"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.