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Scottish League?
One year ago, socialists from all over Scotland joined together to form the Scottish Labour Party. Its best known member was obviously Jim Sillars MP, but its ranks included socialists from many different parts of the socialist movement. For the bulk of its members there were two central questions: firstly the necessity to fight back against the disastrous antiworking class policies of the Government and secondly an understanding of the 'importance of the national question in Scotland and opposition to its manipulation
The history of the SLP is well known. Its Stirling conference in October saw a vicious witch-hunt against all opposition to the reformism of Jim Sillars. Members from all over Scotland including half the active branches were expelled.
The Scottish Socialist League was set up by expelled socialists who wanted to carry through the job that the reformism of Jim Sillars could not manage. Our members are active in trade unions trades councils and tenants organisations all over Scotland; in these District elections we are standing candidates in Falkirk, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. We present this manifesto as the basis of a socialist alternative to the decades of complacency and right wing policies of the Labour Party and to the pro-capitalist nationalism I want to know more about the SSL
Scottish Socialist, 64 Queen Street, Glasgow.
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Smash the Social Contract The Social Contract has been the cornerstone of Labour policy. Curb wage demands we were told: inflation will stop, unemployment will be kept down, social spending will go up.
But inflation still rages at 20% clear evidence that inflation is not caused by wage increases. And the argument that wage curbs would stop unemployment is a really sick joke today.
The Social Contract was intended from the outset to make working people pay for the economic crisis. The Tories could not hold wages down, so Labour and the Trade Union leaders were to do the job. Money was to be diverted from our wage packets and the public sector into financing industrial investment.
The reality is that the Social Contract has been a social con-trick. It was brought in because the economy is in crisis. And this crisis is a crisis of the capitalist system of production for profit rather than need on which it is based.
We say that the capitalist bosses, not the workers, must pay. We stand for a planned socialist economy under the democratic control of working people.
nolgO cuts mean nal thausands more ABle
We are standing in the District Council elections to ensure that a challenge is offered to the betrayals and wage cuts of the Labour MPs and councillors and of the trade union leaders: to see that a voice is given to those who are fighting back.
Our loyalty is to the working class and those who fight alongside it. We stand with those who answered the call of NUPE, NALGO and the STUC on March 19th, with the thousands who went on strike in defiance of the courts ban, and with the 10,000 who marched through the streets of Glasgow against the cuts.
We stand with the busworkers in
to working people.
*
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What We Stand For.....
SMASH ULDAES S SOCIAL CONTRACT, SOCIAL CONFLICT
Soci CONT SOCIAL CON-TRIC
their fight against fare increases and garage closures; with the workers in. British Leyland who have been on strike against the wage cutting policies of their leaders.
We stand for a united movement of all those opposed to the Social Contract who are prepared to fight back. Such a socialist opposition would unite people inside and outside the Labour Party. It would reject any Social Contract with the employers and fight for socialist policies against the right wing leaders. This is the only realistic alternative to the misery and poverty that big business and its accomplices in the government want to stick down our throats.
OM MACES TONT, BUY HINI CARS.
A Socialist Alternative
The usual cry from the Labour leaders is that there is no alternative to the misery of wage cuts and unemployment. We say there is another road open
Against Unemployment: Jobs for all through a reduction of the working week to 35 hours and a ban on overtime without loss of pay. A massive programme of public works to create new jobs. Any firm incapable of guaranteeing work should be nationalised without compensation under conditions imposed and controlled by the workers themselves.
Against Inflation: The maintenance of the purchasing power of wage packets through the inclusion of cost of living threshold clauses in all wage agreements. A minimum wage of £50 a week and pensions equal to the minimum wage. Big across the board wage increases of at least £15 a week to compensate for the last two years' wage cuts. An immediate freeze on prices of big business and an end to VAT. 2
* Against Social Spending Cuts: Restore the cuts in housing, health and education. Eliminate all personal charges, extend the social services with spending inflation-proofed to keep pace with rising costs. * Make the capitalists pay for their crisis: Nationalise the banks, insurance companies and other money lenders; reduce interest rates. The tax system must be directed against big business and the multinationals, not workers or small traders. For an end to the waste of arms expenditure. Abolish the monarchy and other hangers on. * Against the Crisis bearing down on women: Equal pay for women; free abortion and contraception on demand; free 24 hour nurseries. * Against racist divisions in the working class: Repeal all immigration acts stop the break up of Asian families. * Against the imperialist war in Ireland: Withdraw the troops: the Irish people must be allowed to determine their own government and future.
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Assembly
From the ruler of a world Empire, Britain has declined to become the 'sick man of Europe'. Decades of migration, chronic housing, lower wages and higher unemployment have provoked in many Scottish workers a desire for fundamental change. The failure of Westminster to deal with these problems has led many to see self-government as a way out of the mess.
To those workers who have turned their backs on the Westminster circus we say: We are with you in trying to put something better in its place; we are with you in setting up an elected Assembly without further delay. However, we are also for a totally different kind of Scotland: a socialist Scotland and a socialist Britain.
Today, with the Devolution Bill defeated, the Labour Government is playing an intolerable game of delay and manoeuvre. The Labour Party Conference, the Trade Unions and the vast majority of Scottish working people want an Assembly. The Labour govern ment has shown it can't be relied on to deliver the goods. We stand for a united campaign of the labour movement to ensure the Assembly gets set up.
We defend the right of the Scottish people to decide their own form of government. But will life be any different just because an Assembly is set up? We believe nothing will change unless working people organise to fight for their own demands and impose their own solutions on our real rulers - big business and the multinationals. An Assembly is just as likely to introduce its own version of the Social Contract, and the Scottish MPs who voted for hospital closures in Westminster are just as likely to do so in Edinburgh.
If the fight for an Assembly is to be any use at all to working people, our "representatives must be made accountable to the people who elected them. We stand for workers' democracy: for the right of recall of elected representatives and the right of working people to control their own parties and organisations.
We believe that only the presence of socialist representatives mandated to use the Assembly as a platform to rally working people to a united fight for socialist policies can make an Assembly more than a useless debating
Stop the March of the SN
These District elections are no normal elections. As the first general elections since 1974, they will be a test for the Government's anti-working class policies. These policies will lead Labour to heavy defeats in the polls. For so 'many people today, a vote for Labour is just a vote for more cuts, empty factories and more young recruits for
For many working people, a vote for the SNP will be seen as a way out of this dismal prospect. But the radicalism of the SNP is only skin deep. The SNP was born and bred as an alternative not only to the Labour Party but the labour
It grew because of Labour's failure to meet the aspirations of working people, but it grew up opposed tooth and nail to every form of organisation that working people have built up over the years be they tenants' committees, trade unions or cooperatives. It offers an Assembly with no policies bar one: that of the unity of boss and worker of landlord and tenant as part of a cosy classless Scottish nation.
Like wolves and sheep, the capitalists whose profit system brought on the crisis and the workers who are paying for it are supposed to lie down side by side. The end result of an SNP victory wouldn't simply be the break-up of Britain. A million times more important, it would mean the break up of the trade union and labour movement along national lines. A Scottish engineering union, a Scottish local government union,
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a Scottish transport union would only weaken the strength of working people in Scotland, in Wales and in England.
The SNP have already provided many examples of how - for all their talk of classless nations - they serve the bosses' class rather than the workers. In Cumbernauld when the SNP council tried to viciously break the strike of local binmen against wage and service cuts; in Edinburgh where the SNP has only recently forced through more cuts than the Labour councillors were prepared to support; and the SNP has campaigned for the trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party.
Labour or the SNP. What a miserable choice to have to make. It is to provide an alternative - a real socialist alternative - that we are standing in the Council elections in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Falkirk and Glasgow. But where we are not standing we cannot remain neutral. We believe that only the working class can lead the fight to replace the rotten society we live in today; and the greatest strength of the working class lies in the organisations it has built up over years of struggle.
We say, stop the march of the SNP whose policies would break up the organised strength of working people. Vote for a council which is based on the labour and trade union movement and which you can organise to bring to heel - and today this can unfortunately only mean a Labour council.
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We do not think that a few councillors can change society. District councils are subject to financial controls over their budgets and their political rights are narrowly limited by central Government. But we do have the beginning of model for socialists in local government: Clay Cross, where the Labour councillors made a long and courageous stand to freeze rents, in the interests of their working class supporters. * Our councillors would seek to be responsible to the organisations of the working class. Local democracy is a fiction. Corruption abounds. Any genuine democratic set-up would require the elected representatives of the workers to be under the constant control of those who voted for them. It would require the permanent participation by workers in all the affairs and decisions of the cities. Elected officials would be recallable at any time. Labour and socialist councillors would be responsible to the community - associations, womens groups, trade unions and shop steward organisations which elected them. * No district council can replace the activity of people themselves in fighting for a workers solution to their problems, any more than Parliament can. But a . district council which really represented
Published by Scottish Socialist, 64 Queen Street, Glasgow. Printed and typeset by Trade Union Labour.
Socialist Councillors Do?
What Would
the interests of working people would grant aid to women righting for their rights through ensuring equal employment possibilities, total freedom of abortion, provision of nursery and child care facilities and free availability of meeting places and discussion centres. It would extend aid to the unemployed by providing tree transport and other facilities, by organising an emergency program of public works, by special rates on big business. * The district council would strive to foster class solidarity, not racial divisions. It would ban the use of public halls to theracist and fascists, and the use of police against anti-racists as was seen at Kingston Halls last year, would be a thing of the past. * The district council would support every effort to defend the environment against the pollution and exploitation of the multinationals - it would foster public transport, the demands of Glasgow bus workers would be supported; no fare rises which only drive passengers off the buses, no closure of garages and no reduction of services. The urban car parking facilities, owned by private business and used for private profit would be taken over and their revenue used to subsidise the public transport system.
Just as in Clay Cross, any socialist led council would immediately be attacked by the law courts and the Government of the day, Labour or Tory. We have no illusions that it is possible to build islands of socialism in this or that town. But a vote for the Scottish Socialist League will be a very practical and effective action.
Firstly it will be a vote for all Labour councils to refuse to implement the cuts in social spending. Secondly it will be a - vote for socialist democracy, for the
SCOTTISH SOCIALIST CANDIDATES:
Edinburgh:
Aberdeen: Falkirk: Glasgow:
Vote Scottish Socialist
Lorne Ward, Leith Bonnington Ward, Leith Harbour Ward, Leith Links Ward, Leith Castle Hill Ward Falkirk East (Callander) Ward Kelvin Ward
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* Finally the district council would ensure proper housing for working people. After generations of housing programmes, our cities are still slums. We would ensure that evictions are banned. Direct labour departments would be expanded to end corruption and provide jobs. Well over half of our rent goes on debt repayments to the banks immediate halt would be called to these blood payments, and the capital used to finance new housing.
right of working people to control and determine their representatives and political parties. Lastly and most importantly it will be a vote in favour of building an alternative to the lousy choices between Tory, Labour and SNP.
We are only a small part of a much larger socialist and working class movement. By ourselves we do not claim to be the alternative. But we do claim that your support, and your vote, is a practical and credible step in that direction.
Pauline Tierney Des Tierney Jenny Donaldson Ron Cormack Ian Grant Dave Fowler Matt Montgomery
an
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Notices
* The Labour Government has cut your living standards. In the last year the buying power of the average working class family fell by £9.50 a week. * Unemployment is soaring. One Scottish worker in every twelve is without work. Since last October there have been an average of 1,000 redundancies every week. Attacks on democratic rights have * multiplied under Labour. The government refused to release the jailed Shrewsbury pickets. The courts have been allowed to dictate to the unions. And the government is expelling anti-CIA. Reverse the Cuts The Social services have been bled dry. In three years, capital spending has been cut by 38%. Hospitals, schools and welfare services have been put on the chopping block to finance handouts to big business. Staff shortages and overcrowding * have got worse while teachers, medical staff and local government workers have been thrown on the dole. * Over £94 million has been cut off Scottish housing expenditure by the latest White Paper. Councils continue to dole out fortunes in interest
journalists Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball without even the right to know the charges against them. * Corruption, mismanagement and careerism have left the Tories and big business laughing * Labour have abandoned every remotely socialist policy in their manifesto. They have betrayed the trust of those who voted for them. They have paved the way for the most vicious Tory government since the war. David Steel of the Liberals can now say with complete satisfaction "There is no prospect of socialism under this government". charges. Direct Labour departments are being ditched. The burden of housing costs is being shifted onto the council tenants to boost the profits of private contractors and finance houses. The result? Soaring rents and the survival of Europe's worst slums. * Transport cuts continue to axe vital community services. Fare increases of over 250% in three years have hit working people's pockets hard. * Instead of supporting those who elected them against the government, as the Clay Cross Councillors did when the Tories were in, Labour councils are first in line to carry through the cuts. 1
DISTRICT COUNCIL ELECTION MANIFESTO
1977
OF THE SSL
What is the
Socialist
by the SNP.
of the SNP.
NAME. . • ADDRESS
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For an Elected Scottish
shop.
the army.
movement as a whole.
SNP rally in the Grassmarket. Edinburgh.