A TOP member of the project to bring Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s political party to life in Scotland has lifted the lid on the organisation – and revealed the fledgling party’s constitutional stance.
Jim Monaghan, a member of the Collective Scotland group which is in the process of setting up the as-yet-unnamed party’s Scottish branch, said that “electoral success is why we’re forming a political party” despite previous failures to build broad-church socialist groups.
He said that the party would start from the position of backing the Scottish Parliament’s right to hold indyref2 – but that members and candidates could be for or against independence itself.
In the first interview any member has given since Sultana's announcement of the new party on Thursday, Monaghan (below) told The National: “We want to bring the left together, no matter what side of the independence debate they’re on.
“For our candidates or members, they can hold either position on independence.
“Our position will be – to start, I put a caveat in here that once we’ve got members they might call a conference and agree or disagree with this – our starting position is that we support self-determination and we support the Scottish Parliament to have the right, to have the powers to be able to call and hold a referendum.”
The party will be both a party in and of itself, tied to the one being set up in England by Corbyn and Sultana, and part of an “electoral coalition”, Monaghan said.
He added: “There will be a party and people can join it. It’s not the same thing as the electoral coalition that we’ll stand at the Holyrood elections because that will be made up of other people and other parties as well.
“We’re not saying that everyone who joins the electoral front will be joining Collective, we want to build an actual party, a left-wing alternative based in Scotland which will be part of the UK-wide initiative.”
Policy decisions will be taken by members, Monaghan said, and he expects that a conference in Glasgow on October 4 will see “something put forward that day for everyone to agree on and that would be the start of it”.
The nascent party has already held talks with the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), Socialist Party Scotland (SPS), the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) and the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), according to Monaghan.
The involvement of the SWP may prove a source of controversy, given the toxicity of the Trotskyist party among some sections of the left.
Despite this, the SWP have maintained a role in organising coalitions of left-wing groups around specific causes and remain a regular presence at protests.
Other non-party-affiliated actors will be involved, Monaghan said, including trade unionists, “well-known” community campaigners, and some involved with the Sheku Bayoh campaign.
The electoral front is said to have already been put into practice by Left Alternative, a group which is driving the creation of an electoral coalition that Monaghan claimed had played a part in agreeing “non-aggression” pacts between small left-wing parties in two recent Glasgow City Council by-elections.
In Southside Central, the group negotiated that the local SSP candidate would stand unopposed by any other small, left-wing parties and the same for the TUSC candidate in the North East ward.
In the former election, the SSP’s vote increased by 5.2% while in the latter, it rose by 2.5%.
The SSP have not held a Scottish Parliament seat since 2007. TUSC, which have contested elections since 2011 have never won a parliamentary seat, though have picked up a handful of councillors.
Asked why he expected the Corbyn-Sultana project to succeed where others had failed, Monaghan said: “The politics of the country have changed. The centre ground has moved to the right and the centre parties aren’t really addressing that, they’re shifting to the right with the centre ground instead of fighting back.
“Even under Blair and Brown there was things like minimum wage, there was loads of things came in that were able to keep trade unionists and keep socialists in the Labour broad church. Now there’s nothing like that. Starmer himself has set out to destroy the broad church.”
Monaghan said that the SNP would not be welcome to work with Collective Scotland, as they were the party of government. “If the SNP were in opposition, then possibly but this is to offer people a left alternative to Labour and the SNP,” he said.
The Scottish Greens would be welcome to get involved, Monaghan said, though he thought this unlikely.
“I’ve been involved in left politics in Scotland for a long time, for decades and the Greens have never really been part of that, never really shown any interest in being part of any of the various campaigns and coalitions that have come, apart from a handful of individuals,” he added.
