News Updates

Voice Forum Calls For Indy Left Alternative to Growth Commission

Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission must be urgently replaced with a progressive alternative if a majority Yes vote is to be won in a second independence referendum.

That was the view of a packed Scottish Socialist Voice Forum in Edinburgh on Saturday. It roundly condemned the neoliberal Growth Commission and called for an alternative capable of winning Scotland’s working class majority.

The platform included former MP George Kerevan, Green Councillor Susan Rae, RMT Union executive Paul Shaw, economist Margaret Cuthbert and SSP spokesman Colin Fox.

At the heart of all the contributions was the urgent need to recognise that a Yes victory lay in the hands of working class voters. Not the bankers who the Growth Commission aim to soothe.

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Remembering 9/11 – the overthrow of socialist Chile

It is the 45th anniversary of the the violent and tragic overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in Chile. With the first Marxist elected head of state in Latin America.

At the time, and even more in retrospect, it seemed to mark the end of a time when democratic socialists could see possibilities of real advances across the world.

When the Allende government was elected in 1970, it was on a programme which included bringing key national resources into public ownership so they served the interests of the Chilean people and not multi-national companies.

It put in place an ambitious programme of economic and social reform aimed at lifting significant numbers of its people from poverty.

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Pearls of a Private Banking System

by Hugh Cullen, SSP Interim National Secretary

“The only surprise of the Economic Crisis of 2008 was that it came as a surprise to so many”
Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall.

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) takes no glee from the crises of capitalism that socialists have tirelessly exposed for the past 200 years. For ours is not to laugh or cry, but to understand.

The fragility of our modern world’s global banking flows, as tragically proven in 2008, is born of a system where absurd amounts of money (and therefore power) is ‘earned’ by those who simply shuffle capital around and gamble on the results.

Not only are speculative bankers not those in society who work to create wealth.

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A Party On The Move

by Billy Flanagan

Last Saturday, the 18th August – Dundee witnessed one of the largest demonstrations the city has seen since the 1992 Timex dispute. The appetite for self determination campaigning shows no signs of slowing, in fact, the opposite seems to be the case – contrary to the desperate rambling of various Tory and Labour MSPs.

As always the SSP were at the heart of the action, putting forward the case for a progressive, forward thinking socialist republic. A Scotland free of nuclear weapons, US-led military aggression and a society freed from the shackles of further exploitation of the working class under capitalism. We turned nationalist cries of “FREEDOM!” into real class demands –

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From Trident to Turbines

by Calum Martin

Weapons Of Mass Destruction. They don’t protect us from acts of terror. They don’t shield us from infrastructural cyberattacks. Hideously expensive, morally indefensible and functionally purposeless, they are some of the most dangerous and expensive relics in the world. So what point is there in keeping them?

“Well,” squawks many a rich Tory politician in protest, “what about the irreplaceable jobs nukes provide?” It’s a claim which has started to echo outwards into the broader debate.

It is a claim however which is fundamentally baseless.

Let’s start with the actual numbers. Little over 500 people work at the Faslane base, the majority of them regular naval personnel,

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Nicaragua: beyond nostalgia

by Joyce McCracken, in Nicaragua

All over the world, the left proclaims itself as the future. A future beyond exploitation, beyond perpetual wars initiated by capitalism in its neoliberal mind and body. Sounds like good stuff.

The veteran Nicaraguan journalist Onofre Guevara López has a different take on some of the left. Writing in Havana Times, he has this to say:

“[An] outdated left, aren’t analysing the situation in Nicaragua as Marxists, but through their prism of nostalgia for a revolution which ceased to exist many years ago.”

He, like others, be they Marxist, non-Marxists, Christians or whatever, have long recognised that the Sandinista Popular Revolution of 1979 has been corrupted by President Daniel Ortega and his Vice President wife,

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Past Time For Change: why I joined the SSP

by Billy Flanagan

By 2009, I found myself taking an interest in politics and what the various parties stand for. As Labour have always enjoyed masquerading themselves as the “party of the people” on the day of the General Election of 2010, I found myself voting Labour (for the last time). I saw them as the lesser of evils. However, having already began to realise that Labour were certainly not the people’s party – the so called champion of the working class but a thoroughly neoliberal warmongering machine, I needed something different.

In the run up to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, I found myself briefly voting SNP. Although I fully support Scottish self-determination,

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