Welcome to Tommy's world

All the MSPs are expected to be there: all, that is, except the six Scottish Socialist Party members who will boycott the event because they do not agree with the links between the Crown and parliament and, particularly, because a senior member of the Royal Family will be present.

As one senior member of the SSP put it yesterday: "It’s Prince Charles and all that b******s."

The new session of the parliament will begin officially tomorrow. All the MSPs, new and old, will be called individually to the front of the debating chamber, asked to raise their right hands and swear an oath or an affirmation of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen.

MSPs have to swear either the religious oath or the secular affirmation before they can take their seats. The oath is simple and straightforward. It states: "I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God."

But it has produced an extraordinarily difficult dilemma for the SSP MSPs. They do not approve of the monarchy and they find the idea of swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen repellent. But if they do not swear the oath or affirmation, they will not be allowed to take their seats.

This conundrum took up quite a lot of time at the Scottish Socialist Party conference this year and, after weighty debate, the party decided that any new MSPs should declare their loyalty to the Queen, but only after prefacing the declaration with a statement questioning the need for such an oath.

So this is what will happen. The six SSP members will recite the affirmation and their statement of rebellion before taking their seats as members of the Scottish Parliament.

It is also likely that, instead of raising their right hands, they will clench their fists in defiance, trying to signal their solidarity with the workers’ struggle.

This is exactly the same sort of gesture that Tommy Sheridan adopted in 1999. He made headlines by clenching his fist and questioning the need for the oath. But at that stage, he was the only SSP MSP in the parliament. This year he will be joined by five others, a far more formidable group of militant left-wingers to challenge the parliamentary consensus.

Rosie Kane, one of the SSP’s new breed and an MSP for Glasgow, has already warned the public and the media what to expect from the SSP MSPs in the chamber. "They’re going to be amazed at all the madness and craziness that’s going to happen in there," she said.

She is not the only one to give some hint of what the rest of the MSPs can expect. Frances Curran, elected on the West of Scotland list, has promised to "take the struggle off the streets" and "into parliament".

She said: "We’re going to open the door to the Scottish parliament and say ‘Come in, it belongs to us’."

And Colin Fox, elected on the Lothians list, defended his party’s plans to tax the rich with the warning: "So look out up there at Jenners and Harvey Nicks, here we come."

Carolyn Leckie, an SSP MSP for Central Scotland, has long experience of disruptive politics, having led a walkout by hospital staff in Glasgow.

Mr Sheridan has spent the past four years making some of the best speeches in the parliament, but he has also tried to disrupt the parliament on several occasions.

Sir David Steel, the Presiding Officer, was forced to cut Mr Sheridan’s microphone off on numerous occasions, because he continued to protest long after he had been told to shut up and sit down.

Just before the parliament rose for the election campaign, Sir David cut Mr Sheridan’s microphone and was on the verge of expelling the SSP conveyer from the chamber for continuing to shout objections to the war in Iraq.

The only reason Mr Sheridan was allowed to remain in the chamber was because the Presiding Officer recognised that he appeared to want to be thrown out, and Sir David did not want to oblige him.

The Scottish Socialists are well schooled in the art of disruptive politics. They grew up fighting against bigger party systems and finding any way possible to cause as much trouble as they can.

Usually, this takes the form of demonstrations and non-violent protests, but these are sometimes used to disrupt the meetings of others by making as much noise as possible.

What is certain is that all the SSP MSPs will try to make their mark as soon as possible in the new session.

Taking the lead from Mr Sheridan, they will object and argue with the Executive as much as possible, using every parliamentary device they can, in order to achieve what they cannot achieve by votes, because their group is too small.

They can be expected to raise numerous points of order, table dozens of amendments and hundreds of written questions and motions to further their agenda.

The SSP will have a member on the parliamentary bureau which will give the party a say in the organisation of parliamentary business and the allocation of committee places.

All the SSP MSPs will be on committees, some of them on more than one, where they will try to influence the shape of reports and the questioning of witnesses.

Hugh Kerr, the SSP’s press officer, insisted yesterday that his party’s MSPs would not set out deliberately to disrupt the work of the Executive.

"We will not be disrupting proceedings. We will be bringing new ideas and maybe a different style. Our members will have vision and colour but they will only be disruptive in terms of ideas."

But his words of reassurance have not influenced MSPs from other parties. One Labour MSP described the SSP MSPs as "cranks" and another labelled them "militant lunatics", despairing of the trouble they expected them to cause.

What is clear is that, although Mr Kerr may insist that the SSP are not in the business of disrupting the parliament, the other parties expect them to do so simply because they have come across the SSP on too many occasions to reach any other view.

The arrival of six MSPs will give the SSP a much greater visible presence in the parliament and much more parliamentary time to articulate their vision of a Scottish socialist republic.

They will lodge members’ bills on the introduction of free school meals and the abolition of the council tax, hoping to build on Mr Sheridan’s success in the last session in almost getting the total abolition of warrant sales.

Warrant sales were abolished by the Executive under pressure from a coalition of interests led by Mr Sheridan, but ministers then introduced another measure which kept the provision of warrant sales as a last resort, thwarting Mr Sheridan’s hopes.

The SSP hopes to be able to measure the success of their MSPs by the parts of their manifesto which they have managed to force on to the statute book; but very few, if any, of their plans are likely to be accepted by the other parties.

They might then be forced to gauge the success of their MSPs by the impact they have made in disrupting the work of the other parties in the parliament and, given their track record at the front-line of militant politics, this could be considerable.