SSP marching against the G8
About the Scottish Socialist Party
by Roz Paterson
The SSP is Scotland’s socialist party that stands for the transformation of society. We fight to replace capitalism with socialism; an economic system based on social need and environmental protection rather than private profit and ecological destruction.
We believe we can make a better Scotland, where every state school child eats a nutritious, free lunch every day of the working week; where pensioners receive a decent income with access to well-funded, free public services; where families are housed in warm, secure homes near green spaces and schools and shops; where refugees are welcomed and given the right to work and make a new life here, to the benefit of us all; where war is an ugly memory; where energy is sustainable and nationalised; where we protect instead of destroy our environment; and where expanded, fare-free and publicly-owned train, bus and ferry services link every community in Scotland, from the heart of Glasgow to the shores of the Outer Hebrides.
But this is a dark time.
As the British government declares terrorism the greatest threat to ‘our
way of life’, across the world people are already dying as a result of
climate change caused by that same way of life.
We have only a very short time
left to stop the Earth from burning because of the destructive waste
of capitalism.
Since the Scottish Parliamentary election in 2003, a brutal war has been
raging in Iraq, courtesy of the British and American governments.
Hundreds of thousands
of civilians have lost their lives, and their society has been pounded
to dust.
The SSP opposed this war long before it started. So too did the majority
of Scots.
Yet the lives of our troops, and billions of our tax money, continue
to be squandered on this ugly misadventure, this last gasp of a dying,
discredited empire.
It’s long since time we pulled out of Iraq and handed sovereignty
to its people.
In Scotland, we have no say over this.
Such is the illusion of devolution.
An independent Scotland would have full control over its foreign policy and where
and how it deploys its soldiers.
There is now a consistent trend towards pro-independence parties. Scotland
is calling time on the 300-year old Union – and for a myriad of
reasons, none of them to do with anti-English sentiment.
We are calling time on a Union that drags us into illegal, immoral wars, from
Flanders fields to Iraq and Afghanistan.
On a Union that ignores the call for nuclear disarmament and instead dumps its
world-shattering arsenal within miles of our biggest city.
On a Union that opens up a democrat ic deficit of such proportions that, no matter
who we vote for,we always get the choice of Middle England.
On a Union that offers tax breaks to corporations and the rich, while screwing
the poor and forcing them into lowwage, short-term, soulless, meaningless jobs.
We have nearly full employment, yet are plumbing new depths of poverty and all
that it entails, even amongst working families, from premature birth to premature
death, through barely habitable housing, cheap, over-processed, nutrition- free
food, pollution, crime, isolation and physical and mental illness.
On a Union so obsessed with fixing it for its corporate friends that
we have badly and inappropriately constructed schools and hospitals,
built for double or triple the cost through PFI, to keep us in hoc for
decades to come; infants suffering from middle-aged diseases that will
kill them, through the government’s
refusal to regulate the processed food industry; generations sliding
into unimaginable, unpayable debt through unregulated credit and finance
companies; cities, towns and villages gutted by out-of-town retail developments
and the unstoppable invasion of the big four supermarket cartel; and
a countryside bulldozed over by developers and agribusiness, at the cost
of our rural ways of life, our indigenous food culture and a solid husbandry
of the land.
This is no way to live, and wrenching ourselves free of this dysfunctional relationship
will do us, and England, the world of good.
The bogus ‘British’ identity that Labour politicians are
currently struggling to articulate is nothing more than a jingoistic
relic of the past. In re-establishing our identity, as Scots, as socialists,
as members of an international community that stretches from pole to
pole, we enable the English, the Welsh and Irish to do so too.
We seek an independent, Scottish socialist republic that functions, not as an
island, but as a part of a living, breathing network of humanity.
A network that will recognise that we are part of nature, rather than
masters of nature, and that will build a global society that lives within
the limits of the Earth’s ecosystem.
We seek to reach out to others in struggle, from the Palestinians in Gaza to
the trade unionists in Colombia, the political prisoners of Burma to the benighted
indigenous peoples of Australia.
We fight in hope, and we work hard. In 2003, we returned six MSPs to
Holyrood; the biggest parliamentary breakthrough of any left wing socialist
party in the UK in a generation.
We used that parliamentary representation to highlight grassroots campaigns -
for free school meals, the scrapping of prescription charges, opposition to the
illegal invasion of Iraq. To highlight the plight of low-income households, of
children growing up in a world of consumerism and dense traffic and commodified
education, of asylum seekers locked up in former prisons, of all who are left
out in the cold by the market system that puts a price on everything, yet values
nothing.
We fight in hope, for people everywhere.
Our MSPs took only the workers’ wage, donating the rest to the
party; we have no career politicians in our ranks.
Our focus is always at street-level, our aim being to build a mass movement to
promote and develop the ideas of socialism.
To put the idea of real equality, real social justice, back on the agenda.
To make this a better world for the upcoming generations and ensure that the
Earth is still in a fit state to support them.
Join us in the only war worth fighting – against poverty and greed,
and for humanity and peace. People, not profit.