Class politics hold the key to resolving the national question, bringing down the Conservative government at Westminster and isolating the fascists’, Tommy Morrison told the Communist Party executive committee at the weekend.
He said the contest to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as leader of the SNP and Scotland’s First Minister was exposing deep divisions within the nationalist party.
‘The main leadership candidates want to take the SNP in a more neoliberal and pro-big business direction and hand over Scottish sovereignty to the EU and NATO, whereas many SNP voters are on the left and one-third of them voted take Scotland and Britain out of the EU’, Mr Morrison argued.
As secretary of the Communist Party in Scotland, he wanted to see a third option on the ballot paper in any future referendum on that country’s constitutional future.
He insisted that the ‘separatist option for a veneer of sovereignty’ would undermine 150 years of building working class unity across Scotland, England and Wales against the British capitalist class, while the unionist option would do nothing to change the ‘undemocratic and anti-working class status quo’.
‘That’s why Scotland’s Communists call for a third option – a federal system, which extends and entrenches the powers of the Scottish people through their own parliament to intervene against the very capitalist market forces and monopoly power that the EU and the British state are designed to reinforce’, he explained.
The CP executive committee urged closer links between local community and trade union organisations to help build united resistance to Tory central government policies to cut living standards, boost corporate profits and restrict democratic rights to protest and take industrial action.
‘This is the best basis on which a united front can be forged to defend living standards, public services and jobs, form councils of action and press local councils to fulfil their duty to assess the impact of budget cuts on the most vulnerable sections of society’, Mr Morrison declared.
‘It is also the real alternative to the appeal of the racist and fascist groups trying to benefit from the vile anti-migrant hysteria being whipped up by Tory ministers and the right-wing press and TV channels’, he added.
Britain’s Communists urged its members and supporters to help make this coming Wednesday (March 15) a militant day of action at picket lines and demonstrations in solidarity with striking workers and appealed for big turnouts on marches in London, Cardiff and elsewhere next Saturday to mark UN Anti-Racism Day.