The Rise and Demise of the SSP – one woman’s personal view

Norma Anderson, now a member of Solidarity, joined the SSP after 1999 election of Tommy Sheridan. This is the first of two articles in which Norma charts the rise and demise of the SSP from her own personal perspective and asks what lessons can be learned from the phenomenal ascension and spectacular fall of the Scottish Socialist Party

Who can remember their feelings of joy at seeing the Thatcher government overturned by a Labour Party led by Tony Blair in the 1997 general election? Who can ever forget their feelings of joy at seeing 6 Scottish Socialist MSPs returned to Holyrood in 2003? And who could have believed that, in both these cases, that feeling of joy was to end in such abject despair?
	Possibilities for a new Scottish party of the left arose, as initial hope in Blair and New Labour turned to disappointment.

We all know what went wrong with the Labour Party but who can say with any real authority that they can tell the story of what went wrong with the SSP project? At best, one can only give a subjective account told from a personal perspective – which I am about to do here. I make no claims to any great theoretical overview. As an ordinary working class woman coming into active politics this is what I saw and felt. I hope my small contribution can be the beginning of a debate about how a once great party which commanded the hopes and aspirations of a significant section of the Scottish working class rose so quickly, and then was – just as quickly - tragically destroyed. I would argue that the problems which led to the break up of the SSP began long before the Tommy Sheridan defamation action and had their roots in a small clique of members led by an even smaller clique of gender feminists, determined to foist their own peculiar brand of identity politics on the rest of us.

	When I voted for the SSP in the 1999 election, I was not involved in politics at all. I had never even been a member of a political party. My vote went to the SSP because it was led by Tommy Sheridan. This may or may not be the 'best' way to select which political party to vote for – the arguments against 'personality politics' have, again, been well rehearsed elsewhere. However, I only had Tommy's personal appeal to guide me at that time. Maybe it was because I lived in Elgin, but there was little or no literature available, no media coverage and no way of contacting anyone for more information! But I knew who Tommy Sheridan was! I had followed Tommy's career from the poll tax demonstrations onwards and I was impressed by the things he was doing. Not only did he argue against the hated tax, he went to jail for demonstrating against it! Whilst serving his sentence for this act of defiance he was elected to Glasgow City Council. To the politically minded outsider here was somebody to believe in. It wasn't hero worship – it was relief that, at last, there was somebody who had broken through the wall of silence and given a voice to the politics of the left.
Thousands of people, young and old, were attracted to the SSP.

It was a year later that I saw a poster advertising an open meeting of the SSP in the upstairs room of a local pub. The 'guest speaker' was Steve Arnott, the SSP Regional Organiser for the Highlands & Islands. I attended that meeting, joined the SSP that Tuesday evening, did my first political stall the following Saturday and within 3 months was both the Treasurer of the local branch as well as the SSP candidate in a local council by-election.

We achieved 12% of the vote in that election despite my inexperience as a candidate. If I had to analyse that vote I'd say that some was due to me being a local candidate, some was due to the fact that some of the voters were genuinely pleased to have a socialist to vote for but the two main reasons for the size of the vote was the work put in by comrades across the North of Scotland and a visit from Tommy Sheridan. We leafleted and door stepped the ward for weeks. We got into trouble with the returning officer because of a tiny sticker that had been stuck to a lamppost. We had comrades from Inverness and from Aberdeen pounding the streets and pushing up the vote. And we also had Tommy speaking at a public meeting in a local school. I was soon to learn that this was not an unusual event; that Tommy spent most of his life travelling the country speaking at public meetings, by-elections and to the press. Apart from Steve Arnott and Graeme McIver (the Regional Organisers of the Highlands & Islands and the South of Scotland respectively) there was nobody in the SSP who could even look at Tommy's annual mileage – far less match it!

I was extremely enthusiastic in those early days as well. I must have been a real pain in the proverbial backside. I remember phoning and emailing Steve Arnott regularly with some bright idea which I was convinced would 'revolutionise' the party!

The first thing anyone has to learn when entering into left wing politics is the power of initials. In no particular order: CWI, SWP, ISM, CPGB, ISG, SP, IWW, SLP, WPRM, CP, SRSM etc, etc, etc! What these initials really represent is the many splits that have overtaken the left over the years. I really believed when I joined the SSP that I had joined a party which was going to make a mockery of the old idea that if you had two lefties locked in a room they would come out with at least 3 opinions between them!

In the Highlands, away from the ‘socialist citadel’ of Glasgow, it all seemed a bit bizarre to us. We were building branches, running successful campaigns (water charges, Scrap the Council Tax, stop the war), holding our own in the local media, and recruiting members hand over fist, with no real input from the many groupings that seemed to dominate discussions at Conference and in the central belt. Between 1999 and 2003 we went from two active members in the Highlands and Islands to over 250 members with twelve branches. We went from less than 1% of the vote to nearly winning a list seat with 5.24% of the vote. There was a feeling that we were united around the socialist programme of the SSP and moving forward.  I believe this was probably a feeling replicated in most areas of the country at that time.

Highland protest against care home privatisation.

The first inkling I had that I may have been seriously deluded about this came with the move to what became known within the party – somewhat misleadingly - as 50/50.

All of a sudden, some women within the SSP were declaring themselves as an oppressed minority who were facing prejudice on a daily basis – not in their everyday lives, but within the SSP itself. And the only way to 'fix' this problem was to introduce a mechanism of positive discrimination, not one which would 'ensure' that women in general were treated more fairly, but one which would ensure that 4 out of 8 top of the regional list candidates would be women. Lifelong feminists like myself were told – in all seriousness - that it was the height of feminism and democracy for women in half the country to be denied the chance of being democratically selected to represent their party, as long as men in the other half were denied that same democratic right!

Together with many other comrades, many of them women, I predicted that this would be a divisive measure that would be of no benefit whatsoever to the party. In fact, the exact terminology I used was that this measure would split the party apart! Unfortunately, and in the long run, I was proved correct!

That is not to say the subsequent split between Solidarity and the SSP that occurred four years later developed simply along these lines. Some who backed our view then are still in the SSP, others who were on a different side of the fence are valued comrades in Solidarity.

But the breaking of the consensus methodology which had built the SSP (‘there’s more that unites us than divides us. Let’s proceed on that basis and put the rest to one side’) indicated the emergence of a grouping which wanted to set their own agenda regardless of whether huge numbers of members thought it necessary or desirable. That breaking of consensus politics and the resultant emergence of a leadership clique ultimately paved the way for what I now see as the disastrous coup against the leadership of Tommy Sheridan in 2004. 

But I run ahead of myself.  At the 2002 conference I remember making a speech opposing 50/50 as did some of the leading female comrades in the party. We were, however, lined up against most of the leadership of the party – even Tommy, who seemed convinced by the arguments of the same glib fantasy feminists who would eventually turn on him like a pack of wolves. I particularly remember Rosie Kane, who was at that time the SSP Environment spokesperson, giving a rousing speech in favour of 50/50. In her speech she outlined her journey into the SSP via the environmental group who were opposing the M74. What she did not tell us was how, without 50/50, or any other form of ‘positive’ discrimination being in place, the SSP had managed, in every election in which we stood, to strike a gender balance of candidates roughly in line with the balance of the membership – i.e. about 1/3 of the membership were women and about 1/3 of candidates were women. Rosie also never gave us an explanation as to how she had managed, despite the many drawbacks she experienced, and without the assistance of 50/50, to become the party's environment spokesperson as well as a candidate for Holyrood following the death of Donald Dewar.

It was a close run thing but the vote was lost. Steve Arnott urged us to accept the decision of conference, but the terms in which the debate had been conducted left some permanent damage.  Lifelong feminists like myself and Anne MacLeod were made to feel like Uncle Tom’s for defending the right of regions and branches to select their own candidate free of interference.  Male comrades who opposed the move – many with very radical views on gender and sexuality - were characterised as ‘sexist Neanderthals’.

Personally, I was devastated. I had never experienced sexism in the SSP and if I had I would have made my feelings about it clear. I hate discrimination of any kind but, with the possible exception of the early days of the civil rights movement, I do not believe that ‘positive’ discrimination is an effective tool with which to counteract it – especially where that led to the effective debarring of women from selection in half the country.

When I first stood as a candidate for the SSP, I did so simply because there was nobody else in the branch who could do it. In that sense, I was the best person for the job. In subsequent elections, I was nominated in my own right – not by default - and I felt a real sense of achievement because I knew that I had worked hard to be the kind of candidate the party could be proud of!

Ironically, in the 2007 Holyrood elections, Solidarity – with no 50/50 mechanism – selected women (democratically, and on their own merits wouldn’t you know) to stand top of the list in 5 out of 8 regions while the SSP reversed their policy to allow a man to stand instead of a woman in the North-East, and ended up with only a minority of women candidates.

Nevertheless, much of this bitter dispute passed the media and the wider public by – thank goodness. And at the 2003 elections we – it was still we in those days – had fantastic success, electing six socialist MSPs to the Scottish Parliament and lighting a red touch paper to Scottish politics.  It should have been a recipe for continued success – but a pattern had been set that would spiral out of control over the next few years and rip the SSP apart.

Norma Anderson

This article will be completed in a future issue of the Democratic Green Socialist.