Socialist Resistance : SR40 - December 2006

Scotland

After Sheridan sabotage... Party rises from the rubble

Frances Curran

Scottish Socialist Party MSP Frances Curran spoke at a meeting in London hosted by Socialist Resistance on October 27.This is an edited version of what she said.

About two years ago Alan Mc Coombes rang me and asked me to go round his house. I got there and he showed me a copy of the previous Sunday’s News of the World with its headline about MSP in kinky sex romp. Tommy had not been named. I was in absolute shock.

We had heard about the story and had thought it was a Tory but Alan told me Alan told me that he had discussed it with Tommy and he had already been identified on a SNP supporter’s site. Our consideration at this point was damage limitation protecting this party we had spent our lives building.

Alan advised Tommy: “if or when you get named say, “My personal life is my personal life, no comment.” He could have sat it out or could have said I made a mistake, I’m sorry and taken the Charles Kennedy option and stepped back for a while.

Instead he said “I’m going to launch a libel case.” We told him that he was crazy. There might be CCTV or mobile phone videos, records or witnesses.

We don’t know what’s going to come out in the future. We were concerned about possible perjury charges. He refused to discuss it and broke off contact.

The danger for us was that our party had a reputation for truth and integrity and that our convenor, with the party’s support walked into court and end up in jail for perjury. We couldn’t take that chance. So we asked him to resign as convenor. It was not a moral issue. We acted to protect the party’s integrity.

When we launched the SSP we expected some sort of crisis. We thought it might be something like some of our councillors going into coalition with the SNP. We didn’t think it was going to be anything like this.

When we launched the SSP we said it was going to be open, democratic, gender equality built in, not tagged on. We wanted to learn the lessons of the past.

We have the single transferable vote, platforms can organise and every minority is represented. The EC and national council are gender balanced.

But we knew that constitutions alone don’t protect the party. We had to keep a working class base and preserve that open culture. Tommy ignored the party’s structures and went straight to the TV cameras.

The rest of the party leadership didn’t speak to the press. We were reading these trashings of ourselves in the Sunday papers week after week but we kept quiet as part of our collective responsibility for the best interests of the party.

The worst thing in the press was the misogyny. A man resigns so it must be the fault of three women. We were called untalented, slappers, harridans and witches. Colin Fox didn’t get the same press as me Rosie Kane and Carolyn Leckie.

We discussed defiance of the court. We agreed to say that the party doesn’t have its own minutes and that Alan Mc Coombes has them that he should be in contempt of court.

We don’t go to jail lightly. It’s not an easy decision but one based on a judgement of where the movement is at. I was looking at a year in jail without seeing my son. I’m willing to do that but it has to be on an issue in which I’m leading a movement or it’s understood amongst the class why I’m doing it.

It was agreed that Alan, who has no house and no money was in the best position to go to jail. It was very upsetting for all of us.

There are comrades who say all nineteen executive members should have lied. There are big problems with this. The first is that you have to persuade everyone to do it. Otherwise one group is calling the others liars.

Even if all nineteen of us had agreed to lie then the entire leadership of the SSP would have been a walking talking time bomb. It only takes one person to say “I was lying” after giving evidence.

People’s political allegiances change. Look at the Jeffrey Archer case. His pal admitted lying and Archer went to jail. We pointed this out to Tommy. That’s why most of us went in and decided to tell the truth.

When the verdict came through we were stunned. It’s really positive that the jury found against the News of the World. But for Tommy to win he had to trash the party, comrades he’d worked with for more than twenty years and everything that he has ever stood for.

Tommy’s supporters have never said anything about his contribution to all this and what he put the party through and Tommy has never accepted any responsibility.

He put several women in the witness box that he’d had sex with and asked them intimate details about their sex life in front of the media, called them liars and trashed their characters. That’s not my kind of socialism.

And what is a socialist politician doing running to the highest court in the land to defend his reputation as a family man? Whose morals is that? You defend yourself inside the movement.

After the verdict, the party was in tatters. We were climbing over the rubble. We thought that it was over for us after all these years of work. If we’d been defeated in a big struggle we would have understood it. But it was devastating to be defeated over something like this.

Tommy won the press war. We couldn’t say everything we knew. There was a lot of confusion. But when he called us scabs and his wife got the fashion pages in the Daily Record at that point opinion shifted. Now nobody in Scotland believes that Tommy is innocent and he’s a figure of fun.

Now that Tommy, the SWP and the CWI have split it has taken all this away from the SSP. We don’t have to deal with it anymore. We think Tommy didn’t want to return to the party because he didn’t want to debate the issues, especially around women and prostitution. Anyway Tommy’s been moving to the right politically and it was only his membership of the party that kept him on the left.

I don’t know why the CWI left. The SWP are a nightmare. They want Respect in Scotland. It’s a relief that they’re not in our branches any more and it’s a relief that we are not having a battle at every EC meeting. Because of our democracy they had three EC members.

Their behaviour is utterly sectarian but in the SSP they didn’t get away with just setting up their fronts. People would say, “We’re going to do this instead. If you want to set something up you have to discuss it with all these other people.” I think one of the reasons they want to be outside the SSP is that they want the opportunity to do that again without any scrutiny.

They said they wanted us to focus on Palestine, the war and asylum, as if we weren’t doing these things anyway. We are active on all those issues but we are also active in working class communities. Almost every night of the week I’m sitting in community centres and unemployed workers’ centres. I spend my entire life in working class communities.

We need physical and financial support in the 2007 elections. We need the left in England to hold onto these seats. That’s because the SSP is a huge gain. Even if we don’t hold onto the seats it will stimulate the discussion that’s already under way about the difference between a grassroots party and a parliamentary party. But if the parliament moves towards independence it’s important that we are represented there.

The party itself has a culture where you can say what you want. That’s the culture that we are building and it’s a joy to be in the SSP at the moment. It has a really great future and I hope it can make a contribution to the European and international fight for socialism.

Frances Curran is an member of the Scottish Parliament for the Scottish Socialist Party.

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