THE COLLAPSE of the anti-capitalist/socialist vote in the elections for the Scottish Parliament is a major setback for the radical left in Scotland, Britain, Europe and beyond. All six seats won by the Scottish Socialist Party in 2003 were lost - including the Glasgow seat that Tommy Sheridan was widely expected to hold. The Greens were also badly hit, going down from seven seats to two, while the group of independents was reduced from six to one. This was a heavy defeat for the far left. In 2003 the SSP received a total of 128,026 votes on the regional lists, representing 7.68% of the votes cast across Scotland, winning six seats in the Scottish Parliament. This time the combined vote of the SSP and Solidarity was 43,737 voters - just 2.28%.
This election was always going to be must harder for the left than last time because the SNP was in a position to replace new Labour as the largest party. That was seen by many on the left, including many SSP voters, as the best way to give the Blairites a well deserved kicking.
The results show this clearly enough. The SNP gained 20 seats, Labour lost 4, the Tories lost 1, the Lib Dems lost 1 whilst the SSP, Solidarity, the Greens and independents lost between them.
The Scottish Parliament has consequently lost the bulk of its radical wing and will now be dominated by the grey suits of the major parties.
Alongside the political squeeze from the SNP was the fallout from the splitting of the SSP by Sheridan following his mad-cap libel action against the News of the World scandal-rag undertaken against the strongest possible advice of the bulk of the leadership of the SSP. It was undertaken in spite of the fact that he had admitted to a meeting of the SSP NC that at least some of the allegations were substantially true.
Prior the it appeared that the SSP might have been weathering the storm of those damaging events, at the electoral level, and that it might retain a reduced representation in Parliament. This was not the case.
The damage done by the bile heaped on the SSP by Sheridan in the course of his five-week libel action was still there in a strong enough form to undermine the SSP vote and the socialist vote as a whole in
It is worth remembering the scale of this. The News of the World cited 11 executive members of the SSP as witnesses at the trial. These included MSPs Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie and Colin Fox. Sheridan accused them, in court, of being scabs, liars and perjurers when they insisted on telling the truth.
The Daily Record carried an interview with Sheridan with the headline "TIl destroy the scabs who tried to ruin me". There were photos of MSPs Frances Curran, Rosie Kane, Carolyn Leckie and Colin Fox with the word "scab" stamped over them.
Fighting an election eight months after such massive and damaging publicity of this sort was an awesome task.
This was further compounded by the huge prominence of Sheridan