BY SARAH STEPHEN
The Scottish Socialist Party is causing a stir in the run-up to Britain's June 7 general election. The party will contest all 72 seats in Scotland, its most ambitious election campaign to date.
"What we want from this election is to assert ourselves as the fifth party in Scotland. We want 100,000 votes and we are confident that by 2003 we will be fighting the Scottish elections on actual seats. We are confident we will get between six and eight seats and that will certainly be a problem for the established parties", the party's Member of Scottish Parliament Tommy Sheridan told the May 17 Guardian.
Other newspapers have also given substantial coverage to the SSP manifesto and interviewed Sheridan and other leaders. BBC News Online ran a story entitled "Socialists pledge to help the poor", and the May 18 edition of the Daily Telegraph carried an article entitled "Socialists put royals and rich on notice".
The May 17 edition of the Glasgow Evening Times ran an interview with Sheridan headlined "We're no one-man band".
"Tommy has probably inherited his [union activist] mother's fiery passion for politics", the paper noted, quoting Sheridan saying "She instilled in me this sense of injustice that burns me up. It means I don't care if I've got one supporter or a million supporters... I'll keep trying to fight against injustice wherever it rears its ugly head."
The paper also noted the SSP's growing support among the "so-called middle classes", including actors, broadcasters and even a Queen's Counsel.
The May 18 Times profiled the SSP's manifesto in some detail, including its pledges to legalise cannabis, raise the minimum wage to 7 pounds an hour and impose a maximum 35-hour week. The manifesto also calls for directors of all Scottish companies to be elected by their workers and for the confiscation of the assets of any company which "pulls out of Scotland in search of more profitable environments".
The SSP would also institute a new top rate of income tax of 63 pence to the pound, an increase in corporation tax to 52%, and a lowering of the value-added tax to 8%. "Mr Sheridan said his new taxes would raise an extra 25 billion pounds, to be spent on abolishing NHS trusts, university tuition fees and the student loan system", the Times said.
"The SSP does not pretend it is on the verge of government", Sheridan told the Times, "but we do believe that our day will eventually come".
Support for the SSP has risen steadily since its formation in February 1999. Its membership has grown from 500 to over 2000, and has been further boosted by the Socialist Workers Party joining it on May 1.
It has outpolled the Liberal Democrats in four of the last five by-elections. One recent poll put support for the SSP at 26% in the Highlands and Islands, 21% in Glasgow, the SSP's traditional base of support, and 7% in Edinburgh.
Its growing support has sparked vitriol from some quarters, however. The pro-Labour Daily Record, which had previously printed a weekly column by Sheridan, ran a front cover on March 23 attacking Sheridan as a "working-class zero" and "human form of low life scum which has crawled out from under the stones".
Sheridan countered by pointing out that the Record's new editor Peter Cox, "learned his trade in the Sun which vilified miners as the 'scum of the earth'" and vowed that he would "not be bullied back into line" by a "puppet of New Labour".
[Visit the SSP web site <http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org> or that of its newspaper <http://www.scottishsocialistvoice.net>.]