I have decided to shift my main allegiance from the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) to Solidarity: Scotland’s Socialist Movement. This message is in part a justification of that decision and also an apology to Graham Campbell, Glasgow Solidarity organiser, on whom I made a personal attack (in reply to criticisms he made of me).

 

I will now urge people to vote for Solidarity in the Scottish parliamentary election on the 3rd of May, and give their first vote to Solidarity and second to the SSP (so that it will be transferred to that party if the Solidarity candidate fails to get elected under the Single Transferable Vote electoral system) in the local elections on the same day. I intend to rejoin Solidarity at some point in the near future, after letting my membership lapse at the end of November.

 

I have not yet made my mind up whether I will resign from the SSP or defy a resolution passed at the October conference banning SSP members from being members of other parties. I want to try to help the SSP develop in a positive direction, and encourage cooperation with Solidarity perhaps even eventually leading to reunification, and am opposed to such rules – which remind me of the witch-hunts against members of Militant (an organisation I was a member of for eight and a half years) in the Labour Party.

 

I have come to the conclusion that Solidarity is now a healthier organisation than the SSP. It is in the ascendancy while the SSP is stagnating. One indication of this was an opinion poll showing both parties expected to get one MSP in the Scottish parliamentary elections (presumably Tommy Sheridan and Rosie Kane at the top of the Glasgow lists). [I still haven’t found out the affiliations of three socialists expected to be elected in a more recent poll mentioned in the Herald.] An influx of new members is vital to avoid infiltrators on the side of big business gaining a stranglehold on a party. All is not necessarily lost for the SSP however – the Socialist Party of England and Wales (as Militant is now known) has improved significantly since I left in 1998 at the time that it failed to support the setting up of the SSP, when feeling that such infiltrators (who had stayed after many genuine members had left since Militant’s hayday at the time of the miners’ strike and Liverpool council dispute) were dominating the party; it is less sectarian to other socialist organisations now as shown by the establishment of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party (CNWP).

 

Solidarity seems to have positioned itself as the more radical and defiant socialist party, compared to a relatively wishy-washy and mainstream SSP that went along with the News of the World in the Tommy Sheridan defamation trial. Key to this positioning was the defeat of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at Solidarity’s November conference – when they narrowly lost a resolution to remove “Scotland’s Socialist Movement” from Solidarity’s name and dropped another resolution to organise Solidarity like Respect in England and Wales (which tends to encourage people who don’t regard themselves as socialists or identify with the working class, particularly Muslim small businessmen, to join) after finding no (significant) support for this outside their own ranks.

 

There will be a certain layer of working and middle class people who support the SSP, and that party could revitalise itself by getting good results in the Scottish parliamentary elections, perhaps even reaching or exceeding the level of support that gave it six MSPs in the last elections (in 2003). Although I will primarily urge people to vote Solidarity in my internet activities, some (mainly those who are not as left-wing) will undoubtedly vote SSP as a result. Good election results would bring a new layer of activists into the SSP, and encourage some of those who have drifted away from the party to get involved again. Despite primarily aligning myself with Solidarity, I hope this will happen! There are still quite a lot of former members of the International Socialist Movement (ISM), formerly Scottish Militant Labour, who I greatly respect in the SSP and I’ll continue to encourage their endeavours to defeat the infiltrators on the side of big business within that party.

 

Whether or not I stay an SSP member, I’ll maintain my Revolutionary Platform of the SSP initiative to try to unite revolutionary socialists who want such views reflected in the party, similar to my Revolutionary Platform of Solidarity initiative. For more information, visit the Revolutionary Platform Network website (www.revolutionaryplatform.net), at which I’ve set up a web-based forum.

 

I’ve sometimes had a tendency to be more anti-SWP than is justified. I’ve recently spoken on the phone a lot to my brother Sean (who maintains the national website of the Stop the War Coalition) and his Greek partner Yota, who are both in the SWP in London . This has been useful for correcting that tendency. The SWP has had a big influx of new members due to leading the anti-war movement, by far the most impressive achievement in their long history. As I stated above, such influxes help good people within parties get in a stronger position relative to dodgy people and I now think that the SWP in Scotland is playing a positive role overall. I read a Mike Gonzales article in the SWP’s International Socialism Journal about the split in the SSP, which made me more sympathetic to their position than I had previously been. If Graham Campbell is in the SWP, as I assumed he was and still think he probably is, then I welcome that as a positive influence on that party.

 

I have had a habit recently of undermining the SSP, despite supporting them overall (with my conscious mind if not my subconscious). This is because I (nearly always) try to be honest and that party has big problems. If I had made these criticisms as a Solidarity supporter, it could have been seen as sectarian, which I think is why I took so long to realise with my conscious mind that Solidarity is a better party for me to be a member of and to urge people to vote for. I’ll list some of those criticisms, all of which I made in recent emails (some of which you may not have received but they’re all on my more comprehensive blog at  (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/manchesterism) below:

 

• Pointing out that the SSP has banned people from being members of other parties but that Tommy Sheridan welcomed my dual membership.
• Presenting the opinion poll predictions mentioned above, which were actually more favourable to Solidarity than the SSP.
• Mentioning that a 120-strong meeting of the SWP unanimously decided to leave the SSP in favour of Solidarity.
• Trying to get rid of positive discrimination in the SSP and failing in that task.
• Mentioning SSP convenor Colin Fox MSP’s lack of support within the SSP at the time of the September rally.
• Mentioning the overwhelmingly white nature of the SSP. I blamed Graham Campbell for this, although perhaps it is other black and Asian people leaving the SSP for Solidarity, following Graham’s lead, which has exacerbated the problem within the SSP.
• Criticising the SSP’s Frances Curran MSP for ignoring emails/answering machine messages when I tried to join the ISM.
• Mentioning that SSP member Charlie McCarthy helped two policemen when they tried to get me in a police van in the social after the first day of the SSP conference, at which I was AWOL from a psychiatric ward where I am a part-time political prisoner (although I did point out that Charlie is overwhelmingly genuine).

 

It is clear that Graham Campbell was on the side of big business at the time of the ISM fringe meeting in Glasgow that we went to. I had previously suspected that when he complained (in a text message or phone call) about text messages I was sending to SSP mobile phone numbers listed in the party’s newspaper Scottish Socialist Voice at a time that I did not have email access. Genuine people tend to appreciate my messages (via texts or email), but he was very rude!

 

However, I saw him again at the G8 Alternatives Summit in Edinburgh (on the 3^rd of July 2005 ) and at the CNWP conference (in March 2006 I think), and on both occasions I got on well with him. He was smiling quite a bit, which is a good sign of someone being (at least mainly) genuine. I now suspect he had switched sides in the class struggle to that of the working class, perhaps partly as a result of my interactions with him.

 

I accused Graham of lying when he said that the ISM was not going to dissolve itself but that they would announce what was happening in due course, when I met him at the CNWP conference. He claimed in his email that it was the new name for the United Left Network (ULN). I pointed out that the SSP’s Richie Venton (who is their trade union organiser and Glasgow organiser) said that the ISM had indeed dissolved itself leaving nothing in its place. However, I don’t think Richie was at the ISM meeting in which dissolution was agreed, and presumably options to form a new platform were discussed at the meeting. I pointed out that the ULN is very different from the ISM, since it fails to differentiate between revolutionaries and reformists while the ISM was historically a Trotskyist organisation. However, the formation of the ULN, which does include many former ISM members as well as a considerable number of others (including the MSPs Rosie Kane and Carolyn Leckie), could well be the decision that Graham said would be announced.

 

I therefore apologise unreservedly to Graham Campbell, and hope that I will be allowed to rejoin Solidarity. I don’t expect to get back on the Glasgow Solidarity list until I rejoin, but would ask somebody on that list who gets this email to forward it to the list.

 

Incidentally, I have now discovered from the Solidarity website (www.solidarityscotland.org) that the list open to non-members is actually a different one from the Glasgow Solidarity list I was on. The open list is called “Glasgow Solidarity Update” and is only for receiving information about Solidarity. I have now joined it and am also receiving emails from Solidarity treasurer Gordon Morgan, which will enable me to keep up-to-date with happenings in Solidarity in the meantime. A very good sign that I am making the correct decision to choose Solidarity is that a Glasgow Solidarity meeting decided that I could be readmitted to the Glasgow Solidarity list despite it being intended solely for members. I blew it by making the personal attack on Graham, but had sent the introduction and another chapter of my forthcoming book “Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen?” (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revolution-destroyed) to the list before I was chucked off for the second time.

 

In solidarity (but not yet Solidarity),

      Steve.