By
Iain Ferguson and Mike Gonzalez

INTRODUCTION
The Scottish Socialist Party is facing its
biggest crisis since its formation in 1999.
In July 2006, the Party’s best known
member, Tommy Sheridan, will appear
in a Scottish Court where he is suing the
News of the World (NOTW), the flagship
newspaper of the Murdoch empire
in Britain, over a story about an alleged
affair that appeared almost two years ago.
The court case – or more accurately,
the failure of the SSP leadership to give
political support to Sheridan’s libel
action against the Murdoch press – has
the potential further to damage an SSP
which has often struggled over the past
18 months, in large part as a result of the
EC’s failure to support Sheridan when
the NOTW story first broke in 2004.
On the back of recent poor by-election
showings, there is a real danger that
the current crisis could seriously undermine
the Party’s ability to present a credible
socialist alternative at the Scottish
Parliamentary elections in May 2007.
If that happens, it will be a serious setback
for the anti-war, anti-neoliberal left
not only in Scotland but internationally.
The decision of members of the Socialist
Workers Party in Scotland to unite with
the SSP in 2001, and to become a Platform
within it, was based on a recognition
that, under Sheridan’s leadership,
the Party was genuinely seeking to break
with the sectarian politics of Militant
from which many of its leading members
came, and to reach out to those disaffected
with New Labour on the one
hand and those involved in the growing
anti-war and anti-capitalist movement on
the other.
That optimism was confirmed by the
election of six Scottish Socialist MSPs
(Members of the Scottish Parliament) in
2003. The period since these elections,
however, has seen the forward march of
the SSP halted and the Party experience
a decline in terms of active members,
morale and sales of the weekly newspaper
the Scottish Socialist Voice.
In this article, we shall analyse the
roots both of that decline and of the current
crisis in the SSP. We shall argue that
Discussion Bulletin 8 July 2006
11
only under a new leadership, genuinely
committed to breaking from the sectarianism
of the past and engaging with all
those involved in struggle at whatever
level, can the Party regain the support of
the 130,000 people who voted for it in
2003 and present a real alternative to
New Labour and the Scottish Nationalists
in the elections next year.
THE BACKGROUND: THE MURDOCH
PRESS ATTACKS SHERIDAN
Socialists have a long-established, very
clear position on the issue of personal
morality. Essentially, it is that whatever
happens between consenting adults is up
to them.
In contrast to the hypocrisy of bourgeois
politicians who preach morals and
family values while flouting them in their
private lives, or tabloids like the Sun and
the News of the World that profit from
publishing titillating photographs and
articles while simultaneously condemning
and destroying the lives of those
whose behaviour they label as ‘deviant’,
we believe that consensual sexual relations
are the business of no one else but
those involved.
So when the NOTW attacks on the
best-known socialist in Scotland appeared
in the autumn of 2004 (at a time,
incidentally, when Sheridan was closely
involved in the setting up of Military
Families Against War, led by relatives of
those who had lost their children in the
occupation of Iraq) the leadership should
have dismissed them out of hand and
stood behind Sheridan.
Not only did they fail to do so but following
these allegations, at an EC meeting
in November 2004 Sheridan was
forced to resign as Convenor. Since then,
leading EC members have argued that
they did so not out of sexual prudishness
or petty bourgeois moralism but rather
because they were concerned that the
way in which Sheridan intended to
defend himself in the Court could have
had damaging implications for the Party
as a whole.
That may or may not be true, though
it is certainly the case that a current
within the Party leadership have maintained
a whispering campaign inside the
SSP since that time over Sheridan’s alleged
sexual misdemeanours.
What is indisputable, however, is that
for many who had voted for the SSP in
May 2003, as well as for many Party
members, only one conclusion could be
drawn by the EC’s decision: that in the
face of a vicious attack on the personal
life on one of the finest class fighters that
Scotland had produced for decades, his
comrades had failed to stand by him and
had thrown him to the wolves of News
International.
(For the record, it should be noted
that the sole SW Platform representative
at that meeting also voted for Sheridan
to stand down but has since publicly acknowledged
that she was wrong to do so
while at a National Council meeting the
next weekend, all SW Platform delegates
voted against his resignation.)
That decision is not the only factor in
explaining the decline of the SSP since
May 2003 and other factors will be considered
later in this article. However, the
fact that voters in the Scottish elections
of 2003 were asked to vote for a Party
which appeared on the ballot papers as
‘Scottish Socialist Party – Tommy Sheridan’
gives some indication of the esteem
in which Sheridan was held within the
working-class and anti-war movement in
Scotland and some sense of the likely
impact on that support of what appeared
to many as his abandonment by the Party
leadership.
There was, however, worse to come.
With the libel case scheduled for July
2006, a hastily convened EC meeting in
May of this year called on Sheridan for a
second time to drop the action.
In its place the EC proposed a strategy
of ‘defiance’ which involved a refusal to
accede to a Court’s request (at the behest
of the NOTW) to hand over the minutes
of the meeting in November 2004 where
Sheridan discussed the content of the
NOTW allegations. That strategy led
briefly to the jailing of Sheridan’s erstwhile
comrade and current SSP Policy
Co-ordinator Alan McCombes as the
minutes were in his possession.
Many members (including SW Platform
members) initially supported that
refusal to hand over the minutes, in part
out of a desire to express solidarity with
McCombes, in part because they believed
the minutes should never have
been taken in the first place.
However, concern that the refusal to
hand over the minutes was being used as
a weapon with which to force Sheridan
to drop his action, growing scepticism
about the minutes (why were they taken
at all and why was their existence made
known to the bourgeois press?), and unhappiness
at placing the principle of ‘confidentiality’
above all other
considerations (including the indefinite
jailing of McCombes and the likely bankruptcy
of the Party) contributed to growing
doubts about its appropriateness.
These doubts came to a head on the
morning of a special National Council
meeting to discuss the situation on May
28th when the Scottish broadsheet the
Sunday Herald revealed that, following
the EC meeting on November 2004, a
member (or members) of the Executive
had gone to the newspaper and in a
sworn affidavit, had given full details of
the proceedings of the meeting to that
newspaper.
There was fury amongst delegates
that, in the words of an emergency
motion presented at that NC, ‘at a time
when Alan McCombes is in prison for refusing
to make confidential SSP minutes
available to the State or the News of the
World, one or more leading members of
the Party were aware that the contents of
the minutes were already in the possession
of the bourgeois press as a result of
their actions’.
As the motion noted, what this
showed was ‘a level of cynicism and contempt
for Party members which is
beyond belief’. Despite opposition from
most of the EC, this motion was passed
by a large majority.
As the information contained in the
minutes was now in the public domain,
most delegates also felt that this left the
EC strategy of ‘defiance’ in tatters and
following a powerful intervention by
Sheridan who argued that no one should
be in jail over a set of minutes, regardless
of their content, voted to reject that
strategy (in the face of fierce opposition
from some EC members), resulting in
McCombes being released from prison.
Finally, the meeting voted to give full
political support to Sheridan in his court
case against the NOTW, again in the face
of opposition from leading EC members
and some MSPs. (A motion from the
RMT union also expressed support for
Sheridan in his battle with the Murdoch
Press).
Many members correctly drew the
conclusion that the party would not have
been dragged in to Tommy Sheridan’s
libel case if the leadership had politically
backed him against the slanderous attack
by News of the World 18 months ago,
and if they had not decided to minute a
conversation at an EC meeting where
Tommy Sheridan discussed the content
of the NOTW allegations.
THE POLITICAL ROOTS OF THE
CURRENT CRISIS
In the immediate aftermath of the Special
NC of 28 May, many SSP branches, from
Shetland to Dumfries, have called for a
Special Party Conference to be held as
soon as possible with the aim of electing
a new Party leadership. While most of the
calls to date have come from branches
without SW Platform members in them,
it is a call which the SW Platform supports.
It would be wrong, however, to see
the present dispute purely in terms of
personalities which can be resolved be re-
Discussion Bulletin 8 July 2006
12
placing them with other (pro-Sheridan)
personalities in the leadership, though
that would undoubtedly be a step forward.
There are also political differences
between the pro- and anti-Sheridan
camps which are important in making
sense of the present crisis.
Sheridan himself has suggested that
one of these differences is a conflict between
what he characterises as ‘gender
politics’ and ‘class politics’. This is not
necessarily a characterisation that we
would accept, not least since we see the
struggle against class exploitation and for
women’s liberation as intimately linked.
Nevertheless, the dominance of feminist
ideas amongst a section of the Party,
who see the central issue as being Sheridan’s
alleged personal behaviour rather
than News International’s attacks on a
leading socialist, have been important.
The SWP was able to clarify its understanding
of the real Marxist tradition on
women’s liberation through a lengthy
and sometimes bitter faction fight in the
early 1980s around the question of ‘autonomous’
women’s organisation.
By contrast no such debate took place
within Militant, which was in fact notorious
on the left in the 1970s and 1980s
for its denunciation of the women’s liberation
movement as ‘petty bourgeois’.
Perhaps as a consequence of that experience,
leading SSP members who are
former Militant supporters and some of
those around them have now ‘flipflopped’
into an uncritical acceptance of
many feminist ideas, including notions of
patriarchy.
As an example of where such positions
can lead, in a recent article in the Sunday
Herald MSP Carolyn Leckie (who was
not previously in Militant) argued,
amongst other things, that the SSP took
the nursery nurses’ dispute less seriously
than other disputes because it involved
women workers.
In itself this is an outrageous slander
against the many SSP comrades, male
and female, who visited picket lines on a
daily basis but is particularly inaccurate
in that an important source of support
for Sheridan comes from nursery nurses
who joined the Party because of his support
for their strike!).
There is, however, a more important
political divide within the SSP which
concerns the relationship between Party
and class.
Since its beginnings, there has been a
tension within the SSP between those
who have seen the Party growing
through its engagement with wider
social movements, such as the anti-capitalist
movement and the anti-war
movement as well as those disaffected
with New Labour, and those who,
whether through pessimism or sectarianism,
have argued instead for an emphasis
on purely Party-initiated, Partycontrolled
campaigns.
Although the differences were present
prior to the 2003 elections, the strength
of the growing anti-war movement (with
100,000 on the streets of Glasgow on 15
February 2003) meant that in practice,
the Party was forced to relate to this
movement (even if the SSP’s support for
the Stalinist-controlled Scottish Coalition
for Justice Not War meant that the
movement remained more passive and at
a much lower level than the movement
south of the border. Despite huge numbers
of young Muslims being present on
all the anti-war demonstrations, for example,
the Party still has very few black
members).
After the Scottish parliamentary elections
in Holyrood 2003, however, that
unwillingness to relate to forces outside
the SSP in practice led to an over-orientation
on Parliament, which ironically
meant that the Party with six MSPs was
much less visible than it had been during
the four years in which Sheridan was the
sole MSP. No less importantly, it meant
that the Party failed what has been perhaps
its biggest test to date – the meeting
of the G8 leaders at Gleneagles in Scotland
in July 2005.
In that month Scotland would
become the focus of an international mobilisation
of the anti-capitalist movement
and the wider forces supporting Make
Poverty History. For the Socialist Worker
Platform, and for a small but very active
layer of other SSP members throughout
the country, the significance of the event
was clear.
Other forces outside the SSP were enthusiastically
preparing for G8. It was an
ideal opportunity to work with wider sections
of the movement in a united front
which could bring the SSP into contact
with a layer of people even wider than
the 130,000 who had voted for us in
May 2003.
To waste such an opportunity would
be criminal neglect, and the rest of the
left internationally would hold us to account.
So Platform members began to
organize G8 Alternatives, a broad and
open coalition of a number of organizations
and individuals whose main activity
would be the preparation of an
Alternatives Summit on the Sunday after
the MPH demonstration and the Gleneagles
demonstration on the opening
day of the G8 summit on the following
Wednesday.
Unfortunately most of the SSP leadership
saw it differently. Other than
token involvement in G8 Alternatives,
the reaction of leading SSP members was
to dismiss the G8 as an event that ‘didn’t
interest the working class’ and in practice
to block any party mobilization for the
event.
Little material was produced and the
leadership made no effort to encourage
or mobilize Party members to become
involved in building what was likely to be
(and indeed turned out to be) one of the
most significant political events in Scottish
history.
As the likely scale of the event belatedly
began to dawn on the leadership, a
protest in Parliament for the right to
march at Gleneagles by four of the six
MSPs (neither Tommy Sheridan nor
Rosemary Byrne took part) on the Friday
preceding the Edinburgh demonstration
was too little too late and served mainly
to illustrate how far the party’s leadership
had separated itself from a growing, vibrant
movement.
As we expected, the Make Poverty
History demonstration was enormous
(around 300,000) and as varied, diverse
and dynamic as such demonstrations
always are. The SSP leadership’s main
concern, however, seemed to be not how
Party members could best connect with
this new movement but rather how we
could differentiate ourselves from other
marchers.
Thus SSP members wore red t-shirts
(not white, like everyone else) and organised
a tight closed contingent rather
than participating throughout the
march in the delegations of trade unionists,
students, anti-capitalist protesters
and the like.
The Sunday Alternatives Summit was
an extraordinary success, with 5000
people attending a profoundly vibrant,
open and exciting event full of political
ideas and debate.
It was sad, then, to see the SSP leadership
standing outside the main hall
throughout the day collecting signatures
for a petition to defend the MSPs who
had been expelled from the parliament.
Most significantly, Frances Curran
speaking at the final rally went to considerable
pains to emphasize the differences
between SSP and the movement,
and in particular between the major international
figures with whom she was
sharing a platform, including Trevor
Ngwane from South Africa, Susan
George, Caroline Lucas and George Galloway
among others.
Several members of the EC complained
bitterly in the subsequent meeting about
the conduct of the SSP at this great event,
with a supporter of the leadership group
publishing a frank and withering assessment
of the Party’s performance in the
next issue of Frontline, the magazine of
the International Socialist Movement Platform
within the SSP.
As a Party, the SSP had deliberately
and explicitly refused to engage with the
Discussion Bulletin 8 July 2006
13
movement, though the Socialist Worker
Platform together with other rank and
file members of the SSP as well as many
others outside the party worked tirelessly
for months to build the event. The
tragedy is that the SSP so signally failed
to reap any political benefit from it.
That said, there was little evidence of
the Party leadership learning the lessons
of Gleneagles. Only two months after
these massive events, for example, the
Policy Co-ordinator of the Party Alan
McCombes presented a paper to the EC
which argued that the Party’s main audience
lay not in those who were disaffected
by New Labour or those involved
in the anti-war or anti-capitalist movement
but rather, in the poor and dispossessed
in the housing schemes:
The biggest potential reservoir of support
for the SSP is not to be found
among Labour voters, SNP voters, Lib
Dem voters or even Green Party
voters, but among the 50 per cent of
the population who do not participate
in elections. Well over 1 million people
did not bother to vote in the 2003
Scottish election or in the 2005 general
election.
Of course the poor and dispossessed
must be part of the SSP’s potential audience
and it is right that a socialist party
should be trying to encourage their entry
into political life, while recognising the
difficulties involved in doing so.
McCombes’ mistake, however, is to
imagine that the dispossessed can be the
main or leading component in our social
base (one reason, along with his suggestion
that Party organisation in future be
based on a series of interest groups or
‘networks’ rather than geographical
branches, that his paper was not supported
by the EC).
McCombes combined this focus on
the dispossessed with a plea for a renewed
emphasis on Scottish independence,
while accepting (with considerable
understatement) that support for independence
at present was ‘simmering’
rather than ‘boiling over’!
If much of the leadership seemed unaffected
by the events at Gleneagles, the
same cannot be said of the membership
of the SSP.
The national conference of the SSP in
March of this year (2006) was notable
for its changed atmosphere. Around
issues of war, racism and climate change,
delegates consistently rejected sectarian
motions which argued for an ‘ourselves
alone’ approach, in favour of working
with other activist and campaigners.
When Rosie Kane MSP, for example,
spoke in a debate on environmental
issues (she is, it should be remembered
the party’s most prominent environmental
spokesperson) on behalf of the EC,
she specifically rejected the motion that
the party should become involved in the
broad Campaign for Climate Change, arguing
instead that ‘we don’t need to
work with anyone else, we can do it by
ourselves’. Her position was decisively rejected
by the delegates.
Again, however, there is little evidence
that the spirit of the Conference made
any impact on the Executive Committee.
The reality was that our support in the
country was ebbing away – a series of
local and parliamentary by-elections in
2006 had shown how slender that support
now was.
Yet the process of preparing for the
Scottish elections in May 2007 should already
have begun, with candidates being
selected and campaigns begun at local
level. Instead, the issue of Tommy Sheridan’s
libel action provided the pretext to
reopen all the arguments (and the
wounds) of two years earlier.
Sheridan had been elected Chair of
the Party by Conference. But the party’s
leadership was not prepared to accept the
declared will of the party – instead it
counter-attacked by launching yet another
whispering campaign intended to
force Sheridan to drop the case, effectively
withdrawing the support of the
party from him at a critical moment.
That is the background to the extraordinary
meeting of the party’s delegate
body, the National Council, with
which this report began. The majority of
delegates passed a series of motions
giving unconditional support to Tommy
Sheridan and condemning anyone within
the party who had fuelled that campaign
in any way.
The meeting itself was in many ways a
rebellion of the party’s rank and file –
control had been taken back from the
small and unaccountable group who had
manipulated things from above and systematically
ignored the views and instructions
of one delegate body after
another.
The Council was not just expressing its
frustrations and criticisms of the party’s
leadership – it was also demanding a different
kind of party, a party open to the
movement, democratic and pluralist.
In the eyes of many of those present,
that model was clearly identified with
Tommy Sheridan. More importantly,
that is the alternative which he is seen to
represent for tens of thousands of working
class people, who had placed such
hope in the SSP and who deserted it
(hopefully temporarily) when it failed to
fulfil those hopes.
What is clear from talking to people
inside and outside the party in recent
weeks is that the hope is not lost, and
that there is a genuine desire that the SSP
should resume the course that won it
such unprecedented support just three
years ago.
For that to happen, and for the SSP
to offer a socialist alternative to the
mounting numbers of working class
people deserting the Labour Party in disgust
and disillusionment, our party must
change direction now.
As noted above, as a Platform we are
supporting the call that is coming from
increasing numbers of party branches for
a Special Conference which will call for a
new leadership that will express the diversity
of forces within the SSP and lead
the party back towards all those who are
enraged by Blair’s and Bush’s war, who
are under attack as civil rights are restricted
more and more, who are the victims
of racism and Islamophobia, who
are persecuted and discriminated against.
All those, in other words, for whom
an open, democratic socialist party is the
only real alternative. The kind of party
that can claim it will represent them in a
parliament elected in 2007 because it will
be a party that is democratic, open and
transparent and rooted in their struggles.
Iain Ferguson, Glasgow Dennistoun
Branch Organiser, NC delegate
Mike Gonzalez, SSP Executive Committee
(Both in personal capacity)
Discussion Bulletin 8 July 2006
14