Scottish Socialist Party

3 May: support the SSP

By Keir Lawson, Glasgow SSP and Scottish Socialist Youth student organiser The Scottish Socialist Party is currently in the midst of campaigning for both councillors and MSPs in the upcoming Scottish elections. Unlike Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity, the SSP is standing on an explicitly socialist platform, while emphasising our key demands of free public transport for all, scrapping the council tax and opposition to the occupation of Iraq. The SSP has recovered a lot of lost ground, with the most recent national poll putting the party on 5%; retaining all our current MSPs and gaining a handful of...

Left: Ken Livingstone, Respect, SSP

By Amina Saddiq Ken Livingstone’s wonderful world Ken Livingstone, god bless ’im, is holding a conference on 20 January under the title “A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations”. “Some argue that the world is going into an era of conflict and war driven by a ‘clash of civilisations’”, says the blurb for the event. “The Mayor of London’s policies are based on the exact opposite idea – that the multicultural city is part of creating a new concept of world civilisation that corresponds to a globalised world.” The “clash of civilisations”, proposed by Harvard academic Samuel Huntingdon in...

Tommy Sheridan in battle with his parliamentary workers

We publish for information and comment this article from the website of the Industrial Workers of the World - to visit their website, click here . Sheridan betrays his own workers In this article, Manny Neira reports and personally comments on the dispute between IWW and NUJ Scottish Parliamentary workers, and the MSPs who employed them. As Christmas approaches, eleven workers at the Scottish Parliament face broken contracts and unemployment in the new year, courtesy of self-proclaimed champions of the Scottish working class, Tommy Sheridan and Rosemary Byrne. They are both MSPs, Sheridan...

Was it wrong to wrong to video Sheridan?

I have to admit this when I'm bored and have nothing better to do, I go into UK Left Network, a Yahoo list usually filled with unbridled sectariana. My excuse is that it can be useful to search through that list to find out what some people say about the AWL.

Usually the contributors are obsessive...

Rail union disaffiliates from SSP

On 26 October the RMT voted to reverse its 2003 decision to affiliate to the Scottish Socialist Party. The decision was another knock-on effect from the destructive decision of former SSP convenor Tommy Sheridan to pursue his own personal success in a libel case against the News of the World at the expense of splitting the SSP. John Milligan, a leading figure in the RMT in Scotland, was close to Sheridan in the row in the SSP about the libel case. He attended the SSP conference on 7-8 October, after Sheridan had split away, but announced there that the RMT was "consulting" its Scottish...

Scottish Socialist Party - time to rethink!

By Elaine Jones, Dumfries SSP The SSP is holding its conference on 7-8 October at Glasgow Caledonian University. This is the chance for the SSP to discuss the way forward after the split with Tommy Sheridan and the SWP. There are some important lessons to learn. • Even after the split the same hero-worshipping language is being used to describe Sheridan’s role — the “greatest working class hero we have seen in decades”. They have given him a position that implies he is more important than other party members, more important than organisers and those who develop political theory. They have...

SSP conference and independent working-class politics

Stan Crooke reports from the Scottish Socialist Party conference which took place at Glasgow Caledonian University on 7-8 October. “Three hundred years ago next year, the English ruling classes and a section of the Scottish ruling classes began the colonisation of Scotland. The Scottish people lost their democratic rights. Since then, Scotland has been plundered. It bankrolls the Westminster Treasury. And it provides young men to die overseas.” This was how a member of the “Pro-Independence Platform (Temporary)” began his speech motivating a pro-Scottish independence motion at the Scottish...

SSP industrial organiser Richie Venton's appeal to trade unionists

Letter to SSP trade-unionists from Richie Venton Dear comrade, I write to you as a socialist and trade unionist whom I value, in sorrow and in anger at the wreckage being done to the party I helped to initiate, organise and build. I am not a member of any faction; I am a loyal, committed SSP member who appeals to you to save the SSP as Scotland's class-struggle socialist party, the vehicle for working class struggle and socialist change, for an independent socialist Scotland. Tommy Sheridan and a few others are threatening to wreck the party of socialist unity that hundreds of decent, honest...

SSP Executive statement on the Sheridan split

SSP Executive statement on the Sheridan split, 20/08/06 The SSP executive met today in Edinburgh and issued the following statement: "The SSP executive notes that Tommy Sheridan and others plan to launch a breakaway party, thus rupturing asunder the most successful socialist unity project in Europe." "We reject the claim by Tommy Sheridan that Scotland is big enough to accommodate two socialist parties." "The creation and building of a unified Scottish Socialist Party represents an inspiring break with the petty division and conflict that has for generations weakened the left internationally."...

"Scotsman" report on Sheridan split

The Scotsman, 19/08/06, on the Sheridan split: "Sheridan looks for new Solidarity", by Louise Gray. TOMMY Sheridan yesterday vowed to turn his back on the Scottish Socialists and to set up his own party, after admitting he had no future in the organisation he founded. Mr Sheridan urged those in the SSP to join him in a new movement, which his supporters said could be called the Solidarity Scottish Socialist Movement - a reference to the shipworkers' opposition movement in communist Poland. However, rivals poured scorn on the idea of Mr Sheridan using the Solidarity label and vowed to fight any...

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