By Neil Scott
The SNP needs to be better. The SNP has to be more “SSP.” Hear me out.
I have sleepless nights over the genocide in Gaza. I see no real solution coming about until Israel changes as a result of our collective actions, our collective push in the way YEARS of boycotting and sanctions did to South Africa. That was the first campaign I was involved with as a teenager (alongside peace marches in NI and CND).
The Anti Apartheid movement won.
But like all monoliths, it seemed immovable for a long, long time. Seeing people dying in South Africa sat alongside my neighbours and family being shot, killed in bombings or injured in the news bulletins in Northern Ireland.
Allow me to digress.
I feel some who have been at the top of the political tree for a long time and having doors opened for them, being called sir, madam etc and being in a party that treats its elected members as having the last word- they are the royalty of the branches- is unhealthy and nurtures hubris- and I feel that hubris was on show when Robertson met the Israelis (by fuck it was on show when Mason did!).
I was in an incredible political party for fifteen years. A party that fought on the streets and in the Scottish Parliament. A party that made a difference. A party that represented working class people.
Hubris, in the end, set the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) back. The warring factions (and a particular individual) tore it apart and it has struggled to recover its confidence from its early days. I left the SSP in 2015 not because I disagreed with its purpose, but because I felt as it was dragged through two courts by a convicted liar, it had changed into something that I hadn’t originally joined. That and the indyref campaign had exhausted me. It is good to see the SSP dusting itself off and standing with workers in the front lines of disputes, and alongside refugees and immigrants in protective solidarity as the fascists threatened to do here what they did in England and Northern Ireland. They are committed to their cause and have held on to their principles through dark times.
Scotland WILL be independent. Scotland WILL be a better nation, but it needs institutions and politics that will be inclusive. That will positively change this place. That will engage. That will nurture. We have three positive political parties fighting for this vision of Scotland in their own ways. The SNP, The SSP and the Scottish Greens.
I joined the SNP not out of love for the party, but out of recognition that that party is best positioned to fight for independence in the theaters of so called democracy created by and owned by millionaires and billionaires and by those who will exploit and drain Scotland of its resources year after year, while children go to school hungry and our NHS is on its knees.
The SNP, as we know, is under attack constantly via the unionist press and media who find things difficult up here as some of them are faced with the quandary, “…what comes first? Loyalty to the Tories/Farij, etc, or loyalty to the union?” Their headlines rock back and forward in such a way that I feel they must be feeling constantly sea sick. But always, their headlines do our representatives down. And always do Scotland down.
Any crack in what they’ve seen as the SNP monolith is a crack for them to exploit. They had little until January 2023. But now they do. They have a lot of little cracks- even if the headlines seem contradictory, they’ll be used. Imagine – the other day the Mail headlined with criticising the end of the rail fares trial- a trial they criticised when it began. Imagine, so called self labeled “yessers” attack Nicola Sturgeon constantly from behind the sturdy figure of their heroic handsy man. Imagine, so called self labeled “yessers” attack LGBTIQ+ people, and brown people and poor people. And the Billionaire owned Unionist press love it and flood our social media timelines with it. As I said, We have three positive political parties fighting for this vision of Scotland in their own ways. The SNP, The SSP and the Scottish Greens. Agree or disagree with them, but they are our imperfect but principled parties of real, positive change.
The SNP, in my opinion, has a huge difficulty. It can either go back to the same model as before in which the leadership lock down and allow nothing out from the top of the party, but look as if they are competently dealing with the British Labour Government (which it seems, is going to be massively difficult as the nuLabour monolith that learned from them and the tories over the past ten years, decreases the budget and the power of the Scottish Parliament). Or it can become what I’d hoped the SSP would (and still could) become (and to be fair it was well on its way until the convicted hubristic liar brought it to a halt): open, democratic to its core, etc:
Be the change you want to see in the world. Or selfishly hold on to a status quo of inequality and exploitation.
Party politics are bloody difficult. Cohesion. Democracy. Message. Participation. Belonging. Feeling valued.
For me at present, I really don’t see the Greens as Scotland’s answer. They are a hugely important part of the answer and nowadays always get my second vote as the SSP don’t stand in my area. But much like the SSP in the early days of the Parliament, I see them as a force that can push and pull the party of power in the Parliament to the left/towards a clean, safe world. The criticisms of the Greens in Government came from a vociferous and amplified right wing minority… and the SNP SPADS and the internally ambitious unfortunately believed or exploited the noise. The Greens too, will make mistakes, and they do (and much of their “leftness” came as a decision, not a principle after the SSP began cracking apart in 2007). I don’t see the Greens ever becoming the main party of independence.
I used to have party loyalty baked in as I used to see mistakes or fallibility as an inevitability, and as part of the journey to socialism, and saw the SSP fight as a link in the great golden chain that included the great John Mclean, Mary Barbour, Sylvia Pankhurst, James Connolly, etc. I see the SNP in that same chain, but one that really is only a vehicle that moves us further left as it moves us slowly, or quickly (depending on what it decides to become) towards the inevitability of a new, free, better Scottish Socialist Republic.
I see the faults of, and the fault lines in the SNP- and the naivety of some of the SPADS and the hubris of some elected members all coming together in a mixing bowl filled with other ingredients such as the British media, social media, the austerity hugging nuLabour party, and the party’s historical massive, sudden growth in 2014. A growth that was almost impossible to control within a constitution that had been built over years of suspicion, loyalty and with traditions passed through families. The SNP hasn’t modernised quickly enough. And it is now at a crossroads- a crossroads that was ignored for years until it brought the bus to a halt. To be clear, my complaints are not those of the impotent, terfy angry brigade of Alba-ists, or Sean Clerkin’s of this world.
I am at present remaining loosely in the party. I really don’t like the hierarchy within the SNP- a kind of belief that the Elected Member of a chamber is the last word. I prefer what the SSP had from 1999 to around 2007, where elected members came to branches to be interrogated and TOLD what needed to happen. That FELT healthy. That FELT like the members were valuable. We FELT heard. I don’t like the mistakes the party have made in the face of a media ready to comment for days on any misstep. Mistakes made by an insular top table.
The SNP needs to change, and perhaps spend a bit of time thinking about what it wants to be. It has been a party in the wilderness, party of protest, a party of competence and change and now is an ex-monolith and is slightly crumbling at its apex’s as self aggrandising puffed up idiots like Jackie Baillie are able to, via a strange compliant unionist media, chip chunks off it; and SOME SPADS who are more interested in their careers and SOME members seem more interested in their own position and comfortable life (it must do something to folk when you enter a building of work and are fawned over every day. As a teacher, in the past, I’ve witnessed idiots who love being called Miss and Sir and have children in fear out of their need to have “respect”… a type of cruel, self regarding, arrogant idiocy that must run through our top down class riven society like ‘A present from Saltcoats’ through a bar of rock).
So. To the original issue. The genocide MUST BE STOPPED. The Palestinians MUST HAVE THEIR OWN SAFE COUNTRY. The hostages returned. I feel the SNP HAD made that clear. Robertson’s hubristic notion of himself as some sort of international broker who met a representative of the Israeli Government, who as a friend has said, have noticed the importance of Humza’s stance and of his VOICE internationally at present as he engages with Musk and other “big political names” on social media. This isn’t a criticism of the need for a Scottish Government to be internationalist- just criticism of overreach in a situation that required something more. This hubris and overreach was pretty much used by the Israeli government who have had a comms coup that was no minor event. They (the Israeli Government) have had a presence in Scotland for years… I first came across their incredible reach on Twitter and Facebook when I defended the then SSP Councillor, Jim Bollan who managed to get the SNP on side in West Dunbartonshire and introduced the policy of divestment in Israeli goods as a motion to Council, which was won and became West Dunbartonshire Council policy. In the early days of Twitter (and of blogging) the deluge of hate that came from across the world, directed at a Scottish Councillor, was incredible. Unprecedented. Like South African Apartheid, we are fighting a government that sees no borders and doesn’t care about scale of dissent big or small- it will cross borders and it will shut down dissent in the harshest and most public of ways in order to win more and more control of people, land and resource in the name of their safety. It’s history as we all know is enmeshed in a history of pogroms and genocides carried out on its peoples over two millennia with a 20th century history of a struggle amongst its own left and right and outright cultist factions in a stolen land that is supposed to be sanctuary from us, the peoples who carried out pogroms and genocides and the Nazi holocaust over the past two millennia… Its army and secret services are imbued with this history and the zeal of a righteous insurgency and offensive siege mentality (it is a complex history – and I hate the simplifying of some on the left to that of “zionism,” which is a term used illiterately and offensively at times). The far right wing of all of that tangled ball of tragic history is in power, and as we know, the right will stop at nothing in order to see its vicious goals successfully to their conclusion (a history that is incredibly labyrinthine and any attempt at simplifying it will be attacked, including, I’m sure, this one!). And at present-and since the very early days of that nation, innocent Palestinian people have been made to suffer and die, caught up in that tangled, bloody, vengeful mess. Robertson’s hubris was in the face of that.
I feel the SNP must look to ensure that this kind of mistake never happens again in its dealings with international governments- it really shouldn’t in the current state of devolution. Israel is an apartheid state, and Scotland must rise as it did for the South African black majority.
I could go on. But to finish, I will say this. At present, the SNP are our voice internationally. We Scots don’t have any other. The Greens aren’t that voice. The SSP aren’t. Alba will never even nearly be, thank the starry plough (but along with ISP and other bams, are loud and are amplified by bad actors, on social media).
I want the SNP to change. It must become the change it/we want to see in Scotland and the world, yes, via policy and how it interacts nationally and internationally, but also and more immediately how it is structured. A broken, secretive and/or undemocratic party taking power will only then influence society in a negative way. The SNP is fixable.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I am at present in a party dominated by the liberal left, who are making unnecessary compromises to a small right wing group in the party with a history that goes way back to its founding days. The right and their naive enablers need to be called out. I don’t feel that some on our side who are in position to do so in this hierarchical party are confident enough to do so- and that is a historic structural problem. I feel we probably need to push our left representatives to move, in solidarity. They need to move less without direction from us. All of us, inside and outside of the SNP. It’s difficult to do so when you feel isolated within something where insipid, fawning, self preserving and promoting liberal voices are loudest (especially when you are a natural introvert who has over the years felt compelled to raise their shaking voice). Change really only happens with numbers. All of us together.
For those who don’t know, there is an SNP Socialists group. People within it range from liberal left to left, and all are decent folk within an imperfect party. If you are in the SNP and want to try to help create real change/push party policy left, please join that group, find comradeship and raise your voices together.
By the way, this isn’t a push for membership of the SNP… I really do understand those in other parties and in no party. I feel at times I’m probably best outside shouting in to be totally honest. There are The Greens and the hard working Scottish Socialist Party and there is the SNP and there is campaigning with other groups for a better Scotland. For a better world. For a free and safe Palestine. For a world without fear or famine or avoidable disease. For a nuclear free Scotland. For stronger protections and equity for our wonderful minorities.
Get involved, wherever you see fit. Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation. The early days of a better, peaceful world.
