News Updates

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“[An] outdated left, aren’t analysing the situation in Nicaragua as Marxists, but through their prism of nostalgia for a revolution which ceased to exist many years ago.”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

by Kleanthis Antoniou

It’s always awful discussing natural destruction, where dozens of lives have been lost in the most horrific ways.

The strong winds, high temperatures, and the site itself, a summer resort for capital citizens – usually of average to low income. In July, the resorts are full of working class people who made time for a quick trip to the coast, an hour away from Athens. (Those with higher incomes tend to visit and build on more prestigious areas.)

But there is a dangerous undercurrent. Of the habits of the Greek owner-class using arson to get round land and planning laws.

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Independence must be about Transformation not “Transition”

Analyzing the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission Report for the Scottish Left Review, SSP national spokesman Colin Fox writes:

Reading the SNP’s long awaited Sustainable Growth Commission Report reminded me why I left the Labour Party. It reads like an extract from Tony Blairs playbook. Readers of a certain age will recall how the ‘Old Fettesian’ warmonger demanded Labour abandon its core values and become ‘New Labour’ to win over ‘Middle England’.

In attempting to placate ‘Middle Scotland’ former SNP MSP Andrew Wilson has adopted a similar approach. His report is full of Blairite calls for ‘more flexible labour markets’, ‘greater tax incentives for business’ and ‘further inward investment opportunities’ for capital. Such neo-liberal orthodoxy may be expected from a former RBS economist,

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May Limps on after Day of Resignations

Amid claims of a ‘Remain coup’ in diluting Brexit plans, SSP national spokesman Colin Fox said:

“Prime Minister Theresa May has survived another debilitating day ‘in the Brexit trenches’ after ‘Leave’ Ministers David Davis and Boris Johnston dramatically resigned from her cabinet over what they saw as further dilution of Britain’s negotiating position with the EU.

As the Brexit conflict continues to ravage her Cabinet, her Party and her political Union it looks increasingly likely, as the Scottish Socialist Party has forecast from the outset, that Britain’s formal departure from the EU next March will result in little difference from present arrangements with the EU.

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Ethical Investments: Scrap PFI and its pensions investments

by Colin Fox

When Arthur Scargill took over as the President of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1980 he was astonished to find the union’s pension fund invested in the apartheid gold mines of South Africa. The Pension Fund Trustees defended their investment on the grounds it produced the highest rates of return to be found anywhere.

This story in The Guardian about how the Strathclyde Pension Fund and others have profited from PFI shows that they too have blood on their hands.

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