Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Approaches to Green Party rejected DEBATE SSP ELECTORAL STRATEGY FOR 2005

by Rose Gentle  |  Socialist Resistance no20  |  page 7

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

The Scottish Socialist Party National Council held its bi-monthly meeting in Edinburgh on 31st October in Edinburgh. CAMPBELL MACGREGOR reports. The most important issue was preparations for the general election expected to take place early in 2005. the executive motivating the proposal that we should contest all 59 seats in Scotland, not to do so would be a retreat. £75 000 for the election fund, a tall order since the SSP is experiencing financial problems, but not impossible. defeated two alternative proposals. an electoral pact with the Green Party, but it was felt that our political diffegences with the Greens were too great to justify this, but in any case there was no sign that the Greens would agree to it.

The second was that branches should take their own decision about whether resources to fight the election, but it was felt that we needed a national decision, and that branches in stronger areas always help out weak areas.

(Obviously if this target isn't reached then economies will have to be made, but the general view, which I share, is that in the first instance this should apply to eg. number of leaflets produced rather than number of seats contested.)

I did raise the question of our attitude to anti-hospital-closure candidates, who could emerge in e.g. the Speaker's seat of Glasgow North East, but nobody answered this.

The NC decided to adopt what was described as "laissez-faire" selection of candidates, i.e. there would be a political expectation that we would stand an equal number of women candidates and a significant number of ethnic minority candidates, but there would be no formal mechanism, proposals for regional slates or twinning of seats were deteated.

This was an awkward situation, I voted for twinning myself, but I can understand why some comrades may have felt that these proposals were not clearly thought out or not clearly motivated.

In the run up to the 2003 The NC passed a document from It set itself the target of raising The NC (rightly in my view) The first was that we should seek

they had the PART (Socialist Part would be expected to do so if reelected. This is a live issue, since Campbell Martin MSP, who was recently expelled from the SNP and now sits as an independent, is believed to be close to joining the

This has led to an upsurge of opposition, several branches have passed motions that any MSP/MP/MEP who joins the SSP should be expected to live on the average wage of a Scottish skilled worker and donate the surplus to the SSP from the day they join.

I expect there will be a full debate on both these issues at the

national conference in February in Aberdeen.

This meeting took place at a time of a number of interesting events in Scotland. The day before, there was a march in the Pollok district of Glasgow, protesting against the war in Iraq, called Gentle, a Scottish soldier who was recently killed in Iraq.

This was significant because it was not just the usual lefty trek round the city centre, but a protest in a working-class area where SML/SSA/SSP have beep strong, involving may people of the area.

Also, Mordechai Vanunu will be standing for rector of Glasgow University in December. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has launched his campaign, and is building support from a range of student societies at the university.