Why the Scottish Socialist Party is opposed to reopening the case of Tommy Sheridan

Why the Scottish Socialist Party is opposed to reopening the case of Tommy Sheridan

Hi readers,

Have not been at all active lately. At least not on this blog. The blog served it's purpose. Or, to be more precise, did not. I set it up specifically to rouse the massed ranks of the SSP into a revolt against the rotten elements who had usurped control against Tommy Sheridan. The blog was set up in the lead up to the 2006 SSP conference. In almost every respect, this was a great conference. Policy-wise, it was the best ever. Those who were a year later to go on to form the treacherous "United Left" (a misnomer if ever there was one) were trounced at every turn, with the most nationalist and right-wing (like drugs' spokesperson Kevin Williamson and press officer Eddie Truman) losing pretty much all the contentious votes. Tommy did not just return to the executive with the most votes on the male section, much to the disgust of McCombes, Baldassarra et al, he was elected top of the poll for one of the key posts of co-chair. Alas, all this was a pyhric victory. I had hoped that those who wanted to see the backs of the rats would coalese into a slate to replace McCombes' majority on the party's executive. Unfortunately, the SWP and the CWI and the non-aligned group either would not or could not agree. They fought each other while McCombes' ragbag employed the divide and conquer strategy, with predictable results. McCombes did seem to have suffered a further set-back from the collapse of his place-men and women the previous year. However, he still held onto a bare majority and could use the divisions between Tommy's supporters to stop them getting anything through the executive. It was necessary to mobilise for the more representative national council to get anything done. And then we saw the moral collapse of some of Tommy's key supporters, primarily Colin Fox, who was our candidate. Fox proved to be the weak character that McCombes portrayed him as during the leadership election campaign. Because of Tommy's supporters being an ad hoc group who pretended that Fox would save the party, it was not until this betrayal, on the very eve of a court case (one that had been in preparation for the previous eighteen months) that Tommy and his supporters finally stood up for ourselves. At the May 2006 national council, McCombes' supporters not only lost every single vote, while Tommy's supporters won them all, this time we pulled no punches. Our three hundred strong national council (including around 150 party observers) called for an end to the disgusting whispering campaign by the executive. Defeated time after time, our national convenor said that while he disagreed with all the votes, he was a democrat and would implement them. What a disgusting liar he turned out to be. There was to be one more national council held by the executive. Then they disobeyed all the decisions taken by the national council, and chose to suspend the next national council, knowing that the branches had mobilised for motions of censure against the rats, and that all of them would be kicked out of the executive at the following national council, and, if I had my way, expelled from the party. Unfortunately, a decision was taken by the overwhelming majority of Tommy's supporters to simply abandon this train wreck of a party, and start with a fresh slate, which now goes by the name Solidarity. I am going to leave things here for the moment. But I promise not to wait so long before posting again. This blog is here to stay.

Iago

In my last entry, I said that it was vital the Scottish Socialist Party executive addressed the concerns of our potential voter base, and our own rank and file, both directly and via journalists. In other words, we have to say something about why Tommy Sheridan resigned. Thus far, our leadership has effectively told everyone it is none of their business. But Frances Curran went on to nationwide television to suggest it had something to do with what she referred to as "The crisis in Tommy Sheridan's private life." Our executive have hinted that there is something extremely problematic about our former national convenor's private life, specifically aspects of his sex life. The only two questions anyone has a right to ask Tommy about this is whether the sex he has indulged in has been in every case consensual and with adults. The answer to both being being a resounding yes. The way McCombes, Curran, Leckie and Baldassarra have addressed the issue is to invite doubt about these answers. They, and thanks to their leadership, the overwhelming majority of the party executive, have dragged our party into a situation where people suspect the worst: one of our MSPs is a pedophile, or rapist, and that the rest of our leadership have been covering up for some kind of sex offender.

If we are ever going to restore our electoral fortunes, the executive have to make it crystal clear that there is nothing in Tommy's private life that is a matter of public interest. And, like every other member of the Scottish Socialist Party (indeed every single human being), Tommy Sheridan has a right to a private life. No less important, we have to insist that the attempt by right-wing billionaires to use the so-called free press to "expose" tittle tattle about Tommy should be treated with the contempt it deserves. There is a long tradition of the secret security agencies of capitalist states (acting hand in glove with press barrons) discrediting socialists, trade unionists, and civil liberties campaigners by, amongst other things, releasing irrelevancies about their private lives. Tommy Sheridan is clearly the latest victim of such smear campaigns.

All those who wish to be elected to the party's executive this March need to go a little further than this. They need to join with Colin Fox, Rosemary Byrne and others in stating publicly that Tommy Sheridan's word is good enough for them. Given the stakes involved (bankruptcy, loss of liberty via a potential criminal prosecution for perjury, and the destruction of his reputation), it is vital that Tommy enters his trial in June with as much solidarity as he can muster. McCombes, Curran, Leckie and Baldassarra might want Tommy to enter the witness box with his jury's collective mind poisoned against him, but I don't. Tommy would have to be insane to launch a libel action against anyone unless truth was on his side. What more does any SSP member need to know?

I wish Tommy had not started this legal action. I think it was misguided for several reasons. In the first place, it was an unnecessary distraction for one of the greatest electoral assets of our party. Secondly, Murdoch has extremely deep pockets. There is no amount of compensation that the courts will award Tommy that will cause Murdoch the slightest bit of pain. Far from learning his lesson, he will exact revenge against Tommy by immediately launching more stories. If he ensnares Tommy into a further legal action, then he wins (as do all enemies of our class) by removing from the forefront of the battle against the capitalist system one of our most important leaders. And, in all probability, Murdoch will simply insist that the News of the World editor is more scrupulous with the facts next time round. Murdoch knows that Tommy's closest collaborators are infested with vermin such as Duncan Rowan, who was prepared to sell Tommy out without financial incentives. By opening up his wallet, and handing out thirty thousand pieces of silver, by insisting the News of the World editor sees to it that the identities of our party's Judases are kept secret from now on, Murdoch will be able to expose things that Tommy can't sue over, because they are true. When Tommy fails to sue over these articles, Murdoch will invite the NoW readership to draw their own conclusions. When Tommy wins this case, the best thing to do is to take the money and run. Don't get entangled in further legal action. Just denounce the gutter press speculation as beneath contempt. Our voters won't give a damn whether the stories are true or not. Just laugh it off Tommy, in the same way you do jokes about your sun tan.

But this is not enough. Journalists will never ever let us hear the end of it until we answer some of their questions about why Tommy resigned. I know far more than I have a right to know, more than I am prepared to say. Journalists have been punishing us (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future) because of our refusal to address these questions. They have been punishing us by boycotting us, and our executive seems bereft of ideas as to how to get them to stop. Journalists and their editors know every bit as much as we do just how desperately need to reestablish a healthy relationship with the print and broadcast media. We need to see to it that they give us adequate coverage. We need their help to allow us to expose the spin and false perspectives of all the non-socialist parties. Without their assistance we siimply cannot reach out to our own natural constituency. We have no choise but to give the press answers that make some kind of sense. And the answers provided so far (in so far as they can be described as answers, rather than evasions) are completely unintelligible. Therefore, without a shred of authority from Tommy Sheridan or anyone else, I have decided to address some of these questions. While I have not requested approval from Tommy, I don't think he would quibble about anything I am going to say. He has nothing to fear. McCombes, Curran, Leckie, Baldassarra and many others, however, will be less supportive. Tough. The journalists have a right to answers to the following questions:

1) Were there any proposals for Tommy to resign prior to the executive meeting at which he did "resign"? Emphatically not.
2) Did there emerge any revelations about Tommy's private life that lead any member of the executive to call for Tommy's resignation? Once again, no.
3) Does that mean the reason for Tommy's so-called resignation is related to what happened at the meeting in question? Yes.

Tommy took issue with the rest of the executive on how to respond to the press smears about his private life. He felt that when the gutter press chooses to write a tissue of lies about him, then he has every right to take them to court and seek compensation. For those reasons already given, I would have councilled Tommy against pursuing legal action. The fact that Tommy was not prepared to accept the rest of the executive's advice was problematic, and may have given a legitimate cause for the party to ask Tommy to step aside further down the line, although it is not inconceivable that the much broader national council would have rejected the recommendation that Tommy had to choose between the national convenorship and pursuing legal action. However, it was very easy for the likes of McCombes, Curran, Leckie and Baldassarra to ask Tommy to take it on the chin when Murdoch spread malicious lies about Tommy. Exposes about their own private lives were not going to sell the same volume of extra papers as "revelations" about Tommy. McCombes and his acolytes felt secure, but insisted that unless Tommy told the truth, the whole truth and nothing about the truth about every detail about his private life, then he had to sit back and watch Murdoch print lie after lie, week in, week out. While it may not have been tactically wise to take Murdoch on via the courts, I think most SSP members would have been a damn sight more sympathetic to Tommy's plight than members of the executive were.

Members of the executive decided that if Tommy insisted on going to go to the courts to get justice, then they would distribute to the next national council details about Tommy's private life, details entirely unrelated to this legal action, details that were nobody's business but Tommy's. Since all three thousand members of the party had a constitutional right to attend national councils as observers, and since anywhere between one and two hundred could be expected to attend that meeting, Tommy chose to step down as national convenor, rather than have irrelevant tittle-tattle about his private life distributed so recklessly to such a large group of people.

Now it is true that in addition to insisting on going to court, in defiance of the advice of the rest of the party's executive, Tommy said things at that meeting he should not have said, things for which he had to appologise, things for which he did apologise as soon as he had calmed down. But let us be absolutely clear. Tommy did not threaten violence against anyone for the disgraceful way they treated him at that meeting, far less did he actually engage in acts of violence. And what he said, although wrong, was clearly caused by extreme provocation. Carolyn Leckie went on within days to tell the Scottish Mirror that her private life was her business and no one elses. Frances Curran went on Newsnight Scotland to tell Gordon Brewer that she would not want her private life speculated on by journalists. Yet the pair of them insisted, along with many others, that Rupert Murdoch must be allowed to print sheer lies about Tommy with impunity, and that details about Tommy's private life had to be made available to thousands of SSP members. Tommy Sheridan had every right to be appalled by the disgraceful way he was being treated by his so-called comrades. No member of our party can blame Tommy for saying things in the heat of the moment that should not have been said.

Having told Tommy that he would have to "resign" immediately or else the executive would leak details of his private life to the next national council, and having gotten Tommy's resignation as a result of this obscene blackmail, the executive then went on to break their side of the bargain; unbelievably, they leaked these details anyway! One of their number, North East Regional Organiser Duncan Rowan, went straight to the News of the World. The rest simply voted to send executive members on a speaking tour of all our branches to leak these details. I could name one of those who addressed these branch meetings. But I won't. That is because I believe he was simply obeying orders, and if he did not agree the rest of the executive would have sent someone less sympathetic to Tommy to break the news. Other members, such as Colin Fox and SW platformer Charlotte Ahmed, and one or two others, virtually immediately accepted they got swept along on the day and had not thought things through. They very much regretted what they had done. I would like to think I played a small part in helping these comrades clarify their feelings, and come to their senses. It was, at any rate, only after I publicly denounced the leaking of tittle-tattle about Tommy's private life on the Monday after Tommy's resignation (I did this on BBC Scotland's Leslie Riddoch Show), and then again in the letters' page of the Herald, that this abuse of power came to an abrupt halt. The majority of the executive thought they could get away with their smear campaign against Tommy by threatening disciplinary action against anyone who exposed what they were up to. I was never in the slightest intimidated by these threats. Given the circumstances, I would prefer to invite expulsion from the SSP than keep my mouth shut. I would never have been able to live with myself otherwise. Besides, I was pretty confident that the rank and file of the party would turn against the executive majority if they got to hear what had been going on.

Our party has no choise but to consider the possibility that Tommy will lose his legal battle. It already has, which is why the selection of candidates for the Glasgow regional list to next year's Holyrood elections has already been postponed until after Tommy wins his legal action - or not. While I don't doubt for a second that Tommy is telling the truth, I am less confident that the courts will arrive at the same conclusion, which is one more reason why Tommy was misguided in gambling on the correct verdict. Since less than two percent of the Scottish people vote for our party these days, is it inconceivable that a jury made up of such people already prejudiced against our politics, prejudiced to such an extent that they will side with Murdoch? Given the vote of no confidence in Tommy's veracity, which is precisely how Murdoch's lawyers will portray our executive's "neutrality", I think there is a very real possibility that Tommy could lose. If he loses, I will not accept the verdict. As an individual, I promise to help get the verdict overturned on appeal. All decent socialists need to promise to collect money to help with his legal expenses. If Tommy is then sent to prison for alleged perjury, then socialists should adopt him as a political prisonner, fight for his release, and for the return of his good name. All those SSP members who played a part in discrediting Tommy in the eyes of the jury will have to be held to account. Any SSP member who actually climbs into the dock in order to spread malicious rumours about Tommy's private life should not be allowed to get away with this simply on account of their being subpoenaed by Murdoch's lawyers. I have no first hand knowledge about Tommy's private life. But if I did, I would tell the judge that Tommy's private life is his business and no one elses. I would rather be sent to prison for contempt of court than to betray such confidences. The judge should rule out of order any questions from Murdoch's lawyers that are unrelated to the specific libel action. But when did socialists ever expect justice from the capitalist courts? There is not a single member of the SSP who claims to know anything about this particular case. Not one. Any SSP member who agrees to appear as a witness for Rupert Murdoch, to spread rumours unrelated to this particular libel action, should be immediately expelled from the Scottish Socialist Party. They need to be made parriahs within the international socialist movement. Just like those vermin who cooperated with Senator McCarthey's House Un-American Activities Committee.

"Kirk Douglas's 1960 historical epic made a bold political gesture by crediting blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. In 1947, Trumbo was one of ten writers sentenced to a year's jail for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation into alleged communist activities.
Pre-Imperial Rome, circa 73 BC. Tyranical senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) has overseen the defeat of the slave revolt. Determined to weed out their leader, Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), he offers them a deal: they will remain enslaved, but be spared mass crucifixion on condition that they give up their figurehead. Spartacus prepares to reveal himself, but as he stands up, so does his loyal friend, Antoninus (Tony Curtis), calling out, "I am Spartacus!" This is echoed by others until the hills are alive with a chorus of identical claims. A single tear rolls down Spartacus's grimy, lined features, cutting through his steely gaze. His identity has been concealed by collective solidarity. The significance is clear."

When I began this blog, I never expected to introduce an entry with a long quotation from the Radio Times. But, there you go. The above article appears on page 59 of the current issue, under the heading of 'Classic Movie Moment'. The film is reshown for the umpteenth time on terrestrial television at 3.20pm this afternoon. Anyone unfamiliar with the film is strongly recommended to watch; you wont be disappointed. I don't know how often I have seen it. But the particular scene referred to above never fails to bring a tear to my eye. I suspect the message contained in the entire film, and this scene in particular, left an indeliable impression on me when I first saw it as a child. I know I am not alone in this. Regretably, these basic instincts of socialist solidarity are patently absent from a very large section of the Scottish Socialist Party's leadership.

Rosemary Byrne and Colin Fox amply demonstrated their personal courage and socialist solidarity when they publicly defied the overwhelming majority of our party's executive. They did this when they refused to be bound by Alan McCombes' straightjacket of so-called neutrality towards Tommy Sheridan's battle against Rupert Murdoch's obscene witchhunt . Implicitly invoking the spirit of Spartacus' loyal army, Tommy wrote in his election address to last year's conference:

"I seek your support for election to the Party's Executive. I also want to thank you for the letters, e-mails and phone calls of solidarity you sent to me in November. When a powerful reactionary rag like the N of W attacks any socialist we know instinctively whose side we are on.

"The Murdoch Empire despises socialists and trades unions. They pedal lies and distortions of the truth daily. Your solidarity with me against them has kept me strong. Some have advised against but I'm determined to fight them all the way, including in court if necessary. Bullies and liars should be fought and I intend to fight them."

Armed with this electoral address, Tommy topped the poll for male members of the executive, defeating McCombes, Baldassarra and the rest of his detractors. This was not a good conference for Alan McCombes. Worse by far than his simply being outvoted by Tommy, and Colin, was the fact that both got themselves elected on explicit madates of solidarity with Tommy against Murdoch, as did Rosemary Byrne who ousted McCombes' supporter Catriona Grant as co-chair. Unfortunately, although this was a magificent conference from my point of view, and an unmitigated disaster for McCombes (and worse still for his more right-wing and nationalist supporters, such as Kevin Williamson, Lloyd Quinan, Eddie Truman and the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement), Tommy's supporters made one extremely serious error. We failed to name and shame all those members of the executive whose behavior necessitated their democratic purge from all leading roles within the party. While McCombes' supporters did suffer a heavy setback, by my calculations they retained a narrow majority of the new executive. And many of those who adopted the correct attitude towards Tommy vis-a-vis Murdoch were, and remain, bitterly divided amongst themselves on almost every other question of importance. McCombes must have breathed an enormous sigh of relief, knowing how easily he could employ divide and rule tactics to make it impossible for Colin to exercise any kind of discipline, despite his powerful conference mandate to do precisely that. As a consequence of our complacency, we ended up with an executive that has wasted yet another year making one serious error of judgement after another. Far from restoring the party to health, this executive has been busily destroying the entire party. We can't afford a repeat of this mistake. The bastards have to be named, and I intend to name each and every one of them.

I have already devoted two entries of this blog to expose the criminal roles of McCombes and Curran. I concluded my last entry with a promise to turn immediately to the next two most important criminals, Leckie and Baldassarra. I am going to have to break that promise. I will have to postpone a detailed expose of this pair for a day or two. I do that in order to turn my attention to more pressing matters: an analysis of the disasterous performance of the SSP in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election.

The first thing we need to recognise is that when John Mcallion decided he wanted to fight this seat on behalf of the SSP, he will not have expected such a derisory vote. He probably anticipated a vote comparable to that of the victorious George Galloway's. Perhaps he will have prepared himself for not actually overturning the Labour majority. He would, however, have expected to significantly dent that majority. If he could not become our first candidate elected under first-past-the-post, then he could surely deliver the kind of vote that would force the mass media to start to take our party seriously once again. Unfortunately, John's vote fell to around one twenty fifth of what he had come to expect. Standing under SSP colours would appear to be the kiss of death to even the most effective communicator, and few are better than John Mcallion. I very much doubt that he will ever again be quite so enthusiastic about putting himself through such a humiliating experience.

The official SSP explanation for this latest disaster is that the press and broadcast media have taken to starving us of the oxygen of publicity. Why would we expect anything else? We intend to grow in membership and influence precisely in order to gain a mandate to abolish private property in the means of production, distribution and exchange. We want to expropriate the expropriators so that these can be collectively controlled by democratic organisations of the workers who actually produce the goods and services society needs. Why should any privately owned corporation, such as the Herald, assist us to get our message across? Prior to Tommy's resignation, we did, virtually uninteruptedly, exploit every media opportunity that came our way. We managed to use them to reach out to a wider group of voters, resulting in an ever expanding electoral base. We set in motion a virtuous circle. Alas, ever since Tommy's "resignation", the publicity we have drawn towards ourselves has alienated us to an ever greater extent from our natural constituency. We have squandred the opportunites that have come our way. And we have indulged in stunts that have proven public relations disasters. By refusing to even address the effects of these disasters, we have made it easy for the media to boycot us, and for our potential voters to do likewise. When our vote collapsed below two percent in the last general election, when our MSPs and executive put on a far from convincing mask of unity for the few weeks of that election, and when John Mcallion scored a mere 1.5% share of the vote, then the Herald, BBC and others have little problem justifying their boycot of our party.

We are now faced with an horrendous chicken and egg conundrum: while we need considerable media exposure to rebuild our electoral base, until we can demonstrate the allegiance of a significant section of the electorate, we are not going to get any such exposure. Given the collapse in our popular support (below two percent and continuing downwards towards a mere one percent), writing letters to the Herald complaining about their boycot of our party (as Tommy did last week), simply will not deliver the goods. So what will? I have a long list of recommendations, but will focus on just four for the moment:

All the most important rights and responsibilities that were Tommy's prior to his "resignation" have got to be returned to him asap. Certainly long before next year's Holyrood elections. This process need not necessarily be officially sanctioned by his re-election as national convenor. I can in fact think of several reasons why Colin Fox should retain the national convenorship. I certainly do not want Tommy to contest the convenorship without the explicit support of Colin and Rosemary.
Alan McCombes' Judas faction has to be smashed to pieces. Their malign influence within the party's executive has to be reduced to, at most, Alan himself and a handful of groupies.
The party needs to open up a sober debate on all those public relations disasters that have threatened to destroy us, disasters that appear on the surface entirely unrelated to our crisis over Tommy Sheridan's "resignation". The most significant of these is, of course, the four person demonstration in the Holyrood chamber.
We can no longer get away with refusing to say anything about why Tommy "resigned." Unless and until we address our potential voters' concerns, they are going to fear the worst. They will assume, among other obscenities, that one of our MSPs is a rapist or pedophile, and that the rest of our MSPs have been engaged in covering up for such criminal behavior. The reality is, of course, that Tommy did absolutely nothing to warrant his "resignation," nothing that should stand in the way of his returning to that office in the next few months. While I can't tell everything I know, I am going to significantly narrow down the options for speculation by our voters. And I am going to argue that there were powerful mitigating factors in Tommy's defense that mean that the story journalists have been trying to uncover is nothing more than a storm in a teacup. In truth, there is nothing there - apart from one man's right to a private life, and the disgraceful attempt by those jealous of him to deny him that right.

As far as my first recommendation is concerned, at least two leading party personalities (Peter Mullan and Hugh Kerr) seem to be on my side. The specific duties Tommy must take on within the next few months are:

Every fortnight at First Minister's Questions, it has to be Tommy who represents our party. It is simply not in Colin's interests for anyone to pretend that he has come close to matching Tommy's performance at the despatch box. If we had the luxury of unlimited time, we could wait for Colin to grow into this aspect of the job. But we don't. Socialist politicians need to ruthlessly fill positions with the individuals best suited to the job. It simply has to be Tommy.
The skills that make Tommy best suited of all our MSPs to conference-chamber debate make him the ideal candidate to take on Jack McConnell, Nicola Sturgeon and all the rest on television. There will be televised hustings in the weeks running up the vote for next May's Holyrood elections. Colin has learnt the hard way (as, to a lesser extent, the rest of our MSPs did in the months between Tommy's "resignation" and Colin's election) that it is not as easy to hold up well when you have to face the hostile questions thrown at you by a non-sympathetic interrogator as it is to preach to the converted at party meetings and rallies. Our party is extremely fortunate to have a star performer of the calibre of Tommy Sheridan. That is an asset that we can't afford to squander. I know that. Peter Mullan knows it. So does Hugh Kerr. It is high time that the executive was made up of representatives of the vast majority of the party's 3,000 rank and file members who share our analysis.

If Tommy Sheridan promises to discipline himself to defend, as best he can, democraticly determined party policy, rather than opt for defending what he personally thinks is best policy (the former being what he managed so successfully prior to "resigning"), then he should return officially as national convenor - with Colin's wholehearted support. With the return of Tommy, and even more imporantly, the crushing of McCombes' Judas tendency, we will be capable of rejuvenating our electoral support - from the miserable 1.5% of last Thursday back to our high of 6% and, hopefully, beyond - into double figures perhaps. If we can achieve such levels of support by the beginning of next year (and that is not an unrealistic ambition), the BBC etc will have little option but to invite Tommy to hustings, where he should be able to consolidate opinion poll success into actual crosses on ballot papers. If not, then we will be absent from the screens, where elections are won and lost these days. And, as a consequence of this public invisibility, we can look forward to being swept from the Holyrood benches. Our party can be expected to implode very shortly after that. I am not going to let that happen.

While I am confident that an overwhelming majority of the party's rank and file would like Tommy to return as national convenor asap, and while I am as confident that the more they learn about the behavior of McCombes and his acolytes, the more pressure they will place on conference delegates to to kick them out of the party's executive, I am less confident about the willingness of the party's activists to face up to some other (apparently unrelated) disasters. Nonetheless, I am going to stick my neck out and challenge party orthodoxy about, amongst other things, the Holyrood demonstrations.

To the best of my knowledge, the only significant figure in the party that has publicly taken the MSP group to task for this demonstration is award-winning actor/director (and close friend of Tommy's), Peter Mullan. No one appears to have felt able to defend what Peter argued in his fascinating interview with Gordon Brewer on Newsnight Scotland. I was always a fan of Peter as an actor and director. But it was not until that interview that I realised how valuable he was to our party. I agreed with every word he said as far as the treatment of Tommy is concerned. I also agreed with his criticisms of Colin dressing up as Robin Hood, although, unlike Peter, I won't portray Colin as a villain of the piece. It is in significant part due to Colin's having played a key role in the Holyrood demonstration that I have, thus far, said and wrote nothing in criticism of the demonstration. And I am convinced that is the reason no one else has raised any criticism. But I can't keep quiet any longer. A myth has grown up that the party got everything right on the day, which is very far from being the case. Unless those of us who realise we got things badly wrong start to challenge this myth, it is going to be too late to ever undo the damage.

It was extraordinarily brave of Peter to raise any criticisms of this demonstration. I suspect he spoke on behalf of a silent majority of the party's rank and file. Not as far as the details are concerned. I doubt if many would endorse his every word; I certainly don't. But, while they can't quite put their finger on precisely what the problem is, most of our members do know something went badly wrong. For my part, I definitely do not agree with Peter. I am confident that in the course of a reasoned debate within the party, Peter would gladly disassociate himself from a large part of what he originally argued. His mistake consists of starkly counterposing two anti-socialist positions: that of anarchism, on the one hand, and, on the other, right-wing reformism, and then coming down pretty enthusiasticly in defense of the latter. This false dichotomy had already been defended by Holyrood's Presiding Officer, George Reid: "The SSP," according to Reid, "have to choose either the parliamentary benches or the barricades." The SNP, Greens and those even less sympathetic to our MSPs expressed full agreement. But these are not the only choises open to us.

Peter was simply wrong to argue that we either accept the protocol of the parliament or we don't try to get elected to it. When the parliament starves the people, and their elected representatives, of legitimate opportunities to challenge undemocratic maneovres, we have every right to challenge the speaker's authority, although we have to be very careful about when and how we do this, for rather obvious reasons. An example of how to do this right came shortly after Peter's Newsnight Scotland interview. Tommy stepped in as Colin's stand-in during his suspension from Holyrood. And Tommy was immediately provoked by the Depute Presiding Officer. Once again, one of our MSPs brought a parliamentary session to an abrupt halt, this time because Tommy refused to bow down before what Peter refers to as the parliament's protocol. What Tommy did was absolutely correct. The Depute Presiding Officer had clearly chosen to humiliate Tommy with a calculated attempt to provoke him into getting himself kicked out of the chamber, which may have lead to yet more disciplinary measures being taken against our entire group. But this provocation backfired. Tommy played it brilliantly. Within a few short minutes, Tommy had wrung an apology from the Depute Presiding Officer for not forewarning him that he was not going to be allowed a second supplementary question, a courtesy that had been extended to the other party leaders. Murray Tosh had not a leg to stand on, since his anti-democratic abuse was exposed for what it was: it had lead to Tommy's wasting his precious once-a-fortnight opportunity to hold the First Minister to account.

So, what was wrong with that other demonstration? This is not an easy question to answer. I am far from convinced that I have all the answers. The first thing to say is that the party was absolutely justified in placing the option of a demonstration of the chamber onto the agenda. However, there were a series of arguments against going ahead with the demonstration. Had I known prior to the demonstration what I learned soon afterwards, I would have strongly cautioned against it, and I think our party should publicly admit it made a serious error of judgement. Or, to be more precise, a series of errors. And we need to spell out precisely what these were.

Error number one: Having promised to vote in support of the victims of hep c getting tens of thousands of pounds in compensation due to the criminal negligence of public authorities, our four MSPs failed to vote, which lead directly to the loss of this compensation. It was grossly insensitive of our MSPs to try to absolve themselves of any responsibility for this robbery of deserved compensation. While they could argue that parliament punished them too severely, and ought not to have done so without allowing their speaking in their defense, there was never any prospect of their not being excluded from the chamber for the rest of the day. In other words, they knew that their actions would result in their no longer being able to keep their promise to the hep c sufferers. They tried to pin the blame on SNP members of the health committee and whips for not informing the SSP MSPs of the closeness of the vote. However, as the SNP members in question pointed out, their job does not include responsibilities to keep the SSP so informed. Perhaps if our MSPs had alerted the SNP to their plans to bring parliamentary business to a halt, then they could have seen the importance of warning them that their actions could cost the hep c sufferers their compensation. But they had no reason to know what our MSPs were planning.

Error number two: The specific demands our raised MSPs during this demonstration were ludicrous. Does anyone suppose the children who are dying at a rate of one every three seconds would feel any better knowing that four MSPs and a few hundred others managed to get their screams of protest at Bush, Blair and the rest of the G8 close enough to be heard by these criminals?

Error number three: Tommy wrote in his Scottish Mirror collumn that, regardless of whether the police sanction the G8 demonstration or not, he would be there. Why should socialists bring the Scottish parliament to a halt simply in order to get police approval for a demonstration? Tommy Sheridan won his reputation and authority as a result of demonstrating in defiance of police bans. Arthur Scargill won his reputation for organising flying pickets that forced the police to throw in the towel. This aspect of the MSPs demand was also pointless.

Error number four: Our MSPs said that they were taking unilateral action in order to force parliament to uphold a decision it had already taken to see to it that a legal demonstration went ahead. Did our MSPs not spot the irony of this argument? This logic was identical to that employed by George W Bush, when he argued that it was legal to go to war against Iraq without a second UN resolution. He said no further resolution was necessary since the first resolution gave it authority, and if the UN would not uphold its own decisions, then he would do it for them. Just as the UN had the right to step back from all out war, Holyrood had the same right to reverse its previous decision, if it so chose. While we might condemn the Greens, SNP and others for not sticking to their original decision, when parties that had just won the allegiance of over 98% of the Scottish electorate votes in defiance of what the SSP wants, we cannot simply tell Scottish workers that their votes don't count. If our party's executive judged that there was mass support outside Holyrood for a demonstration (one based on serious demands, rather than those our MSPs opted for), mass support that vastly exceeded our extremely narrow electoral base, then we may have felt able to break our promise to the hep c sufferers in order to represent this mass of workers. However, if our MSPs, and our executive, expected such broad support, they appear to have badly miscalculated. Far from helping restore our party's electoral base, this demonstration seems to have confirmed all the anxieties of those who turned their backs on us since Tommy's "resignation." They consider our action as indicative of an anti-democratic, anarchistic streak, which is exactly what it was. A party that aspires to form a majority government has no right to disrupt parliament in opposition to the wishes of groups representing 98% of the people. We would not dream of allowing those representing less than 2% to disrupt parliament when we form a majority government, any more than party co-chair Carolyn Leckie allows unrepresentative individuals or small groups to disrupt conference, national council or executive meetings.

Error number five: Parliament voted unanimously for severe sanctions because our MSPs were, in George Reid's words "repeat offenders." Our MSPs took exception to this description. I can't think why. It is perfectly accurate. Carolyn Leckie had on two previous occasions gotten herself kicked out of the chamber, without our party dissociating itself from either of her actions. This was the most serious defiance of parliament, a parliament unanimously hostile to our MSPs' demonstration. Unless the rest of the MSPs wanted to invite Leckie (and the rest of our MSPs) to develop the habit of disrupting parliament on a regular basis, it had no option but to impose severe sanctions. If our MSPs had not anticipated this reaction, then they were naive in the extreme. It is precisely because I am, on the one hand, in favour of such disruptions in principle, and because, on the other, I fully recognise the inevitable consequences of taking such actions, that I am in favour of our MSPs' rationing them, choosing them very, very carefully. Given our promise to the hep c sufferers, and the insanity of the specific demands of this proposed demonstration, it would have been better to have held this card in reserve. This is especially the case given that Carolyn Leckie had already thrown away one of our lives. While I supported her on the first occasion she got herself kicked out of the chamber, as did all the rest of our MSPs, who walked out in solidarity, I did not support her second stunt. And, I suspect, neither did Tommy, Colin or Rosemary. The fact that they resolutely remained in the chamber stony faced confirms me in my suspicions. But if it turns out that they did back her stunt, they were very misguided in doing so. Leckie's second stunt was entirely set up by her and others hostile to Colin Fox's bid for national convenorship. She got herself expelled minutes before Colin's first outing at First Minister's Questions. This was patently a bid to upstage Colin, and get publicity for herself. In the event, the broadcast and print media ridiculed Leckie's stunt, and saw to it that neither Colin nor Carolyn got interviewed that evening. Carolyn Leckie has unilaterally (and on at least one occasion for egotistical reasons) thrown away the small number of stunts in the conference chamber that we could exploit before our party's MSPs are kicked out for good. That means that although much better opportunities may surface in the near future, our MSPs are pretty much going to have to bite their tongues and sit on their hands.

Error number six: Scotsman on Sunday journalist Alan Cochrane wrote that the non-SSP MSPs missed a trick when they disciplined our party. They ought to have opted for different punishments for Colin Fox, on the one hand, and a more severe set of punishments for the rest. I can see where he is coming from. There was in reality not one SSP demonstration at Holyrood that day, but two. Colin's ended abruptly almost as soon as it began. The others refused to pack up along with Colin in a disciplined retreat. They apparently bedded themselves in for an indefinite occupation, which only ran out of steam when the police did a deal with journalists to deny our three MSPs an extended publicity stunt. Why did they not all end their protest in an orderly fashion? Isn't it obvious. Curran, Leckie and Rosie had spent the preceeding months abusing Colin as a coward for his failure to push extra-parliamentary action to the point of getting arrested. They clearly refused to abandon their protest until long after Colin ended his. They did this in order to reinforce their point about Colin's alleged cowardice. They wanted to make him look bad, to help in getting rid of him as national convenor at the earliest opportunity. Three of our MSPs see their job as primarily one of humiliating our national convenor. First Tommy, then Colin. They wont stop destroying our national convenors until they finally get one they like. Or until they have completely destroyed our party. Perhaps it is the rest of the party that needs to send them packing. From the party's executive, and from Holyrood.

There's a spectre haunting Alan McCombes: the spectre of Iago. Alas, I am that man.

Iago is not a name I chose for myself. Nor does it appear anywhere on my birth certificate; I would have very much resented my parents if it did. This unfortunate pen-name was selected for me by the policy coordinator of the Scottish Socialist Party. Although it was intended as the crudest of insults, it is a name I have chosen to accept.

It was during an interview with BBC Scotland's Glenn Campbell, a few days after he chaired a press conference of our MSPs, that McCombes first spoke darkly of an Iago lurking in the shadows of our party, a creep disseminating malicious gossip, bringing our party into disrepute. Although comrade McCombes promised that he would shortly name this malicious individual, a full thirteen months have passed and still we are all kept waiting.

Comrade McCombes and his supporters on the party's executive drew a sketch of this 'so-called 'Iago' at the secret national council meeting that confirmed that Tommy Sheridan remained a valued member of the party and of our MSP group. While McCombes and his close supporters have lacked the guts to name me, or to put me before a kangaroo court, they have summoned sufficient courage to blacken my name by innuendo, without giving me an opportunity to challenge any of their smears.

This blog is going to be my principle means of clearing my name. But it is going to be much more than that. I intend to use it to reach out to as many of the party's members, affiliated trade unionists and voters as I can. I will use it to repeat everything I argued publicly in the immediate aftermath of Tommy's resignation, everything that lead to McCombes' anger with me in the first place. I will add more details. I will supply additional information that all three thousand SSP members need to know about McCombes and his closest supporters. And I will argue why the majority of them need to be purged from the SSP's executive in next month's elections. Delegates to the party's conference need to agree to draw up a series of recommended slates that will eliminate from the executive anyone unwilling to publicly support Tommy Sheridan against Rupert Murdoch in this July's libel action against the News of the World. Probably over fifty percent of the present executive fall into that category, including fifty percent of our MSPs.

For their unforgivable role in dragging the party into crisis, Frances Curran and Carolyn Leckie need to be kicked off the party's executive. Both then need to be democraticly removed from top place in their respective regional lists. Rosie Kane has yet to back Tommy against Murdoch. And she associated herself one hundred percent with McCombes' thoroughly discreditable campaign against Colin Fox. However, as far as I am aware, her actions were due to her allowing herself to be dragged along by Curran, Leckie, McCombes and others. Unless and until I discover otherwise, I will be giving her the benefit of the doubt. Her crime is one of incompetence, not maliciousness. While it is far too late to redeem the souls of her two companions, if Rosie took a long overdue decision to stand alongside Tommy against Murdoch, then she could yet merit a place on the executive. And her being reselected as top woman on our Glasgow regional list for Holyrood. Will she declare herself to be a Spartacus, like Colin and Rosemary? Or would she rather have the thirty pieces of silver? Like Curran and Leckie? I live in hope.

Alan McCombes was clearly the ring leader of the criminal elements that plunged the Scottish Socialist Party into crisis (from which we have yet to recover) fifteen excruciatingly long months ago. That said, he can rehabilitate himself in my eyes. But only if he publicly recognised what precisely he did wrong, the seriousness of it, and apologised personally to Tommy and to the rest of the party. We could then all move on. If, that is, he proves capable of growing up. However, this forgiveness should not be extended to all of McCombes' posse. While he might still deserve re-election to the party's executive, this year and for the foreseeable future, the same does not go for his loyal lieutenants. MSPs Frances Curran, Carolyn Leckie and Housing Spokesperson Keith Baldassarra certainly do not warrant any forgiveness. Why not? Two reasons.

In the first place, McCombes had drawn into his orbit the overwhelming majority of the SSP's executive at the time of Tommy's resignation, a process that had escaped my attention and, I am sure, that of almost all the rest of the party's ranks. Their absolute blind loyalty to McCombes as an individual and, it turns out, to his seedy leadership ambitions, overrode their loyalty to the party as a whole. McCombes' wings need to be clipped by purging the executive of such toadies. While McCombes will probably scrape back into the executive regardless of any apology for what he did, his groupies need to be left languishing on the back benches, from whence they can go home to think again.Then and only then can the party's leading body be restored to something approximating health. Then and only then will the catalogue of disasterous mistakes be brought to an end.

Of all McCombes' aides, Frances Curran is by far the most poisonous. I find it extraordinary that McCombes has managed to keep the massed ranks of the party in the dark about what she has done. I have tried, with insufficient success thus far, to sound the alarm. Hopefully in the month left before the party's conference I can successfully make the case for her removal from the executive. Here goes.

I could provide a list of over one hundred SSP members who heard Curran boast that if anyone asks her about Tommy Sheridan's private life, she will tell the truth. If she was expecting this commitment to "the truth" to be rewarded with a standing ovation, she will have been disappointed. Gasps of incredulity and disgust were audible throughout the hall as she made this threat. Decent members of the SSP will continue to tell any such curious individual to mind their own business. I would have done this prior to discovering Rupert Murdoch's News of the World were engaged in a witchhunt against Tommy - had I known anything about his private life, which I did not. Given the circumstances known to me now though, I will be taking a mental note of everyone who asks such questions: why are they asking this? Might they be wired for sound? For Murdoch? The British security services, perhaps? Frances Curran has effectively boasted that she intends to act in exactly the same manner that lead to former North East regional organiser Duncan Rowan's suspension from the party. Every delegate to our annual conference needs to be aware of Curran's petty, malicious gossip-mongering against Tommy, and who knows how many other comrades. They need to ask themselves whether our party can afford to tollerate such an individual polluting our party's executive. Or our MSP group for that matter. I trust they will make the correct decision.

If anyone still needs further proof of the undesirability of having Curran on the party's executive, consider the following. She was personally charged with organising the press conference of all our MSPs, a press conference specifically designed to anounce the "unity" of our party. Incredibly, Curran decided that Tommy should not be invited to this press conference, although the party's extraordinary executive meeting had only hours previously confirmed Tommy as a member of the party and our MSP group. When this unilateral declaration of independence from Tommy Sherdan lead to a rebellion by other leading members of the party, and she was told Tommy had to be invited, Curran considered unilaterally cancelling the entire press conference! Over one hundred SSP members heard her say that she wishes she had done this! This episode provides us with further proof that her bitterness towards Tommy is far more important to her than her commitment to democratic votes within our party.

As if this was not bad enough, Curran chose to use the run up to last year's general election to express public contempt for her MSP colleague. Colin Fox pointed out that Tommy was not treated with the respect he deserved during his resignation. When this was put to Curran, she thought it wise to give a journalist a quote to the effect that Tommy Sheridan did not deserve her respect, and, by implication, neither did he deserve the respect of Glasgow's voters. So intent on demonising Tommy is she that it did not concern her that the party's potential voters would ask themselves why they should respect those who sit alongside Tommy Sheridan, such as herself. If Curran did not appreciate the electoral consequences for our party of such a statement, then she is too stupid to be granted any responsible role in the party. The truth is, of course, that she knew perfectly well what she was doing.

This public indifference to the electoral consequences of knifing Tommy Sheridan in the back also explains her particularly nasty role in the party's election for national convenor, although it has to be said that McCombes was no less nasty in his bid to stop Colin Fox getting elected. They both seized every opportunity they could to reintroduce the man who was shortly to be elected as the party's national convenor as, amongst other things, a coward, a Tory collaborator, anti-democratic, opposed to women's rights in the party, someone lacking any leadership qualities, and someone whose judgement had been suspect for years, and in particular since Tommy's resignation. These were the politics of the gutter, and, I am pleased to say, backfired spectacularly. McCombes leadership ambitions turned to dust as his campaign grew nastier and nastier. Unfortunately, while Curran simply helped to destroy McCombes leadership campaign, the pair of them further destroyed the credibility of our newly elected leader when he needed it most. Our party's catastrophic collapse below 2% of the popular vote in the general election, in what was a record low turnout, was the price we all paid for their miserable ambitions. If McCombes accepts this analysis and apologises, I will forgive him, and hope that Colin and Tommy will do likewise. However, Curran is beyond redemption.

Curran was the first of McCombes' toadies to appear on the telly to attempt an explanation for our party's executive, and MSP group, being unwilling to lend any solidarity to Tommy Sheridan in his libel action against Rupert Murdoch. She did this in a Newsnight Scotland interview with Gordon Brewer on the evening of our MSP's press conference. Like McCombes himself a couple of days later, Curran justified her so-called neutrality on the basis of Tommy failing to provide catagorical proof that the News of the World story was fiction. Over the next forty eight hours two of our MSPs (Colin Fox Rosemary Byrne) came to their senses. Both understood how vital it was to break out of the straightjacket that McCombes' majority on the executive had placed on them. Both publicly stated that Tommy's word is good enough for them. Although Tommy has resorted to half truth in the past, just like the rest of the adult population of planet earth, Colin and Rosemary realised that Tommy would not have raised the stakes in the way he did (effectively putting his solvency and liberty, not to mention his reputation, at stake), unless truth was on his side. Notwithstanding the ruinous consequences for Tommy of his defeat in an entirely unnecessary libel action, three of Tommy's closest collaborators for two decades saw fit to mobilise the overwhelming majority of the party's executive to deny Tommy the solidarity he had every right to expect.

Policy Coordinator, McCombes, International Secretary, Curran, and Housing Spokesperson, Baldassarra, were key in denying Tommy this support. I have heard each and every one of them express incredulity that the press corp found their Pontius Pilate impersonations so extraordinary. The reason is obvious. The public refusal of McCombes et al to take Tommy's word is intended to poison the jury's mind against Tommy. Fifty percent of our MSPs, still over fifty precent of the party's executive, and most of Tommy's longest standing political confidantes, are, by a process of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, hinting to the jury that they secretly know that the News of the World story was accurate, which is clearly nonsense. The only alternative explanation for their "neutrality" is that they want the jury to be aware that, as far as they are concerned, our former national convenor, and still one of our MSPs, is perfectly capable of launching a libel action based on lies and deceit. These people want the leader of the mass campaign that destroyed the poll tax and Margaret Thatcher's reactionary political reign to be confined to the dustbin of history courtesy of the world's most reactionary billionaire. And they are perfectly prepared to destroy the SSP's electoral fortunes in order to achieve that dispicable end. Incredible, but absolutely true.

As stated previously, if McCombes woke up to the consequences of his actions and went on to beg forgiveness, then he should be welcomed back as a prodigal son. But these are the only circumstances that should result in his rehabilitation. As for Keith Baldassarra and Carolyn Leckie, though... both are, like Curran, entirely beyond the pale. I will explain in detail precisely why that is in my next couple of posts.