At the Scottish Socialist Party's "after the election" meeting in Glasgow, in mid-May, the message was that the SSP vote held up well in the general election compared with the Holyrood elections of 2007.
The Socialist Party says that they will back John McDonnell for Labour leader, and support him in advocating the restoration of democracy in the Labour Party.
The SWP held one of the first of their round of the "after the election" meetings in central London on 13 May. Charlie Kimber, the new editor of Socialist Worker, was the main speaker.
The “poll tax” — a flat rate system of local government taxation — was introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1989. By 1992 the Tories had withdrawn the tax because thousands of working-class people could not or would not pay it. One important turning point in the anti-poll tax movement was a clash between demonstrators and police in London in March 1990.
Brian Caton, General Secretary of the Prison Officers' Association (POA) and member of the Socialist Party, spoke to Solidarity in a personal capacity.
In the early 1980s, Gerry Healy's WRP - then an organisation of considerable assets, including a weekly paper, Labour Herald, sponsored by well-known Labour left figures, but edited day-to-day by a WRP member - sued Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity) for libel, and ran a big campaign in the labour movement against Socialist Organiser.
John Rees, the SWP's leading figure from Tony Cliff's death in 2000 to 2007, has resigned from the SWP together with 41 others, with a statement endorsed by 18 other recent ex-SWPers.
At the conference of the Socialist Workers' Party which took place on 9-10 January, the expulsions of dissident members Clare Solomon and Alex Snowdon were confirmed. Both were members of the minority “Left Platform” within the SWP.
The Socialist Party has launched a “Trade Union and Socialist Coalition” for the general election with a platform made up of unobjectionable and largely worthwhile reformist demands, but notable for the absence of anything positive on migrant workers’ and asylum seekers’ rights or European workers’ unity. Whether it will have any real, independent, democratic life on the ground also remains to be seen.
With the Socialist Alliance nearly a decade ago there was much talk of uniting the left. Most of the 9 pieces collected here explore the question as we saw it then. The new situation poses the issue once more.
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