frontline 10
Scotland: Socialists Cause a Political Earthquake
On 1st May as workers took to the streets internationally, Scotland made it's own contribution to international working class solidarity, the people voted to shift Scotland to the left. Frances Curran MSP examines the Scottish elections, and asks where the SSP goes from here.
The War Factor
The election campaign for the second Scottish Parliament played out against a background of nightly television coverage of the war on Iraq and in the days running up to polling we were saturated with TV footage from the fall of Baghdad.
During the election it had been put to the Scottish Socialist Party many times that our uncompromising anti-war campaigning would cost us dearly at the polls. We consistently replied that this was a matter of principle and it did not matter if we lost support - we were a party of principles.
On election day the pundits were forced to rewrite their copy. Support for anti war parties, the SSP, the Greens, and anti-war independents increased dramatically. The SSP returned to the Mound with six seats, the Greens with seven and the independents with four.
Support for the SSP had increased threefold since the last Scottish elections, increasing to 6.8% and 128,000 votes. We came so very close to taking a seat in two other regions, being beaten by less than 1% of the vote.
The establishment parties of government and opposition were licking their wounds. Votes for both Labour and the Scottish National Party (SNP) slumped. Labour lost 400,000 votes and slumped to an all time low of 29%, with the loss of six seats. The SNP lost 8 seats.
Shift to the Left
The make up of the new parliament represents a huge shift to the left. The coming years will bring increased opposition to privatisation of schools and hospitals, opposition to GM crops, support for free school meals and other anti poverty measures, opposition to war and increased support for independence.
This dramatic shift in Scottish politics would not have happened without the creation and the building of the SSP. The existence of a party which at it's core stands for an independent socialist Scotland and has been capable of uniting the left in Scotland while building roots in every working class community has been decisive.
The parliamentary breakthrough is a turning point for the party. It has created a new stage for the ideas of socialism. It gives weight to our community campaigning and it has brought the first trade union support. The railworkers union (RMT), which was one of the founders of the Labour Party a hundred years ago, has taken the historic decision at it's recent conference to break it's monopoly affiliation to the Labour Party. Bob Crow, RMT General Secretary, has called for support for and affiliation to the SSP in Scotland. We are hopeful that this will mean affiliation by the end of the year. The anti-trade union, anti-working class policies of New Labour are provoking huge opposition within the unions to the continued affiliation to Labour. Pressure is building in other unions and one or two may follow the road now being taken by the Railworkers.
SSP in holyrood
From the outset the socialist MSP's have started as we mean to go on. Our first day at work in the blue-carpeted chamber saw every SSP MSP challenge the swearing of allegiance to the monarchy and the Queen as the constitutional head of state. Rosie Kane dressed in jeans made a clear statement written on her hand that her oath was to the people. This grabbed national and international headlines. Our words and actions were not a cheap publicity stunt. As socialists and democrats we intended to challenge the Queen as head of state and to challenge the whole culture which attempts to get MSP's to conform to establishment norms within the parliament, attempting to control and hem us in with procedures and protocol. Well we're not playing their game. Without a whimper Labour MSP's meekly swore their allegiance to 300 years of privilege, wealth and feudal power. They should hang their head in shame.
We need to use the parliament to raise the ideas of socialism, but also to fight for our five main manifesto pledges. We are already tabling bills at the Scottish Parliament on the introduction of free school meals. We are calling for the abolition of the council tax and its replacement with a service tax which would redistribute wealth. We will introduce a public sector workers bill, which would establish a 35 hour week and a minimum wage of �7.32 an hour for public sector workers. We will bring forward bills on public ownership especially of the railways.
The SSP can begin to build broad coalitions of support for these bills across Scotland, from North to South, in urban and rural areas. We must enlist the active support of community groups, voluntary projects and trade unions.
Challenging the Establishment
In the course of this we intend to challenge the political status quo. We intend to take on and challenge the view, accepted even in the labour and trade union movement, that there is no alternative to privatisation, that we cannot afford free school meals or a decent minimum wage and that the wealthy can't be taxed more or they'll leave the country. The left have been on the political defensive for far too long. Now, in Scotland, we have moved onto the offensive. Let Labour, the SNP and the Liberals, defend rampant capitalism, which moves call centre jobs from Scotland to India because slave labour wages means more profit for multinationals. Let them explain why privatisation of the railways is a good idea when it has been an unmitigated disaster. And let them stand up in the Parliament and defend the idea that lower paid workers should pay the same council tax as MSP's who are in the top 5% of earners in Scotland.
We welcome the opportunity to debate these issues not just in Parliament, but also in the press and media and at countless local meetings across the country.
The pantomime banter across the debating chamber with the traditional parties shouting ya-boo at each other, hides the real picture, of a cosy free market consensus which they all agree on. This is a consensus which we intend to expose.
Socialist Revival
There is definitely a revival of interest in the ideas of socialism. If the main strategy of the first four years of the life of the SSP was to launch and build the party then a key strategy for the next four is the development of political ideas. The party has been approached by several groups of academics in Scotland who would like to work with us to develop the arguments, backed up with research, of how to implement our political and economic programme.
We now have the responsibility to develop the core Marxist ideas and use them to help create political and economic theory which is relevant to a 21st century advanced capitalist country. There is a new generation who are questioning the world they live in, experiencing an alienation from the values of this society and the possibility already exists of beginning a dialogue about socialist ideas with those young people.
We need to make a contribution to the international debate within the anti-globalisation movement, which is divided between reforming global capitalism or overthrowing it and replacing it with a new type of democratic, political and economic system. The position that the SSP has built both through its involvement in mass struggles and its parliamentary success means we now have both the credibility and resources to give us a significant voice in this movement.
We don't see this task in isolation. We intend to strengthen our international links, we want to import the debates from Porto Alegre, from Florence and the European Social Forums into the party. We want to clarify our programme and deepen our political understanding. We want to take these ideas into the mass movement of working class people in Scotland.
SNP in Crisis
The SNP may have lost 8 seats in this election, however support for pro-independence parties, i.e. the SSP and the Greens increased. This is a point that has not been lost inside the SNP. The SSP has taken a big section of the SNP vote in the working class central belt. In Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city we were within a few points of dislodging the SNP as the opposition to Labour. These election results have provoked a political crisis within the SNP. Their leader John Swinney faces a challenge to his leadership at the forthcoming conference. This is the first time a sitting leader has been challenged since the 1960's. The SNP has been on a rightward trajectory for several years, the working class base which they built up with their more radical phase during the anti poll tax campaign has been haemorrhaging.
But the issue of independence is a central question for the SNP, ourselves and the Greens. There has been a debate emanating from the left of the SNP and echoed by some in the leadership, arguing that what is needed is the setting up of a constitutional convention in Scotland to advance the debate around independence. This would be done in the same way that the Constitutional Convention for a Scottish Parliament was set up in the early 1990's. One SNP leader made the point in a recent newspaper article that the SNP do not have a monopoly on the idea of Scottish Independence. She proposed that the convention should open a dialogue whereby parties like the SSP would be invited to contribute their view of an independent Scotland. The question of independence and national identity will become a bigger issue in Scottish politics. The SSP stands for an Independent Socialist Scotland, this is a defining demand of the SSP, but we have to develop a more detailed case for socialist independence. The national question in Scotland will be an increasingly relevant factor in Scottish politics, especially given the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist stance of Blair and the sheep within the Scottish Labour Party who blindly follow and even attempt to defend this policy.
Building the SSP
The lesson we need to be aware of is that work in the parliament is just one aspect, albeit a very important aspect, of our work as a party. We use it well, but we also need to build strong community bases and build organised support throughout the trade unions. A sizeable youth and student organisation is an important wing of the socialist movement.
There is widespread antipathy toward organised politics by big sections of society, particularly in working class and deprived communities and amongst youth. A big challenge for our MSP's and our party is whether we can engage with this section of society, which is an absolute majority of young people and almost a majority of the population as a whole.
The day after we protested the oath to the Queen when Rosie turned up in her jeans, she was roundly attacked in the press (with the exception of the sketch writer in the Scotsman) for her attitude. However walking through the area where she lives, which is in the Shettleston constituency, the area with the lowest voter turn out in elections, a young woman shouted at her 'you're her, you're that MSP - don't change'.
Weeks later when Rosie challenged Labour ministers for using the word �NEDS'( Non Educated Delinquents) to refer to young people in working class communities again she was hammered in the press. But, a youth project in a working class area of Edinburgh, called Citizen Y, were painting a mural on the side of a church. They retitled their positive image of young people in their community to, 'Who are you calling a NED?' and invited Rosie to open it.
We have a challenge to translate the experience, the voice and the aspirations of working class people into the Scottish Parliament, it is not a matter of speaking for people, rather it is about encouraging a section of our society who have been silenced and sidelined for too long to find their own voice and let it be heard.
The SSP and its MSP's hold defined socialist views, our challenge is to develop both a mass party and a mass movement where these ideas can be debated and tested against the real development of the class struggle.
Socialism in Scotland has broken into a canter, with the election of 6 MSP's the SSP is now in serious training to win the race.
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