of the Herald - one of Scotland’s most incisive and experienced pro-Labour analysts - pointed out the irony behind that shift:

“The far-left took out its anger over New Labour, Blair and Iraq by backing a party which, while sharing their goal of Scottish independence, has even less interest than Gordon Brown in bringing the pillars of modern capitalism crashing down.”

The small print of Alex Salmond’s economic policies were drowned out by the headline promises of an independence referendum, the removal of nuclear weapons, Scottish troops out of Iraq and more immediately, the scrapping of the Council Tax.

Labour, the LibDems and the Tories have all been tested in government in recent times, either at Westminster or Holyrood level, while the SNP is as yet untarnished by power.

As we go to press, the LibDems have spurned Alex Salmond’s advances to form a coalition. That means that the SNP are likely to form a minority government, possibly with the involvement of the two Green MSPs.

However, with the SNP up against the much larger bloc of unionist MSPs, it is unlikely that an independence referendum can be achieved before 2008.

The other key flagship policy of the SNP - replacing the Council Tax with a three pence rise in income tax - may also have to be shelved.

The economics of the policy do not add up. It would leave a black hole in council budgets of half a billion pounds, forcing cuts elsewhere. Moreover, although a deal could possibly be reached with the Liberal Democrats over the scrapping of the Council Tax, the Greens have in the past voted against an income-based tax – which means that the policy could be scuppered by the narrowest of margins, even with LibDem support.

Paradoxically, a minority SNP government could potentially create a more favourable climate for a future surge towards independence. A stable SNP-led coalition would involve backdoor deals, horse-trading and shoddy compromises with the LibDems, allowing Labour the opportunity to recapture some ground.

In contrast, a minority SNP government could allow Salmond to portray the SNP as a party which is trying to introduce radical changes, but is being blocked and obstructed at every turn by the three unionist parties.

Either way, the sands of Scottish politics are shifting. The socialist left may have been marginalised for the time being, but that can change rapidly and dramatically in the future.

It is not much more than year ago that the political obituaries were being written for the SNP after the Dunfermline West by-election - the SNP’s worst by-election performance since 1982.

A procession of political pundits pronounced the terminal decline of the SNP and the unstoppable march of the Liberal Democrats. As one commentator, Chris Deerin, expressed it in Scotland on Sunday:
“Nichol Stephen is youngish, moderate and attractive. Salmond, in contrast, wears a sullen air& the perception that they have failed to develop as an alternative government, makes him, and them, an unattractive prospect. The LibDems are succeeding where the SNP have repeatedly failed & The SNP cannot turn second place into first.”

Even within the SSP at the time, some members (who later left to join Solidarity) drew the conclusion that the SNP was finished, the LibDems were now the main opposition force in Scotland, and the idea of independence was all but dead and buried.

Fifteen months later, and the SNP are now Scotland’s biggest party and about to form a government.

As sure as the sun rises in the morning, the socialist left will be back with vengeance in the future. And whatever the arithmetical breakdown last Thursday, the only socialist party with the capacity of coming back from this defeat is the Scottish Socialist Party.

The SSP fought this election with dignity and restraint. We also fought a highly political campaign, with a 450-point manifesto, including the boldest and most radical policy of any party in this election - free public transport.

In contrast, Solidarity exposed itself as an embittered personality cult around Tommy Sheridan.

The 16-point manifesto of the breakaway party, along with its other election material, prominently featured photographs of Sheridan, his wife and his two year old daughter. His name appeared on every ballot paper, including even for the local council elections.

A large part of the Solidarity vote was an expression of sympathy for Tommy Sheridan based on confusion and misunderstanding of the facts that led to the split in the socialist movement, rather than a conscious socialist vote.

Tommy Sheridan himself, in his manifesto, on TV, and at public meetings repeatedly accused the SSP of lies, dishonesty and backstabbing.

That is the prospectus upon which Solidarity was created: that Tommy Sheridan was the victim of a plot to remove him as party convenor; that the SSP leadership manufactured allegations about Sheridan’s personal life to justify his removal; that the party leadership
forged documents to back up these allegations; that members of the SSP conspired to pervert the course of justice and in order to destroy Sheridan.

The entire Solidarity edifice has been built upon this fairy tale, and will come crashing to the ground as the lies unravel and the truth emerges.

In the meantime, for wide sections of the public, including for many ex-SSP supporters, there is no smoke without fire. The allegations against the SSP have not yet been disproved. At the very least, people are inclined to lay the blame equally on both sides.

The events of the last two years have been complex and labyrinthine. But the stark facts are these. Like Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, two top Tory politicians who
served lengthy jail sentences for their actions, Tommy Sheridan took out a libel action based on a fraud: at least some of the material published in the trashy tabloid News of the World was substantially true.

The SSP did everything it could to dissuade Sheridan from this insanely reckless legal case. We predicted that this grotesquely selfish and deceitful course of action could lead to the destruction of everything that had been built over decades by hundreds and
thousands of socialist activists.

But Sheridan carried on regardless. He dragged scores of people into a legal toxic waste dump against their will. These included innocent people who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and have since had their lives destroyed to protect Sheridan’s right to
hypocrisy.

The SSP was also dragged into the Court of Session. Our response was to defy the courts and face down a jail sentence.

In the weeks that the SSP was under siege, dragged through the courts, having its offices raided, Sheridan effectively went into hiding, failing to turn up to any of the meetings to decide tactics.

The rest of the SSP stood valiantly against the courts.

Finally, Sheridan emerged to argue that the SSP should now buckle under and surrender the party’s internal documents to the News of the World and the courts. His capitulation was backed by those who went on to found Solidarity. So far, so dishonourable.

But worse was to come. In an abysmal display of cowardice, Sheridan told the courts and the media that the documents had been forged by the SSP as part of a plot to fit him up.

To salvage his fake reputation, he denounced the SSP leadership as liars, perjurers, forgers and conspirators, before walking out to split the left and wreck the socialist unity project, built up over a decade and more.

The mainstream press, cowed by the courts and the threat of libel action - and perhaps also by the fear of jeopardising an ongoing police investigation into perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice - have never been prepared to bring out these
facts.

As a result, the SSP was fighting this election under a cloud of suspicion. To pretend otherwise would be to run away from reality.

However, two or three years down the road, the events of the past year will have begun to fade into the mists of history. With the removal of Tommy Sheridan from Holyrood, the Solidarity bubble will burst.

That will be a massive step forward for the left, allowing Scottish socialism to be rebuilt under the clean banner of the SSP.

Spoiling tactics turned confusion to fiasco

“It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes” said Josef Stalin.

The New Labour establishment could have taught the commissars of the old Soviet Union a thing or two about manipulating elections.

If 100,000 votes had been disqualified in Venezuela, politicians and newspaper editors would be calling for the tanks to be sent in to restore democracy.

In Scotland, it looks like the response to this mass disenfranchisement of a vast swathe of the electorate will be a whitewash, with the Electoral Commission asked to investigate the Electoral Commission.

Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, has called for a full judicial inquiry - a call that has been rejected by the man responsible for the debacle, the Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander.

In Glasgow, lawyer Mike Dailly has begun legal proceedings.

The SSP should support both of these moves. This democratic abomination was not the result of incompetence by the Scotland Office.

It was a product of a deliberate, cynical manoeuvre by New Labour politicians to confuse the public and marginalise the smaller parties.

Since 1999, Labour has consciously undermined local democracy by refusing to separate the council elections from the Holyrood elections. In this election, when council elections were conducted for the first time under PR, the case for a change was overwhelming.

But it was never put before the Scottish Parliament. A Tory MSP had begun to initiate a private members bill, but, after what appeared to be backdoor wheeling and dealing,
dropped the proposal.

Even worse was the decision to swap the order of the Holyrood ballot papers and to include the constituency and regional votes on a single form for the first time.

This was a deliberate subversion of democracy, designed to protect the big parties and undermine the diversity of Holyrood.

The SNP went along with this ploy, hoping that they too would benefit from the confusion. They opportunistically attempted to manipulate the new arrangements by renaming their party “Alex Salmond for First Minister – SNP”, reinforcing the confusion that already existed.

The SSP can report numerous examples of voters - including even party members - marking their X against Alex Salmond then scrolling down the regional list to vote SSP. All of these votes would have been discounted.

Ironically, the SNP s tactic has almost certainly backfired on the party. Their cunning plan was that voters would back Alex Salmond on the left side of the paper, then be forced to vote again for the SNP on the right side of the ballot paper when they realised that the smaller parties were not listed on that side.

What the SNP failed to anticipate was that a large proportion of voters would mark both their crosses on the left side of the ballot paper.

Because the regional and constituency ballot papers were not physically separate, tens of thousands of people appear to have believed that it didn’t matter which side they marked their two crosses.

This would not only distort downwards the vote for the smaller parties; it would also negate many thousands of constituency votes, particularly for the SNP.

Without a full analysis of every paper, it is impossible to say how the results were affected by confusion.

However it is wishful thinking for Tommy Sheridan to claim he was robbed of a seat in Glasgow. The claim that with just a few hundred more votes, Solidarity would have won a seat in Glasgow is pure fiction. Out of around 10,000 disqualified regional votes in Glasgow, Sheridan would have required 2,200 to beat the Greens and 2,600 extra
votes to beat the SNP - and even that would be based on the far-fetched assumption that neither of these parties had any disqualified votes!

In Glasgow as elsewhere, it is likely that the vote for the SSP, the Greens, Solidarity and a range of other small parties would have been significantly higher, but nowhere near enough to affect the outcome.

Nonetheless, this distortion of democracy blatantly discriminates against the most deprived voters in the poorest constituencies who are already disproportionately excluded from electoral politics.

The constituency with the highest number of disqualified papers, Glasgow Shettleston, was also the constituency with the lowest turnout in Scotland - just 33 per cent.

And by the way, just in case you didn’t know - Shettleston also tops the UK league table for poverty and deprivation.

The Scottish elections in perspective

Electoral politics can be cruel but is not inexplicable. Unfortunately a lot of what passes for election analysis is facile and self-serving, often being used to reinforce an already existing prejudice, or to fluff up a particular party allegiance.

To put the recent performance of the Scottish left into perspective, consider a comparison.

In 1989 the Green Party achieved an astonishing 15% across the Britain in the Euro elections, with a total of 2292695 votes. This included 115028 votes in Scotland. Yet five years later their vote across the Britain was only 3% and was only 23304 in Scotland (compared to 12113 for Scottish Militant Labour in 1994, who stood only in Glasgow, compared to all eight constituencies the Greens stood in). The Green vote in Scotland in 1994 was no better than the far left vote in that country today, and exhibited a comparable decline over a few short years, yet they have recovered.

You can read the full Euro election results here (PDF).

The extraordinary vote for the Greens in 1989 was due to the intersection of a number of factors that no longer prevailed in 1994. This article is not about the Greens, so I will leave discussion of that till another day.

Scotland in Britain

Scotland is a nation, but its political, economic, industrial and cultural history has developed in the context of Britain. There are both elements of commonality with the rest of Britain, and differentiation through particular Scottish characteristics.

One of most important aspect of commonality is the broadly progressive nature of the Labour party’s electoral base, and the institutional links between the trade unions and the Labour Party. For several decades the Labour vote has been higher in Scotland, and Trade Union membership has been higher than in England as a whole, but not higher than some English regions, such as the North east, and not higher than Wales. For more discussion on this see Gregor Gall’s book, “The Political Economy of Scotland”

There is no convincing case that Scottish trade unionism has followed a significantly more militant path that trade unionism across Britain. Nor, to dispel a famous myth, was the poll tax rebellion deeper or more militant in Scotland. The campaign started a year earlier in Scotland because it was introduced there earlier, and the tactic of non-payment and opposing bailiffs was derived from Scotland, but there was considerable militancy in England also, paradoxically more so in the South West, with for example, some 15000 marching through Plymouth, hundreds of protestors in Swindon breaking into the council chamber as councillors set the tax, and it was England that saw the Trafalgar Square riot, where the South African Embassy was set alight.

The political common sense in Scotland has been more left social democratic than in Britain as a whole. Added to which there is a distinct national culture that has had a stronger left voice than in England. Yet the general level of working class struggle has been very similar, and the levels of class consciousness and organisation are no greater than in some English regions.

Four particular factors have operated in the least few decades to accentuate the differences between Scotland and Britain.

Firstly the fall of the British Empire has removed an external referent. Scotland, England and Wales were historical partners as an imperial power. The diminished role of Britain today permits an alternative model of Scottish capitalism to be envisaged, and one of the strongest aspects of the SNP’s politics has been its opposition to the war in Iraq.

Secondly, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished or weakened most British wide national institutions, such as British Rail, British Gas, British Steel, National Coal Board et al. (Subordinate to this, but culturally significant was the abolition of football’s home international series in 1984, which removed a common British framework for the most popular sport)

Thirdly, Scotland endured eighteen years of Tory rule without the Tories ever having won a majority there. This is of course also true of English regions such as the North East and South Yorkshire, but in the case of Scotland and Wales there were subordinate nationalisms that could give expression to this grievance.

Finally, devolution has created its own dynamic, with an increased proportion of media coverage in Scotland referring to events in Hollyrood rather than Westminster.

The result of which is that the dominant form of separatism expressed by the SNP ditches a lot of the imperial baggage of British culture and politics, and reflects the generally social democratic social attitudes prevalent in Scotland. True the SNP sucks up to Brian Souter and other businessman, but in this regard new Labour is no different. For many voters the SNP are a vote to the left of Labour, a position they have achieved due to expressing left opposition to Westminster policies via separatism. (Of course the SNP also has its share of Hooray Hamishes, and James Bonds, but these are not characteristic of the party)

What is more, the objective conditions for a stable and successful socialist party to the left of Labour in Scotland is neither better nor worse than the conditions in England or Wales. The hitherto greater success of the Scottish left had been largely due to subjective factors – they had simply been better at it than us in England.

Nature of political parties

All political parties are complex social institutions. We need to consider the relationships between the party leadership, the party bureaucracy (not meant pejoratively), the activists, and the wider electoral support. We also need to consider the social forces that interact with the party, the party’s professed ideology, and the dynamic between that ideology and day to day pragmatism.

Parties also operate within concrete historical and political contexts, which they can influence but not determine.

Yet much of the commentary about the SSP in particular has signally failed to look at the party in the round, instead we get facile comments about how its alleged nationalism is the source of all woes, etc. Or an assumption that its electoral performance (good or bad) has been entirely due to this or that individual factor.

Let us consider some aspects of this concretely

Factors of the SSP’s 2003 success

A distinct difference between the Scottish and wider British political situations was the much more effective organisation of Scottish Militant Labour in consolidating gains from the poll tax rebellion.

In 1992 Tommy Sheridan (then in gaol) gained 6,200 votes in the 1992 general election, coming second to Labour in Pollok. A few weeks later Tommy Sheridan was elected from prison to Glasgow District Council. SML also won another council seat in Pollok and came within 46 votes of winning a seat in Drumchapel. This gave SML four councillors in Glasgow. In September 1992 SML won a victory in Easterhouse winning 54% of the vote in a regional council byelection. SML stood 7 candidates in the May 1992 council elections receiving more votes that the 77 Green Party candidates who stood across Scotland.

When the Scottish Socialist Alliance (later the Scottish Socialist party) was launched, it was therefore building on consistent and patient work over a period of years.

Of course, a pernicious factor in electoral politics is the necessity of building a brand loyalty towards individual politicians. This is exaggerated by the preference of journalists to hang stories on individuals, and to create local celebrities. In the process a popular legend is created, that may or may not accord to the actual history and characteristics of the individuals.

In the case of Tommy Sheridan, as a young man he had indeed been the firebrand popular face of the poll tax rebellion, and he was a popular leader of some ability. But we must also recognise that Tommy was also collectively supported, educated and developed by the Militant, who also provided the strategic framework within which he operated. In more recent times, Sheridan has been a figurehead, but it was the party who built him up.

Nevertheless, Tommy was a potent brand, and had been a success as an MSP between 1999 and 2003. His name, associated with the SSP, helped the party electorally. Of course, Tommy was not the only high profile activist in the SSP, and one of Scotland’s best known trade unionists, Carolyn Leckie, was also elected in 2003.

Another important factor was the war. In February 2003 the SSP was seen as central and indispensable to the campaign in Scotland against the upcoming attack on Iraq, and the level of militant opposition to the war remained very high for the May elections. As the SWP’s Mike Gonzalez has written, the vote in 2003 “arose directly out of the public perception of the [SSP]’s leading role in the anti-war movement: 100,000 marched through Glasgow on 15 February that year. It is no coincidence that that figure so closely reflected the numbers in the election.”

In 2003 the SSP were also able to stand as a party that had achieved the unification of almost the entire Scottish left, with the exception of the no-longer mighty Communist Party. This would have been an important factor in motivating the activists, it also helped in establishing a popular recognition of the SSP brand. Electoral differentiation was also achieved over say Arthur Scargill’s SLP because the SSP stood not only on the list (where very many minor parties compete) but also stood in the constituencies, associating the SSP with the major parties.

The 2003 election therefore saw a favourable conjunction where the party’s ideological position opposing imperial war and the party’s commitment to extra-parliamentary struggle attracted a militant leftward moving component of the opposition to Iraq. They also benefited from the long term electoral work of Sheridan and the SML, and the SSP was still in its heroic phase in the eyes of the activists, helping it get more campaigning out onto the streets.

Reasons for electoral failure in 2007


Whereas the intersection of Scottish and British politics acted largely in the SSP’s favour in 2003, in 2007 this had changed.

Opposition to the war has become much more all-pervasive over the last four years, and this has muted the intensity of the issue. Paradoxically the success of the hard left in building a strategic opposition to the war in Iraq that embraces the political mainstream has also diminished the degree to which the hard left are seen as the political expression of anti-war militancy. Alex Salmond has been a consistent opponent of the war, and the SNP presented themselves as an anti-war party, and what is more one that could actually achieve the withdrawal of Scotland from the imperial British project.

This election has seen a complex interaction of Scottish and British characteristics. The defining feature of British politics is the enduring social democratic electoral base for the Labour Party, despite the abandonment of its traditional social democratic role by the Labour Party, structurally and ideologically, so that the victory of neo-liberalism is institutionally reinforced in Labour. In most of Britain, there has been no electorally credible vehicle to break a significant section of the progressive vote towards a new force.

But in Scotland, there is no prospect of the Tories winning, and the SNP position themselves, or at least are perceived by much of the electorate (which may not be the same thing), as a social democratic party, moderately but tangibly to the left of Labour.

To a large degree then the votes for Solidarity and the SSP in 2007 were simply eclipsed by the SNP.

What was clear was that the results for both Solidarity and the SSP range from disappointing to disastrous. Nevertheless, Tommy Sheridan’s brand loyalty was more effective electorally than the SSP’s. This is no surprise, and was indeed the sole political rationale behind Solidarity.

However, the positive spin being put on this by Solidarity, that they are now the largest socialist party is Scotland, is disingenuous. The wider electorate do not follow the ins and outs of debates within the party, or even very much the debates between the parties. The vote for Solidarity is based upon the inherited capital of SML and the SSP, expressed through loyalty to the Tommy brand, but organisationally and institutionally Solidarity does not represent continuity with either the SML or SSP, in terms of its political composition or ability to sustain community campaigning.

Solidarity are also now spinning that because Sheridan missed out on a seat by around 0.5%, then it was the SSP to blame for splitting the vote. The dogs in the street are laughing at that one, because whatever view we take of the background to the situation, it was Tommy who walked out of the SSP and set up a rival organisation.

The Tommygate sex scandal, and the NOTW trial not only led to a split in the party, they also demobilised a layer of activists, and demoralised a lot of SSP voters. The blame for which entirely lies with Sheridan, who simply should not have brought the libel case to court.

However, there was already some malaise in the SSP even before the NOTW problems. As described by Gregor Gall, in an interview with me in June 2005. ,
“Many of the key pre-2003 activists now are MSPs or are Parliamentary workers. This is necessary to support the MSPs and to use the platform of Parliament as much as we can. The key issue here is why is it that a new generation of activists have not emerged or have not been produced to fill this vacuum. Four further issues are critical here. One is that many of the members and activists that helped get the six elected by general campaigning and specific election work have sat back and let the MSPs and other staff get on with ‘the job’. For example, my branch (Edinburgh North and Leith) had between 20-25 members out of 60-80 members in the branch come to twice monthly branch meetings prior to May 2003. Now, it’s down to about 10. These now inactive members see that their job was to get the MSPs elected so that they could ‘fight for socialism’ as a result of having that public platform. The second is that the members which continue to be active do not have a very good understanding of how a parliamentary platform can be used to build the SSP. This is most clear over extra-parliamentary campaigns to support SSP bills where with only 6 MSPs and only 19 SSP, Greens and independents out of 129 MSPs, extra-parliamentary pressure must be brought to bear on other MSPs and parties to support SSP bills, either to get them passed into law or to have any impact on Scottish Executive policies. Thirdly, the SSP underestimated (or more accurately did not give much thought to) the amount of resources that are necessary to be given over to acting seriously as a party with significant parliamentary representation. This concerns both the call on MSPs to speak at countless public meetings and to the media, and the preparation this requires, but also that if the SSP does not take its parliamentary work and responsibilities seriously, it will be torn to shreds by other parties and the media, thus undermining its credibility and stature. Lastly, the terrain on which the SSP works has not been so favourable of late. The anti-war movement has subsided as a force in between demonstrations. There has been no major trade union struggle like the nursery nurses since early 2004.”

Consequently, although the six (and then four) MSPs did a brilliant job, their work did not necessarily engage with the wider electorate in such a way as to consolidate the vote. The SSP was in the process of a debate about how to overcome these problems, and may well have succeeded, when Tommy Sheridan blew the whole thing off course.

There may have also been technical issues, we will never know whether the SSP would have done better had its also stood in the first past the post seats, but it didn’t have the financial resources to do so.

So where next?

Despite the electoral disaster, the combined left vote was still proportionate to European levels for the far left. And the combined vote would have seen at least one MSP elected for Glasgow. (Unless something remarkable happens twixt now and then, the performance of Respect in the Europeans elections in 2009 will probably be no better).

The SSP must be demoralised, as they were expecting to do better than they did, and in elections, it is not so much how you do in absolute terms but how you do relative to your expectations that determine how you feel about it.

However, they still have a number of advantages:

i) They are not perjurers, and when (as seems likely) criminal charges are brought against Sheridan, they will not be blemished by the muck.
ii) The SSP still has the larger proportion of the activists and what is more, unlike the SWP members in Solidarity, the SSP activists are committed to building the party between elections.
iii) They have five former MSPs, who are experienced and popular politicians: Rosie Kane, John McAllinon, Colin Fox, Carolyn Leckie and Frances Curran.

Solidarity failed to get Sheridan elected, and it is not clear whether there is enough glue to keep the organisation together without him being an MSP. The differences over independence and mutual incompatibility between Sheridan, the SWP and CWI may pull it apart. There are however many activists who, for good or bad reasons, joined Solidarity, and they should hopefully be part of any regroupment.

One area where the Scottish left (SSP and Solidarity) need to more seriously work is in the trade unions, where they need to build a stronger industrial cadre. This needs to take place alongside, work in community campaigns. They are back to the hard slog by which Scottish Militant Labour built their electoral base in the first place.

Scotland’s hanging chads?

...
Remember how the so-called “hanging chads” decided the election in Florida that first inflicted president George W Bush on the world? These were the punched ballot papers that were not properly counted because some of the punched out paper remained connected.

It is possible that the relatively poor performance of the minor parties, the greens, Solidarity and the SSP in Scotland may have been influenced by a poorly designed ballot paper.

As Kevin Williamson explains :

“In 2003 the first vote on page one of the voting form was for the Constituency vote. What happened in 2003 was that 100,000s of people voted for a big party on the first page then turned it over and thought "I'll give my other vote to a small party or an independent." Maybe the Scottish Office wanted to try and avoid that happening again.


“However, when they put both votes on the same page what they didnt realise was that over 100,000 people read "YOU HAVE TWO VOTES" at the top of the page, and then saw what appeared to be one long list. Folk may have marked it with an X twice in the first column and as a result their votes have been deemed spoiled.

“If that is the case then it will become apparent very soon when they check the spoiled papers - cos they will find two votes in the first column in lots of them.

“If it is then another interesting ramification will automatically follow. The folk who vote SNP-SNP or TORY-TORY or LAB-LAB will not be the ones whose ballots have been spoiled. You cant do that in one column.

“The spoiled ballots will probably be the ones where people voted for two different parties, eg a big party and a small party. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the small parties lost out. Cos up to 100,000 votes for them were annulled.”

This explanation is given extra credence by a report in the Scotsman newspaper on 5th May: “John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, said the level of spoiled papers was "unprecedented" in UK election history. He went on: "Huge numbers of people have cast two votes in one column and none in the other, rendering both votes void. The ballot paper says 'you have two votes' and it appears this is where the confusion may have been caused."

If there is a legal challenge then this will primarily assist the Green party and Tommy Sheridan. The SSP would still not win any seats, as they came behind other minor parties.

I will return to the discussion of the SSP's performance in a later post, becasue relevence is wider than the Scottish left, and is also significant to the general position of the left in England and Wales.

SSP hold council seat

With an overall disappointing night for the left, it is good to note that SSP member Jim Bollan has held his council seat in West Dunbartonshire.

UPDATE: Sadly the SSP's Keith Baldassara has lost his council seat in Glasgow Pollock, gaining 591 votes. The influence of Tommy Sheridan' name is clear by the fact that Keith, who has been a tremendously good councillor carrying out work on behalf of his constituents got less votes then Alice Sheridan, standing under the banner "Solidaity - Tommy Sheridan". (In fact I understand that Keith used to carry out a large part of Tommy's MSP case load) The combined votes of Solidarity and the SSP would have been enough to win a seat in the four member ward, as it was three labour and one SNP councillor were elected.

Solidarity did however win a seat in Glasgow, in Creightom ward, where Ruth Black topped the poll with 1220 first preference votes, while the Greens got only 315 and Wullie mcGartland just 224 for the SSP. Ruth is a worker for Glasgow's LGBT community, and it would be interesting to know the factors behind her success.

BNP stumbles

With just a few key councils still to declare we can happily say that the BNP has not made its promised breakthrough in the 2007 local elections. Despite standing over 750 district and borough candidates (and boasts of winning up to 60 seats) the current net gain is ZERO.

The BNP has so far won eight council wards but then they have also lost eight council wards.

BNP gains have taken place in Stoke-on-Trent (3), North West Leicestershire (2), Charnwood (1), Bradford (1) and Burnley (1).

However the BNP lost seats in Burnley (3), Bradford (1), Calderdale (1), Stoke-on-Trent (1), South Holland (1) and Broxbourne (1).

Particularly pleasing were the great results in Sandwell, Bradford, Kirklees, Epping, Dudley and Burnley. Even in Stoke-on-Trent, where the BNP won three, they lost in both of the key wards where a strong campaign was fought.

Searchlight’s campaign website has the full BNP results and they will shortly be producing a more detailed summary of the election results and campaign reports from around the country.

Don't mourn, organise

....


Last night I was watching the election coverage on BBC Scotland, and the omens were all there. A helicopter crashed bringing ballot boxes from the Western Isles. A ship ran aground in the Clyde bringing a ballot box from Arran, and a man went berserk in an Edinburgh polling booth, smashing open three ballot boxes with a golf club and ripping up scores of ballot papers. With a golf club? It was after all Edinburgh.

I had visions for a moment that this might be an alternative strategy for the left, and was fearing that the police would issue a statement that they were looking for a tall man in his late forties, with a hedgehog of dark bushy hair and an ear-ring, but I am sure Colin doesn’t own a golf club.

Switching channels briefly to BBC England I was lucky to catch Jon Cruddas MP who I am increasingly impressed with. He did a very good interview where he managed to stay within the Labour party envelope, but also make some very telling points that if Labour doesn’t start delivering on issues that benefit its core supporters, particularly housing then it will be in trouble. Opinion polls suggest that Cruddas’s campaign for the deputy leadership is not finding a resonance with individual party members, which is a very revealing indicator of how profound the weakness of the Labour left really is.

The election coverage in Wales was dreadful, they managed to interview Trish Law AM without asking her why she was standing against Labour, or any political questions at all. And there was a very excitable and young BBC reporter from Newport who was uncritically relating that Newport’s Tories were really excited because they had had a fantastic campaign and were expecting an upset. Whereas in truth, the chances of the Tories ever winning Newport are slightly less than George Galloway becoming leader of the AWL. John Marek lost Wrexham by the way, and Ron Davis came third in Caerphilly, but with an impressive 22% of the vote. Meanwhile the BNP came just 2580 votes short of winning a seat in the Welsh assembly, polling around 5% across Wales.

(By the way, a whiel ago i conducted a very intersting interview with Ron Davies.:
http://www.socialistunitynetwork.co.uk/voices/rondavies.htm)

So what about Scotland?

I am writing this before the full results are in, but unless Colin Fox achieves a significant personal vote in Lothians (count delayed due to golf club man), it looks like the SSP will have no MSPs. What is more their vote has suffered badly, and in some cases they have polled less than Arthur Scargill’s SLP. Four years ago the SSP secured almost ten times as many votes as the SLP.

Obviously there will be a degree of demoralisation, and there needs to be some reflection. The loss of the MSPs will also have a serious financial impact on the party.

These are some provisional comments of mine, based upon discussions I have had with comrades in Scotland. I offer them in the spirit of fraternal and constructive commentary, with all the humility appropriate to an Englishman living hundreds of miles away!

Elections are fought on a terrain largely outwith the control of the minor parties, both the SSP and Solidarity have probably suffered by some progressive voters switching to the SNP given that independence became the major issue.

Despite the well founded contempt that socialist activists have for Tommy Sheridan, he is a very accomplished and professional politician with an appeal to the wider electorate. Without Sheridan the electoral appeal of the SSP was diminished – this even without the negative impact of the court case and press coverage of the split.

The last four years have seen a relative loss of momentum for many SSP activists. The result of having six MSPs was to demobilise the membership to a degree, as the SSP didn’t really manage to carry through a debate involving the whole membership about the need to remain a campaigning party. That is not to say that SSP activists were not involved in several campaigns, but I understand this involved fewer of the membership. The burden for a small party of providing the infrastructure and support for the MSPs was also a factor, in pulling the party’s few resources towards Hollyrood, and away from the communities. There was no easy answer to these problems, as they were the necessary consequences of growth and success.

To a certain degree the difficulties of the SSP over the last four years were exacerbated by the SWP and CWI factions fighting a guerrilla war within the party, which further excluded the bulk of members who were not animated by the same concerns as the opposition platforms.

At the same time, there was a neglect of developing the education of party members, and promoting their inclusion in party activities, especially outside the central belt. And these less integrated members were cynically manipulated by Sheridan and the opposition platforms in the build up of the court case.

As a consequence, of all these factors the recent election campaign was fought enthusiastically and brilliantly, but with only a relatively small proportion of the SSP’s membership actively involved.

Sheridan’s shameful defection to Solidarity, and his attacks on other socialists using the mainstream press, have damaged the SSP’s electoral support.

Despite the somewhat better electoral performance of Solidarity, the model of that party is not one that can provide a long term attractive home for militant activists. Some will think I am sectarian for saying this, but the worst possible result was Sheridan being elected without the SSP winning a seat, as this would have bolstered the Solidarity organisation, which is an obstacle to the task ff building an inclusive left party. This worst possible outcome has been avoided.

The SSP remains an inclusive, activist party, and despite these electoral set backs it still provides the foundations for future growth.

Finally, thanks to Colin Fox, Carolyn Leckie, Frances Curran and of course the marvellous and inspiring Rosie Kane for their brilliant work over the last four years. They have been outstanding representatives for the socialist left, and an example to us all.

Lavalette re-elected in Preston

Congratulations to Respect councillor Michael Lavalette who has been re-elected in Preston, four years after first winning the seat (originally for the Socialist Alliance). He received over 50% of the vote in his ward, and Respect came second in two of the other three wards it contested in Preston. Respect also made a gain in Birmingham where, amongst a number of strong votes for the party, Mohammed Ishtiaq won in Sparkbrook to join Salma Yaqoob as Respect's second councillor in the ward. Let's hope the left has some other victories to celebrate as the night rolls on...

Good luck comrades

....



Best wishes to the comrades in the SSP in this most important election.
Whatever happens today, the example of the SSP remains an inspiration.

And good luck to all socialist and progressive candidates standing for election in Wales, Scotland and England.

CP on TV - You've waited 37 years!

For the first time since 1970, the Communist Party have this week had a party political broadcast, which had five slots on TV, and two on radio. It was broadcast on HTV last Sunday and on all other channels on Wednesday.

This is becasue the CP are standing in all regional list seats for the Welsh assembly. I have to say, it is quite a good broadcast. If I was in Wales I would vote for them.

This is the English language version.



You can watch it in Welsh here:



(Actually it is not exactly the same, perhaps becasue Angharad Halpin doesn't speak Welsh?)

The ghost haunting Blair

As publicity launches go, it did not get as much news coverage as the organisers may have hoped. On Sunday 24th September the bereaved relatives of British servicemen and women killed in Iraq launched their new SPECTRE political party.

There was a short article in theScottish paper, the Herald, in the previous week that quoted Peter Brierley, whose son Shaun died in Iraq three years ago, explaining why they had launched the party: "We have called ourselves Spectre because we intend to hang over the government until they listen to us. We will definitely get votes and hopefully we can win some seats,"
Despite Mr Brierley’s optimism that SPECTRE may win parliamentary seats, the launch of SPECTRE did not even make the pages of the Morning Star, although they did find space to report the launching of a new political party by former Punk singer Captain Sensible. The only report I found of the launch event was in the Turkish newspaper, Sabah.

As I wrote before the launch, SPECTRE is being formed to pose the single question of the war at the ballot box, but will therefore presumably also be standing against other anti-war parties? The Green party? The Scottish Socialist party? Respect? This is further complicated by the fact that the political basis of SPECTRE is problematic. They say: “We would like to stress from the outset that we are not anti-military and we do indeed support our troops wherever they may serve as they have to fulfil their duties without question.”

Most left wing and peace movement activists will strongly disagree with the need to support the troops “wherever they may serve as they have to fulfil their duties without question.” With parachute regiment soldiers still at liberty despite their perpetrating a massacre on the streets of Derry in 1972, can we really be expected to support that statement? Left and progressive candidates cannot be expected to stand down in favour of candidates who are so uncritical of the role of the armed forces.

The choice of name seems eerily similar to RESPECT. In so far as RESPECT sought to be the political expression of the anti-war movement the very existence of SPECTRE suggests that RESPECT has failed in that objective. What is more the relatively right wing attitude of SPECTRE to the military illustrates the degree to which opposition to the war has not led to wider radicalisation. The only previous example of a political party based upon expressing the views of serving soldiers, sailors and airman, the Common Wealth, which won the 1943 Eddisbury by-election and the Chelmsford by-election in 1945, was an explicitly socialist party.

Will RESPECT be standing aside for SPECTE, and have the membership of Respect any opportunity to express a view on this? Is SPECTRE the electoral expression of the Military Families Against War, or is it a separate initiative? If it is part and parcel of the MFAW campaign, then the involvement of socialists like Andrew Burgin and Chris Nineham with MFAW sharply raises the question of what approach socialists should take to SPECTRE.

There is a difficulty in bringing this single issue campaign to the ballot box, where it inevitably compete with other political viewpoints and organisations that would otherwise be wholly sympathetic to the anti-war movement – even more so as these elections will be conducted under first past the post, and other organisations or parties may have candidates with better local standing that the bereaved families. By posing a single issue electoral challenge there is a danger that SPECTRE could actually prove divisive to the anti-war movement.

local elections, what would be a good result?

My article on what would be a good result for the left in the local elections has now been published. The whole article is here:

But is you want to skip the argument and leap to the conclusion, this is how the article ends:

Generally, in local elections left of labour candidates except where there are special circumstances, get votes of around 2% or 4%. Anything above that is good, and suggests that the campaign has some resonance, anything below that suggests that you are doing something wrong: perhaps your leaflets shouldn’t have mentioned the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Hegelian dialectic after all.But we also have to judge what the impact of our campaigns is on developing networks of relationships with other activists in the town, the degree to which it is having an impact on the local Labour party. How many activists are involved in the campaign, etc. Crudely these factors will be reflected in the size of the vote as well.

In local elections it doesn’t matter so much that the left are standing under different banners, and we can all play to our own local strengths. I am hoping that when we look at the elections outside East London that we will see an average vote of around 4%, with some isolated results above 10%. That would be progress on the Socialist Alliance. Except in areas where there may be large Moslem populations I am not expecting Respect to do any better than the rest of the left.So what about Tower Hamlets and Newham? Galloway has set the bar high by suggesting that they will win control of a council, more likely they will end up with small but significant opposition groups on both councils. This will both be a big step forward, and also a very significant challenge. Once they have a few councillors it will no longer be enough to talk about Iraq, they will have to deal with next year’s budget, and can they hold their coalition together to lead a militant mass campaign for better funding, which may include surcharges on councillors?

It is an exciting prospect that a group of Respect councillors in Tower Hamlets could lead a fight over the issue of the Council tax, which is an issue that transcends the exceptional nature of their predominantly Moslem vote. Galloway has said it his ambition to fly the Palestinian flag over the town hall, but remember when John Lawrence was leader of St Pancras council in the 1950s he flew the red flag over the town hall – are Respect ready to take up that example?

However it pans out, if Respect win a significant group on either council this could provides the platform for the left with a practical basis for collaboration in a struggle against the council tax, and local government underfunding. It is through such practical collaboration over specific concrete projects that a new left can be built, and which could pull the Greens behind us.