[Marxism] The Scottish Socialist Party: the biggest small party

[Paul Flewers]

A rather cynical pal of mine has recently written a piece including the
following on the Scottish Socialist Party and its antecedents in the
Militant tendency, which may shed light on the issue. 

For non-UK readers, the Rector of Stiffkey was a Church of England priest
who was defrocked (dismissed) when it became clear that he was visiting
prostitutes in London when he was supposedly attending ecumenical
conferences; he later became a lion-tamer's assistant and had his head
bitten off by a disgruntled lion. It could only happen in Britain... The
Carry On films were a series of British low-quality comedy productions that
relied upon double-entendres and teenage humour. List members will probably
know about the Socialist Workers Party and the fiasco surrounding its
Respect front.

Paul F

Militant has gone through a series of crises. Its Scottish section
unilaterally wandered off into ‘Tartan Trotskyism’. The office boys around
Peter Taaffe staged a coup and turfed out their group’s founder and
longstanding leader Ted Grant, and pulled their much depleted group out of
the Labour Party. Now trading as the Socialist Party, it competes directly
with the SWP, and almost certainly hopes to nibble away at its rival’s
target constituency in the aftermath of the Respect fiasco. However, it is
sorely handicapped by its inability to replace the dreadfully dull public
image so lovingly cultivated over the decades by its now-deposed leader with
something more attractive. It has set up the Campaign for a New Workers’
Party with the ostensible aim of building a broad left-wing alternative to
New Labour, but as the Socialist Party walked out of the genuinely
broad-based Socialist Alliance on the grounds that it wouldn’t automatically
follow its prescriptions, this new campaign will be just another party front
organisation.

As for Ted Grant, the poor fellow spent his last days in an Essex nursing
home, aghast when he discovered that, after having dutifully listened over
the decades to his stern warnings about cheerleading Third World radicals,
however romantic a figure they might cut, his heir apparent Alan Woods had
taken advantage of his absence from head office to add Venezuela’s dashing
Hugo Chávez to the pantheon of revolutionary Marxism.

Militant’s defectors to ‘Tartan Trotskyism’ formed a key component of the
Scottish Socialist Party, a broadly-based organisation dedicated first and
foremost to divorcing Scotland’s workers from their brothers and sisters
south of the border. It achieved some successes, including winning several
seats in the Scottish parliament, but its aim to replace the Scottish
National Party as the authentic voice of Scottish nationalism has been well
and truly stymied by events perhaps unexpected in an organisation steeped in
the grimly prim traditions of Ted Grant’s Militant and Scottish
Presbyterianism. Evoking images worthy of a bawdy British farce, a sort of
Carry on Comrade — or indeed the notorious Rector of Stiffkey — the News of
the World alleged that the SSP’s charismatic front-man Tommy Sheridan had
spent nights romping with women of ill-repute in a Manchester bordello. No
sooner had Sheridan won his libel writ against the paper than he, his wife
and his father-in-law were charged with perjury. The SSP leadership spent
much of last year in a state of civil war, with endless allegations and
counter-allegations of lying and deceit and tales of surreptitious audio and
video recordings being bandied around. Needless to say, the party split,
with Sheridan taking with him the Scottish SWPers and the former Militant
supporters. As there are no discernable doctrinal differences between the
two halves, we may safely conclude that, in this instance, we have a
situation in which the personal has taken clear preference over the
political.