Body-blow against Scottish left

The collapse of the anti-capitalist/socialist vote in the elections for the Scottish Parliament is a major setback for the radical left in Scotland, Britain, Europe and beyond.

All six seats won by the Scottish Socialist Party in 2003 were lost – including the Glasgow seat that Tommy Sheridan was widely expected to hold. The Greens were also badly hit, going down from seven seats to two, while the group of independents was reduced from six to one.

This was a heavy defeat for the far left. In 2003 the SSP received a total of 128,026 votes on the regional lists, representing 7.68% of the votes cast across Scotland, winning six seats in the Scottish Parliament. This time the combined vote of the SSP and Solidarity was 43,737 voters – just 2.28%.

This election was always going to be must harder for the left than last time because the SNP was in a position to replace new Labour as the largest party. That was seen by many on the left, including many SSP voters, as the best way to give the Blairites a well deserved kicking.

The results show this clearly enough. The SNP gained 20 seats, Labour lost 4, the Tories lost 1, the Lib Dems lost 1 whilst the SSP, Solidarity, the Greens and independents lost 15 between them. The Scottish Parliament has consequently lost the bulk of its radical wing and will now be dominated by the grey suits of the major parties.

Alongside the political squeeze from the SNP was the fallout from the splitting of the SSP by Sheridan following his mad-cap libel action against the News of the World scandal-rag – undertaken against the strongest possible advice of the bulk of the leadership of the SSP. It was undertaken in spite of the fact that he had admitted to a meeting of the SSP NC that at least some of the allegations were substantially true.

Prior to the vote the vote, it appeared that the SSP might have been weathering the storm of those damaging events, at the electoral level, and that it might retain a reduced representation in Parliament. This was not the case.

The damage done by the bile heaped on the SSP by Sheridan in the course of his five-week libel action was still there in a strong enough form to undermine the SSP vote and the socialist vote as a whole in Scotland.

It is worth remembering the scale of this. The New of the World cited 11 executive members of the SSP as witnesses at the trial. These included MSPs Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie and Colin Fox. Sheridan accused them, in court, of being scabs, liars and perjurers when they insisted on telling the truth.

The Daily Record carried an interview with Sheridan with the headline "I¹ll destroy the scabs who tried to ruin me". There were photos of MSPs Frances Curran, Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie and Colin Fox with the word "scab" stamped over them.

Fighting an election 8 months after such massive and damaging publicity of this sort was an awesome task.

This was further compounded by the huge prominence of Sheridan had always had within the SSP. He was not just the first SSP MSP but the personality around which the SSP was built. For such a central personality to lead a split – even a completely unprincipled one – is bound to be a massive problem for a political party.

This celebrity factor no doubt contributed to Solidarity gaining more votes than the SSP.

The SWP, who (shamefully) backed Sheridan throughout these events, recognises the rather obvious fact that it was the division of the left which helped to wipe out far-left representation in Parliament.

Socialist Worker puts it this way: "although the electoral draw of the SNP did not completely obliterate the far left vote, it was fragmented between three parties [Solidarity, the SSP and the SLP]. Although Solidarity gained twice as many votes as the other two added together, a split vote denied the party any seats.

"Had Sheridan received even half of the 5,259 votes that went to the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and the Socialist Labour Party, he would have beaten the Green candidate for the fifth regional list seat in Glasgow".

It goes on, however, to contradict this analysis by saying that the results are: "a tribute to the work of Solidarity members over the past months and vindicates their decision to split from the SSP". So the fact that Solidarity got more votes than the SSP vindicates a split which wiped out the far-left representation in Holyrood? It is this kind of small-minded analysis which will ensure that Solidarity will not have a long-term future.

What is now opening up, with as looks likely a minority SNP adminstration in power in Holyrood, is a turbulent time in Scottish politics

As the SSP’s Alan McCoombes argues

“The small print of Alex Salmond’s economic policies were drowned out by the headline promises of an independence referendum, the removal of nuclear weapons, Scottish troops out of Iraq and more immediately, the scrapping of the Council Tax.

Labour, the LibDems and the Tories have all been tested in government in recent times, either at Westminster or Holyrood level, while the SNP is as yet untarnished by power.”

But the SNP will not deliver what the majority of their voters want or expect. They showed themselves willing to look for deals on the referendum in talks with the Lib Dems. The economics of their council tax proposals don’t stand up. They want to cosy up to their big-business friends like Brian Souter of Stagecoach not the thousands of working class people in Scotland who voted for them.

The Scottish left will be building an opposition to all this back-sliding. It will be onto the streets into the campaigns and into the unions. This is what will ensure that the 2011 elections show a different picture of the radical potential of Scottish voters.

In this, the principled basis on which the SSP has been built will show through. In the meantime, those on the left in Britain and internationally who have stood with the SSP in its time of crisis, need to do so more than ever now. Socialist Resistance is more than happy to be part of that chorus.