Downfall

The author of Downfall, Alan McCombes had been a leading member of the Scottish Socialist Party for several years, and the editor of the Scottish Socialist Voice until 2003.

Together with Sheridan, a fellow member of Militant, McCombes had played a leading role in the anti-poll tax movement. His 1988 pamphlet, How To Beat The Poll Tax, advocated a mass non-payment campaign. With Tommy Sheridan, he was also author of Imagine: A Socialist Vision for the 21st Century [Canongate Books 2000]

In 1992 McCombes was a leading figure in persuading Militant in Scotland to organize openly independently of the Labour Party resulting in the creation of Scottish Militant Labour. Throughout the 1990s, he challenged the traditional “British Road to Socialism”, arguing for the left to champion the idea of an independent Scottish socialist republic.  In 1995, he promoted a Scottish Socialist Alliance to unite the left that laid the basis for the emergence of the SSP in which McCombes held the position of policy co-ordinator.

The events recalled in Alan McCombes’ Downfall seem both sadly realistic and depressingly common. Published in 2011, it is an intensely individual story, obviously partisan in the telling, and immensely political in its message. One can read it as a narrative of a flawed individual who made some bad decisions, but it is not a morality tale; it is more a statement of record of a contested account that split the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) over Tommy Sheridan’s defamation action against the News International.

The background

The Scottish Socialist Party was formed in 1998 to contest the first elections of Scotland’s new parliament.

It was created after a number of left-wing organisations which made up the Scottish Socialist Alliance aligned to form a single party which allowed various fractions or platforms to operate within it. Former Militant members – organized as International Socialist Movement – were the largest group but the Alliance contained other representatives from the Trotskyist Left as well as non-aligned Scottish socialist members.

The roots of this development lay organisationally in the break-up of the entryist Trotskyist organisation Committee for a Workers’ International better known south of the border for the Militant Tendency organised within the British Labour Party. [Read more about the origins of the Militant tendency in Ted Grant’s opinionated account  History of British Trotskyism.]

There had been the sanctioned division of the CWI’s British section into two organisational units in the mid-1990s. In England and Wales, following a series of exclusions from the Labour Party, Militant Labour changed its name to the Socialist Party after a somewhat fraught internal debate during 1996-97. In Scotland, the organisation retained the name, Scottish Militant Labour. It advocated a broader socialist alignment in the Scottish Socialist Alliance. Their English-based comrades disagreed.

Between them was a bitter row over the transformation of the Scottish Socialist Alliance into the Scottish Socialist Party in September 1998. In 2001, the International Socialist Movement – formerly Scottish Militant Labour – finally completed its break.

The SSP advocated proportional representation, abolition of the monarchy and an end to the union through the creation of an independent, Scottish republic.

The SSP achieved electoral success almost instantly when one of its founders, Tommy Sheridan, was elected to Holyrood as a list MSP for Glasgow in 1999. Tommy Sheridan was central to the initial success of the party.

He had been the face and the voice of the anti-poll tax demonstrations in Scotland in the 1980s, and was jailed three times over protests against warrant sales, poindings and nuclear weapons. And he was more media savvy than most.

And at the end of 2000 the party’s campaign to have warrant sales and poindings abolished paid off when Mr Sheridan’s members’ bill made it through parliament.

The SSP leader caused a stir in parliament from the start, when he swore the oath of allegiance to the Queen with a clenched fist raised to signal his protest. He was in parliament for four years before being joined by five of his party colleagues in 2003 – making the SSP the largest left-wing party in Scotland. At its height, as well as six MSPs, the SSP boasted 3,000 members, scores of branches and the support of important trade union organisations. In 2003, at its annual delegate conference, the Labour-affiliated Rail Maritime and Transport (RMT) trade union voted to allow its branches to affiliate to the SSP. It secured more than 245,000 votes across the country.

Six MSPs were elected on the regional list: Carolyne Leckie in Central, Colin Fox in the Lothians, Frances Curran in the West of Scotland seat, Rosemary Byrne in the South of Scotland and Tommy Sheridan and Rosie Kane in Glasgow.

The facts

In November 2004 the News of the World ran a series of stories, smutty allegations and innuendoes claiming a married MSP had visited a swingers’ club and had committed adultery.

Shortly afterwards, Tommy Sheridan resigned as convener of the SSP, citing personal reasons, and announced his intention to sue. When Sheridan stated he was going to sue the newspapers over the allegations, SSP MP Caroline Leckie said: “There is no official backing behind any legal challenge.” Alan McCombes, the SSP’s policy coordinator and one-time close friend of Sheridan’s, casually said: “The executive committee does not want to go down a road where we are helping Tommy Sheridan build a tower of lies.”

The Workers’ Weekly, a reporting source for any confrontation within the British Left (while continuing to relentlessly criticise their failings) stated it understood that

“the executive committee of the SSP urged Sheridan not to fight the thing out in the courts. It voted unanimously to tell him to fight using other, political, methods. Events so far have tended to indicate this would have been the best course.” 

Weekly Worker Issue 628 07.06.2006   Defend SSP’s Alan McCombes

Scottish Socialist Party official Alan McCombes was jailed for refusing to hand over party documents to the Court. The now-closed News of the World had requested the internal minutes, which it claims would help defend a defamation case brought by former SSP leader .  McCombes was jailed for 12 days after he ignored a deadline to release the papers. SSP offices and comrades’ homes were search in a vain attempt to find the required document, minutes of the November 9 2004 SSP executive meeting which forced Tommy Sheridan to resign as convenor.

Four SSP MSPs gave evidence against their former leader during his legal action against the newspaper, which Sheridan won in 2006, along with £200,000 in damages.

He was later retried and found guilty of perjury, and was jailed for three years in 2011. The investigation and subsequent perjury trial were estimated to have cost £4 million to £5 million, which shows the State has deep pockets when its interests are involved.

His former comrades said while this outcome had vindicated them, the socialist movement in Scotland had been very badly damaged in the process. In the midst of the saga, in the 2007 Scottish elections, the SSP’s vote slumped and the party lost all its MSPs.

Sheridan left the SSP after he won the first court case and formed another party, Solidarity. He failed in his bid to return to Holyrood as a Solidarity MSP in 2007. The group failed to make any progress and in 2020, he joined Alex Salmond’s Alba Party.

Accusation & charges

Throughout the whole episode the reporting on the Left was posturing and the sectarian left’s condemnatory vocabulary was given full expression. The political analysis shaped by an understanding of what caused the internal crisis within the SSP. Beside political disagreements, hostile to the “opportunistic and abject surrender to nationalism” of the SSP, there were differences as to where the emphasis was placed: the central issue being mistakenly presented as Sheridan’s alleged personal behaviour or the News International’s attacks on a leading socialist.

After the first court case, Sheridan described his former colleagues as “scabs” in a tabloid interview, and those who had given evidence against him reportedly faced threats and attacks by his supporters. Sheridan did not explain he had wanted the Executive Committee for political expediency to lie in defence of his personal interests. The first case saw him victorious, awarded a cash settlement.

In the second case he was later found guilty of perjury, and was jailed for three years at the start of 2011. Sheridan spent a year in prison.

A false argument was raised that the conviction of Tommy Sheridan for perjury was the result of a political vendetta, waged by Rupert Murdoch’s News International in a de facto alliance with the Lothian and Borders Police and the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). However, McCombes did observe that “Like Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, two top Tory politicians who served lengthy jail sentences for their actions, Tommy Sheridan took out a libel action based on a fraud: at least some of the material published in the trashy tabloid News of the World was substantially true.”

Sheridan’s former comrades had said while this outcome had vindicated them, however their movement in Scotland had been very badly damaged in the process.

Far from joining forces with The News of the World in bringing Sheridan down as critics claim, McCombes’ explanation is the more believable:

He declared himself a hostile witness, describing the case as a “squalid little squabble” but was ordered to answer questions by the judge. He said: “I am here under the strongest possible protest. […] Your client, I have to say, the News of the World, symbolises everything that as a socialist I have stood against my whole adult life. […] It should have been settled by one of both parties before innocent people were dragged into this bizarre pantomime.”

McCombes published account does provide a detailed, convincing rationale for why the SSP members who testified ‘against’ Sheridan did what they did. On 7 July 2006, McCombes gave evidence in the defamation proceedings launched by Tommy Sheridan against the News of the World stating that Sheridan had admitted to him that he had visited swingers clubs. His version of events was supported by ten other people who were present at the meeting and matched the minutes of the meeting presented in court, though these were naturally disputed during the court case.

August 2006, in the aftermath of the Sheridan defamation case, McCombes publicly released an all-members bulletin addressed to SSP membership, entitled “The Fight for the Truth” in which he said Tommy Sheridan’s libel victory over the News of the World “could set back the cause of socialism by years if not decades” because of the divisions that had occurred within the party and went on to give his view of the events leading  up to the trial. 

Downfall reads well, with a few jarring exceptions and Tommy Sheridan’s implosion recounted with insider perspective could not resist a few incidental snipes about Sheridan, understandable given the personal enmity, and consequences of the anger at the selfish actions of the man who wrought destruction on the SSP. Some might describe Downfall as a forensic indictment of a man who sold out his comrades for ego. Along the way is an insight to a fraying strand of early 21^st century Scottish political radicalism.  Tommy Sheridan should be commended for his anti poll tax stance, but like so many others somewhere along the way he was twisted by his fame; Yes victimised by the press, but also losing traction with the political service as too often the Left lauds the individual rather than the movement and its aims.

In August 2022 the disgraced former MSP Tommy Sheridan was declared bankrupt over an £82,000 legal bill after his failed bid to prove he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

When McCombes left the SSP employment he moved to central Scotland to work engaged in environmental activity. With Roz Paterson, he co-authoured the 2014 publication, Restless Land: A Radical Journey Through Scotland’s History. Glasgow: Calton Books.

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Alan McCombes, Downfall. Glasgow: Birlinn Ltd

Just Read… Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising

Fearghal McGarry [2012]

Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising 

ISBN  978-0141041278

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Contemporary accounts are the first partial draft but often not the most accurate account of history, here, written by participants, structured by a historian, the compilation of quotes provides a narrative and the conveys the flavour of the Easter Rising. From the witnesses’ recollections of their schooling and other childhood influences to their accounts of what happened at Easter 1916, Rebels tells of this seismic and much-debated insurrection. The testimonies gathered from participants by the Irish Bureau of Military History in 1947 provides a real feel for the ordinary person in history, and captures the detail often absence in the general histories. To recall just two incidents: Seamus Pounch stationed at the Jacob’s biscuit factory, in the first few quiet days before the arrival of British army reinforcements in Dublin, said:

“During a lull in the fight in Jacob’s we held a miniature ceilidh – Volunteers and Fianna, Cumann na mBan, Clan na Gael Girl Scouts… a real welcome break in the serious business we had in hand.”

A testimony to the rank-and-file spirit, and indicative of the conglomeration of forces – not solely a Sinn Fein rebellion – involved in the struggle for Irish national freedom. Not quite a carnival but a celebration, not the mystic “blood sacrifice” so often stressed, but a survivor’s account and insight in an incident that contributes to the human story and commitments that makes history. In another contribution from Liam Tannam, based at the GPO, not a story about the great James Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army, but a nameless Finn. He, and a Swede appeared at the GPO to join the fight.

“The Finn[ish] volunteer was no catholic. He had no English but before he left he was saying the rosary in Irish.”

This provoked a smile and thoughts of Lenin talking in defence of 1916 with references to no pure rebellions, and Mao’s reference to revolution not being a dinner party. The range of forces that were involved in the action, and those who opposed it from within, is clear in the contributions in the book quoting Bulmer Hobson, Irish Republican Brotherhood and general secretary of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin. Among “the rebels” the warmth and affection that Tom Clark, one of the signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, engendered in many activists had not previously registered with my own preference for James Connolly.

We know the insurrection was not popularly acclaimed, jeered and booed by the Dublin mob at the time. The rebels were branded as criminals, traitors, fanatics, or, at best, dangerously misguided fools in the first drafts of history   Dublin 1916.  However, the suppression of the rebellion and executions, military occupation with twenty thousand troops in the Dublin city centre alone and nightly curfews that followed meant that the Rising’s legacy would transform Ireland forever. It was the opening shots of the protracted modern Irish revolutionary struggle .

In his more conventional historical narrative, the Rising [Oxford University Press 2010] McGarry points out that within the nationalist tradition, republicanism was moved central stage, and many revolutionary-minded activists could raise “the accusation that they had failed to live up to the ideals of the Proclamation “ so central had those events of Easter 1916 become to the identity and legitimacy of the extensive rebel tradition in Ireland. In their own words are the men and women who played a part in that writing of history.

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Irish Revolutionary Tradition in Cork Workers Club’s Publications (Part 2 )

Small press publications have traditionally been the vehicle for radical political argument and providing an alternative record from the dominant narrative that makes up the general fare of public and academic publishing. Throughout the 1970s, the Cork Workers’ Club were industrious in publishing a series of historical reprints of classic texts of Irish socialist republicanism, including James Connolly. There was eventually twenty pamphlets in the series that reflected an orthodox Marxist analysis of Ireland’s radical tradition. These long out of print pamphlets had an international distribution.  

The Cork Workers Club emerged from the Cork Communist Organisation. The latter had itself been formed in 1972 in reaction to the Irish Communist Organisation’s shift from a Republican standpoint to a ’two nations’ and functionally pro-Unionist one. Through a number of organisational developments the Cork Workers’ Club, operated out of the same premises in St Nicholas Church Lane in south Cork that the republican Saor Éire had used since 1968 as its headquarters. The premises acted as a meeting place, bookshop and printing house.

Memories of CWC posted by Fintan Lane on the Irish blogsite The Cedar Lounge Revolution in 2007 recalls:

The ‘Cork Communist Organisation’ was made up largely, I believe, of the Saor Eire people (publishers of ‘People’s Voice’ etc.), who had earlier merged with the ICO. Their politics was a mixture of Marxist-Leninism (Maoism in this instance) and republicanism. My father – Jim Lane – was involved….

The CCO later morphed into the Cork Workers Club, which survived into the late 1970s as a real group and, afterwards, as a sort of publishing house. The bookshop in Nicholas Church Place remained open until the early 1980s, when it was actually an IRSP bookshop/office. It was a centre for the anti-H-Block campaign during the hunger strikes and was later used by the Release Nicky Kelly Campaign. In its early years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, public meetings were held upstairs at times. I remember once seeing a poster advertising an appearance there by Eamon McCann.

I ‘staffed’ the bookshop for a while in the early 1980s, when it was open only on Saturday and some week nights. There were some regular customers, but, as time moved on, few people slinked in besides the affiliated. Its heyday really was at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s when it was the place to go in Cork to get left-wing and republican literature. It was a genuine backstreet bookshop and when other places opened, such as the bookshop in the Quay Co-op in the early 1980s, it effectively no longer had much of a purpose. It was too far off the beaten track. A strange place, in some ways. Internet shopping would have wiped it out, had it survived that long, because it primarily dealt in political material that mainstream shops wouldn’t sell.

Source: Fintan Lane – October 30, 2007

— February 2018

THE CORK WORKERS’ CLUB ~ HISTORICAL REPRINTS

Reprints of pamphlets, booklets and newspaper articles of historical value to the study of the Socialist Movement in Ireland

 No.1   James Connolly and Irish freedom. A Marxist analysis G.Schuller

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/James-Connolly-and-Irish-Freedom-G-Schuller-Cork-Workers-Club-1974.pdf

No.2  British Imperialism in Ireland  by  Eleanor Burns

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/British-Imperialism-in-Ireland-A-Marxist-Historical-Analysis-Elinor-Burns-Cork-Workers-1974.pdf

No.3  Marx, Engels and Lenin on the Irish Revolution

http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/radical/MarxEngelsAndLeninOnTheIrishRevolution.pdf

No.4    The Irish Republican Congress by George Gilmore

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/The-Irish-Republican-Congress-George-Gilmore-Historical-Reprints-No-4-Cork-Workers-Club-1974.pdf

 No.5    The James Connolly Songbook (1972)

No. 6   Workshop Talks  by  James Connolly                              

No.7   The Irish Question (1894)  by  John Leslie

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/The-Irish-Question-John-Leslie-Cork-Workers-Club-1974.pdf                           

No.8 The Historical Basis of Socialism in Ireland  by Thomas Brady

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/The-Irish-Question-John-Leslie-Cork-Workers-Club-1974.pdf

No.9   The Connolly-Walker Controversy on Socialist Unity in Ireland

No.10 The Story of Irish Labour  by J.M.MacDonnell

Read Here cwc 10 

No.11 Ireland Upon The Dissecting Table – James Connolly on Ulster &             Partition.

No.12 Convict No. 50945: Jim Larkin, Irish Labour Leader

No.13 Irish Labour and its International Relations in the era of the 2^nd             International and the Bolshevik Revolution.

No.14 Freedom’s Road for Irish Workers (1917)

No.15 The Connolly-DeLeon Controversy:On Wages, Marriage and the Church (1904)http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1904/condel/index.htm

No.16   The Irish Crisis, 1921 – The C.P.G.B. stand by William Paul

Read Here cwc 16

No.17  The Struggle of the Unemployed in Belfast October 1932

http://michaelharrison.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/The-Struggle-of-the-Unemployed-in-Belfast-October-1932-by-Tom-Bell.pdf

No.18   The Irish Free State and British Imperialism  by “Gerhard”

Read Here cwc 18

 No.19   Sinn Fein and Socialism: James Connolly, “Charles Russell”,  Selma Sigerson

No.20   The Irish Case for Communism: Sean Murray, Jim Larkin Jun., Seamus MacKee & the C.P.I.

 

 

50. John MacLean

John Maclean, Scottish Marxist, one of the leaders of the ‘Red Clydeside’ era died on 30 November 1923 in Glasgow at the age of 44 .His funeral was attended by thousands of his fellow Glaswegians and at the time, was the biggest funeral ever seen in the city. Even today John Maclean is remembered by a Commemoration in November with a march and graveside oration at Eastwood Cemetery.

Maclean’s daughter, Nan Milton, provided a biography on her father and her selected works of Maclean, In the Rapids of Revolution was the first published collection of essays, articles, pamphlets and letters by the revolutionary organiser and educator of Clydeside. The indispensable Marxist Internet Archive have his articles from Justice and Forward, available online https://www.marxists.org/archive/maclean/index.htm

January 2018 saw the publication of Gerard Cairns new book on John MacLean titled: ‘The Red and the Green – a Portrait of John Maclean. The former Secretary of the John Maclean Society has a chapter in the book that highlights Maclean’s links with Irish revolutionaries on Clydeside, and the practical assistance he gave to the cause of Irish freedom. The author of “The Irish Tragedy: Scotland’s Disgrace”, is known better on the Left than in wider society. There has been a gradual increase in the literature that focuses on John Maclean and his political life but he remains still a controversial icon, partly because of his advocacy of a Scottish Workers Republic and rejection of the then newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain, an issue explored in John MacLean and the CPGB by Bob Pitt, on the Trotskyist left, who political disagreements with Maclean’s conclusions are open and reflective of the British Left’s attitude http://www.whatnextjournal.org.uk/Pages/Pamph/Maclean.html

That Maclean is published by others who politically oppose him, like the SWP’s 1998 study by Dave Berry, reflects the problem of how to incorporate an obvious revolutionary internationalist who stands for Scottish Republicanism in an essentially unionist Left. There was renewed interest in the importance of Maclean in the context of the debate about Scottish independence that saw the image of MacLean as a meme! While others equally ideologically hostile strangely try to claim him as their own [see Terry Brotherstone’s introduction to the WRP’s  Accuser of Capitalism published in 1986.]

Then [as today] radical socialists operate on a British stage to an agenda set largely in response to the British state centred on London. The perspective offered by Maclean did not gel with that metropolitan-influenced analysis. As Graham Bain states “Historians on the whole have been unkind about John MacLean.” Drawing upon his own mythologies, MacLean argued for an anti-war class patriotism, to refuse to fight each other over the interests of Europe’s capitalist classes. The call to break up the British state through Scottish Independence was “All Hail the Scottish Workers Republic” and not the patrician bourgeois call of ‘Scotland Free’.

“Scotland must again have independence, but not to be ruled over by traitor chiefs and politicians. The communism of the clans must be re-established on a modern basis. (Bolshevism, to put it roughly, is but the modern expression of the communism of the mir.) Scotland must therefore work itself into a communism embracing the whole country as a unit. The country must have but one clan, as it were – a united people working in co-operation and co-operatively, using the wealth that is created.”

There are a minority of activists who will regard John Maclean as a legacy for today. His dedication and determination alone means he should not slumber in some ill-deserved obscurity. His expression and contemporary analysis maybe dated, his Marxist optimism and appeal to the working class endure:

MacLean turning to friends in the court shouted, "Keep it going, boys; keep it going".

Gerard Cairns (2018) ‘The Red and the Green – a Portrait of John Maclean. Connolly Books £6.99

Mail order: http://www.calton-books.co.uk/books/the-red-and-the-green-a-portrait-of-john-maclean/

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Of Interest

Accuser of Capitalism. John MacLean’s speech from the dock, May 9^th 1918. New Park Publications 1986

Bain, Graham (nd) John MacLean, His Life and Work 1919-1923. John MacLean Society

McHugh J. and Ripley, B.J.,   John Maclean, the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party and Scottish Nationalism Scottish Labour History Society Journal, No.18, 1983.

MacLean, John (1973) The War After The War Socialist Reproduction.

MacLean’s pamphlet ‘The War After the War’ has been republished by the Bristol Radical History Group.

Milton, Nan (ed) (1978) In the Rapids of Revolution. Allison & Busby

Milton, Nan (1979) John Maclean. Pluto Press

Sherry, Dave (1998) John Maclean. Socialist Workers Party

John Maclean – “The Most dangerous man in Britain” –   http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/john-maclean-most-dangerous-man-in.html   [July 1, 2014]

Sean Ledwith, The Scottish Lenin: the life and legacy of John Maclean http://www.counterfire.org/revolutionary/17009-the-scottish-lenin-the-life-and-legacy-of-john-maclean [February 21, 2014]

John Maclean’s Pollokshaws http://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk/people/johnmaclean.php

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Legacy