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Since the first Congress of the Scottish Labour Party in October, there has been an almost incessant cry from Jim Sillars, MP, the Party leader, that all the disruption was caused by the International Marxist Group raembers and their fellow travellers. The Scottish media have promoted this Left witch-hunt with vigour. This is not surprising when one considers the number of media figures who are not only SIP members but who participated in the formation of the Party.
But at no time has any real evidence been offered to support this witch-hunt, The total IMG membership in Scotland does not exceed 5O, and it is difficult to understand the fear which they have created in the leadership of a party which claims a membership of 2,000. One must look elsewhere to determine the reasons behind the various expulsions that have wracked the new party, and I contend that the main reason for Sillars actions was the forging of an electoral pact between himself and the Scottish Nationalist Party. In the recent Glasgow District Council clection in Darnley, the first campaign the SLP has undertaken, we took 15% of the vote as a huge swing against Labour saw the return of an SP Councillor, the only one on the Council. It was obvious from an analysis of the canvass returns in Darnley that our vote had been taken almost exclusively from the British Labour Party. At the National Organising Committee meeting on October 9, it was decided that in the event of an early election, seven Parliamentary seats would be fought: Paisley, South Ayrshire, North Aberdeen, Central Fife, Pollok (a constituency in the southwest of Glasgow), one in Edinburgh and one other. The fighting of the Paisley seat was regarded with some concern by the NOC as, with only 30 SLP members in the Paisley branch, no one could believe the probable candidate, John Robertson MP, would save his deposit. The desire to contest North Aberdeen was presented to the NOC by two of its members Bob Tait and Danus Skene, both members of the Aberdeen branch. They claimed this desire had the full support of the branch and said nothing of the arguments which had been caised there against fighting Bob Hughes in North or lan Sproat in South Aberdeen. Bob Tait, formerly a member of the SNP, is now on the new NEC of the SLP, and Danus Skene, who is expected to be the Party's prospective Parliamentary candidate in North Aberdeen, is now the SLP Executive Vice Chairman, Bob Tait has since expelled from the SLP those who agitated for the party to fight lan Sproat in Aberdeen South. Pollok branch, through expulsions and resignations, now has less than 20 members of whicht the Party would enable the Leadership to
fewer than five are activists. It is impossible to believe they have any chance of fighting what is the biggest Parliamentary seat, in population terms, in Britain. Looking at the Edinburgh situation, it was the general feeling of the whole SLP membership that they should fight the Leith constituency at a General Election. Jim Sillars, and Alex Neil, the SLP General Secretary, were strongly opposed to this and advocated that the SIP should put up against Robin Cook, the Tribunite in Edinburgh Central. It is again dificult to understand this decision unless some form of electoral pact has been concluded with the SNP. At the October 23 meeting last year of the NOC, the Secretary of the Standing Orders Committee, Litster Craig Gardiner, stated that the whole of the Leith branch would need to be suspended as it had been infiltrated and controlled by the extreme left wing. The only evidence produced against the branch came in a letter from Tom Nairn, a New Left Review editorial board member for the past ten years. In his letter he stated that he had been in touch by phone with a personal friend who was a senior official with the IMG in Eondon, This person had confirmed that it was IMG strategy to infiltrate the SLP. Several individuals from four other branches were also suspended because of previous IMG connections, No evidence was offered against them. Jim Sillars did not find it necessary to inform those present at the October 23 meeting of the NOC that the previous evening he had addressed a meeting of the SP-controlled Andrew Fletcher Society in Edinburgh, He had stipulated that the text of his spech should not be published, or released to th press No other member of the SLP was present at the meeting, In spite of the embargo on the speech, it has been reported, without any disclaimer from Sillars, that the question of dual membership and joint work between the SNP and SLP was discussed. There followed the first Congiess of the SLP in Stirling, opening on a day when an Opinion Research Centre Poll conducted for The Scotsman revealed that 28% of the British Labour Party vote would swing to the SLP at the next General election, In contrast, only 9% of the SNP vote would swing to the SLP. The leadership were contirmed in their decision to expel the Leith branch and the named individuals. They saw a triple benefit: firstly, increasing electoral credibility by being seen to do the one thing the British Labour Party had been unable to do - the purging of extremists from within its ranks. Secondly, this purge would also make the SLP palatable to the SNP; and thirdly, the removal of the bulk of the active socialists from
pick on more seats held by the Tribunite Left Labour MPs, Although the SLP share of a general election vote would only be in the order of ten to fifteen per cent, it would be taken almost exclusively from the British Labour Party, so SLP intervention in a labour-held seat would almost certainly ensure SNP success. The extraordinary undemocratic poenes which occurred at Congress culminated in the disbandment of Kelvin, Cumbernauld, Stirling and Stirling University branches, Their delegates were expelled on Sunday October 31 for "disruption" without any evidence being presented or discussion allowed. The Kelvin branch had long been feared by the leadership, who had made previous attempts to destroy it. Their main fear seems to have been the wish of Kelvin to build a large Glasgow membership which could balance the artificial card-vote majority enjoyed by the Ayrshire branches. A large SLP membership in Glasgow would also perhaps want to fight its own constituency seats, and this would not please the SNP, who need to make substantial gains in the industrial belts of Scotland in a General Election to justify their position. The reasons behind the disbandment of the other three branches are not so clear. Not one of these branches has a single member who has either been a member or associated with the IMG. In fact the bulk of their membership is ex-Labour Party, and their only connection is that they are all members of the Central Area Federation of the SLP. The Cumbernauld branch of the SNP was deeply involved in supporting the Cumbernauld dustmen's strike against an SNP-controlled District Council and also against the publiclyexpressed wish of Jim Sillars. The branch membership was also seriously considering standing several candidates against the SNP at the district elections in May 1977, and has given consideration to fighting the East Dunbartonshire Constituency seat at a General Election. This seat was won by the SNP From the Tories in October 1974 by 22 votes. Stirling Town and Stirling University branches have extremely good relations with the Labour and Trade Union movement in the Stirling area, and in the past, prior to joining the SLP, members from these branches were sympathetic to, and worked for Denis Cavan, Tribunite Labour MP for West Stirlingshire. It has been difficult even for myself, who was a member of the old National Organising Committee of the SLP, to understand the motivation behind Sillars' decision to destroy the major portion of the Party. I am convinped that time will prove my contention that only an clectoral pact with the SNP can adequately explain one of the worst disasters ever to be inflicted on the Scottish Socialist movement.
The Leveller January 1977 JOHN NAIRN