Last week’s Holyrood elections marked a further decline in electoral support for independent socialist candidates in Scotland.
In the 2003 elections the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) won 117,709 votes (6.2% of the poll) and six seats in the Scottish Parliament.
In the 2007 elections, following the previous year’s split from the SSP by “Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement”, the SSP vote slumped to 12,731 votes (0.6% of the poll).
Solidarity – hanging on to the coat-tails of Sheridan – did better, scoring 31,066 votes (1.5% of the poll). But this was insufficient to secure Sheridan’s re-election to Holyrood.
Since then the electoral competition between the two sides of the split has become an ever more meaningless exercise. And last week’s results simply underlined that basic fact.
The combined SSP and Solidarity vote amounted to 11,000 (out of a total number of votes cast of just under two millions).
With 8,272 votes the SSP secured 0.4% of the total vote. Solidarity picked up 2,837 votes, representing 0.1% of the total vote.
(And even if Solidarity had stood a slate of its own in Glasgow, instead of rallying to George Galloway’s self-serving candidature, they would still have picked up only around 0.2% of the total vote.)
By contrast, the BNP won 15,580 votes throughout Scotland, amounting to 0.8% of the poll. Not for the first time, they won more votes than the number of votes cast for the SSP and Solidarity added together.
Anyone who tries to read something positive into the election results for the SSP and Solidarity – great achievement to contest all regions, kept the flag flying, scored as ‘high’ as 0.7% in one region, support for policies did not translate into votes, laid foundations for future growth, etc., etc. – is in a state of denial.
Neither the SSP nor Solidarity were able to benefit from the weaknesses of the Labour campaign, a six-week-long car crash in slow motion.
Neither were able to win support from voters repelled by the fact that Labour and the SNP alike were passing on cuts in public spending.
And neither were even able to hold on to the minimal level of support they had received in other elections and by-elections which preceded last week’s elections.
Although comparing the performance of one party which won 0.4% of the vote with the performance of another which won 0.1% of the vote is an essentially meaningless exercise, it must be said that Solidarity suffered the bigger – and possibly (and hopefully) – fatal blow.
Since they split from the SSP in 2006 Solidarity (which consists of the Socialist Party (Scotland), the Socialist Workers Party, and a few non-aligned individuals) has postured as the main left-wing force in Scotland.
This posturing is based on the fact that their electoral performance has hitherto been better (i.e. not as bad as) that of the SSP.
In reality, the only thing that has prevented an absolute collapse in the electoral performance of Solidarity (and the different names under which it has contested various elections) is its association with the (gradually declining) celebrity status of Tommy Sheridan.
But with Sheridan unable to stand for election because of his imprisonment for perjury, Solidarity had to contest these elections simply as Solidarity. Their vote crashed: only in one region (South of Scotland) was the Solidarity vote higher than the SSP vote.
What makes this result even worse for Solidarity – insofar as anything can be worse than securing just 0.1% of the vote – are the pre-election prophesies by its supporters that the SSP vote would be wiped off the map.
Indignant voters, they claimed, would take their revenge on SSP members who had given evidence against Sheridan in last year’s perjury trial. The SSP had collaborated with the bourgeoisie, the police and the Murdoch press! No worker would stand for that!
In the event, although the SSP vote did continue its historical longer-term decline, it would be more accurate to speak of the Solidarity vote being wiped off the map. The testimonies given by SSP members in last year’s trial were a complete irrelevance in the elections.
The SSP and Solidarity (i.e. the Socialist Party (Scotland) and the SWP) need to face up to the reality that the elections were unremittingly bad for the left (save for the solitary consolation that Galloway failed in his carpet-bagging endeavours).
Whether they will do so or whether they will prefer to engage in fantasises about how the SNP landslide victory will lead to an independent Scotland (which, in turn, will usher in an independent socialist Scotland) remains to be seen.
