Election Wipe-Out for Left Parties

Hopefully at some point it will sink into them that sectarian behaviour harms both of them.

Agree that this gives us a lot of potential. In the community here, plus in IWW we've been working with SSP members anyway. However most SSP'ers are frustrating to work with, as like most party politicos they'll drop anything and everything if their party clicks its fingers. Hopefully they'll now be a bit more disillusioned/realistic about it and more committed to real working class organising, not just as a way of trying to get votes. ~shrug~

Stop crowing and get organising. ;-p There's two of you now - when you starting Eilean a' Cheo branch of the AF and what and where is Highlands IWW these days? You're in the country for another year or something aren't you?

Whatever happened to the whatever between the SSP deputy and their IWW employees?

Nah. You have to add SSP's vote to Solidarity's vote, which polled far higher, for a fair test. The public bought Sheridan's argument, and saw the SSP as being sectarian, which was the message of papers like the Herald after the court case. Sheridan never got in of course (for the reasons you highlight), but it would be false to assume that this was not the result of a split in the parties.

I believe it was obvious that this was the intention of the SWP to begin with. I think they believed Sheridan was their major threat so they backed him and bolstered him into thinking he could start his own party, which you joined for rather a different reason, mostly to destroy his credibility and see the SSP wiped out electorally as a prelude to forming Respect in Scotland. From a confused onlookers point of view this makes perfect sense for them as they are now poised to do this as the SSP farts about for another six months with its 800 or so members and Solidarity falls apart.

Whether this is relevant to the class struggle or not is a rather different question but it blatantly would have been better for the cause of electoral social democratic politics to have avoided the whole debacle and exercised whatever influence as possible to have avoided a split before a seminal election. I think there is a failure in the SSP to understand electoral politics. For the Greens it makes little difference how many MSPs they return, as long as they can be coalition makers they can get their cycle lanes and windfarms. An SSP which was seriously committed to parliamentary politics would not have been so childish as to protest at the G8 in parliament, would not have split over one man's ego, would not hold 'unity and integrity' rallies, would still have the affiliation of the RMT, and frankly now would have been in government, making itself synonymous with the parliamentary institutions and winning concessions on free school meals and prescription charges. An SSP which was revolutionary (as opposed to just really confused) would not give too shits about elections, compared with its other activities, as right now such an organisation wouldn't stand a chance at winning seats in any election. By failing to placate Sheridan and handing the SWiPs a gifthorse like this the SSP have set themselves back a decade.

If nothing else this whole sordid affair shows the bankruptcy of a socialist politics that puts electoralism before the wider class struggle. It makes the politics a soldier of fortune to the media and sephological phenomena, and it means that you recruit people based on the most minimum programme politics who then are only interested in fighting in elections. Over time this skews parties like the SSP, which make it out of the party political wilderness, to move further and further to demagogy and the right.

While on the whole I'm saddened by the affair and recognise that it will lead to a number of retrenchments in the 'body politic' so represented in the mass media and force socialist ideas to become more subjectively 'extreme' (which will have negative effects in the years to come) it does also present an opportunity to do something a bit different, with a greater hope of success. On that basis I'm unconvinced that this election has been an entirely negative outcome.

£5 a bag? Please please spread this about so the cunt upstairs from me losses business.

I did add the solidarity and SSP votes!

Read it again. I compared the SSP vote in the 2005 general elections (43,000) with the combined vote of SSP Solidarity last month (44,000 - 31k sol, 12k ssp).

Actually this is also an almost exact repeat of the SSP vote in the 1999 holryrood elections (46k).

Thats shows that this is roughly the level of the socialist vote in scotland and that it wasnt the split that affected the result.

To underline this we can look at the vote for the greens which also follows the same pattern. Their vote last month has fallen, also to more or less the same levels as in the 1999 scottish elections (84k last mont 86k in 1999). For further back up to this theory look at the SNPs votes on the lists cadidates (633k lasy month 638k in 1999).

To me this shows that the votes in 2003 were a blip and not a sign that left parties and/or the greens were making long term headway.

I think that people who think the public bought sheridans story over the SSPs or that the public rejected both parties are not looking at this objectively and have already decided the split caused the poor showing.

The actual results in terms of votes over the last few years does not back this up. The greens didnt have a split or a court case yet had the same result as the SSP and Solidarity.

Scottish Elections 1999 (regional list votes) SNP 638,000 Greens 86,000 SSP 46,000
Scottish Elections 2003 - SNP 399,000 Greens 132,000 SSP 128,000
Scottish elections 2007 - SNP 633,000 Greens 84,000 SSP/Solidarity 44,000

The 2003 elections took place against the background of the invasion of Iraq and The SNP being weak at the time after Salmond was replaced by John Swinney.

This year Salmond was back, people thought that the SNP could beat Labour and their votes returned to them. Any specualtion on what might have happened in the left vote of their had been no split or court case is just that, pure speculation.

If the SSP and Solidarity had been combined the result would have elected Tommy Sheridan as the only socialist MSP at the expense of Green MSP Patrick Harvey in Glasgow meaning that, not only would there have been one Green and One Socialist as in 1999, it would have the same two MSPs, Robin Harper and Tommy Sheridan.

The most that could be claimed re the split is that it prevented Tommy Sheridan from being elected in Glasgow, but didnt stop the SSP getting elected anywhere.

As far the council elections, its clear that the SSP did badly there as well.

I think it is more to do with the sort of party they have become rather than the court case or split.

Since 2003 they changed their course significantly and had little or no activism in communities, with everything centred around parliamentary bills and interventions at high profile national events.

In the "lower" working lass/ lumpen areas of my ward turnout was 30%, around a quarter of the people I know are not on the electoral roll, in the middleclass areas it was 60%. Basicallly the working class have walked away from the parliamentry model, but perhaps I have a naive belief in some form of elected assembly. Any examples out there, apart from Spain, where syndicalists, anarchists etc have participated ina "democratic" election.