Well, perhaps. But it won’t be all that it appears to be.

There may be a stampede to cross the Labour box, if only to fend off a Cameron government, complete with public spending cuts that will ruin Scotland’s very public sector-dependent economy.

That, and to rule out a reprise of the Thatcher years, wherein the Tories, despite being utterly rejected by the Scots, ruled and wrecked us for nearly two decades.

There may also be a bit of an anti-SNP protest, or a feeling that there is no point in voting for a party that could never form a UK government. Nonetheless, Scotland’s status as a Labour stronghold is almost certainly on the slide.

Since devolution in 1999, a pattern has been emerging. Labour may have been in power for the first two terms, with the SNP only squeaking to victory in 2007, but seismic shifts have been occurring beneath the surface.

Political entrenchment is breaking up, particularly among the under-40s, who often switch parties from election to election, and express different preferences for their first (constituency) and second (regional) votes. The causes include a collapse of party and trade union membership, and particularly in payment of the political levy.

But these are UK-wide trends. What makes Scotland different is the proportional representation (PR) system, which enables smaller parties to break through, as in 2003, when the Scottish Socialist Party won six seats, and the Greens ran away with seven. This renders voting with your conscience more than a token gesture, in contrast to traditional first-past-the-post elections. Tactical voting also plays a part. The SNP victory in 2007 was a triumph of tactical voting, with the party winning more seats on the regional list – the so-called ‘top-up’ vote – than in the constituency vote, where it trailed Labour by 16 seats. This suggested that the anti-Labour forces rallied to the nationalists, if only to break the deadlock of Scottish politics.The issue of independence, though not top of everyone’s ‘most wanted’ list, is central to what happens next.

No turning back

Certainly, there is no turning back. The Scottish Labour Party supports the call for a stronger Scottish parliament. And even the Tories, who have quietly dropped the word ‘Unionist’ from their Conservative and Unionist party label, can feel the way the wind is blowing.

While Holyrood may have done less than many Scots would have liked, it has passed some progressive legislation. This includes free personal care for the over-65s, scrapping tuition fees, the smoking ban and the staged reduction – with a view to abolition – of prescription charges. All have proved to be broadly acceptable, if not trumpet-blastingly popular.

That the ‘graduate endowment tax’, implemented to replace tuition fees, has now also been abolished, while in England a top-up fee, a form of graduate tax, has been introduced on top of tuition fees, suggests that the north/south divergence is becoming more marked.

Not that Scotland has much to be proud of. It was Scottish Labour MPs, after all, who helped drive through the foundation hospitals legislation, when English MPs threatened to rebel. The same foundation hospitals legislation that does not and never did apply to Scotland. And it was Scottish Labour MPs who ensured top-up fees for students at English universities too.

As for the referendum, Alex Salmond has rather cleverly billed it as a chance for Scots to ‘have their say’ – are those in opposition really going to insist that we shouldn’t?

The SNP’s game plan almost certainly extends beyond this Westminster election to 2011 and the next Holyrood poll. If the opposition insist on denying a referendum, it could rebound on them, with the SNP increasing its majority at the next Scottish elections. After a year of Cameron’s Tories, or a hung parliament, or an increasingly savage Labour one, Scotland could well be mobilising for independence.

But what would independence look like? Where is the vision? The SNP’s is a soulless one, a corporate pamphlet of golf courses and ‘open for business’ schools, hospitals and universities. The spectre of Ireland looms large.

The pro-independence left, for various reasons, is not in a strong position right now. But the various forces that combined to get 100,000 onto the anti-Iraq war march in Glasgow in 2003, and got six unreservedly socialist MSPs and seven Greens into the Scottish parliament three months later, could do much to furnish an alternative vision.

Huge mobilisations

While the political elite continue to eat away at the public sector, there are huge mobilisations by trade unions, anti-poverty groups, the SSP and the left-wing rump of the nationalists, waging war against cuts and privatisation, and against stealth taxes that hurt those on low incomes while leaving the rich with extra change in their pockets.

The call to scrap the council tax, a flagship SSP policy in 2003, and voted down within Holyrood, has proved so popular that the SNP has adopted it. It has noted the huge support for abolition from not only the left and the anti-poverty alliances, but from the small business sector too, which sees, in the adoption of a local income tax, a freeing up of the ‘marginal propensity to spend’ – one of the mainstays of a local economy.

On a more radical note, cancelling Trident and thereby freeing up millions of pounds of public money is a call taken up across the board, from CND through the hard left and way over to the gentler slopes of environmentalism and the church. Renationalising the railways and ferries, a move supported vigorously by the RMT union, as well as the buses, expanding the network and making it free, was the SSP’s key policy in 2007.

Free public transport is a welcome and timely idea that has already been implemented in some places (none of them in Scotland, alas) and enjoys enormous support.

So does the campaign for nutritious, free school meals, which continues long after the bill was twice rejected at Holyrood. Interestingly, the idea has been taken up, albeit piecemeal, by local authorities and by the SNP, who are rolling it out in primary schools.

This goes to show that, when ideas are good, well thought-out, and popular, they can filter through somehow. So how about a progressively taxed, public sector-friendly, Trident and council tax-free Scotland with free school meals and free buses? That would do for starters.

Roz Paterson writes for Scottish Socialist Voice

Scotland went to the polls, for the first time in a long time, with something almost akin to hope. Labour won, but not by enough to form a government, and went into coalition with the Lib Dems.

At the next Holyrood elections, the same team was returned to power. But it was a good election for small, radical parties, with the Greens returning seven MSPs and the Scottish Socialist Party six, thanks to the regional list top-up system, which gave everyone a second vote, counted on a proportional representation basis.

It made what would have been the most anodyne of all parliaments, given its limited remit and absence of anything even akin to government party rebels, an occasionally remarkable place. Once in a while, the political consensus got a run for its money.

Now we head to the polls again, in what are being called the ‘independence elections’, not least because they mark the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Union – and because opinion polls consistently suggest that the SNP could overtake Labour as the biggest party in Holyrood. Which explains why the likes of John Reid and Tony Blair are vaulting the border to warn us against such folly because, er, our beloved entrepreneurs will stampede for the exit and the gentle river Tweed will be patrolled by armed guards hell-bent on stopping us visiting our aunties in Berwick.

Curiously enough, the more these big guns blast hot air, the more we flock to the banner of independence.

The call for independence is in fact a very pragmatic one, and a measure of how far we’ve come from the tentative early days of 1999, when devolution was as far as most people were prepared to go.What our experience of the Scottish Parliament has made clear is that we need more, not less, democracy.

Why? Because nothing is more sickening than hearing well-paid, career MSPs duck every difficult issue by reminding you that, of course, it’s a reserved matter. Be it war, or want, it’s up to Westminster. And frankly, the rest of the powers might as well be reserved too, as Scottish Labour do nothing if not their London master’s bidding.

We do have some marginally better things up here, such as free care for the elderly (though in practice, it’s not so simple) and no tuition fees (though it makes little difference if you don’t have the money to fund yourself for three to five years). But we also have higher rates of poverty, ill-health and premature death; a disproportionate number of our troops are being sent to Iraq; and we alone get to house the UK’s stock of nuclear weapons – and within a few miles of our biggest conurbation too. Imagine that happening near London.

All of the above was true at the last elections in 2003, of course, but people were not yet ready to relinquish their faith in the mainstream alternative to the Tories.This election will be different.

This election, Labour seems set to become a minority. Its local representatives are also likely to be swept out of the town and city councils they have run like private fiefdoms by the new broom of the single transferable vote.This is despite the fact that Labour politicians voted for the least democratic version of it available, on top of massive pay-offs to those who agreed not to stand this time, as the number of council seats is to shrink.

They’ve also fiddled with the ballot paper, on which the vote that last time was the first vote is now the second, and the second is now the first, with a council vote thrown into the mix. Confused? They clearly hope we will be.

Even so, the SNP seems likely to win, though not by enough to form a government alone.This will force them into coalition, possibly with the Lib Dems and perhaps even the Greens.

Don’t get too excited. This isn’t nearly as promising as it sounds.

Sure, the SNP is anti-war and anti- Trident, pro-independence and against poverty. These are the headlines, and the reason why most of the people who vote for them will vote for them.

But scratch beneath the surface, and you have a party that seeks to make corporate taxation the lowest in the UK, in a bid to woo the multinationals who have already ravaged swathes of Scotland, burning up the workforce, swallowing government subsidies whole and then pissing off to sweatshop economies elsewhere. And a party that may talk bombastically of its ambitions for Scotland, but more quietly of its intention to delay an independence referendum until the end of its first term in office, around 2010.

The Lib Dems may have called for the abolition of the council tax in England, but as coalition partners here, they voted down a Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) bill to do just that. Likewise, they didn’t mention the war, even as Charles Kennedy headlined on anti-war platforms. The super-right turn the party has made under Menzies Campbell is well underway here.

As for the Greens, their power would be marginal in any kind of coalition, even if some media predictions are right and they get ten MSPs. Mark Ballard, probably the most left-leaning of the Greens’ parliamentary representatives, says they would only go into coalition on a ‘confidence and supply’ basis, as practised by Green parties in New Zealand and Sweden.

In exchange for some pledges – the red-line one being no construction of new nuclear power stations – the Greens would support the government in votes of confidence and in supply – that is, budget – votes.Thus they would avoid having to flush their manifesto down the pan, a la the Lib Dems, but may not escape having to shore up a noxious government, as the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista has had to do in Italy.

For the SSP, this promises to be a troublesome election, in that the left has been split with former SSP convenor Tommy Sheridan contesting seats with his Solidarity party.

That said, the SSP is strongly identified with our campaigns for free, nutritious school meals (the parliamentary consultation for which attracted more responses than almost any other bill in the Scottish Parliament’s lifetime, and 98 per cent supportive too), the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the closure of Dungavel detention centre and an end to dawn raids, the abolition of the council tax and prescription charges, and for an independent Scottish socialist republic.

The SSP has been showing 3-4 per cent in the polls, a couple of points down on last time but consistently ahead of Solidarity, which means we are within reach of getting four MSPs (compared with six in 2003).This is remarkable, given that some parties only have to break wind and they get a half-page in the Daily Record, whereas the SSP barely breaks surface in any paper.

But even if we are wiped out electorally – unlikely, as we seem set to gain considerably in council seats – we are far from finished, being a grassroots, campaigning party from inception. Ours is the long fight – for socialism, for generational change – and 2007 is a detail. We still have the vast majority of our membership, the money we need to campaign comes in, and we’re building, fast, across even rural Scotland.

As for the election itself, it will be the usual fight of the giant billboards between the big parties.We may have proportional representation, sort of, but our electoral system remains stacked against the small parties because of money.

The SNP has discovered the game of effectively bribing backers, by offering corporate tax cuts. It has a war chest of £1.5million. We have £30,000. We get pensioners coming in to donate, in fivers and tenners, the money they didn’t pay in council tax in March.They have multimillionaire homophobe Brian Souter, of Stagecoach and the appalling campaign to Keep the Clause (28), swanning in with a cheque for £500,000.

When the dust settles after 3 May, if Labour goes into opposition, the momentum towards independence will be strong.The SSP will call, within or without Holyrood, for a referendum within a hundred days.We won’t be alone.

For us, it’s a stepping-stone towards socialism. It won’t deliver a just and equal society, but will make good the democratic deficit that saw the Scottish people vote for Labour election after election, and yet get Thatcher every time. It increases democracy for England too, not least because there will no longer be Scottish MPs in Westminster voting through Blair’s hated policies for England. After a referendum, and the shattering of the Labour deadlock, it will be up to us what we make of ourselves.

Unlike the Labour party, the SNP has no heartfelt place in the nation’s psyche. If the Scots Nats disappoint us, and they’re certainly showing all the signs, they won’t dig in for generations, which leaves the field open for the left.

Independence is a step forward, not back.We could break up the British state, open our borders, redistribute wealth, rebuild the health service and kick the private profiteers into touch. And that’s good news for everyone, in every corner of the fallen empire.

But it’s not quite business as usual. When you’ve had your party’s reputation dragged through the central sewer of the Scottish tabloids, you start to ask yourself some serious questions. And that’s just what we’ve been doing.

At our national conference in October, motions for constitutional change included examining the role of convenor – a post, incidentally, created for the benefit of Tommy Sheridan when he was elected as our sole MSP in 1999 – and debating possible alternatives, such as a collective convenorship. Many ideas were put on hold when a motion proposing the establishment of a commission to ‘investigate the existing structures, organisation, culture and constitution of the party’ was voted through overwhelmingly. This will happen next year, when a bit of time has opened up between us and ‘Tommygate’.

Another conference motion mooted the possibility of scrapping the 50:50 gender balance policy, which requires equal representation of women on the SSP national council, election lists and among conference delegates. This sank like a cement wellie, but there is no doubt that the 50:50 policy is a blunt instrument. It requires rather than facilitates, and has caused friction when, for instance, a branch cannot send a full delegation to the conference because it has too few women members. That’s a pity, but it doesn’t mean, in most members’ minds, that the 50:50 rule should be scrapped. What should be scrapped is the notion that having too few women members is somehow an immutable fact of nature.

And thus we move onto the less concise but infinitely more interesting question of how to change the culture of a socialist party from one in which men dominate (generally white, able-bodied, 30- to 50- year-old men, living in or around Scotland’s central belt) to one in which everyone’s voice has equal weight? Not easy. But not avoidable either.

So how do we engage women? And young people? And old ones? And people with disabilities? And people living on islands and farmsteads and distant housing schemes? And people who want to be in the SSP but are only interested in the environment or human rights issues?

Let’s consider the cliché of the socialist party branch meeting, with its 7.30pm start, gloomy venue and earnest, bearded speaker brandishing spidery notes. Would you pay £20 for a babysitter so you could come to that?

Evening meetings are difficult if you have kids, or don’t like walking home alone through dark streets, or have two part-time jobs that sometimes involve out-of-office hours. Or live somewhere so remote that travelling to them involves an 80-mile round trip.

But without meetings, how do you meet? Daytime events at weekends are one idea. So too is a virtual branch, where comrades in far-flung places talk to each other via the internet. Another possibility put forward involves twinning branches, so that urbanites can learn from their country cousins and vice versa. The weekly paper, the Scottish Socialist Voice, is a conduit of information too, with regular reports on street campaigns, branch activities and educational initiatives, allowing comrades to swap notes, longdistance.

For the single-issue people, through our new system of networks, which are autonomously organised, we can help people channel their energy into what they’re passionate about. The SSP women’s network has already made progress in various ways, drawing in women who have otherwise not attended SSP events. It organises its own meetings (weekends and daytime, creche included), hosts discussions at the annual Socialism event, formulates its own motions to conference and even produces its own literature, the most recent being a very successful pamphlet on prostitution.

The bid to engage members will inform the way we write our next parliamentary manifesto. This is our opportunity to set out our stall to a wider audience, to get across the message of who we are and what we hope for to the election-time window-shoppers. If we are to turn our young, small party into a mass movement for change, we can’t be doing with a manifesto written hurriedly by torchlight ten minutes into the printers’ deadline by a handful of party workers. We need the man from Shetland to tell us why large-scale wind farms won’t work, just as we need the young woman from Glasgow’s inner city to argue for a living maternity allowance.

To this end, we’re writing the manifesto on a ‘wiki’ space, an access-restricted internet site that allows users to edit and add, as well as scroll through previous versions. It is very user-friendly, and enables everyone involved (that is, every SSP member who asks to be included) to see stuff as it goes up.

Another important strand of thought is education. We need to bin those spidery notes. In place of the 45-minute lead-off followed by recitations on a Marxist- Leninist theme from the floor, we’re thinking theatre forum – where people roleplay through their ideas – and facilitators, flip-charts and Paulo Freire. It’s much more demanding, but it draws people into the circle of discussion and brings on new ideas about organising, campaigning and thinking.

The SSP, from its inception, has been about newness, about cracking the mould of the traditional socialist party and reaching outwards. We want socialism, open borders and justice, free health care, education for education’s sake, an end to war and a beginning to peace.

We have to keep pushing forward to achieve any of this. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, if you’re not being born, you’re already dying. And despite press notices to the contrary, we’re definitely not dying.

Now he’s gone, and the SSP is shuddering in his wake. We are about to refound our party, begin anew, with a few salutary lessons on board, all learned the hard way. This time we do politics, not heroes.

The story begins on the night of 9 November 2004. An emergency meeting of the SSP’s executive committee (EC) was convened at the party’s headquarters in Glasgow. Those in attendance listened in stunned silence as Tommy Sheridan, the party’s convenor and longest-standing Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP), admitted being the unnamed, married MSP in a sordid News of the World story published that week. He had, he confessed, visited the Manchester sex club mentioned in the article at least once since his muchpublicised marriage to Gail Healy, who had recently announced her pregnancy.

The EC asked him to stand down as convenor, citing family reasons if he wished. He refused, saying the newspaper had no proof and therefore he intended to fight the claims – and wanted the SSP to back him. The EC voted unanimously to call for his resignation. Not because of his sexual behaviour, but because he wanted the party to join him in a cover-up.

Tommy was angry, and left the meeting early. But he did resign. During the following week, he held court with the press, saying he had stepped down in order to be a proper ‘socialist dad’.

Fast forward a year and a bit. Out of the blue,Tommy denied he made any such confession to the EC. Instead, a ‘source close to him’ insinuated (to the media) that a ‘cabal of witches’, who had been jealous of him for years, had said this as part of a plot to bring him down. Those witches apparently included Rosie Kane and Carolyn Leckie, his fellow MSPs.

Perhaps they also included Barbara Scott, the minutes secretary who took the 9 November minutes and, from early 2006, was roundly abused by Tommy’s supporters for both recording too much salacious detail and contriving the whole thing as part of a plot to bring him down.

It got worse. As Tommy’s and the NoW’s legal teams prepared for the defamation hearing that Tommy had initiated, the minutes of the EC meeting became hot property. The NoW’s lawyers claimed they needed them for the defence, so the court demanded they be handed over. The EC agreed a strategy of defiance, as handing over minutes of internal party meetings was a breach of our privacy and set a dangerous precedent.

Alan McCombes, SSP national press and policy co-ordinator and a founder of the party, agreed to take sole possession of the minutes. When he refused to hand them over, he was jailed.

Meanwhile, back at Tommy’s home SSP branch, Cardonald, a motion was passed calling for the minutes to be destroyed. Tommy went one better by distributing the motion via his parliamentary email.

Then, at the SSP national council of 28 May 2006, he did an abrupt about-turn, leading the call for the minutes to be released to the court, presumably in the hope that Judge Lady Smith wouldn’t throw the book at him. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI, ex- Militant) delegates on the council, who had previously been hammering the case for defiance, about-turned along with him. That same afternoon, Tommy released an open letter directly accusing SSP members of framing him.

Before this,Tommy had repeatedly said that the SSP would not be dragged into his court action. Yet by publishing these accusations, 17 SSP members, cited by the NoW and Tommy’s lawyers, had the choice of either confirming a lie or telling the truth in court. Eleven of them repeated in court what Tommy had told the EC. Their evidence was reported, word for word, by an exultant, crowing Scottish press.

In the end, the jury found for Tommy. He left the court punching the air. In an exclusive with the Daily Record, a vehemently pro-Labour tabloid, he denounced those who testified against him as ‘scabs’. The Record, which paid Tommy £30,000 for the story, published pictures of four SSP members with the word ‘scab’ emblazoned across them.

For Tommy, this backfired badly. He said he would like to return as SSP convenor, and would put himself up for election against Colin Fox, the incumbent, if he received at least 25 nominations. He got nine. Meanwhile, the biggest branch in his home city of Glasgow issued a resounding vote of no confidence motion in him.

Thus he packed up and left. One fifth of the membership, including the SWP and the CWI, went with him.

Now let’s rewind a bit. When Tommy stood down, SSP members and supporters were knocked for six. When they learned, via their branch and regional organisers, as had been agreed with Tommy, that he was not the man they thought he was, some went into mourning.

That maybe sounds extreme, but it is hard to overstate what Tommy Sheridan meant to many socialists in Scotland. He was the working-class militant boy made good, who went to jail over the poll tax, who was carried by the crowd through Glasgow’s Queen Street Station on the day of his release, who raised his fist in the socialist salute when sworn into the Scottish Parliament in 1999, in defiance of the oath of allegiance to the queen.

When you campaigned on the streets, or canvassed at elections, you said, ‘The SSP, you know,Tommy Sheridan’s party.’ That was lazy and dangerous; and, boy, did we pay the price.

Colin Fox MSP became our convenor in March 2005, but by then the party was unravelling. Tommy’s supporters were beginning to brief against the ‘faction’ that was against him. But the faction was a fiction, woven around those who clearly didn’t share Tommy’s supporters’ agenda.

The truth is that there was more to it than ‘my leader right or wrong’. Tommy was identified with an old-style socialism in which men did most of the talking, class was the only issue, and people who demanded equality for women were the ‘gender police’.

This faultline had emerged in March 2002, when the ’50:50 debate’ – which called, for example, for mechanisms to ensure equal gender representation on the regional lists – was won after fierce and rancorous argument. The fissures blew wide open after November 2004, when Tommy began to appear as the man who would lead the charge on behalf of the traditionalists, and became wider still by the time he was rolling out the one about the ‘witches’.

We began talking to each other too, meeting tentatively for the first time in February 2006. The ‘February 2006 network’, as we called ourselves before becoming the SSP ‘United Left’ in June, met every few weeks. We discussed what was happening, sharing stories and theories and having a good bellyache about it all in the pub afterwards. There was a lot of sadness and anxiety, but also a lot of warmth and hilarity. The UL helped us get our sense of humour back, as well as our fighting spirit.

We launched ourselves as an SSP ‘platform’ (an aspect of the SSP’s democracy is the right of people to form ‘platforms’ for open debate), with a statement confirming our commitment to socialism, Scottish independence and gender and racial equality. Within days, we had over 100 signatories. Within days of that, the SSP Majority, as they called themselves, posted their own statement, confirming their commitment to Tommy.

Essentially, we saw ourselves as the SSP-within-the-SSP, committed to the principles on which the party was founded – in particular, open, democratic structures; grassroots campaigning prioritised above parliamentary work; and generational change as opposed to quick victories built on compromise. We felt we could only steer the party away from the rocks through politics. We put forward no charismatic leaders or celebrities. We kept our heads, and called no one names.

On 28 May 2006, that was a tough call. The SWP, CWI, and Tommy’s supporters had a narrow majority at the SSP national council and they used it to vote through various motions – including one to root out and purge people who had briefed the press, and another to support Tommy through his libel action.

The next few months were consumed by the court case. From 4 July, the SSP got more publicity than it had in six years, and it could not have been more destructive. Yet membership held surprisingly steady. Some people even joined.

When Tommy won, causing jaws to hit the deck in legal offices across Scotland, we thought all was lost. But in truth, his winning was the worst thing that could have happened to him. Suddenly he was no longer a victim of Rupert Murdoch, but a winner. And he brayed and bullied his way through the press like there was no tomorrow. And politically, for him, maybe there is no tomorrow.

So,what have we learned?

First, that single leaders belong in mainstream parties, not socialist ones. Not only does the elevation of one individual make you a hostage to fortune, it makes you lazy. You perceive the party as having a ‘leadership’ that will ‘sort things out’. Your responsibility, as an activist, is diminished.

Tommy wasn’t really a single leader, in that he had no more say in party policy than anyone else. But he was seen to be, and ultimately that was our undoing.

Following on from that, we also learned that party structures need to change, not least to prevent regional organisers from creating their own little fiefdoms, in which internal party information is disseminated selectively and people are manipulated. Not all SSP regional organisers were guilty of this; indeed some are outstanding in their integrity. But we need to ensure the post cannot be abused in future.

We also learned that the SWP, which joined the SSP only in 2001, has no place in an evolving political organisation. We saw how it destroyed the Socialist Alliance when it realised it couldn’t control it. We thought it would be different with us because its members were such a small minority. We were caught out, never having imagined they would so ruthlessly exploit an opportunity to split the party – and, they hoped, create a new one over which they had charge.

We learned that the youth of the party, who organise autonomously as Scottish Socialist Youth and thus have a network that cuts across branches and regions, are one of our great strengths. With networks, people who can’t attend branch meetings, or don’t want to, can plug into the SSP regarding issues that are close to their heart, be it women’s issues, racial issues, environmentalism or whatever, rather than being hidebound by geography.

We also learned that the SSP is comprised of many hundreds of hardworking, principled and fighting socialists who will see this through, come what may. And that they will do so without the need for heroes.

May 2003: At an election count in Glasgow outgoing Scottish National Party MSP Kenny Gibson calls the SSP the party of “neds, drug-dealers and housebreakers’. Gibson has reason to be angry. His party has just suffered painful electoral losses. The SSP, by contrast, has exceeded everyone’s expectations, returning six MSPs to the Scottish Parliament.

December 2003: Five Scottish branches of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union vote overwhelmingly to affiliate to the SSP – a development that spells the beginning of the end for the Labour Party’s working-class credentials in Scotland.

Today, the SSP’s membership exceeds 3,000, which makes it one of the biggest socialist parties in Europe per head of population. How did this happen? How did the SSP grow from a tiny grouping of left and single-issue activists (a grouping that was ridiculed or ignored by the Scottish media, had no money, few resources and any number of ideological sticking points to thrash out) into one of the fastest growing new left parties in Europe? And in such a short time?

These are good and timely questions. The Iraq war has raised people’s political consciousness, and opened the window on the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy – the manoeuvrings by governments on behalf of international capital and their sheer, bloody disregard for ordinary people’s lives.

But this window will not stay open for long. Human beings cannot gape in horror for ever, and if they don’t find a place to run to soon they’ll run back home – to political disengagement or the safe confines of the “reclaim the Labour Party’ campaign – and the left will have lost them.

The SSP’s roots can be traced back to a variety of soils: the Scottish anti-poll tax campaign, motorway protest groups, hunt sabs, the Socialist Conferences in Chesterfield (which, after the miners’ strike of 1984-85, sought to bring together socialists from inside and outside the Labour Party) and the radical nationalist movement. People up trees and down mines and round trade union negotiating tables came together to mould the SSP, and they’re still bloody well arguing today, which is probably a very good thing.

The ability to conduct debate, furiously and openly, without sustaining multiple fractures or jeopardising the possibility of united action, is one of the secrets of the SSP’s success. It is perhaps the key thing that distinguishes it from other socialist parties; that and its affinity with the social movements rising like waves across Europe and beyond.

SSP ally and former Labour MSP John McAllion says: “The SSP’s great strength is its reaching outside of itself& It used to be that once a political party established a line, its members were loyal to that: my party, right or wrong. That kind of politics is finished.’

The SSP story begins in the 1980s – in the wake of the miners’ strike, which left the Labour Party discredited and the trade union movement in sharp reverse gear, and the collapse of Stalinism. The left was reeling as it read the press announcements of its own demise.

But before the earth had been stamped down on the left’s grave, new shoots were pushing through. In 1989 the Conservative government in Westminster introduced the “community charge’, or poll tax, to Scotland (one year ahead of the rest of the UK). This flat-rate tax was a body blow to the already struggling working-class people of Scotland, and they revolted against it. Scottish Militant Labour (SML), with Tommy Sheridan as its most prominent figure, organised a campaign that brought together people from across the political and class spectrum.

The Anti-Poll Tax Federation organised huge demonstrations and a non-payment campaign; at one stage half the population of Glasgow refused to pay the tax. Though members of political parties were involved, their political colours stayed out of it: Sheridan was elected to Glasgow City Council on an anti-poll tax union ticket, not as a member of SML. “The federation got people together, got them marching into the city chambers, destroying files, doing things they’d never done before,’ says SSP policy coordinator Alan McCombes.

The poll tax activity set a precedent for subsequent campaigns, such as that against the Criminal Justice Bill. SML contacted hunt saboteurs, the anti-M77 motorway campaign Pollok Free State, ravers, ramblers, political groups – anyone whose rights were potentially infringed by the bill’s clampdown on civil liberties – to link up protests and, more importantly, get the scattered resistance talking to itself.

That was how anti-roads protester turned SSP MSP for Glasgow Rosie Kane got involved. “That was my in from being just anti-motorway,’ says Kane, “the realisation that something bigger was going on, that the decision-making process wasn’t democratic.’

Meanwhile, socialists within the Labour party were gathering at the Chesterfield conferences, debating the future of the left and whether their party was still relevant. Socialist Forums were also organised in Scotland, and were attended by non-aligned individuals and delegates and members of the Communist Party, Labour, the SNP, SML, and small protest groups and campaigns. Tentatively, a new way of working was mooted, a new party even. You might have thought that a mixture of traditionalist Trotskyists, hardened trade unionists, nationalists and political virgins wouldn’t work. You’d have been wrong.

“It worked because it encouraged difference, and it encouraged people like me, working-class people, who had nowhere to run,’ says Kane. “I wasn’t politically intelligent, but I knew that Glasgow was under attack and that this thing was drawing in people from all kinds of direct-action backgrounds and listening to what they had to say.’

The SSA was launched in February 1996, alongside the Save Our Services campaign, created in response to a swingeing diet of school and community closures in Glasgow. The campaign, recalls SSP national secretary Allan Green, “saw the majority of the schools reprieved and drew in a lot of community activists’. Green says: “As well as generating a lot of local activity and putting forward the idea of a real political alternative, [it] showed that the SSA wasn’t a front organisation that fought elections and then, between times, fell back into its constituent parts.’

The SSA’s formation had been accelerated by the launch of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP). The latter was organised on the lines of a traditional, democratic, centralist party, with a pre-written constitution and a non-negotiable UK-wide basis. “In Scotland we’d always been clear that the new left party had to be an autonomous one,’ says Green. “The class struggle was tied up in people’s minds with the issue of Scottish autonomy.’

It was already clear that Labour would win the 1997 general election and that a Scottish parliament was inevitable. That the party’s voting systems would incorporate proportional representation meant that small parties stood a chance of getting elected. But an electoral alliance could only ever be a stage in the process.

In 1996 “people were still suspicious’, says Green. “They weren’t ready for the big leap then, and we felt we wouldn’t get anywhere by issuing ultimatums.’ Similarly, it was implicitly understood that SML had to take its time if its pro-SSA activists were to take the majority of members with them.

Efforts were made to sustain trust between the SML and the alliance. Former Militant organiser Frances Curran is now a West of Scotland SSP MSP. She says: “We saw the dangers of making decisions behind closed doors, which is why, when we were still having meetings as SML, we invited people like Allan Green along to them. I’d tell him everything. Working together brings down a lot of barriers.’

The SML braced itself for a bitter divorce from the traditionally top-down Socialist Party (formerly Militant) in England and Wales. A new party needed a new way of organising itself. The top-down approach rankled: it closed down debate and proved to be self-limiting.

Like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), SML had put down some roots in working-class communities, had got so far but no further. It wasn’t a mass movement, and showed no signs of becoming one. On the other hand, the dissent that Labour wore on its sleeve like a badge of honour, but which allowed its elected representatives and leadership to disregard conference votes, wasn’t much better.

The SSP heeded these lessons. The majority of its executive committee is elected directly at conference. The national conference also sets the party’s policies. And the SSP’s national council comprises delegates from every branch.

Mindful of its majority status within the fledgling SSP, SML chose not to organise a rigid, centralist faction. SML members knew that a united left movement could not progress, or build trust, if one faction dominated and used that position to fashion a party in its own image. Though the old SML still exists as the International Socialist Movement (ISM) platform within the SSP, it functions as a forum for ideas – not as an organisational caucus.

The SSP was formed in 1998; Sheridan became the party’s first MSP at the 1999 Scottish Parliament elections. The SWP came on board in 2001. The SWP faction within the SSP operates as a solid phalanx that pre-determines its position before entering discussions with the broader party. Given that most SSP members approach debates with an open mind, this can cause friction. But because the SWP platform doesn’t dominate the SSP, it cannot undermine its integrity.

That the SSP’s membership is witness to the rigorous democracy of the party is hugely important – not least when contentious debates over issues such as the national question arise. Those who opposed the proposal to join a cross-party “Independence Convention’ argued that independence was not a pressing issue for ordinary Scots; those in favour described independence as an extension of democracy and part of the transition to socialism. That particular debate was, to put it mildly, heated; there were regrettable outbreaks of name-calling.

Generally, however, name-calling is rare in the SSP. Carolyn Leckie and Catriona Grant, the party’s national co-chairs, always remind conference and the national council that the enemy is “out there’, not sitting next to you. Implying someone’s a racist or reformist because they don’t agree with you is strongly discouraged; aggressive posturing achieves nothing.

The “50/50′ debate, on the issue of equal representation for women on regional election lists, proved equally stormy. But the party survived and everyone accepted the democratic decision. “It showed our maturity as a party,’ says Kane.

That maturity was rubber-stamped by the electorate in last May’s Scottish Parliament elections. The SSP did well because it was seen to be consistent and campaigning, and because people were crying out for a political alternative.

OK, so a small parliamentary group can’t implement a comprehensive socialist programme. But it can undermine an elitism that cons ordinary people into thinking that only members of a “political class’ can become MSPs. By taking only half their wages – the other £24,000 is donated to the party – SSP MSPs are in no danger of being neutered by an addiction to comfy cars and big houses.

Apart from raising important issues, the business of tabling bills facilitates campaigns with branches, members and outside organisations. The SSP’s engagement with social movements, charities, community groups and NGOs is ongoing. The party has a system of networks (black and Asian, animal rights and women’s networks) that link up with groups outside the party – and always in the pluralistic manner in which the party was founded. “We wouldn’t approach anyone and demand they accept our programme,’ says Curran. “We don’t adopt the attitude that we’ve got nothing to learn; we’ve got everything to learn.’

In the short term, the party is preparing for a sustained campaign against the council tax, in tandem with Sheridan’s Parliamentary bill calling for its abolition. Then there’s the European elections. An SSP MEP (a tall order given that more people vote for Pop Idol than turn out for European elections) could make hugely important links with like-minded parties and organisations in Europe, could use the EU’s resources to highlight issues such as asylum, and would continue the valuable process of demystifying our supposedly democratic institutions.

The SSP has other tasks ahead. It needs, for example, to break out beyond its west of Scotland heartland, and to turn those 129,000 votes for socialism into members without compromising the robust, internal democracy that holds the broad-based party together. It also needs to continue reaching out to the disenfranchised, the people in Scotland’s housing schemes who’ve never been to a political meeting, never been to college, never read books, never even had a job. People say homophobic, sectarian, stupid things; it doesn’t mean they believe them, and it doesn’t mean we should dismiss them. As Kane says: “If we don’t tolerate people, help them to learn, how are we going to get into the housing schemes? How are we going to change the world?’Roz Paterson is deputy editor of the SSP’s weekly paper Scottish Socialist Voice; this article was commissioned in collaboration with the New Politics Project of the Transnational Institute, www.tni.org