Leadership and Scottish socialist parties

Vince Mills

This year there has been an understandable emphasis on anniversaries and in particular 1956 with Khrushchev's secret speech to the closed session of the 20th party congress, the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

An admittedly lesser anniversary, but, in the light of the crisis enveloping the Scottish Socialist Party, a relevant one for all that, is the launch of the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) in 1976 led by Jim Sillars, the then Labour MP for South Ayrshire.

The SLP split from the Labour Party largely because of disaffection over the increasingly right-wing drift by the Callaghan-led Labour government on the one hand and the failure of that government to make any progress on home rule for Scotland on the other.

The SLP quickly adopted a left-wing programme, although not left enough for some of its members, and support for independence in Scotland.

Despite a comparatively positive press for a left-wing party, the SLP quickly ran into the electoral quicksand. With only a few council seats to its name and polling only 583 votes in the Garscadden by-election in 1978, it disappeared without trace in the 1979 general election, where it fought three seats. Only Sillars polled well, but not well enough. He lost his seat.

Why dwell on this, however briefly? Well, much of the current analysis of the crisis facing the Scottish left and, in particular, the SSP, is offered in a historical and political vacuum.

Let us consider the role of leadership. Whereas it may be true that the specifics of the SSP situation are entirely new, many of the issues that it has thrown up are certainly not new for any organisation seeking to build a healthy internal democracy in a society obsessed with media profile and leadership positioning.

We are used to charges being made against Labour Party leaders, not least the current incumbent of No 10, that they routinely dismiss the democratic decisions of the Labour Party, assuming that they have failed to derail them at Labour Party conference in the first place.

What is probably forgotten is that the left of the Sillarsite SLP was highly critical of what they saw as a leadership that was domineering and manipulative and frustrated with a Scottish media that assumed that what a leading MP said was what the membership of the SLP believed. Sillars was not the first left MP to dominate the political stances of his party.

The Independent Labour Party's charismatic leader Jimmy Maxton MP once insisted that the ILP change a conference position because he could not argue it in Parliament. The ILP membership complied.

Since its inception, the SSP has struggled with this issue. Former convener Tommy Sheridan is a gifted media and Scottish parliamentary performer who can make socialist ideas sound like common sense. Inevitably, at least from a ratings perspective, it was to him that the media looked if it wanted the SSP take on any given issue.

Of course, this generated concerns in the SSP and, I would argue, in the wider left, about how both talent can be put to use and democratic control over party policy retained.
In the end, I think that it was this underlying tension which led to the decision by the SSP executive to remove Sheridan from the leadership, a decision which some have considered fatal for that party. It certainly led to its split and the emergence of Solidarity.

This is not a trivial matter for any socialist and it should certainly not be dismissed as a matter of personalities, although the tensions in the party were, no doubt, real enough.

These tensions were also well founded. Like the SLP before it, the SSP quickly began to lose electoral momentum after initial successes and, crucially, this began to happen before the crisis of leadership. It is this more than any other issue that the Scottish left should think long and hard about.

The SLP had a more left-wing profile than the increasingly unpopular Callaghan Labour government and espoused left nationalism at a point when the Scottish National Party had 11 MPs in Westminster. Still, it could not build an electoral base at the expense of either the central party of labour or the central party of nationalism.

Yet it is by displacing these political colossuses that the SSP and now Solidarity hoped and hopes to flourish. I believe that, like the SLP before it, its increasing failure to make progress heightened tensions in the SSP.
In the 2001 general election, the SSP polled 72,528 votes, over 3 per cent. By the May 2005 general election, the SSP vote was down to 43,516, under 2 per cent. The central reason offered by some SSP supporters for this is the loss of Sheridan as leader.

Arguably, Westminster elections are not the best way to gauge support for the SSP - it does better in non-first-past-the-post elections. In the 2003 Holyrood poll, the SSP picked up 7.68 per cent of the vote on regional lists across Scotland, but, interestingly, by the June 2004 EU elections, which are conducted on a PR basis, the SSP vote had dropped to 5.21 per cent. This was before Sheridan resigned as the SSP national convener in November 2004.

The numbers are perhaps less important than the extent to which the SSP was being seen as an emergent force in the comparatively new political context of devolved Scotland.

For reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, but which lie in working class allegiance to Labour as the vehicle for progress, whether you believe that to be a forlorn hope or not, the SSP, like the SLP before it, has remained marginal.

Few commentators in the mainstream press, however, have chosen to look to the frustrations and difficulties that such failure engenders as the basis of the current crisis in the SSP and the emergence of Solidarity, choosing instead the garish headlines that the politics of personality offers.

Socialists must take a deeper, more historical approach. In particular we need to develop our understanding of the British working class allegiance to Labour and how we can use that allegiance to advance democratic socialism.