Marxism 2004
Change on SSP
CPGB comrades who attended the 30-40 strong session on ‘The
break-up of Britain and the realignment of the left’ - a debate
between the SWP’s Huw Williams and the Scottish Socialist Party’s
Allan Green - were struck by the apparent change in attitude.
The tone of comrade Williams’s remarks - as well as those of
SWP contributors from the floor - showed a real shift. They actually
attacked the SSP’s nationalism. A pleasing development, even
if the comrades tended to simply counterpose an abstract ‘internationalism’
to Green’s crass plans for ‘socialism’ in one little
country. While they were right to condemn the SSP’s advocacy
of independence, they had little concrete to say about ways to address
the real sense of national grievance in Scotland and (to a lesser
extent) Wales.
Comrade Green did make some telling criticisms of the SWP’s
flippant approach to left unity - for example, in the Socialist
Alliance. The SA was “not given the opportunity to succeed”,
being effectively shelved by the SWP at the time of the mass anti-war
demonstrations last year. Such formations simply could not establish
a base if they appeared only “at the time of elections”,
he correctly noted. That said, he spent most of the session very
much on the back foot, eventually resorting to the profoundly lame
plea in his summing up that socialists from different countries
should refrain from criticising each other: “We wouldn’t
dream of telling you how to organise yourselves,” he maintained.
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Of course, for comrade Williams this was a gift. Quite apart from
the point of working class principle about our duty to criticise
comrades who are making mistakes, there was the little matter of
Wales, wasn’t there? Williams gently reminded Allan Green that
the SSP had actually written to Respect in Wales telling it: “Just
as the SSP would urge socialists not to stand against Respect in
the elections in England, we urge Respect not to stand against Forward
Wales” (Weekly Worker April 29).
Comrade Williams described himself as “semi-shocked” by
Allan’s “blurring … of nationalism and socialism”.
If this is true, then the comrade cannot have been paying too much
attention to developments north of the border for quite a few years.
At the very programmatic core of the SSP since its formation is
precisely a commitment to a ‘national socialism’ which
owes everything to nationalism and nothing to socialism. A fact
the SWP and its co-thinkers have either ignored or minimised since
they joined as a faction in May 2001. So why the change?
Perhaps the answer was hinted at in comrade Chris Bambery’s
contribution, delivered with the characteristic machine-gun splutter
that sometimes makes him very hard to follow. He bluntly announced
that “left realignment” explicitly “did not mean
shuffling the deck of the existing left”. It was a process
that excluded the “old left who could not relate to the new
movement” created by the fight against the Iraq war.
Not exactly conciliatory words and perhaps a hint that the SWP and
George Galloway - who is well known as a vocal opponent of Scottish
nationalism - are toying with the idea of extending the Respect
remit further north at some stage. Be that as it may, it is clear
that the SSP is no longer a happy home for the SWP’s co-thinkers
in Scotland.
Ted Fraser
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