There are signs that Solidarity, Tommy Sheridan’s new party, could be going into meltdown, not a surprise to many people. Here is a posting by Graham Campbell, their former Glasgow convenor, which is finding its way round the internet. It’s got some harsh, but recognisably true, things to say about the organisation’s two largest components.
I was the Glasgow Convener for Solidarity from December 2006 till June 2007 so was central to the party’s election campaign and branch organisation/ coordination.
Firstly I echo the comments made that Ruth should do the honourable thing and resign but Lee is quite right that she will obviously not. I assume the reason for the limited political response
from Solidarity so far is surely that it being Xmas, no one is around to gather the National Steering Group to make a detailed collective party statement; and Tommy’s and Aamer’s defence campaigns have beenin full swing.
Ruth was one of the key movers in defence of Tommy inside the SSP, and her election was a great surprise to her more than anyone. But she struggled with the quadruple burden of being councillor, mother, Glasgow LGBT Centre Coordinator (they refused to allow her to go part- time as agreed before the election) and has caved into careerist pressure.
With Glasgow and South Lanarkshire being Scotland’s only two Labour controlled councils to survive the May 2007 election under PR/STV (most of the other 30 Scottish councils are SNP/Lib Dem coalitions); Purcell (who is an out gay man risen to the top on the back of a mostly very backward crowd of New Labour councillors) has moved to secure his narrow Glasgow City Council majority from a coalition of 22 SNP and 5 Green councillors. Ruth was prominent on all the summer strike picket lines in Glasgow but has been awol during most of the 7 week long daycare workers strike – when she was negotiating with Purcell.
It may be that Solidarity can make a complaint to the Election Commission to call a by-election since I believe she is the first councillor to defect under the new PR/STV electoral system.
But clearly this is more than a setback but a hammer blow to Solidarity. It also is a setback for the Left in Britain but we have only ourselves to blame. It is also a hammer blow for the concept of the broad, socialist multi-platform party of the electoral variety. This model is finished in the short term in Britain.
The far left keeps kidding itself and others that they are reaching out and being broadminded when in fact they act as narrow-minded and control-freakish as ever. The left as it is currently
organised is incapable of keeping the unity they all call for or of acting in a revolutionary humanist way of tolerating difference of perspective and viewpoint.
Those who agree with our basic socialist principles are numerous in Scottish society but we know 70% of far left voters switched to the SNP in May 2007 to get rid of New Labour. To win back their confidence, we have to have leaders who can trusted and are accountable, independently minded rank and file activists and satisfy the democracy test.
What I read of what the SWP internal conference document posted here matches what I know to be the case from working with Glasgow SWP members. The written words match what has been said to me in terms of Solidarity not making the breakthrough, not having serious orientation to the movements, and not being essentially different from the old party despite all the talk of “new-ness”.
The SWP find the CWI’s presence and over-sized influence inside the party intolerable, as I do, which is mainly why I resigned from Solidarity at the Conference on November 11th. The
CWI’s pro-racist, pro-imperialist and Islamophobic positions on immigration border controls, Mohammed Atif Siddique, Israel/Palestine, caused great offence to me and many other comrades. I’m told that despite us all being called “apologists for terrorism” in Iraq by CWI members at Solidarity Conference, sweetness and light still prevails within the party’s NSG. Solidarity at least had the virtue of a much better atmosphere than the previous organisation, at least until real policy- making differences were raised.
The CWI’s behaviour prompted several resignations including my own, while the SWP’s behaviour prompted council candidate and Bengali activist Akhtar Khan and Esther Sassaman (from both
SWP and Solidarity) to resign.
But apart from the obvious negative impact of the 2006 split in the far left – the main political reasons for the project’s failure is the essential incompatibility of the SWP view of Solidarity as a broad coalition (much nearer the truth and to what’s necessary at this stage) with the CWI’s very traditional workeristconception of a “socialist party”.
In reality we had a hybrid moving between the two, Solidarity being composed from 3 essential locations within the classstruggle
1. trade unionists,
2. anti-war protesters;
3. community/anti- racist activists.
Each sector representing legitimate sectoral or communal interests of part of the working class, and reflecting the recent political traditions and methods stemming from these legitimate experiences within those sections of the class that have been in struggle.
As a Black radical activist I insist that any new socialist project must not be yet another white; university-educated , middle-class, middle-aged- blokes club and must have a consistent understanding of race, gender, sexuality and identification of oppression as central to its conception. The response of the backwards elements in the CWI or those influenced by them, towards serious anti-anti-racist politics at Conference convinced me that Solidarity is incapable of developing along those lines or of making it a priority. If it’s not consistently anti-racist; it can’t be consistently socialist or revolutionary.
The SWP rightly view the lack of Solidarity’s development as symptomatic of a repeat of the SSP’s failures to reach out beyond its “bread and butter”-question comfort zones; or to
orient correctly towards the anti-war and anti-racism movements. But they have been an essential part of ensuring this outcome once the unifying factor of an immediate election campaign was gone. It was impossible to motivate the CWI and SWP to act as Solidarity members first.
These two supposedly Marxist currents have refused to develop new ideas and ways of working to break down far left sectarianism – beyond the electoral questions – in order to attract
the non-aligned socialist forces outside. The splits obviously further discredit the idea of socialism and left unity, and put the socialist revolution further into a future that looks uncertain and which ought to be a favourable environment for growth of anticapitalist sentiments in the working class.
The SWP is quietly on its way out of Solidarity despite having carried majority support for the resolutions it put forward at Conference and indeed worked hard to build the election campaign. The non-aligned sections of Solidarity are now too depleted to bear the dog-fights between SWP and CWI over trade union and student orientation. The CWI trade unionists in charge of Glasgow UNISON played an appalling role first opposing, th
en isolating the daycare workers strike. While they were right to challenge the CWI’s trade union record, the SWP were consistent in their reluctance to build Solidarity branches wherever it would cut across building the SWP’s branches.
Had they built Solidarity branches in areas where we weren’t able to mount much activity (in about 40% of Glasgow untouched by leafletting) we would certainly have got more councillors elected (we came very close with 800 votes and 4th place in East Centre ward. Ruth Black would not then have been 100% of our representation) . Maybe even got those extra 2000 votes to get Tommy back in. Who knows?
The SWP tried from the start to limit Solidarity to being merely an electoral “united front of a special type” given their opposition to an “SSP Mark 2” and their move to more public political work by selling their paper. Anyone in Respect or the pre-Split SSP will be familiar with this pattern of SWP waining and fluxing interest.
Solidarity rightly had no ban on public platform material – a welcome change from the ingrained institutionalised sectarianism within the SSP. What was disturbing was not public CWI and SWP appearances but that they made little or no mention of Solidarity in their work.
More than once I mobilised locals and indeed Tommy along to postworkers picketlines to find SWP members (Glasgow Uni students and their SWP minder) there with no Solidarity identity or materials. I gave them some!
Tommy was as usual very warmly received by the workers and he arranged for a striker to come on his radio show. The posties were very generous in their welcome to the students (who
had made iced fairy cakes which they liked!) but they obviously did not take this new “vanguard of the revolutionary party” too seriously.
We were right to try to rescue something from the ashes of the SSP by forming Solidarity – and to the extent that Ruth Black helped us keep a flag flying for socialism we opened the door to that possibility of rescue. Had Tommy won election that possibility would have been greater but objective forces and pressures squeezing the Green vote as well as the far left’s support meant we could not float in a declining waters.
I could go on with these anecdotes but I won’t. My brief conclusion is that the solution to the crisis of the left cannot come from amongst Solidarity and SSP forces but from a credible and significant break to the left from outside of it – either from New Labour, the trade unions or even the SNP.
Ironically, some of the areas we agree on – building the Scottish wing of the National Shop Stewards Network, and the Scottish Network of Stop the War Coalitions – may bring us all into much closer cooperation than before.
Tags: Solidarity, Scotland
Liam redux 
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