Crisis will still dominate after 7 May: The Left must rise to the challenge

Editorial by Ken Ferguson

WHEN THE VOICE after this one you are now reading appears the full outcome of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senned and English Council elections will be known and they are likely to be challenging.

Based on the information available, as we go to press, the likely outcome is a continuing SNP government either with a majority or more likely as the biggest party with support of some form from the Greens. Perhaps the great unknown is the likely strength of any Reform group at Holyrood and, significantly, if this is largely at the expense of the Tories thus in effect amounting to a reconfiguration of the right or drawn from other parties such as Labour and the SNP.

Of course there has inevitability been speculation and comment on all sides as to what — if anything — an SNP majority or one constituted by an alliance with Greens means for the prospects for a second independence referendum.

This has ranged from confident predictions of an SNP majority from First Minister Swinney to brutal determination to block independence from New Labour hack English health secretary Wes Streeting. Given the flat nature of the campaign for Holyrood power — despite taking place amidst a major war and further colourful Mandelson revelations taking Starmer to the brink again — the fear must be that the Holyrood session about to open looks much like that just closed.

We know for certain that there are plans in the pipeline to sack 20,000 public sector workers, that pledges to control 50 commodities from Swinney will melt like summer snow and all this before the undoubtedly severe hammer blows on the way from Trump’s illegal war.

Make no mistake the battle for where the public spending axe is to fall is already joined with soft focus TV documentaries airing of life on the “security safeguarding” Trident submarines, of infantry platoons training and aircraft carriers and destroyers sailing across our screens.

Then step forward — into the full glare of the compliant media Lord ( formerly George) Robertson defence secretary in the first Blair government and then top dog in NATO to opine that we are in imminent danger and cannot sustain welfare spending alongside buying submarines, jet bombers, tanks and many, many more soldiers, sailors and airmen. In this contest the noble Lord makes it clear that he sides with those like Herman Goring who said “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.”

Across Europe the drum beat of war, arms spending, conscription and calls to sacrifice sits alongside poverty, insecure work, a mass housing crisis and a rapidly burgeoning climate emergency. As the new parliament opens it can either opt for continuity tinkering which has already alienated thousands of voters or face up to the reality that the challenges on cost of living, housing, health and much else stem from the neoliberal policies that have imposed cuts and austerity on working people since the 2008 crash.

This sorry prospect has been — despite bouts of — verbal condemnation — the stock in trade of the so called ‘progressive’ parties who complain about austerity then vote for it.

The conjunction of an ever tightening cost of living crisis running alongside the climate emergency confronts us all with a crisis far greater than what went before it. Answering the angry demands for change potentially opens up new political terrain in which the answers on offer can be progressive based on the needs of people and planet or they can take us in a direction apparently simplistic but actually retrograde and sinister.

On the likely assumption that they will win Holyrood representation it is perhaps best to turn first to Reform who may well constitute the majority of any right bloc in Holyrood and must be isolated and opposed by all parties and public pressure built to achieve this. However central to denying political space for Reform and the far right will be breaking with the blinkered vision characterised by SNP/Labour timidity and business dominated ’Safety First’ centrism.

The unavoidable task facing us is the need to take the Scottish Parliament beyond the sleepy consensus of the last twenty years and build a real struggle for change capable of energising on jobs, housing, poverty, health by ending PFI and taking key sectors such as energy into public ownership serving people not profit.

Elsewhere in this Voice, we carry two contributions: one from SSP national co-spokesperson Colin Fox and one by Niall Christie, former Scottish representative on Your Party’s national leadership, now resigned. Both discuss the need to build socialist politics in communities, schemes, streets, campaigning groups and unions.

That the hopes and expectations of those who put their efforts into YP have been dashed is, sadly, not a new story on the left. But that doesn’t diminish the urgent need to build support for socialist politics, as the SSP has done for 30 years, and pressing the continuing demand for an independent Scottish socialist republic.