In my last entry...

Tuesday, February 14, 2006 In my last entry, I said that it was vital the Scottish Socialist Party executive addressed the concerns of our potential voter base, and our own rank and file, both directly and via journalists. In other words, we have to say something about why Tommy Sheridan resigned. Thus far, our leadership has effectively told everyone it is none of their business. But Frances Curran went on to nationwide television to suggest it had something to do with what she referred to as "The crisis in Tommy Sheridan's private life." Our executive have hinted that there is something extremely problematic about our former national convenor's private life, specifically aspects of his sex life. The only two questions anyone has a right to ask Tommy about this is whether the sex he has indulged in has been in every case consensual and with adults. The answer to both being being a resounding yes. The way McCombes, Curran, Leckie and Baldassarra have addressed the issue is to invite doubt about these answers. They, and thanks to their leadership, the overwhelming majority of the party executive, have dragged our party into a situation where people suspect the worst: one of our MSPs is a pedophile, or rapist, and that the rest of our leadership have been covering up for some kind of sex offender. If we are ever going to restore our electoral fortunes, the executive have to make it crystal clear that there is nothing in Tommy's private life that is a matter of public interest. And, like every other member of the Scottish Socialist Party (indeed every single human being), Tommy Sheridan has a right to a private life. No less important, we have to insist that the attempt by right-wing billionaires to use the so-called free press to "expose" tittle tattle about Tommy should be treated with the contempt it deserves. There is a long tradition of the secret security agencies of capitalist states (acting hand in glove with press barrons) discrediting socialists, trade unionists, and civil liberties campaigners by, amongst other things, releasing irrelevancies about their private lives. Tommy Sheridan is clearly the latest victim of such smear campaigns. All those who wish to be elected to the party's executive this March need to go a little further than this. They need to join with Colin Fox, Rosemary Byrne and others in stating publicly that Tommy Sheridan's word is good enough for them. Given the stakes involved (bankruptcy, loss of liberty via a potential criminal prosecution for perjury, and the destruction of his reputation), it is vital that Tommy enters his trial in June with as much solidarity as he can muster. McCombes, Curran, Leckie and Baldassarra might want Tommy to enter the witness box with his jury's collective mind poisoned against him, but I don't. Tommy would have to be insane to launch a libel action against anyone unless truth was on his side. What more does any SSP member need to know? I wish Tommy had not started this legal action. I think it was misguided for several reasons. In the first place, it was an unnecessary distraction for one of the greatest electoral assets of our party. Secondly, Murdoch has extremely deep pockets. There is no amount of compensation that the courts will award Tommy that will cause Murdoch the slightest bit of pain. Far from learning his lesson, he will exact revenge against Tommy by immediately launching more stories. If he ensnares Tommy into a further legal action, then he wins (as do all enemies of our class) by removing from the forefront of the battle against the capitalist system one of our most important leaders. And, in all probability, Murdoch will simply insist that the News of the World editor is more scrupulous with the facts next time round. Murdoch knows that Tommy's closest collaborators are infested with vermin such as Duncan Rowan, who was prepared to sell Tommy out without financial incentives. By opening up his wallet, and handing out thirty thousand pieces of silver, by insisting the News of the World editor sees to it that the identities of our party's Judases are kept secret from now on, Murdoch will be able to expose things that Tommy can't sue over, because they are true. When Tommy fails to sue over these articles, Murdoch will invite the NoW readership to draw their own conclusions. When Tommy wins this case, the best thing to do is to take the money and run. Don't get entangled in further legal action. Just denounce the gutter press speculation as beneath contempt. Our voters won't give a damn whether the stories are true or not. Just laugh it off Tommy, in the same way you do jokes about your sun tan. But this is not enough. Journalists will never ever let us hear the end of it until we answer some of their questions about why Tommy resigned. I know far more than I have a right to know, more than I am prepared to say. Journalists have been punishing us (and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future) because of our refusal to address these questions. They have been punishing us by boycotting us, and our executive seems bereft of ideas as to how to get them to stop. Journalists and their editors know every bit as much as we do just how desperately need to reestablish a healthy relationship with the print and broadcast media. We need to see to it that they give us adequate coverage. We need their help to allow us to expose the spin and false perspectives of all the non-socialist parties. Without their assistance we siimply cannot reach out to our own natural constituency. We have no choise but to give the press answers that make some kind of sense. And the answers provided so far (in so far as they can be described as answers, rather than evasions) are completely unintelligible. Therefore, without a shred of authority from Tommy Sheridan or anyone else, I have decided to address some of these questions. While I have not requested approval from Tommy, I don't think he would quibble about anything I am going to say. He has nothing to fear. McCombes, Curran, Leckie, Baldassarra and many others, however, will be less supportive. Tough. The journalists have a right to answers to the following questions: 1) Were there any proposals for Tommy to resign prior to the executive meeting at which he did "resign"? Emphatically not. 2) Did there emerge any revelations about Tommy's private life that lead any member of the executive to call for Tommy's resignation? Once again, no. 3) Does that mean the reason for Tommy's so-called resignation is related to what happened at the meeting in question? Yes. Tommy took issue with the rest of the executive on how to respond to the press smears about his private life. He felt that when the gutter press chooses to write a tissue of lies about him, then he has every right to take them to court and seek compensation. For those reasons already given, I would have councilled Tommy against pursuing legal action. The fact that Tommy was not prepared to accept the rest of the executive's advice was problematic, and may have given a legitimate cause for the party to ask Tommy to step aside further down the line, although it is not inconceivable that the much broader national council would have rejected the recommendation that Tommy had to choose between the national convenorship and pursuing legal action. However, it was very easy for the likes of McCombes, Curran, Leckie and Baldassarra to ask Tommy to take it on the chin when Murdoch spread malicious lies about Tommy. Exposes about their own private lives were not going to sell the same volume of extra papers as "revelations" about Tommy. McCombes and his acolytes felt secure, but insisted that unless Tommy told the truth, the whole truth and nothing about the truth about every detail about his private life, then he had to sit back and watch Murdoch print lie after lie, week in, week out. While it may not have been tactically wise to take Murdoch on via the courts, I think most SSP members would have been a damn sight more sympathetic to Tommy's plight than members of the executive were. Members of the executive decided that if Tommy insisted on going to go to the courts to get justice, then they would distribute to the next national council details about Tommy's private life, details entirely unrelated to this legal action, details that were nobody's business but Tommy's. Since all three thousand members of the party had a constitutional right to attend national councils as observers, and since anywhere between one and two hundred could be expected to attend that meeting, Tommy chose to step down as national convenor, rather than have irrelevant tittle-tattle about his private life distributed so recklessly to such a large group of people. Now it is true that in addition to insisting on going to court, in defiance of the advice of the rest of the party's executive, Tommy said things at that meeting he should not have said, things for which he had to appologise, things for which he did apologise as soon as he had calmed down. But let us be absolutely clear. Tommy did not threaten violence against anyone for the disgraceful way they treated him at that meeting, far less did he actually engage in acts of violence. And what he said, although wrong, was clearly caused by extreme provocation. Carolyn Leckie went on within days to tell the Scottish Mirror that her private life was her business and no one elses. Frances Curran went on Newsnight Scotland to tell Gordon Brewer that she would not want her private life speculated on by journalists. Yet the pair of them insisted, along with many others, that Rupert Murdoch must be allowed to print sheer lies about Tommy with impunity, and that details about Tommy's private life had to be made available to thousands of SSP members. Tommy Sheridan had every right to be appalled by the disgraceful way he was being treated by his so-called comrades. No member of our party can blame Tommy for saying things in the heat of the moment that should not have been said. Having told Tommy that he would have to "resign" immediately or else the executive would leak details of his private life to the next national council, and having gotten Tommy's resignation as a result of this obscene blackmail, the executive then went on to break their side of the bargain; unbelievably, they leaked these details anyway! One of their number, North East Regional Organiser Duncan Rowan, went straight to the News of the World. The rest simply voted to send executive members on a speaking tour of all our branches to leak these details. I could name one of those who addressed these branch meetings. But I won't. That is because I believe he was simply obeying orders, and if he did not agree the rest of the executive would have sent someone less sympathetic to Tommy to break the news. Other members, such as Colin Fox and SW platformer Charlotte Ahmed, and one or two others, virtually immediately accepted they got swept along on the day and had not thought things through. They very much regretted what they had done. I would like to think I played a small part in helping these comrades clarify their feelings, and come to their senses. It was, at any rate, only after I publicly denounced the leaking of tittle-tattle about Tommy's private life on the Monday after Tommy's resignation (I did this on BBC Scotland's Leslie Riddoch Show), and then again in the letters' page of the Herald, that this abuse of power came to an abrupt halt. The majority of the executive thought they could get away with their smear campaign against Tommy by threatening disciplinary action against anyone who exposed what they were up to. I was never in the slightest intimidated by these threats. Given the circumstances, I would prefer to invite expulsion from the SSP than keep my mouth shut. I would never have been able to live with myself otherwise. Besides, I was pretty confident that the rank and file of the party would turn against the executive majority if they got to hear what had been going on. Our party has no choise but to consider the possibility that Tommy will lose his legal battle. It already has, which is why the selection of candidates for the Glasgow regional list to next year's Holyrood elections has already been postponed until after Tommy wins his legal action - or not. While I don't doubt for a second that Tommy is telling the truth, I am less confident that the courts will arrive at the same conclusion, which is one more reason why Tommy was misguided in gambling on the correct verdict. Since less than two percent of the Scottish people vote for our party these days, is it inconceivable that a jury made up of such people already prejudiced against our politics, prejudiced to such an extent that they will side with Murdoch? Given the vote of no confidence in Tommy's veracity, which is precisely how Murdoch's lawyers will portray our executive's "neutrality", I think there is a very real possibility that Tommy could lose. If he loses, I will not accept the verdict. As an individual, I promise to help get the verdict overturned on appeal. All decent socialists need to promise to collect money to help with his legal expenses. If Tommy is then sent to prison for alleged perjury, then socialists should adopt him as a political prisonner, fight for his release, and for the return of his good name. All those SSP members who played a part in discrediting Tommy in the eyes of the jury will have to be held to account. Any SSP member who actually climbs into the dock in order to spread malicious rumours about Tommy's private life should not be allowed to get away with this simply on account of their being subpoenaed by Murdoch's lawyers. I have no first hand knowledge about Tommy's private life. But if I did, I would tell the judge that Tommy's private life is his business and no one elses. I would rather be sent to prison for contempt of court than to betray such confidences. The judge should rule out of order any questions from Murdoch's lawyers that are unrelated to the specific libel action. But when did socialists ever expect justice from the capitalist courts? There is not a single member of the SSP who claims to know anything about this particular case. Not one. Any SSP member who agrees to appear as a witness for Rupert Murdoch, to spread rumours unrelated to this particular libel action, should be immediately expelled from the Scottish Socialist Party. They need to be made parriahs within the international socialist movement. Just like those vermin who cooperated with Senator McCarthey's House Un-American Activities Committee. posted by Iago @ 10:53 AM

I have not been at all active for some time

Friday, August 03, 2007 Hi readers, Have not been at all active lately. At least not on this blog. The blog served it's purpose. Or, to be more precise, did not. I set it up specifically to rouse the massed ranks of the SSP into a revolt against the rotten elements who had usurped control against Tommy Sheridan. The blog was set up in the lead up to the 2006 SSP conference. In almost every respect, this was a great conference. Policy-wise, it was the best ever. Those who were a year later to go on to form the treacherous "United Left" (a misnomer if ever there was one) were trounced at every turn, with the most nationalist and right-wing (like drugs' spokesperson Kevin Williamson and press officer Eddie Truman) losing pretty much all the contentious votes. Tommy did not just return to the executive with the most votes on the male section, much to the disgust of McCombes, Baldassarra et al, he was elected top of the poll for one of the key posts of co-chair. Alas, all this was a pyhric victory. I had hoped that those who wanted to see the backs of the rats would coalese into a slate to replace McCombes' majority on the party's executive. Unfortunately, the SWP and the CWI and the non-aligned group either would not or could not agree. They fought each other while McCombes' ragbag employed the divide and conquer strategy, with predictable results. McCombes did seem to have suffered a further set-back from the collapse of his place-men and women the previous year. However, he still held onto a bare majority and could use the divisions between Tommy's supporters to stop them getting anything through the executive. It was necessary to mobilise for the more representative national council to get anything done. And then we saw the moral collapse of some of Tommy's key supporters, primarily Colin Fox, who was our candidate. Fox proved to be the weak character that McCombes portrayed him as during the leadership election campaign. Because of Tommy's supporters being an ad hoc group who pretended that Fox would save the party, it was not until this betrayal, on the very eve of a court case (one that had been in preparation for the previous eighteen months) that Tommy and his supporters finally stood up for ourselves. At the May 2006 national council, McCombes' supporters not only lost every single vote, while Tommy's supporters won them all, this time we pulled no punches. Our three hundred strong national council (including around 150 party observers) called for an end to the disgusting whispering campaign by the executive. Defeated time after time, our national convenor said that while he disagreed with all the votes, he was a democrat and would implement them. What a disgusting liar he turned out to be. There was to be one more national council held by the executive. Then they disobeyed all the decisions taken by the national council, and chose to suspend the next national council, knowing that the branches had mobilised for motions of censure against the rats, and that all of them would be kicked out of the executive at the following national council, and, if I had my way, expelled from the party. Unfortunately, a decision was taken by the overwhelming majority of Tommy's supporters to simply abandon this train wreck of a party, and start with a fresh slate, which now goes by the name Solidarity. I am going to leave things here for the moment. But I promise not to wait so long before posting again. This blog is here to stay. Iago Labels: From Clown Fux to Solidarity posted by Iago @ 10:06 PM