Scotland

Can the SSP revive?

Just nineteen motions have been submitted for the 2007 annual conference of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), being held in Dundee on 21 October. Four of the motions have been submitted by the party’s Executive Committee. The Republican Communist Network (RCN) platform in the SSP and the SSP Assistant Secretary have each submitted one motion. The other thirteen motions have been submitted by eleven different SSP branches. That about sums up the sorry state that the SSP is in. And just over a third of the motions — seven of them — deal with the SSP’s internal organisation, covering issues...

Can the Scottish Socialist Party recover?

Just nineteen motions have been submitted for the 2007 annual conference of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), being held in Dundee on 21 October. Four of the motions have been submitted by the party’s Executive Committee. The Republican Communist Network (RCN) platform in the SSP and the SSP Assistant Secretary (website) have each submitted one motion. The other thirteen motions have been submitted by eleven different SSP branches. That about sums up the sorry state that the SSP is in. And just over a third of the motions – seven of them – deal with the SSP’s internal organisation, covering...

"Bosses for Scotland"

£581,000. That was Sir George Mathewson’s annual salary as chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) when he stood down from the post in 2006. As RBS chairman, Mathewson also enjoyed the benefit of one-off bonus payments – such as the £2.5 millions he was paid after the RBS’s takeover of the NatWest bank in 2000 (a bonus dismissed by Mathewson as something which “would not give you bragging power in a Soho wine bar.”) Mathewson presided over the transformation of the RBS from the lame duck of British banking into the second-largest bank in Europe, and the fifth largest bank in the world...

SNP launches National Monologue

In the Scottish Parliamentary elections held in May this year the Scottish National Party emerged, albeit by the narrowest of margins, as the biggest single faction within the Scottish Parliament. Stan Crooke looks at what has happened since. The SNP now runs a minority administration, albeit with semi-formal support from the two Green MSPs. SNP leader Alex Salmond and his party wants to build popular support and big business support for independence, in preparation for a referendum to be held in 2010. Only a minority of the Scottish population currently supports independence for Scotland...

SNP launches National Monologue

In the Scottish Parliamentary elections held in May this year the Scottish National Party emerged, albeit by the narrowest of margins, as the biggest single faction within the Scottish Parliament. Stan Crooke looks at what has happened since. The SNP now runs a minority administration, albeit with semi-formal support from the two Green MSPs. SNP leader Alex Salmond and his party wants to build popular support and big business support for independence, in preparation for a referendum to be held in 2010. Only a minority of the Scottish population currently supports independence for Scotland...

SNP: neither Washington nor Moscow, but – Reykjavic, Havana and Helsinki?

By Stan Crooke The Scottish National Party (SNP) is a bourgeois political party committed to the achievement of an independent capitalist Scotland. And it does not pretend to be anything other than that. In the Holyrood elections held in May of this year the SNP emerged, albeit by the narrowest of margins, as the biggest single faction within the Scottish Parliament. It won 3% more of the list vote than did the Labour Party, 1% more of the constituency vote than did the Labour Party, and one more seat in the Parliament than did the Labour Party. An SNP-Labour coalition government was never on...

Thousands of postal workers on unofficial strike in Scotland and northern England

For our last postal workers' bulletin, see here . The last three days have seen thousands of postal workers across Scotland walk out on unofficial strike in solidarity with victimised colleagues, and the strikes have now apparently spread to a number of cities in northern England. On Monday 30 July, thirteen drivers from the St Rollox mail centre in Glasgow were suspended after they refused to cross an official picket line at Edinburgh Airport. (Airports are one of the functional grades which the CWU has decided to call out separately from sorting offices and delivery staff.) The 20 or so...

Why the cardinal went political

By Maria Exall Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the leader of Scotland’s Catholic church, has made an unprecedented threat to Catholic politicians: support the church’s position on abortion or face excommunication. While Catholic intervention on the issue of abortion is par for the course, such a direct intervention is a new departure. What has caused this outbreak of “political Catholicism”? The intervention of the Catholic church in England into the debate on the Sexual Orientation Regulations, the so-called gay adoption row, should be seen as part of the same phenomenon of a more politically...

SNP win is no step forward

by Stan Crooke In the 3 May elections for the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged as the largest party. It looks likely to form a minority administration. The SNP’s gains did not come from a collapse in the Labour vote, but mainly from the collapse of the votes for independent candidates and the candidates of the smaller parties. Or as Alf Young put it in the Glasgow Herald: “The far left took out its anger over New Labour, Blair, and Iraq, by backing a party which, while sharing their goal of Scottish independence, has even less interest than Gordon Brown in...

“As sure as the sun rises”?

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), within which Scottish supporters of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty are active, did very badly on 3 May. Its vote went down from 128,000 in 2003 to 12,731 this year, and it lost all its seats in the Scottish Parliament. The SSP Executive’s statement on this debacle is inadequate. It amounts to 64 paragraphs. 27 of those paragraphs concern Tommy Sheridan, the former SSP leader who split from the SSP last year to form his own personal vehicle, Solidarity-Scotland. Much, if not everything, that the statement has to say about Sheridan is true. But trying to pin...

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