Alex Miller
On April 18 in Glasgow, the Scottish Socialist Party launched its 57-page manifesto for the British general election, scheduled for May 5, with a pledge to build the mass movement against global capitalism.
The manifesto states: "The SSP will do all we can to build this movement in Scotland and worldwide. At the same time, the central message of our manifesto is this: to make poverty history, we will need to make capitalism history".
Organised around "20 reasons to vote for the SSP", the manifesto provides policies on issues as diverse as the fight for a Palestinian homeland to the extension of the Glasgow underground system, and peripheral housing schemes like Drumchapel and Easterhouse. The manifesto reasserts the SSP's commitment to an independent Scottish socialist republic, calls for an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, and reaffirms its opposition to any US-British military action against Iran, Syria or North Korea.
The April 18 Evening Times summed up the key pledges of the manifesto: "[The manifesto promises] free travel, free heating, free social housing, free phone rental and free TV licences for all pensioners. Retirement would be at 60 with full pension rights on a basic state pension of £160 a week index-linked to earnings. The party would also replace the Council Tax with an income-based Scottish Service Tax which it says would benefit four out of five households. Spending on nuclear weapons would shift to hospitals, houses and schools, the rail industry would be taken back into public ownership and the M74 extension through the south side of Glasgow cancelled. The party's spending plans would be funded by taking full control for Scotland over revenues from corporation tax, income tax and North Sea oil and rises in tax for high earners. The manifesto pledges to tax the rich to redistribute wealth and introduce a two-tier VAT system. Luxury goods such as sports cars would be rated at 20% while the tax on all other goods would be slashed to 8%".
The launch of the manifesto has further stimulated the already lively debate on socialism in Scotland. The April 18 Scotsman reported that a spokesperson for the Labour Party dismissed the manifesto as "irrelevant Trotskyite rhetoric", while the April 18 BBC News Online quoted Steve German, a Kircaldy voter opposed to the SSP: "This is just a wish list. What firms would stay in Scotland if they had to pay a minimum wage of £8 and pay 53% of their profits in tax? This so-called manifesto would destroy jobs. Corporation tax might return to Thatcherite levels, but so would unemployment".
But the same BBC News Online quoted Wally Grainger, an SSP supporter in London: "Well, the old right-wingers certainly start creating again when someone dares to suggest that the rich and powerful should pay their way rather than exploit people as they do. The old 'brain-drain' scare is wheeled out. What if all the low-paid workers upped ship and left because of poverty wages? Ever tried living on minimum wage? What if shopworkers, transport workers, firefighters, nurses and teachers left? You would need to replace them sooner or later.
"A socialist transformation of society may seem a long way off, but it is not impossible. To accuse the SSP of being outdated is a joke — aren't things like increasing poverty, low pay, unaffordable housing and neoliberal economics more outdated and irrelevant to today's needs? We don't have to go begging at the bowl of the rich — take it away and utilise it ourselves!"
[Copies of the SSP manifesto can be downloaded from <http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 27, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.