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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 the army.
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 movement as a whole.
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,
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.
SNP rally in the Grassmarket. Edinburgh.