THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES – PART 4
A feature on the Scottish Election and its aftermath
By SSP election campaign organiser Richie Venton
We are carrying a series of articles, making up this feature, written two days after the Holyrood election results. In this fourth part of the series, we explore the distinct socialist alternative that the SSP presented to the Scottish people – we were the only party putting forward a socialist plan to every voter in Scotland.
We called the SSP’s election manifesto A Socialist Action Plan for good, conscious reasons. We stand for collective working-class action to compel the incoming Scottish Government – however reluctantly – to back off from their savage attacks on jobs and services and instead build a movement for radical socialist measures that would protect and transform the lives of working-class people, amidst the mounting cost-of-living crisis.
When the STUC announced their plans to hold a summit on abolition of the Council Tax, I immediately welcomed the announcement but added that “it will take summat more than a summit” to force abolition of this obscenity of a tax.
Rather than just a gathering of STUC officials and a few ‘poverty experts’ – along with the political parties who for 19 years have defended the Council Tax, or utterly failed to implement the SNP’s and Scottish Green’s promises to scrap it – they should open the doors to shop stewards, community campaigns, and the SSP.
We have a track record of agitating for its outright abolition for nearly 28 years, advocating a viable, progressive alternative that would cut bills for 8 out of 10 people, and last year would have raised an additional £2.6 billion for local jobs and services.
Unite in action
Alongside our call for united action to Axe the Council Tax, the SSP will organise campaigns demanding free public transport for all – not just on buses, but also trains, ferries, subways and trams; for a £15-an-hour minimum Living Wage for all 600,000 public sector workers and the 130,000 others who work in private companies with public sector contracts (a measure well within the devolved powers of Holyrood); for cancellation of all PFI contracts to save £1.25 billion for investment in hospitals and schools this year alone; and for organised mass resistance to the slaughter of jobs and services. including demonstrations and coordinated strike action.
We will seek to put all those elected on the spot, with action.
Get your copy of the SSP’s Socialist Action Plan below:
A SOCIALIST ACTION PLAN » Scottish Socialist Party
Read this short excerpt from the introduction of the Action Plan:
WE LIVE IN THE 6TH-RICHEST ECONOMY on planet Earth. Yet a million Scottish people officially live in poverty. They cannot afford the bare necessities of life, such as food, housing, heating, or travel, which cruelly stunts their lives amidst the fabulous wealth of the nation.
This criminal reality is caused by the rampant profiteering by multinational energy companies, the major supermarkets, private landlords, and privatised transport companies – combined with the hoarding of wealth by a class of millionaires. But that’s capitalism. A system entirely based on the maximisation of profit for the few at the expense of the many.
The Scottish Socialist Party proudly presents the case for genuine, radical socialist change. We want to change the way Scotland is run, root-and-branch. We stand for people, not profit; for public ownership, not privatised profiteering; for an independent socialist Scotland, a democratic republic, which is nuclear-free, poverty-free, pollution-free, and a force for international peace and cooperation, not imperialist wars without end.