Workers’ Liberty has the story:
And so, after weeks of negotiations behind closed doors the dirty deed has now been done.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party Scotland (SPS) have thrown in their lot with George Galloway in order to create a new electoral bloc for this year’s Holyrood elections.
Fortunately, there is a Holyrood election rule which limits the name of political parties to six words. Otherwise, the bloc’s title would have been even more cumbersome than its chosen name: “George Galloway (Respect) – Coalition Against Cuts” (most easily referred to as: Galloway and Co.).
An alliance between the SWP, the SPS and Galloway? You’d really need to go back to 1305, when John de Menteith betrayed William Wallace to the English, to find a comparable abandonment of political principle in Scotland.
Galloway and Co. is no more than a mechanism to try to get Galloway into Holyrood: the only candidate with even a half-realistic chance of being elected is whoever stands as number one on its list for the Glasgow regional seat – and that candidate will be Galloway himself.
The SWP and SPS, in other words, have signed up to be Galloway’s foot soldiers in this endeavour. Although this will be a new experience for SPS members, the SWP already has form when it comes to this kind of thing. They must be gluttons for punishment.
(From 2004 until 2007 the SWP acted as Galloway’s bag-carriers and played a politically invisible role in Respect. But in 2007 Galloway decided that he had had enough of the SWP, split the party, and walked away with the right to use of the party’s name, two SWP full-timers and a number of other SWP members.)
The only question left unanswered by the creation of Galloway and Co. is when it will fall apart.
The SWP are very stupid people, aren’t they?
I’m assuming that the Socialist Party Scotland is the pro-swinging and perjury faction of the Scottish Socialist Party, but can’t be bothered to look it up.