Peter Ross: Socialists who go it alone

Published on Saturday 23 April 2011 11:07

ON A long, sun-baked Good Friday, a woman in her early fifties is sitting behind a trestle table in the pedestrianised shopping street in Motherwell. She has short silver hair, red boots, and a tartan rosette. Behind her, taped to the windows of a shut-down shop, banners urge passers-by to vote Solidarity. "Roll-up! Roll-up!" she says through a megaphone. "Elect a Sheridan back into the Scottish Parliament."

It might have been Gail Sheridan speaking those words had she not, in late January, decided not to go ahead with a much-trumpeted run for office. In fact, this is Lynn Sheridan, sibling of the imprisoned Tommy, a lecturer in social work at Glasgow Caledonian University, who is standing as her party's lead candidate on the Central Scotland regional list. She is Solidarity's best hope of electing an MSP; in Glasgow, the party has joined a coalition backing George Galloway.

"I think it would be very nice to see a Sheridan back in Holyrood," she says. "Tommy might not be there, but his big sister is going to fight the fight as he did."

She's talking about the fight for social justice. First though, Solidarity must battle for every vote with the Scottish Socialist Party. In Motherwell, strolling in the sun past the Solidarity stall, there are several men and women wearing Rangers and Celtic tops, displaying their allegiances before the crucial Easter Sunday match. The rivalry between the two left-wing parties can, at times, match the Old Firm for bitterness and rancour. For Solidarity, the SSP are "collaborators" in a police conspiracy to bring down Tommy Sheridan. For the SSP, Solidarity is little more than a personality cult.

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• Peter Ross: Socialists who go it alone

Sheridan co-founded the Scottish Socialist Party in 1998 and a year later became its first MSP. At the 2003 election their numbers grew to six. Following lurid newspaper reports that he had attended a swingers' club, and a split with the SSP leadership over evidence it gave against him during his successful defamation trial, Sheridan formed Solidarity in 2006. Though he came close to re-election in 2007, Solidarity has no MSPs and must campaign from the unenviable position of having its founder and poster boy in prison for perjury. The last election, meanwhile, was a disaster for the SSP. The party lost every seat and secured only 10 per cent of the votes it had won four years previously.

The result is that at the very moment when a unified socialist party might have real popular appeal, surfing a wave of anti-cuts fear and anti-banks anger, the SSP and Solidarity will instead take votes from each other, each making it less likely that the other party will win a Holyrood seat.

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Both sides admit that this is "a tragedy for the left", but no-one seems able to see beyond the electoral suicide pact.

Policy-wise, there is little to choose between the parties. Both are committed to the establishment of independent socialist republics, to opposing the cuts in public services, and to balancing the books by replacing council tax with a new income tax which will hit hard at the very wealthy. But any sort of rapprochement is highly unlikely. Lynn Sheridan says Solidarity would welcome the SSP's membership, but not its leadership. The SSP's Frances Curran, meanwhile, dismisses out of hand the idea of reunification. "It would be like regrouping with the remnants of a Tommy Sheridan fan club," she says. "It's not a political organisation."

Curran, 49, was elected in 2003 but lost her seat in 2007. She believes that the SSP can emerge on 6 May with at least two list MSPs - herself in Glasgow and Jim Bollan in the West of Scotland. No chance, says Lynn Sheridan: "They are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. At the last Holyrood election, Solidarity had three times the votes of the other left parties put together. So I think they're on some kind of drugs, because that's not gong to happen. They are going to be decimated."

Certainly, the SSP would appear to face a substantial threat from George Galloway in Glasgow, though Curran talks this down. "He is not in the consciousness of people in Scotland. He's been a London MP for a while. He's lived in London for 20 years. He doesn't have a track record up here. George thinks his celebrity is bigger than it really is. So, no, I don't think he's going to get elected."

Spending time with Curran as she hands out campaign literature and talks to people outside the Mecca Bingo in Parkhead, it's clear that there is a public appetite, at least in this part of the city, for politicians to whom voters can relate. That rules out much of the Labour mainstream. From the perspective of Glasgow's east end, Ed Miliband might as well be from Venus. Two women with Farmfoods bags nod approvingly when Curran, who grew up in nearby Barlanark, tells them she is a lone parent who works part-time and receives Working Tax Credit.

"We need a party that can help us here," says Sandra Smith, a small greying woman who has decided to vote for Curran. "My family have always voted Labour before, but things are getting worse. Everyone's losing their jobs. My brother needs a lot of support, but he's getting his disability benefits taken away."

There is a lot of anger. The SSP, with their "Tax The Rich" banner taped to the front of the Bank of Scotland, have an opportunity to tap into that widespread sense of grievance and translate it into votes. For both they and Solidarity, this election is a chance to re-establish themselves in a minor way and create a modest base from which to build.To do that, they both need the vote of Jimmy, a middle-aged man in Motherwell, who said, despairingly, "See these cuts? Scotland now is like the punk rockers sang in the Seventies - no future."

The future for the SSP and Solidarity is equally uncertain, but if they are to have one, they must find a way to convince Jimmy, and many others who feel as he does, that they will fight on his behalf and not against each other.