Scottish Socialist Party

Why Doesn’t the Scottish Socialist Party Join the SNP?

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) won just 8,722 votes (0.4% of the total votes) in the recent Holyrood elections. A pretty poor result? Not according to the election analyses which the SSP has now posted on its website. In fact, or so we are to meant to believe, the election outcome is a harbinger of great things to come for the SSP. And here’s how it’s done. Stage one: Argue that the SSP’s score is not really as bad it might appear at first sight. Yes, the result was “disappointing”. But this was “inevitable when the fiasco of the Sheridan affair is added to the steamroller effect of the...

Scottish left is in a story state

Calling for a Labour vote, combined with rebuilding the left and pushing the unions to assert themselves politically, is the only serious left policy in Scottish Parliamentary elections on 5 May. That is not because the Labour campaign, or the Labour Party’s policies, are good. The Scottish Tories will be lucky to hang on to a handful of seats. In the Holyrood elections the basic question is: do you want a Labour or an SNP government (or some kind of coalition with one of those parties at its core)? The SNP does not claim to be a socialist party. But the policies on which it is contesting the...

Perjury unpunished?

I don’t believe in custodial sentences for many offences, including the one for Tommy Sheridan ( Solidarity 3/192). However I am getting the feeling Solidarity believes the courts have no rights here. I disagree. The argument that because the judicial system has biases and prejudices we do not use it is as ridiculous as saying that because democracy in this society is limited flawed and biased we shouldn’t vote. Many issues are pursued through the courts however imperfect, that actually give people a right of redress to what may have happened to them. There has to be, for instance, some...

Sheridan should not be in jail

Tommy Sheridan, the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, has been sentenced to three years in jail for perjury. Unlike other self-promoting fake-left demagogues such as George Galloway, Tommy Sheridan has a respectworthy background in socialist politics and has been an impressive class fighter. Many would have found it difficult to sympathise with him after a chemically-pure fit of egomania led him to foolishly smash up the SSP (at one time a project with great potential) in order to preserve his public image. As his eventual sentencing shows, that was all for nothing. The wreckage...

Oppose Sheridan jailing!

Former Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan is likely to face several years jail, after being found guilty of perjury on 23 December. He will be sentenced on 26 January. This is the latest in a long and sad story. In 2004 the News of the World published allegations about Sheridan’s private life. The News of the World was, and is, a foul right-wing scandal rag. The Murdoch press was after Sheridan because of his activity on the Scottish left. Sheridan won a libel action against the News of the World in 2006. Then, very unusually, the police launched a perjury investigation into the...

The Sheridan affair and the left in Scotland

Former Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan was found guilty of perjury on 23 December, and will be sentenced on 26 January. The judge has already said that a jail sentence is likely. Dale Street discusses the fall-out for the left in Scotland. “We do not take lessons in morality from the Murdoch press. The central issue is the defence of a working-class leader from attacks by the right-wing press. ...” “Throughout history, from Charles Stuart Parnell and Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century through to Martin Luther King in the twentieth century, the ruling classes have regularly...

The left assesses 6 May

A round-up. Charlie Kimber, the new editor of Socialist Worker, was the main speaker at the SWP's Central London "after the election" meeting on 13 May. His speech sounded like part of a campaign by the SWP leadership to re-educate their membership away from the "Rage against Labour" orientation which they were pushing as recently as September 2009. Kimber emphasised that the surprisingly buoyant Labour vote on 6 May was a class vote. People now rallying to Labour. Labour will talk a different language from when in office. Another leading SWPer, Candy Udwin, followed up from the floor by...

SSP assesses the general election

At the Scottish Socialist Party's "after the election" meeting in Glasgow, in mid-May, the message was that the SSP vote held up well in the general election compared with the Holyrood elections of 2007. In fact the SSP's vote is down to about one-tenth of what it was at its peak. It got 3.36% of the total vote in Scotland in 2001, and 0.3% in 2010. In 2001, it got over 6% in eight of Glasgow's constituencies; this time, the SSP's average vote where it stood was 0.7%. But the claim at the meeting was that the SSP vote held up very well, bearing in mind the Labour Party's scare tactics ("Vote...

Glasgow North East By-election: three contests underway

The Glasgow North East by-election, triggered by the resignation of the sitting Labour MP and House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin, will take place on 12 November. There will be three contests in this election. • To win the election (Labour is the favourite against the SNP). • Between the “candidates of the left” and the BNP. • And rivalry between the left candidates. Michael Martin stepped down at the height of last summer’s scandal over MPs’ expenses, after facing sustained attack for his failure to be critical of MPs who had milked the Commons expenses system and after trying to prevent...

Scottish Socialist Party offers charlatanism masquerading as history

By Stan Crooke “Scotland’s Hidden History” is the title of a historical vignette which currently graces the website of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). And what truly sorry reading it makes. The piece of “hidden” Scottish history so miraculously unearthed and brought to light through the medium of the SSP website is none other than – Red Clydeside! Red Clydeside is the expression popularly used to describe Glasgow in the years between approximately 1915 and 1922. Given the plethora of historical studies which they have given rise to, the events which lie behind this expression can hardly be...

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