Urgent Appeal for Solidarity

Colin Fox

The Scottish Socialist Party is under attack. Four SSP Members of Parliament and their staff have been issued with a month long ban without wages for defending the right to protest against the meeting of the G8 leaders.

We are attempting to generate as much international opposition as possible to this draconian attack. Therefore we request your solidarity in the following ways:

  circulate this letter among your own members, affiliates and contacts.

  Sign the online petition at:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/754099600?ltl=1122382283

  Write to George Reid, Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, to register your support for the SSP:

Presiding Officer, Queensberry House, the Scottish Parliament, Holyrood, Edinburgh EH99 1SP

Email: [email protected]

  Contribute to the SSP’s fighting fund, to pay the cost of legal action to overturn the suspension of our representatives, and to cover the wages of our staff:

Scottish Socialist Party, 70 Stanley Street, Glasgow, G41 1JB, Scotland

Tel: +44 870 752 2505

email: [email protected]

On the 30 June 2005 four Scottish Socialist Party parliamentary representatives were summarily suspended and stripped of their pay and parliamentary allowances for the month of September. The financial suspensions will also mean 28 members of staff, not involved in the protest, will also not be paid.

Their crime? Mounting a peaceful, silent protest, lasting five minutes, at First Minister’s question time. SSP members Colin Fox, Frances Curran, Rosie Kane, and Caroline Leckie held up placards demanding that First Minister Jack McConnell carry out the will of the parliament by defending the right to protest peacefully against the G8 leaders at Gleneagles on the 6 July.

Five months earlier the Scottish Parliament had passed a motion supporting the right of people to protest at the G8 summit. Yet, just, six days prior to the planned protest, official permission had still not been granted for the protest to go ahead. We believe that this was deliberately done by the authorities, in order to cause confusion and undermine the planned demonstration.

This unprecedented and draconian penalty was imposed through a process which makes a mockery of natural justice. The SSP MSPs were tried in their absence, without any kind of due process, right of appeal or any of the basic human rights that are enshrined in law.

This attack is not only targeted at the SSP representatives. By banning them for the month of Spetember, 130,000 voters will be denied a voice in the Scottish Parliament.

In the last six years the SSP has established itself as a tireless defender of working class interests at home and around the world. It has a proud record of supporting workers in struggle and has been at the forefront of opposition to imperialist aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2003 we received a 130,000 votes and six Scottish Socialist Party MSPs were elected to the Scottish Parliament. The SSP, as the only party in Scotland consistently opposing the neo-liberal agenda, has earned the enmity of the mainstream political parties and the political establishment.

Therefore we cannot let these attacks on democracy, freedom of speech and the right to protest succeed.

We are campaigning internationally to bring pressure on the Scottish Parliament to overturn the ban and the financial penalties imposed on the SSP MSPs. Already messages of support have been pouring in from all over Europe and the world, from members of the European Parliament, from trades unions and from individual workers.

Please add your voice to the growing campaign by helping in any or all the above ways.

Yours in solidarity,

Colin Fox MSP, SSP convener, on behalf of the Scottish Socialist Party

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Legal advice given to the SSP is that the 4 MSP’s were in effect in contempt of parliament and that contempt would have to be purged with an apology, an apology the MSP’s are not prepared to make.

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[ 07 September 2005: Message edited by: Wilf Day ]

quote:

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Legal advice given to the SSP is that the 4 MSP’s were in effect in contempt of parliament

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While Parliaments have the right to control their process, for example, by banning those who engage in violence or do not let others speak, protests within Parliament which do not obstruct it are another matter.

Not so long ago, Julian Bond was refused a seat in the Georgia legislature, despite being elected, because he opposed the war in Vietnam.

quote:

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In 1965 Bond officially entered the political arena. The veteran civil rights activist won a seat in the Georgia legislature,
Julian Bond
but his outspoken objection to the Vietnam War prompted the legislature to deny Bond his seat. Three times Bond's district elected him as their representative only to have the legislature ignore their wishes. Finally, in December 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the actions of the Georgia house were unconstitutional. Bond was sworn in on January 9, 1967, and served until 1974, when he was elected to the Georgia senate.

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I'm surprised the LibDems (now known as the FibDems) backed them on this.

Even Australia's right-wing coalition was more fair to the anti-Beijing and anti-Washington antics of the Aussie Greens, one of the few political parties in this world worth a damn.

[ 08 September 2005: Message edited by: Hugo the Liberator ]

Wilf Day are you talking about
this?While it is on the page you linked to, it is a rather busy & full page.

Petition signed; letter to be written.

It's not like the SSP'ers were lobbing bricks or pipe bombs at the government bench or anything.

No response yet from the presiding officer. The Scottish Labour people sent back a response saying basically "the parliament ordered the punishment, not the Labour Party"(not mentioning, of course, that Labour is the LARGEST PARTY in Holyrood.) Most disappointing was the response from the Scottish Greens. I had assumed that, as another party that was born of the "protest politics" tradition, they would have been offended at the treatment of the SSP on free speech grounds, but their response was basically "It happened to the Scottish Socialists, not us, so we have nothing to say about it."

Why THEY sold out on this I will never understand.

The Scottish Socialist Party may be the only genuinely anti-Tory party in Scotland at this point, and it is an outrage to see the entire Scottish political establishment ganging up on them. In joining the attack on the SSP, the Scottish Greens have forfeited any right to call themselves a "radical" or "democratic" party.

[ 14 September 2005: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

Also, I've read that the SNP has decided to "New Labourise" its policies in the last few years, so its leader may have felt it was in his party's interest to do a bit of tartan redbaiting.

[ 14 September 2005: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]