Greetings to the Scottish Socialist Party conference
Talks2000sAlan Thornett speaking for Socialist Resistance, as an international guest with Terry Conway, on the second day of the SSP conference that opened in Glasgow on 7 October 2006. This was the 2007 conference brought forward after Tommy Sheridan's split from the party. Alan and Terry wrote up the conference for Socialist Resistance as “Scottish Socialist Party: Still Remarkably Intact”. Recording on the nwsocialist YouTube channel; transcript corrected from the automatic captions, 10 Oct 2026. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 Chair: Now, the third speaker is Alan Thornett from Socialist Resistance in London. He's up here with Terry, who's sitting next to him. I'm awfully sorry, I forgot to mention them as international guests yesterday, because I suppose I didn't think of them as being international, but that's probably just my English background. Anyway, they have come up from south of the border, so I'm going to ask Alan to say a few words on behalf of
00:30 Socialist Resistance. Alan Thornett: Thank you, chair. Well, the first thing I'd like to say is that it's extremely pleasing to come to an SSP conference which is so strongly intact after the crisis that you've been through. And secondly, when the whole of the left [in Britain] was faced with the
01:00 prospect of a split in the SSP, four or five months ago, looking back at that situation, when we all had to think, well, this is happening, where do we stand, what strikes me now is that in fact it wasn't very difficult to know where you stood. Because we only really had to have one look at the letter that Tommy Sheridan circulated around the National Council on the 28th of May, which actually was quite
01:30 a reactionary letter, to really know that you couldn't stand with that. It was impossible to stand with that. And the second reason, as has been referred to just now, is that for us the SSP has been a model for the creation of broad pluralist parties across Europe, and it's been a
02:00 model for what we've been fighting, not yet achieved but what we've been fighting to achieve, in England. And to lose that would have been an incredible, absolutely incredible loss. In the struggle that we carry out inside Respect, which is essentially really a struggle to democratise Respect, we've used the SSP as the broad model for that struggle. And we've always argued that the SSP,
02:30 and it's demonstrated here again at this conference, is an extremely democratic organisation. It's very easy to have your say inside the SSP. It's managed to create a broad framework which can contain, and did actually, until this split, contain the whole of the left in Scotland: both the organised left inside established groups, and also independent activists, and those breaking from Labour and coming towards the left, and everything
03:00 else. It's formed a common framework. And it's not an easy framework, actually, as you well know; it's not an easy framework to establish. But it's the best model that's been established for that. And next weekend there is in fact the Respect conference, and we'll be at the Respect conference next weekend. And some comrades have argued, well, not argued, but have feared in recent weeks: can we still argue with such confidence for the SSP model, given the crisis
03:30 that the SSP has gone through? And the answer to that is yes, of course we can. That model still exists, and that will be the model we'll be putting forward next weekend, when we're putting forward constitutional amendments directly aimed to [do that]. We won't win the vote, by the way; we're not expecting to win the vote on this occasion. But we're putting forward that kind of broad pluralist model that the SSP has
04:00 represented. And that's really, I think, the big contribution internationally that the SSP has made. When I was asked to speak, [a quarter of] an hour ago, I thought, well, probably in the interest of left unity I should not mention the SWP, because I work closely all the time with the SWP inside Respect. But then I thought, well,
04:30 I've just read in Socialist Worker their report of the Brazilian elections, where of course Heloísa Helena pulled an incredible six and a half million votes, standing against Lula in the presidential elections, which shows what can be done and what the political prospects are. But the conclusion of the article in Socialist Worker is that, well,
05:00 Heloísa has done extremely well, and this is an incredible vote, but what P-SOL, which is her party of course, what P-SOL has to avoid in the future is any tendency to build a party around charisma. And you may wonder which particular experience, whether it was north or south of the border, they
05:30 based this very profound observation on. But anyway, thank you very much for the opportunity both to attend your conference and to make these short remarks. And I go away confident that the SSP will go forward from this and continue to make the contribution that it's already made to building [broad] parties in Europe. Thank you.