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Three days atter the tirst String Conference of the SEP, a resolution was placed before Aberdeen Trades Council by the building workers' union UCATT. It demanded that the local SLP branch be evicted from the offices it rents from the Trades Council. It was not the undemocratic practices of the Jim Sillars leadership which prompted the UCATT branch to move this resolution; it was not even the performance of Sillar's supporters in the Aberdeen branch leadership, who had just announced through the press that they would expel a number of delegates to the SLP conference who had dared to support the democratic rights of suspended delegates and expelled branches.
Rather, it was the decision announced the previous week to stand an SIP candidate against Bob Hughes, the Labour left MP for Aberdeen North. This decision was taken against the strong opposition of all the Aberdeen SLP members subsequently expelled. and, indeed, a number who have not been, who argued that the SLP should ruther stand against lan Sproat, the redbaiting Tory MP for Aberdeen South The debate in the branch was a protracred and heated one, and it is worth considering some of the issues involved both because of the light they throw on the Sillars electoral policy, and also for the general issues they raise.
When Jim Sillars came to Aberdeen to discuss the issue, he said that there was no essential difference between the Labour Party and the Tories and SNP Aberdeen SLP branch chairman and ex- SNP left, Bob Tail, concluded his written contribution to the debate by explaining that we had to stand where we could get the most votes. Unfortumately, as the UCATT response to the SLP standing against Hughes indicates, despite the anti-working class policies of Callaghan and co., the Labour Party and particularly its left" — remains politically. socially and economically rooted in the labour movement and the organised working class. And it is here that any party which seeks to offer policies to the left of the LP has to be built.
If we want to build the SIP, we must understand this fundamental difference between the LP and the Tories and SNP We must stamp out any flirtation with
by Pat Kane Aberdeen S.L.P.
tactical voting for the SNP and campaign for a class vote — a vote for Labour where the SLP is not standing. and a clear assessment of the best interests of the working class before we decide where to stand.
A vote for Labour would not mean political support for the Labour government - whose policies we have consistently opposed. Rather, it would offer us the chance to campaign For our own policies among workers who still see the LP as their party — a possibility sharply cut across by the sectarian approach of the Sillars supporters. We should say to working people: vote for your own partes in order to create a government both in Westminster and in the Assembly, which is based on and responsible to the organised working class. This would carn the SLP wide respect in Scotland as the real fighters for unity in the labour movement.
In order to get across our opposition to the Tory policies of the present
government, the SEP should also run its own candidates. Where supporters of Callaghan and Healey are put forward as LP candidates, it is our duty to the working class to stand against them. They are the people who actually divide the labour movement by maintaining and developing anti-working class policies.
In order to expose the pro-capitalist character of the SP, the SLP should also stand candidates in selected SNPheld constituencies where this can best be demonstrated: for instance, against the SNP council in Cumbernauld which attempted to smash the dustmen's strike. There can't he many Tory seats which justify at this stage the expense, time and energy to stand a socialist candidate; but Aberdeen South, and Tan Sproat, would be a notable and exemplary exception.
What then of Bob Hughes and the Labour "lefts'. There seems to me to be no reason at all why the SLP should refrain from standing against all LP candidates who just mouth verbal opposition to the CUTS. The reason we opposed standing against Hughes was that he had at least taken one step towards translating his opposition into. practice by resigning from the government.
In a situation where Benn has remained silently in the cabinet and most Labour lefts" have marched through the lobbies to vote for the cuts, standing against Hughes would not be under stood by Aberdeen workers as a critique of his policies from the left Lur an impediment to a united fight against the government's policies.
The best way to explain our opposition to his class collaborationist and chauvinist policies of import controls and opposition to devolution, would be to mount a genuine socialist campaign against Sproat, critically supporting Hughes against the Tories and the SNP.
But to do this, it is no use to put forward a class collaborationist platform of your own as Sillars" supporters in Aberdeen intend to do. Standing against Bob Hughes on the basis of the Jobs and Industry" policy document which seeks to resolve the economic crisis through a Scottish Assembly subordinated to the
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capitalist EEC will clarify no-one and merely serve to let in the SNP. ›Any break from the political sectarianism of the Sillars supporters' attitude towards parties of the labour movement should also include a new and fresh approach to the mechanism of the election campaign itself.
Labourism has been described as paternal, and it is in the electoral arena that this attitude becomes raised to a high and holy science. With the opening of the election campaign, the worker is suddenly transformed into a voter, the person with power to decide the future of the 'nation. These voters, who for the past five years have seen their living standards dropping dramatically, have suddenly regained importance.
Those leaflets with ever-so-nice pictures of the candidate begin to fall through your letterbox, telling you all aboul the candidate: their age, the colour of their eyes, their shoe size everything except what they will do when elected.
Our candidates have to break with all these methods, and begin to. treat "voters" as working people who need real political and economic power all the year round, and not just at election time.
This attitude to clections should be seen as an extension to our activities against cuts, for women's rights, against uncmployment. Our election campaigns should be aimed at motivating ordinary people into activity in local action groups and through the trade inions. Contrast this to the method as expressed in Bob Tait's document on elections: "our access to the media through friendly journalists will get these (our socialist alternatives) over locally and Nationally*
It is obvious that next year will be make or break for many political parties which profess to hold socialist objectives both inside and outside the electoral arena. I believe that a party which has a clear economic programme, which seeks a real socialist solution to the problems
faced by working people and which puts forward a socialist answer to the problems of Scottish government, can secure itself a real and lasting position in Scottish working class politics.
PAT KANE