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Scotsman, 3rd November, 1976 Lomond View, Collessie, Fife. Sir, - One aspect of the peculiar events of the Scottish Labour Party Congress was not made at all clear by Neil Ascherson's report today. It concerns the significance of the elections held on the Saturday for the National Executive of the party.
What has become clear, although it is not yet possible to say which votes were counted and which were not, is that the results did not please certain members of the out-going executive. Thus the manoeuvres of Sunday morning and the expulsion of four delegations without debate were deliberately construed tactics to prevent certain individuals taking their place on the National Executive. No indication of the election results was given to delegates at all.
The removal of opposition was quickly covered up by the overused factic of "Left-bashing" in the Press and the media with the claim that all those who left the conference (amounting to about half of the entire congress) were either International Marxists or fellow travellers." assertion is completely untrue.
Many delegates, like myself, had been members of the British Labour Party and had joined the Scottish Labour Party in the hope of building a more radical, and more democratic, party within the Scottish context. Unfortunately the tactics used to prevent open debate and constructive criticism turned out to be more in tune with the Soviet Union in the 1930s than with Scotland in the 1970s.
Like Jim Sillars, I believe in the need for a Scottish Socialist Party, but Talso believe that this will only occur within the context of genuinely democratic organisations. It seems that on this last point we quite substantially disagree.
MARTIN SIME