AWL Scotland

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The last Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) National Council meeting declared that, finances permitting, the SSP will contest every Scottish seat in the next Westminster elections. The Solidarity Tendency thinks that this is wrong. Like the SSP's call to 'Make the Break' (i.e. disaffiliate from the Labour Party) it is rooted in a fundamentally flawed approach to the labour movement.

The SSP claims a paper membership of around 2,000. It is already heavily in debt. It makes no sense to waste the limited human resources of the SSP and to add to its financial problems by standing in seats where the SSP is guaranteed to lose its deposit and where an electoral intervention would be essentially tokenistic.

Far better to concentrate resources in working class areas and build a base for the SSP in workplaces in such areas. The SSP should stand only where it can do so with some local trade union support, and where its candidate could therefore legitimately claim to be standing to give political expression to the interests of the working class.

The SSP should not stand candidates against Labour lefts. Nor should it stand where an electoral intervention could be expected to cost Labour the seat. To do so would discredit the SSP amongst an important and significant layer of labour movement activists and Labour supporters.

The SSP should not allow itself to be portrayed as destructively 'anti-Labour' for the sake of it. Like it or not, there is still a lot of both active and passive support for Labour. In the run-up to a General Election, especially in the context of an ongoing Tory revival, many working-class voters are likely to look to Labour to block a Tory return to power.

A blanket decision to contest all seats, resources permitting, would mean the SSP turning its back on those who fund, sustain and vote for Labour. The SSP should advocate left unity and practise it around key policies. This should be its approach at election time just as at any other time.

As the General Election draws nearer the SSP should issue an appeal to Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidates and sitting MPs seeking re-election. It should declare its support for Labour candidates who can demonstrate in both words and deeds their support for:

• workers in struggle and repeal of the anti-union laws;
• opposition to privatisation and support for re-nationalisation;
• taxing the rich and cutting defence spending to rebuild the welfare state;
• defence of council housing; and
• the repeal of Labour's anti-asylum laws.

A failure by a Labour candidate to respond to such an appeal would help clarify the reasons for the SSP standing a candidate if it chose to do so. An SSP candidate would more clearly be seen to be standing to give workers a political voice in a constituency where the Labour candidate had sold out to New Labour.

Such an appeal could also be used among Labour members and supporters to encourage them to take up such issues in their local Labour Parties and unions. This would help to mobilise support for such policies and provide a basis for unity in action on a longer-term basis.

The key issue for the SSP and the working class in Scotland, as in the rest of Britain, is working- class political representation and the need for the working class to find a representative political voice. The Labour Party has traditionally acted as an inadequate but real avenue for the unions and working-class people to express their aspirations and fight for political change. Blair's 'reforms' have gone a long way to ending that role.

But many unions are still firmly attached to the Labour Party. Millions of trade unionists still vote Labour. Any socialist who believes that the emancipation of the working class can be achieved only by the working class itself must find a way to engage and work with these workers.

But, like the SSP's 'Make the Break' campaign, the decision by the National Council to press ahead with attempting to stand an SSP candidate in every Scottish seat is at odds with the need to draw workers into struggle against New Labour and to re-assert the centrality of class in politics.