A new Socialist
Party
ON May 6th 1999 Tommy Sheridan, head of the Scottish Socialist Party list in Glasgow, was elected as a Member of the first Scottish Parliament for three centuries. This electoral break-through put the SSP, created only a few months earlier, at the forefront of the political scene. But the roots of the new party are much deeper.
FRANCES CURRAN AND MURRAY SMITH*
D Y introducing the poll tax in 1989,
Margaret Thatcher made a double MatTher made a double
Terror. Until then she had attacked the workers' movement sector by sector, choosing her terrain, beating, one after another, steel workers, print workers, left wing councils and, as her pièce de resistance, the miners. But then she tried to impose a new local tax which hit everybody and made the most impoverished pay the same as the rich. This provoked a mass movement which smashed the poll tax and contributed powerfully to her downfall. Her second error was to first introduce this tax in Scotland, a part of Britain where her government had never commanded a majority and where the workers' movement had strong traditions of struggle.
In Scotland the anti-poll tax movement rapidly achieved great breadth. The Scottish section of the Militant Tendency, which later became the main component of the SSP, played the leading role, defending the strategy of refusing to pay the poll tax combined with mass mobilisations and direct action. A wide network of local committees developed, federated at a national level, with Militant's Tommy Sheridan as the main spokesperson. But, while Militant played a dominant role, this struggle also forged collaboration between forces from diverse backgrounds and began to change ways of behaving and thinking.
Following this campaign and the normalisation of the Labour Party under the iron hand of Neil Kinnock, Scottish Militant left the Labour Party in 1992 to create an independent organisation: Scottish Militant Labour (SML).
Profiting from the authority gained in the campaign against the Poll Tax, especially in working class areas of Glasgow, the far left in Scotland, securing the election of several municipal and regional councillors in Glasgow. The most spectacular success was Tommy Sheridan's election to Glasgow city council when serving a six month jail sentence for trying to stop a warrant sale of a poll tax non-payer -the medieval seizure of furniture of so called debtors .
In 1992 Thatcher's successor John Major had won the General Election. In Scotland his victory created double disappointment. We were condemned to five more years of Tory rule and Labour's defeat set back the perspective of establishing an autonomous Scottish Parliament. This strengthened nationalist consciousness linked to social demands.
As the lurch to the right of the LP continued, the Scottish National Party, a bourgeois nationalist party with a petit-bourgeois leadership and a popular base, was trying with some success to develop a left wing profile to attract the votes of disappointed Labour voters.
### Socialist alternative
On the Left the idea was growing that it was necessary to try to create a socialist alternative to Blair's New Labour. The potential was demonstrated anew by the success of Tommy Sheridan in the European elections in 1994, when he scored 7.5 percent in the whole of Glasgow.
In the early 1990s Socialist Forums began as annual meetings organised jointly by the Socialist Movement (SSM, left Labour), the Liberation current (SNP left) and the Communist Party of Scotland (one of the fragments born out of the explosion
SML scored the first electoral success of
ALLIANCE
SSP leader Tommy Sheridan of the Communist Party of Great Britain). In 1994, for the first time, representatives of SML participated. Subsequently they accepted an offer to jointly organise the 1995 forum. Alan McCombes, in the name of SML, publicly launched the idea of an electoral bloc, a Socialist Alliance, to contest the first elections for the Scottish Parliament.
The following year was marked by new struggles: the strike at Timex in Dundee, the campaign against water privatisation. In 1994-95 the campaign against the Criminal Justice Act was characterised by mass, illegal demonstrations. Although the law was adopted it has never been used against militant ecologist advocates of direct action, as was expected.
In a campaign against the building of a motorway in south Glasgow, militants of the traditional left encountered radical ecologist militants, some of whom subsequently became part of the Socialist Alliance and then the SSP.
The idea of a Socialist Alliance was making some headway, though with reservations in the SSM where a section of its supporters remained in the
Labour Party and even more so in the Liberation current, which was entirely integrated into the SNP.
Things accelerated, however, thanks to the intervention of Arthur Scargill who left the LP and in
November 1995 announced his intention to launch a new party.
This interested a number of political forces in
Scotland as in England and could have been the opportunity to create a new, pluralist socialist party.
In
Scotland, however, discussions between Scargill and the organisations from the
Forum foundered on two points. He rejected pluralism, the entry into the new party of organised political currents Che especially wanted to bar the Militant and SWP). Scargill also refused to contemplate an autonomous section of the party in Scotland. By his inflexible attitude Scargill
- inflexible attitude scargill made, unwittingly, his sole contribution to the emergence of a new political force. The notion that he was going to launch his own party no matter what, including in Scotland, accelerated the launch of the Scottish Socialist
Alliance in February 1996.
SML joined the SSA as an organised current. The Socialist Movement also joined, some members remaining in the
LP. Liberation didn't join as a current though many left-wing militants from the
SNP joined either then or later. The CPS also didn't join, though a number of its members and officials did so, including its
General Secretary Bill Bonnar.
Far left
There were also several small far left groups as well as independents from a wide range of social movements. In the first two and half years of its existence the
SSA had between 400 and 500 members. It was essentially limited to the cities of
Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, with a rather weak structure. The weight of SML was overwhelming compared to other
Britain * forces. To create a climate of trust it had been decided that no current should have more than 40 percent of leadership positions. An indication of the road covered in two years is that no-one felt it necessary to maintain this rule at the launch of the SSP.
The Alliance had considerable impact both in struggles, notably defence of public services, and on the electoral terrain. It organised support for the striking Liverpool dockers and in November-December 1996 played an important role in building support for the Glaciers strike, the first factory occupation in Scotland for ten years. This fight was successful and some of the leaders of the occupation joined the SSA.
### Respectable score
In the British Parliamentary elections in May 1997 the SSA it stood in 16 seats, gaining a respectable score and establishing credibility for the future. This marked a turning point in Scottish political life, not just because of the defeat of the Tories but also because devolution would lead to the creation of an autonomous Parliament in Scotland. Political life in Scotland became more and more national, distinct from that in England. A referendum in September 1997 broadly approved the autonomy project proposed by Blair, opening the way to the creation of a Scottish Parliament.
The SSA had taken a decision which positioned it well in this new political framework: in favour of an independent socialist Scotland. This became its identity card and later that of the SSP. Scottish nationalism is only marginally characterised by a crude anti-English sentiment. It is rather more the expression of the profoundly democratic aspirations of the Scottish people to control their own destiny. Historically this aspiration has always been championed more by the left and the workers' movement than by the right and today support for independence is stronger among the working class and youth. It is, therefore, natural to fuse this democratic aspiration with the aspiration for social transformation. In this fusion is found the key to every project for emancipation in Scotland.
The SSP was launched in September 1998. Immediately it had a qualitatively different impact than the Alliance; at a mass level the launch of a party was understood as proof of seriousness. Those who look to us demand that the SSP "must not International Viewpoint #322 June 2000 33