BY FIONA GRAHAM
& COLIN FOX
GLASGOW — A recent opinion poll on voting intentions reflects the Scottish Socialist Party's (SSP) consistent increase in support among the Scottish electorate. The poll, reported in the Herald on September 4, shows support for the SSP running at 5-6%, better than 1 in 20, or 250,000 people.
The SSP has now firmly established itself as the fifth political party in Scottish politics and the third political party in much of urban, working-class Scotland.
Support for the SSP compares favourably with Scotland's other major non-mainstream party, the Greens, with support of 2-3%. A gauge of the impact of the SSP is the decision of the party's national council to stand, finance permitting, in all 72 Scottish constituencies in the coming general election.
For a party which has existed for less than two years, this is a monumental achievement. Membership of the SSP is rising swiftly, from Kirkwall in the Northern Isles to Dumfries in the far south, from Stornoway in the remote Western Isles to Dunbar in the south-east.
This reflects the general disillusionment with Labour, the rightward shift of the bourgeois Scottish National Party (SNP) and the establishment of the SSP as a credible alternative. Another telling indication of the momentum of the SSP has come from a major figure within the Labour Party. Dundee East MSP [member of the Scottish parliament] John McAllion recently lashed out against the marginalisation of left policies and politicians within the pro-market confines of both New Labour and the SNP.
"The mainstream ideas of left politics — public ownership, redistributive taxation, publicly funded services, state intervention in the economy — are everywhere in retreat", McAllion stated. He said the Scottish Parliament and its proportional representation — which has allowed the SSP to be represented — system had allowed the airing of issues which would otherwise have been buried by the major parties.
McAllion hinted that a section of the politically marginalised left wing within the Labour Party may eventually move towards the SSP.
Other evidence of the success of the SSP includes a number of defections from Arthur Scargill's small Socialist Labour Party to the SSP and the decision by the Socialist Workers Party in Scotland to open discussions with a view to possibly joining the SSP in the near future.
With the September 23 election of right-wing nationalist John Swinney as leader of the SNP, socialists within that party are also being forced to reconsider their political allegiances.
The SNP is riding high in the polls, with the latest opinion poll showing the party outstripping support for Labour in next Holyrood [Scottish] elections. Nonetheless, the decision by SNP leader Alex Salmond to resign shook SNP activists to the core. Salmond was seen as capable of leading Scotland towards independence. In contrast, Swinney is a less-inspiring figurehead whose image is of a cautious accountant.
The slow drift to the right by the SNP leadership over the past decade has also disoriented many SNP activists. Today's "Salmondistas", as the SNP was known as when Salmond first donned the leader's jersey, wear more conservative clothes these days. Many of those once on the left, like Salmond, have ditched socialist beliefs as "outmoded and no longer applicable". The election of Swinney as leader will confirm the continued political stranglehold over the SNP by what has been dubbed "MacBlairism".
The official SNP web site <http://www.snp.org.uk/> defines the SNP as "a democratic left of centre political party committed to Scottish independence. It aims to create a just, caring and enterprising society in the mainstream of modern Europe by realising Scotland's full potential as an independent nation". Remove the reference to independence and this mumbo-jumbo could have been written by Blair himself.
Swinney is determined to emulate the economic policies of Ireland, where the government waves cheques in the face of corporations promising them low wages, the lowest company taxes in Europe and legal safeguards against trade unions. The reward for this "cheapest takes all" industrial and political scabbing is vast riches for the few and not much for the masses. As in Blair's Britain, the rich will take the spoils and the poor take the beating in Swinney's Scotland.
Prominent SNP right-winger George Kerevan wallows in the "success" of the "new, enterprising Scotland". He too drools over the Irish experience and claims that not since the 1920s has the Scottish economy and culture been so dominated by an enterprising business spirit.
Yet for most Scots this "success" is no more real than the Loch Ness monster. They face greater exploitation in the new "Silicon Valley" workplaces and the Western Isles call centres than their mothers and fathers did in the Ayrshire factories, Clydeside steel mills and Fife coalmines.
Scotland's workers live in a country with an appalling record of ill health, some of the worst housing in western Europe, archaic land laws and rampant poverty. These problems require more courageous, determined and radical solutions than anything on offer from limp, vision-less politicians like Swinney and the other mainstream party leaders.
The Scottish Socialist Party promotes a genuinely independent socialist Scotland. The best efforts of socialists will be better rewarded by building that party rather than battling in vain to transform a big business party — Labour or the SNP — into a socialist party.
[From the Scottish Socialist Voice. Visit the SSP web site at <http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org>.]