European elections campaign 2009
SSP co-spokesperson Colin Fox looks forward to the SSP’s European election campaign
May Day is a time when we celebrate international working class solidarity and socialist achievement.
The Scottish Socialist Party is focused this May Day on the European Parliament elections on June 4th and the opportunity to encourage and embolden the growing opposition to neo-liberalism.
Our party conference in Arran last month reiterated our promise to working people in Scotland that we will provide them with a socialist alternative to vote for in every general election.
Our commitment to build an Independent socialist Scotland, independent of the banking elite who have so damaged our economy, alongside our internationalist outlook, remains steadfast.
We have something to say in this election which is both profound and unique.
One of our key objectives is to use the platform this election campaign provides to speak out, embolden and encourage the rapidly developing spirit of resistance to neo liberalism now so evident throughout Europe.
There is resistance on the streets in Greece, Ireland, Spain, France and even Iceland. Britain is not untouched either.
The Lindsey oil refinery dispute earlier in the year signified a sea change in the political mood and quickly spread to almost every major engineering and construction facility in the country; power stations, oil refineries and construction sites.
A series of factory occupations in Belfast, Dundee and Waterford has followed. There is a bubbling cauldron of anger building up inside the Royal Mail against government plans to privatise it and postal strikes seem likely.
And let’s not forget the glorious Glasgow schools occupations again illustrating an emerging resistance to public sector cuts.
People are emboldened and angry. Opinion polls released this week suggest that a third of voters blame Gordon Brown for Britain’s economic collapse whilst the other two thirds blame the greedy banking elite.
Either way this is bad news for the four neo-liberal parties in Scotland ahead of these elections. Labour, Conservative, Liberal and SNP politicians all vied with one another throughout the past twenty years to please the greedy, reckless financiers. Sir Fred Goodwin and the prosperous, powerful financial classes were spoilt for suitors.
And the SNP’s claim that an independent Scotland run by them would have reined in the banking classes and avoided the humiliating collapse suffered by Eire and Iceland is simply at odds with the facts.
John Swinney and Alex Salmond spent a decade or more racing round St Andrews Square, the Mound and Gogarburn assuring Scotland’s financial elite their profits [remember them] and commercial strategies were safe with the SNP. The party promising low corporation tax and low wages for workers cannot escape its past so easily.
The SSP has on the other hand a proud record over 10 years now of confronting the neo liberal agenda. We alone argued for the public ownership and control of the financial institutions in order that they were made to serve the needs of the people and the wider economy rather than greedily exploiting both for the benefit of a rich elite.
This is of course an international cause as neo liberalism and banker’s greed knows no boundaries.
Consequently the SSP has developed close links with the European socialist/anti capitalist movement. More than a dozen parties including the New Anti Capitalists in France and Die Linke in Germany have joined us in signing a statement for 21st century socialism and European wide reforms favouring working people.
Fighting the privatisation of both Royal Mail and La Poste in France is a case in point.
This will be an issue raised jointly by us all in the course of the European election campaign. In Britain Labour intends to sell off Royal Mail to private postal companies like TNT and pretends it is being forced to comply with an EU Directive. This is of course complete nonsense.
Far from trailing along reluctantly New Labour is driving the neo liberal privatisation agenda throughout Europe with a worse record here than virtually anywhere else.
The need for a strong socialist voice for working people with an unblemished track record of incorruptibility is more obvious than ever before.
The SSP provides just such a voice and track record and we can build upon those foundations in the course of this election campaign to grow the party and to embolden the forces of anti capitalism still further.