Scottish Socialist Party: 2016 and Beyond

SSP activist and student Dave Mundt gives his opinion on the year ahead for the Scottish Socialist Party and the proposed Scottish Left Project. 

The backdrop of the campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum provided the Scottish Socialist Party with a platform they haven’t enjoyed since their electoral success in the 2003 Scottish General Election. Healed are the wounds inflicted by the split, as a younger generation inject enthusiasm and hope into a resurgent party. Post-referendum, the SSP now boasts thirty branches across the country, with membership visible and active within their local communities. Our party carries a message of hope for the working class who has been long abandoned by a now depleted Scottish Labour Party. We are now maneuvering ourselves into a position from where can fight, and we have a lot to fight for.

Impending ‘New New Labour’ Forces The Scottish Labour Party To Go It Alone or Risk Complete Extinction

Decade long infighting has come to the boil, and Murphy’s refusal to resign in Scotland serves to further crucify their electability. Blairite murmurs south of the border can be used as a marker for things to come, further solidifying the need for a united left alternative in Scotland, past the SNP.

Over the weekend Peter Mandelson expressed an opinion shared by many prominent figures south of the border in the wake of Labours semi-
catastrophic performance on Thursday. The party had moved ‘too far to the left' under Ed Milliband. This analysis appears to be at complete odds with that proposed by many in Scotland, academic or otherwise right throughout the last decade.

Cameron’s Looming EU Referendum Threatens Everything We Believe In And More

The dust has just about settled on a bitter-sweet election night for progressives in Scotland. On the one hand, we smugly watched the Blairite, austerity-light, Scottish Labour party implode in a fireball of their own making. Beaten by an anti-austerity message that inspired over a million Scots to send a message to Westminster demanding change. Those who stayed up until the early hours, popcorn out, were even treated to the result coming in live from South Thanet, where Al Murray gleefully reacted to the news that the man beside him, Nigel Farage, hadn’t managed to make it to the House of Commons either. However, South Thanet was one of the marginal seats that the Tories needed to secure to get a majority, and they did. The Conservatives thumped labour in a masterful move on the chess board of British politics. David Cameron managed to keep enough to the right to bandage up the bleed of voters to UKIP while painting an apocalyptic vision of a Labour Government being controlled by Alex Salmond behind the curtain, pulling all the levers of our economy until we had borrowed and taxed ourselves to an early grave. The fact that that this worked so well in England, and the remarkable shape of Scottish politics today, shows the distance between these two countries is longer than the yellow brick road.

Not In My Name – The Struggle For Nuclear Disarmament

When the first nuclear bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, Robert J. Oppenheimer, one of the minds behind the construction of the atomic bomb, quoted Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad Gita; “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was in that moment that Oppenheimer saw that he had gifted humanity with the means to destroy itself. 70 years later, nuclear weapons, the destroyers of worlds, remain situated in various countries across the globe. Today, in 2015, there are around 16,000 nuclear weapons across the planet, each poised to launch at any moment, ready to be deployed 24 hours a day. We sit upon a perpetual knife edge, moments away from death, moments away from total destruction.

Statement on Stirling University Staff Redundancies

Stirling University SSP Society and SSP Stirling Branch welcomes the Supreme Court’s decision to back the University and College Union over Stirling University’s dispute with staff.  This has been a lengthy legal battle between University management and staff, and we look forward to a final decision in favour of the employees who were made redundant in 2009. This is a victory not only for the staff involved at Stirling, but for university and college staff across the country, particularly those employed under limited-term contracts.