Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

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Socialist Resistance no24  |  page 6-7

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.

campaign?

GC: The war in Iraq and the "war on terror", against the council tax and for our alternative of a service tax, against privatisation and in support of decent pensions.

On Iraq and council tax in particular we have a situation where both the Liberal Democrats and the SNP are opportunistically trying to pose as the people to support if you oppose Labour on these issues. So Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon from the SNP headed up the March 19 demonstration in Glasgow, though they had not been involved in building it.

And the Liberal Democrats are now saying the troops should be home by the end of the year, which doesn't sound that different from our "Bring the Troops home now" slogan. The SSP is the only consistently anti-war party but it's the activists that know that rather than people who are less involved.

Similarly we have the most coherent alternative to the Council Tax and one that is based on ability to pay and taxing the rich rather than the Lib Dems local income tax.

School meals have rightly become a big issue after Jamie Oliver's intervention, but the SSP has been fighting for free