SCOTTISH DELEGATES travelling back from the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool will have two items of news on their minds.
First, the bad news. The results of two local by-elections last week brought the total of seats lost by the Labour Party to the Scottish National Party in the last two years to ten. In the new town of Irvine in Ayrshire, the previous Labour majority of 2,910 was turned into a 919 victory for the SNP. In Clydebank, in the centre of the industrial West ol Scotland, the SNP retained their seat on the local council with an Secondly, the very bad news. At the end of last week, three separate announced 1,200 redundancies in the West of Scotland. Standard Telephones and Cables is closing its East Kilbride plant after 14 occupied against redundancies last winter, is now closing down all its un operations, unrowing zou workers on ine dole. Or top of this Rolls Royce, which employs about 6,000 workers in the area, is No doubt those delegates will draw very different conclusions from these events, but even the most blinkered of the Labour Party leaders in that in Irvine are repeated, the Labour Party will be decimated in Scotland at the next elections. When this is coupled with spiralling unemployment, the growth of the SNP becomes more than a set of election statistics. There now exists a real possibility that massive numbers, above all young workers, will turn their backs on the labour movement. Everything from widespread cynicism over trade union membership to counterposing nationalist or elective solutions to collective action in the work-place is Explosive State Internally, the Labour Party is in an explosive state. Two of the last three by-elections (Darnley and Irvine) were held after the previous Labour representatives had been jailed on corruption charges. Last week saw eight similar charges brought in Lanarkshire. Those charged included one former and one present Labour councillor. These arrests can only increase the disgust which workers have for the right-wing petty crooks who make up so much of the local Labour Party leadership in Scotland But this identification of the labour movement with its corrupt leaders only makes it more imperative to launch a counter-offensive against the policies of the Labour Government from inside the labour movement So far only the Scottish Labour Party has managed even to begin such a fight back. Their candidate received 11 per cent of the vote in Irvine and a similar total in Clydebank, where they collected nearly three times the vote of the traditionally strong Communist Party. These votes are proof that there exists in Scotland a strong minority of voters who are looking for some way forward outside the nationalism of the SNP or the Labour It is difficult to gauge the basis of the SLP support. Both SLP leader Jim Sillars MP and Margo McDonald of the SNP claim that SNP support is taken in the main from Nationalist rather than Labour Party voters. However, the decision by Sillars and the other SLP MP, John Robertson, to reject tne Labour parnamentary whip on te cuts is cleany seell ds d move to the left in Scotland, and an encouragement to organise against the attacks of Healey and Callaghan. Another indication of this was defection of a Labour regional councillor in Strathclyde to the SLP a Hitting out at the 'Tory policies' said that all the Labour leaders seemed interested in was cash not people. I can't go on supporting a government which seems to be run by the Confederation of British Industry.
Run of Disasters
But while jobs and living standards are at the root of Labour's run of disasters, their cynical manoeuvres over devolution have actually had the effect of increasing support for the SP. Everybody can see that the devolution proposals are a hastily worked out deal to stem the SNP tide.
is nothing but a glorified local authority, hemmed in financially by a Government block grant and politically by the Privy Council's veto over 'unacceptable' legislation.
no matter how timid and bureaucratic the Government's proposals, they do at least recognise the feeling in Scotland for some The fake internationalism of Eri Heffer and Denis Skinner, who are for rejecting any devolution, would be disastrous for the whole labour movement if accepted. The notion that Westminster has the right to impose in Scotland any form of government it may think fit, regardless of the wishes of the Scottish people, would anant cemocrate dictate from impotent in the face of the failure of the