Losing everything

During my lifetime, I have owned a railway, trains, airports, airlines flying to foreign and domestic destinations, a telecommunications company, a mobile phone operator, a power company, coal, gas, steelworks, car manufacturers, the mail, hospitals, schools, blood stocks, oil, the defence engineering industry, electricity, banks, buses, air traffic control, probation services, prisons, roads and the police. 

I've only been alive thirty-one years, and all of that has been taken from me - and the compensation for it? Because I live in Glasgow, where I can be reasonably expected to be halfway through my life, I will even have my retirement taken away from me. 

It's not just me, of course. Those industries and services once belonged to every single one of us. They were founded for the good of the country and its people, and because they operated as public services, there was no constant rise in the price to use them to squeeze even more money out of the working people and into the pockets of fat cats and slush funds. 

The vast majority of these things were taken away from us by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, although Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron couldn't quite resist taking their shares either. 

So when I see Scottish Labour claiming to be a socialist and redistributive party, I wonder why in the thirteen years they governed this land, they didn't find the time in parliament to renationalise a single industry other than those which were suddenly abandoned by the private sector when they failed to continue yielding profits, and just as swiftly sold back off again.

Austerity is hurting  people. Those governing us know that: they just don't care. They don't care that the rise in the price of a stamp - not to improve services, but to drip more of our money into the pockets of thieves and spivs - or a rail fare, or phone bills has a disproportionate effect on the poor - the poor that they then hammer - Labour and Tory alike - with vile actions like the Bedroom Tax (Tory, although invented by Labour) and abolishing the 10p tax rate (Labour, with relish) - a policy by a Labour government which had the specific intention of taking money from the poor. 

They both like to brag about how they are going to hurt the weakest and most vulnerable in society in pursuit of their disgusting austerity policies. They take pleasure in detailing how they will reduce benefits given to the disabled and ill. They relish competing with each other to speak in nastier terms about those who need the most help. They crow in delight that they'll outdo each other in closing libraries; that they'll take the most money from the poorest people. 

It took Labour a year to decide they were against the Bedroom Tax. That's not socialism. Decent people looked at that policy and instinctively knew it was an evil and cowardly assault by a gang of bullies on people who have nothing to fight back with. And when they gleefully tell us they'll be "tougher than the Tories", they mean it. 

Of the two major London parties, they differ not a jot in terms of policy and principle: only in extent. They are both pro-austerity, although they'll differ slightly in the amount of cuts. They're both pro-Trident. This very month, Labour and the Tories worked and voted together in Parliament to cut spending on public services, while voting for Trident the next week, and acting to prevent the abolition of fracking the week after that. 

If you want austerity, vote for Scottish Labour, or one of the coalition parties. 

If you want change, send them a message. Scotland can't change whether the British elect a Tory government or not whether we send 59 Labour MPs or 0. But we can send a clear message to Scottish Labour - you can either support the Scottish people, or support the Tories on austerity. And if you back the latter, you forfeit the support of the former.

Moving swiftly on

They did it!

Last night, the Coalition of the Radical Left threw a political hand grenade into European politics with an extraordinary election victory which has shaken the foundations of capitalism and bankocracy itself. It's hard to overestimate the sheer scale of their victory. Five and a half years on from a very creditable performance resulting in fourteen seats and 4,6% of the national vote, the SYRIZA has swept across Greece, destroying the pro-austerity parties in its path. They secured 149 seats in parliament, with 36,3% of the vote, being only two seats away from an absolute majority, and propelling its leader, Alexis Tsipras, into the office of prime minister: the youngest Greek leader in a century and a half. 

It was wonderful to see so much solidarity expressed with the SYRIZA from across Europe. Watching the live coverage on NERIT from the SYRIZA gazebo in central Athens, it was notable that there were an array of flags and banners from France, Scotland, Italy, Germany and Ireland. This is our moment for the radical Left in Europe. We have been battered for a generation. We have raised a generation of political activists on failure. We have had no victories, nothing to celebrate, nothing to inspire us. It has been hard going. 

Last night gave us hope - and the Hellenic Republic is now a source of immense pride to us all. We are inspired by the tremendous victory of the SYRIZA, destroying the established order in a single swoop across every prefecture of Greece. Colin Fox, in Athens, said last night "I've learned a lot. I'm bringing it all back to Scotland with me". When I go to Greece later on this year, it will be with a heart filled with respect and love for the Greek people, who refused to be bullied or intimidated. 

Winning the election was probably the easy part, and the SYRIZA - despite the Scottish Labour Party last night reacting to the victory by referring to the new prime minister as "contemptible, a fantasist, an outright liar, reminds you of Mussolini" - has the best wishes of the real Left in Europe as they carry out a painful repulsion of austerity in an uncomfortable coalition with a Greek version of Ukip which which they have very little in common. 

With the SYRIZA a beacon of hope for Europe's radical Left, where do we go from here?

Well, there are six sets of legislative elections coming up in Europe in the remainder of the year, including the UK's general election in which current opinion polls show the Scottish Labour Party having more in common with the PA.SO.K than merely a propensity for campaigning and governing alongside conservatives; namely, a near-purging of the party from Parliament. 

The next election is on St David's Day, when Estonians go to the polls to elect a new Riigikogu. I was in Tallinn for the last general election, and frankly, there's no hope for the radical Left there at all. The place was festooned with posters for the liberal Reform Party (Reformierakond) and the conservative Union of Pro Patria and Respublica (IRL). The Centre Party (Keskerakond) is the opposition. A Blairite party, the Social Democrats (SDE) is the smallest party in the Riigikogu and props up the Reform Party government in coalition.

There are 101 members of the Riigikogu, elected by modified d'Hondt proportional representation of all parties which pass a national 5% threshold from twelve constituencies

The Vasakpartei is the radical Left movement in Estonia (Estonian United Left). It is a pro-Russian eurocommunist party and has no seats in Parliament. Polling data is not terribly optimistic, and I suspect that if you pin all your hopes and dreams in live on the Vasakpartei winning a SYRIZA-style victory, you may be subject to some disappointment. Reformierakond is leading in the polls, but one recent poll had Keskerakond in the lead. 

Never one to overshadow its neighbour with which it has close relations, Finland is holding its general election the very next month, on 19th April. The current government is a coalition of Kokoomus (conservative), SDP (Finnish version of New Labour, but nice), the Svenska Folkpartiet (Swedish People's Party (No, it's not a copy and paste error. Liberals) and Kristiliisdemokraatit (Christian Democrats). It's supported by the solitary MP sent from the autonomous province of Aaland. 

The good guys here are in the parliament, the Vasemmistoliitto (Left Alliance). They quit the National Government over Alexander Stubb's government cutting the social welfare problems. They have twelve seats in the Eduskunta (they did have fourteen MPs elected at the last election where the party scored 8,1% of the national vote, but two of the MPs had to be purged for being wee scamps). Finland isn't as badly affected by the austerity as other Eurozone countries as a result of years of quasi-socialism, but the Vasemmistoliitto is still polling astonishingly high at between 8-9%. A slight increase in support could result in them having up to 10% of the 200 seats in Eduskunta and being kingmakers in any potential coalition government. 

Finns select their MPs by d'Hondt proportional representation. There will be 13 constituencies for this election, while there were previously fifteen. This is owing to a merger between Northern Savonia and Northern Karelia, and between Southern Savonia and Kymi. Someone obviously really doesn't like Savonia.

The next month is the UK election, about which many words will be spilled, and then psephological geekery goes into abeyance until the Danish general election, which has to be held by 14th September. Like Finland - which is not in Scandinavia - Denmark has a tradition of moderately left-wing policies. It is not a member of the Eurozone, although it is a member of the European Union. It is a wealthy nation which has not tangibly suffered from the ongoing Depression. The government is run by Socialdemokraterna (social-democrats) and the Radikale (a liberal-ish party). Socialistisk Folkspartei, a party analogous in policies roughly to the Greens here, were in the government, but walked out of the coalition after a dispute over the sales of shares in State utilities. The coalition is supported on an issue-by-issue basis by both Enhedslisten (the Red-Green Alliance) and the conservative Venstre, which is the largest party.

The closest to a radical Left party in Denmark is the Enhedslisten, which won 6,7% of the vote in 2011, translating to 12 seats in the 179-member Folketing. 

Denmark has suffered relatively little from austerity, and certainly not to the catastrophic extent of Greece, Ireland and Spain. The government has satisfied itself with public sector pay freezes. Even unemployment is low. The radical Left, therefore, isn't polling at particularly exciting levels. Even so, opinion polling shows they will return a higher share of the vote from last time, perhaps not being terribly far off of doubling their seats. Their worst-case scenario is Voxmeter's 8,3%; the best-case being 11,0% with Greens. Most polls show them between 8,5%-9,5%. my prediction would be that they will get half as many seats again as in 2011. There's every chance they could be the kingmakers in the new Folketing. Danes elect their MPs by the d'Hondt system of party-list proportionality. There are 179 members of the Folketing, 175 of which are returned from Denmark, and two each from Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Denmark itself has ten constituencies, each sending a varying number of MPs to Folketing to a total of 135. The remaining forty seats are allocated to parties which achieve a threshold of 2% nationally by proportion.

Poland will be next to go to the polls before Hallowe'en, on a date selected by president Komorowski. The 460 members of the Sejm are elected on a d'Hondt party-list proportional basis, and the previous election returned a coalition government of Platforma Obywatelska and Stronnictwo Ludowe. The former, Civic Platform, is a conservative party which provides both the president of the republic and the president of the council of ministers (the prime minister), Ewa Kopacz. Parties need to pass a 5% threshold to get allocated seats in the Sejm. Their coalition partners, the Polish People's Party, are also socially conservative, with a farmer-peasant tradition. 

There are two centre-left parties in the Sejm; Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (Democratic Left, borne out of the PZPR- Polish United Workers' Party - which governed the old People's Republic of Poland, but now firmly centrist). They are in decline. Twój Ruch, or 'Your Movement', is tiny, and is unlikely to pass the threshold. 

There is no radical Left party in Poland with any conceivable chance of making it into the Sejm, never mind wielding influence.

The last, best, hope, therefore, for the European radical Left is in the Spanish general election, which may take place before Poland's, but more likely in November. The 350 members of the Congress of Deputies are elected by popular vote in constituencies mirroring the Spanish provinces by the d'Hondt method of proportional representation. Unusually, this does not generally result in coalition governments, with Spanish political parties preferring to govern as minority governments, seeking ad-hoc agreement on issue-by-issue basis. There is a threshold of 3% to enter the Cortes, and this includes blank or spoiled ballots. 

The incumbent Partido Popular is sadly misnamed. The government of Mariano Rajoy is extremely unpopular as a result of its austerity measures. The main opposition PSOE, the Socialist Workers' Party, is a Blairite-style centre-left group, which is plummeting in the polls over a perceived collaboration with the PP over austerity and bank bailouts. Other parties currently represented in parliament are the liberal Union for Progress and Democracy (UPyD); the Catalan nationalist CiU;  Amaiur, a Basque nationalist party; and the Izquierda Unida, the communist-oriented 'United Left' which confidently expected to the beneficiary of the collapse in the PSOE vote. 

Until Podemos. 

The radical Left party has come, literally, from nowhere to be a comfortable second in opinion polls, sneaking closer and closer to the PP with every passing poll and leading in several. 

The Spanish campaign is extremely similar to the election campaign in Scotland. The ruling conservatives are despised for their harsh austerity policies of spending cuts on public services, labour 'reform', bank bailouts and VAT rises, but despite this, the centre-left opposition is unable to capitalise on this lost support, being reviled for its catastrophically inept administration previous to the conservatives taking power. Major corruption scandals have tainted both parties, which are now seen by a majority of voters as two wings of the same rotten establishment, and a constitutional crisis provoked by an independence campaign in a resource-rich province, has led to a political vacuum into which a third force has stepped. 

I'm describing Spain, incidentally, not Scotland. 

Podemos - it's Spanish for 'we can', and a play on words on 'for social democracy', which in Spain is POr DEMOcracia Social - was only founded last year, but still came fourth in the European elections a few months later. It is already Spain's second-largest party in terms of membership, with 100.000 signing up in the first twenty days. Its origin is extra-political - it comes from the indignado anti-austerity street protests which rocked Spain during the financial collapse and subsequent imposition of austerity. Taking inspiration from the Scottish Socialist Party, Podemos MEPs do not take their full salary, taking less than a quarter of the salary to expose the gulf in incomes between the elite and the people.

They are anti-Nato and are a feminist movement, but with the fundamental goal of opposing austerity, and extending this to nationalisation of Spain's wealth and resources - something long-since abandoned by the PSOE. They also support national self-determination - important with a constitutional crisis over the Catalan independence campaign brewing. They are environmentalists, opposing the use of fossil fuels and replacing it with renewable energy; and place strong emphasis on redistribution of wealth through policies such as a citizens' income and the abolition of tax avoidance by big business.

A massive rise in unemployment in Spain has sent young people hurtling away from establishment politics and into the open arms of Podemos. And further displaying their anti-politics credentials, the party decided not to stand in the local elections scheduled for May - instead supporting grassroots candidates on a local level. 

Opinion polling shows that the radical Left is not just going to enter the Cortes, but may dominate it. From 0% in January 2014, it is on a solid 25% a year later, with the PP on 26% and falling. It is a meteoric rise for the young radical Left movement in Spain, and Enrique Iglesias, with his open-necked shirt and rock-star looks, is set to be a major player in Spanish politics. Two opinion polls in 2015 so far have even shown Podemos in the lead, with a poll in December 2014 showing the party on 30%. 

2015 opened with a morale-boosting, earth-shaking victory for the European radical Left. We may yet finish the year with another one. Greed may well be a mortal sin, but having got the taste for electoral success for the radical Left in Greece, I'm afraid I want more and more. We've taken Athens. In November we can take Madrid. 

And in 2016? Legislative elections in Ireland and Scotland. If Greece and Spain can show us the way to take control from the political establishment, let's learn that lesson. Sending pro-independence/anti-austerity MPs to Westminster in May, and socialist MSPs to Holyrood next year would be an unmistakable message from the Scottish people that we have learned from our brothers and sisters in Spain and Greece, and are no longer prepared to suffer so the rich can get richer. 

What's going to happen on Sunday

TL;DR

1. Voting finishes at 5pm our time

2. Exit poll published immediately. Don't get too excited by it.

3. Half 8 our time, we will know who has won. 

4. If the SYRIZA finishes first and gets 40,4% of the vote, it has a majority.

5. By midnight, the full result will be known.

Sunday's Greek election - procedure

I've had quite a few posts asking precisely what's going to happen on Sunday, so I thought it might be useful to give a quick run-down. 

There are 56 multi-member constituencies from Achaea to Zakynthos. Mostly, these constituencies correspond to prefectures (provinces), old or new. For instance, Lesbos has been abolished as a prefecture, but is retained as a constituency, electing three deputies to the Voulí (the sitting deputies are one each for ND, PA.SO.K and the SYRIZA). More urban areas have more deputies - so Athens A returns seventeen: 8 ND, 4 SYRIZA, and one each for PA.SO.K, Chrisí Avgí, Dim.Ar, KKE and Anexartitoi Ellines. 

Fun fact: Athens A's MPs include both the radical Left SYRIZA president Alexis Tsipras and the neo-Nazi Chrisí Avgí founder, the currently-imprisoned Nikolaos Michaloliakos. The hustings must have been fun.

The highest number of seats in a constituency is Athens B, which returns 44. The lowest number of seats is Zakynthos, which returns a solitary islander to Syntagma Square, equalled by Grevena, Evrytania, Kefallinia, Lefkada, Samos and Fokida.

All Greeks over the age of 18 are eligible to vote, provided they are registered in a Greek municipality. Some 100.000 young, first-time voters have been disenfranchised, however, with the Greek Youth Parliament questioning the apparent inability of the Ministry of the Interior to register the new voters, given the three-week notice period. With unemployment amongst young Greeks running at 50%, it's little surprise that support for the SYRIZA is at its highest there (40% of under-25s, whilst the incumbent ND is running at only 15%). 

Given there is a fifty-seat bonus for coming first - even by one vote in the whole country - every vote counts. And in the country which invented cynicism and democracy, there is a bitter irony that the one seems to be trumping the other. 

(c) Precarious Europe

The polls will open at 05:00 Scottish time on Sunday morning and close at 17:00 Scottish time on Sunday evening. Individual polling stations may extend voting hours at the discretion of the presiding officer.

It is compulsory to vote in Greece. There is, however, no punishment for not voting. To prove compliance with electoral law, voters are given a certificate of voting.

Greeks vote in a slightly different way from Scots: rather than having a single ballot paper with all the options, they are given an array of ballot papers, one from each party. They select the party they wish to vote for and the candidates they wish to be elected from that party. This means that, say PA.SO.K wins five seats in Thessaloniki-A constituency. The five most popular PA.SO.K candidates in that seat as ranked by the voters, not the party, are elected to the Voulí.

This is (and I'm sorry to go off on a tangent here) a much better system than we use, where closed party lists fundamentally mean that as long as an MSP is popular enough amongst party members in his or her region - for a Liberal MSP, that could mean being top-ranked by as little as a dozen people - it is basically impossible for the electorate to kick them out of Holyrood. And it's my belief that the closed party list is the reason UKIP have an MEP today: the SNP was guaranteed two seats, with a chance of a third. The Greens had a chance of one, as did UKIP. The SNP selected a Tory as their third-placed candidate, which made it impossible for people on the progressive Left to lend them their vote and keep UKIP out. Instead, they drifted to the Greens, which fell just short of the numbers to stop the anti-foreigner party from sneaking in. Had it been an open party-proportional list, I, and anecdotal evidence of non-Green Green voters seems to show many more, would have voted SNP.

But I digress. The actual candidates selected are irrelevant to me, and I suspect to 99,9% of those reading this. It is the proportion of seats gained by parties which is of interest to us.

The party tallying is done first so that the results can be announced as quickly as possible. Thus, we will know which party has won the election, but not which deputies will be going to Athens, with the exception of party leaders and anyone who has served as prime minister. These men are automatically returned at the top of the party list. So we can say with some confidence that with 4 seats in Athens-A last time, we will definitely be seeing Alexis Tsipras back in parliament.

At 17:01, an exit poll will be published. In June 2013, the exit poll slightly overstated the SYRIZA vote (not by much, it was basically only by a rounding error). In 2000, the exit poll gave ND a 0,5% lead. PA.SO.K won by 1%. These are tiny margins but remember that fifty seat bonus. Each newspaper and TV station will then release their own exit polls as time goes on.

20:30 our time on Sunday should mark the point where 10% of the votes have been counted in each prefecture. It should, at that stage, be possible to extrapolate the results with reasonable certainty. There may well be an official projection from the Interior Ministry's Central Election Service.

What we are looking for is a) the SYRIZA to come in first place; b) a vote for the SYRIZA of at least 40,4%. This means that it has won a majority of at least one seat because of the 50-seat bonus for the winner. 

The remaining 250 seats are allocated in proportion according to the votes cast. However, this is in proportion only to the votes cast for the parties which reach a threshold of 3% nationally. Votes cast for parties which do not reach the 3%, or spoilt ballots, or blank votes, are disregarded. 

What Greece shows Scotland

Tomorrow represents the last working day before Greeks go to the polls on Sunday for the third general election in thirty months. The scene is set in the central Omonia Square in Athens for a massive rally tonight of the Coalition of the Radical Left - the SYRIZA - which is hot favourite to emerge as the clear winner on Monday morning. Current polling suggests that it may even pull off an SNP-style win against the entire political establishment, winning more seats than every other party combined. 

Regardless, it is inconceivable that whether at the head of a majority government or in coalition, Alexis Tsipras, a forty-year-old civil engineer who was born in Athens only hours after the collapse of the Greek fascist regime, will not be appointed Prime Minister. 

The latest poll, for Action 24, shows the SYRIZA on 32,4% against the incumbent liberal/conservative Nea Dimokratia on 28,9%. This is anticipated to translate to the SYRIZA winning around 142 seats in the Voulí ton Ellínon, slightly short of the 150 seats needed for a majority of 0. 

To Potami, a centrist party is third on 5,1% with the neo-Nazi Chrysí Avgí on 5%. The KKE communists are on 4%, the PA.SO.K on 3,6%, Anexartitoi Ellines on 2,6% and To Kinima bringing up the rear on 2,4%. 

Parties which receive less than 3% of the vote are ineligible to enter the Voulí. 

It is hard to underestimate the genuine joy and hope that this is giving to us on the radical European Left. It may not be an exaggeration to say that for many of us, our entire hope for the future rests with the SYRIZA. If they can beat their political system, defeat the political establishment, then why can't we?

The striking thing about the numbers above, incidentally, isn't that the radical Left has made the breakthrough. It's the lads looking up at the communists. The PA.SO.K isn't just some bam party like the Liberal Democrats or something - it is the near-hegemonic social democratic party of Greece. 

In the fifteen general elections since the fall of fascism, the PA.SO.K has emerged as the government in nine of them. For more than half of the entire years of democracy, the PA.SO.K has governed the Hellenic Republic. It is the Greek political establishment, with families being steeped in the tradition. The surnames of the current PA.SO.K great and good are resonant with memories of those of the past.

And now it is within a margin of half a percent of being swept from the Voulí. 

Why?

Firstly, the PA.SO.K - the acronym stands for the All-Greek Socialist Movement - decided in the mid-1990s that it needed to 'modernise' itself. In this 'modernisation', it alienated itself from the working and lower-middle classes of Greek society which had previously been its bedrock of support. 

Secondly, the PA.SO.K began to be viewed by the public as lazy, corrupt, oligarchic, closer to the millionaires than the millions, and with a sense of entitlement to govern Greece. They became identified with the United States military objectives.

Thirdly, they reacted to falling popularity by a series of leadership challenges and changes. They were so convinced of their entitlement to govern that losing support must clearly mean that the electorate just didn't like the leader. If the party is always right, then it must only need a change of leader to regain popularity. From having had two leaders in three decades, they moved to having three leaders in eight years.

Fourthly, the austerity measures brought to Greece by the global economic crisis have been astonishingly harmful to normal Greeks, destroying jobs and hammering the poorest with public service cuts, while insulating rich Greeks from the worst effects. The PA.SO.K is identified with austerity, having voted with the conservatives to implement it. 

Fifthly, in order to preserve the Greek Establishment, and to protect what they saw as the natural order of events, the PA.SO.K entered into a wildly unpopular coalition arrangement with the conservative ND. This conglomeration of the two rival parties in a two-party system was overwhelmingly viewed by Greeks as ND and the PA.SO.K trying to 'game' the system and cheat the electorate.

If I was Scottish Labour, I'd be looking at those five issues. I'd be realising we've already made the first four mistakes and are well along the way to making the fifth. And I'd be explicitly promising in my manifesto that under no circumstances would I go into coalition with the Tories after the general election. Because when you're irredeemably tainted in the eyes of almost half the electorate - 41% of Scots polled say they'd never consider voting Labour again - because of your collaboration with the Tories, you really don't want to give the other half the last straw they need to ditch you. 

The PA.SO.K is just about to neatly demonstrate that there is no right to exist for a party which betrays its support base, and the SYRIZA is going to be there to ensure that they benefit from its collapse. 

Anyone who read Chris Mullin's excellent novel A Very British Coup will be quite aware of what is going to be done to Greece over the next months and years. Make no mistake: it is very much in the best interests of the European political establishment, who have stolen our European Union and transformed it into a protectorate of big businesses, that the SYRIZA government fails, falls, and falls hard. 

Any attempt by Dr Tsipras to renegotiate the terms of a bailout contract so onerous that even Mike Ashley might think twice about it will result in the combined weight of the Bundesbank-dominated ECB landing squarely on the stomach of the Hellenic Republic. There is even the chance that, far from a Grexit, we may end up with a Grexpulsion, pour encourager les autres. This may be the best thing to happen to Greece. The ability to revalue and devalue the Drachma might be the thing which pulls the Greek economy out of this moribund state from which there appears little exit as long as it remains under the control of the Bundesbank and the ECB, with bailout conditions closer to war reparations than a loan. 

And should the SYRIZA fall slightly short of a majority, the pressure put on the other Greek parties for a Grand Coalition - to put a cordon sanitaire around the radical Left - will be irresistible. There will be promises made to them and there will be threats. In the darker recesses of my mind, I sometimes entertain the thought that the SYRIZA might fall short by x seats, and that the PA.SO.K may have x + 1 seats. I genuinely would not like to bet on which side they would fall. And it's perhaps worth noting that former PA.SO.K leader and prime minister Giorgios Papandreou is now the leader of To Kinima.

The ultimate irony, of course, would be if the KKE had enough seats to put a radical Left party into government in Europe for the first time in three generations, and chose not to because the SYRIZA isn't ideologically 'pure' enough. 

The pressures which will be placed on Greece's structures in the event of a SYRIZA victory are going to be extraordinary. I do not rule out, for instance, that Greece will be expelled from Nato. Frankly, I don't expect that the Greek people - as opposed to the establishment - will be at all sorry to leave. There was strong opposition within Greece to Nato's bombing campaign against fellow Orthodox in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And with Greece no longer under the same military command as the Turkish Republic, the Greeks may very well find that they may no longer have the same European Union and Nato support as they once did over Cyprus, part of which remains occupied by Turkish forces.

Look at the panic of the establishment when, only last year, an insignificant region on Europe's extremity threatened the established order. The bullying started with the American president and ended with all of the major banks and big business. Don't think it won't happen again. 

That isn't, however, a reason not to hope for a SYRIZA victory this weekend. Quite the opposite, in fact: if the SYRIZA wins despite the bullying, and if it succeeds - and in Greek terms, success will be not doing worse than the current government, which would not be difficult - then it makes it that little bit easier for the radical Left to spread. When we look to our comrades abroad, we are going to look to successful ones. 

Enrique Iglesias, the president of Podemos, the Spanish equivalent of the SYRIZA said tonight that if we can take Athens we can take Madrid. 

I go further. There are scheduled elections soon in Spain, in Ireland and in Scotland. All countries which have been absolutely shattered by the depression, and all of them with a massive working class which has been utterly betrayed by the main social-democrat party - the PSOE in Spain, and Labour in Ireland and Scotland- choosing to back austerity instead of the workers.

If we can take Athens, we can take Madrid. If we can take two countries which were fascist regimes well within living memory and transform them into successful socialist states, then perhaps we can take Ireland too, where Sinn Féin is polling at numbers almost certain to propel them into government in Dublin, and if we can take Athens, Madrid and Dublin, we can certainly take Glasgow. 

The European establishment is right to live in terror of us. Because for the first time in my lifetime, the radical Left is setting the agenda. We are on the front foot. We are asking ''why'', questioning every structure in modern Europe. ''Why'', we ask, ''must the railways be run for a profit for private companies?''. ''Why'', we ask, ''does there have to be a presumption that the State should not own and built houses?''. 

On Monday morning, the Red Flag may fly over Athens. This is a great day for the radical European Left. I wish Dr Tsipras and his new government all the very best, and I look very much forward to visiting a socialist Greece later in the year. 

Scottish Labour's SNP/Tory Big Lie

The Third Parliament was an exercise in democracy which had never before been tried in Scotland, and only very rarely in any other western democracy. Minority governments are inherently unstable in a Westminster-style system: the last time it was tried in the United Kingdom, four decades ago, it lasted a mere seven months before the prime minister went back to the country to seek an extended mandate, which he achieved - a majority of three - before that, too, was whittled away as a result of deaths, resignations, and the failure of the confidence and supply agreement between the Liberal Party and Labour known as the Lib/Lab Pact.

John Major ran a similar minority government between 1996 and 1997: when he went back to the country to seek a renewed mandate, the electorate's answer to the old Tory question who governs Britain? was 'not you, matey'. 

The failure of the Lib/Lab Pact led directly to Liberal MPs voting en bloc in favour of a No Confidence motion, brought by the Opposition leader, Margaret Thatcher. The SNP MPs voted against the government that night, which fell by a single vote. Had Labour MP Alfred Broughton voted with the Labour government, Jim Callaghan would have been saved by the Speaker's casting vote. 

The fall of Callaghan's minority government was followed by a mandatory General Election in May 1979 instead of the scheduled election, which had to be called an absolute maximum of 160 days later. 

In the schizophrenic and often borderline-psychotic world of Scottish Labour, the SNP voting against Callaghan's minority government has been transformed into 'the SNP voted to bring in Thatcher'. 

Of course, it did nothing of the sort. Not only the SNP, but Parliament as a whole had no confidence in Callaghan's government, which had taken over halfway through Harold Wilson's term without asking the permission of the country. Indeed, Callaghan barely had any confidence in his own premiership, telling his Cabinet 'if I was a young man, I should emigrate'. Even the Labour Party had no confidence in Callaghan as prime minister: he was elected leader despite coming second in the first ballot, with only 26,8% of Labour MPs voting for him to be prime minister.

Callaghan had lost the support of the left some time before, massively cutting public spending and laying the groundwork for Thatcher's monetarist policies and, of course, the trade unions also lost confidence in his premiership as he forced them into the Winter of Discontent, frankly admitting in later years 'I let the country down'. Callaghan himself admitted that he himself had caused his downfall by shying away from calling an election in 1978, which was to have echoes three decades later when Gordon Brown - a similarly unelected prime minister - also shat it before losing in spectacular fashion the next year. 

However, in the tortured, crazed weirdness of the Scottish Labour Party, none of this matters. In their fevered minds, the complex web of events which led to the collapse of the government was down to one single thing: the SNP brought down a Labour government and gave us Thatcher.

Certainly, if the SNP had voted with the government - a government, incidentally, which had just overturned the result of a Yes vote in the devolution referendum months earlier in favour of retaining direct rule from London - Callaghan would have survived for another few weeks. That's not in doubt. But Labour mythologise this into a lunatic dolchstoßlegende in which Alex Salmond, cackling maniacally as he stroked a white cat on his lap, personally defenestrated a Labour prime minister and equally personally installed Margaret Thatcher in Number 10.

This is nonsense, of course. As I show above, at the very most, the SNP voting alongside the government would have caused the election to have been delayed for 160 days at the latest, giving another 130 days of a Labour government. It is almost certain that it would not have lasted that long. 

But Labour want the SNP to be the Tories' little helpers. In a way, they need them to be the Tories' little helpers. Perhaps it helps them to black out the taint to their party of their lengthy partnership with the Tories and their three-year campaign for the principle that the Conservative Party has the right to rule Scotland even if Scotland elects no Tory MPs.

Labour then use the second part of their fantasy - a very recently invented tale that the SNP was in coalition with the Tories during the Third Parliament. 

This would be news to the Tories, who in fact voted more often with Labour in the Third Parliament than they did with the government, including when the Unionist parties united to force the disastrous Edinburgh Trams project through despite the opposition of the government. How many nurses and teachers could have been funded for the money Labour and the Tories coalesced to waste?

It is the stench of their collaboration with the Tories which force Labour to do this: put simply, they are rightly ashamed of what they did. They are ashamed that Scottish Labour councils were the most enthusiastic of all when it came to implementing Thatcher's hated Poll Tax, and that Scottish Labour councils were the most enthusiastic of all when it came to implementing Cameron's hated Bedroom Tax. It was Labour councils who got their thugs to kick down the doors of those who refused to pay the Poll Tax and sold families' property on the street. It was Labour councils who evicted Bedroom Tax victims with sheer glee. 

It is the Labour Party who are in coalition with their Tory friends in a quarter of all Scottish councils. It is the Labour Party who have spent 13% of their entire time in government in Westminster in coalition with their Tory friends. 

All one needs to do is look at the parties. Any of you who have ever been to a referendum or election count will know that the shiny, suited and booted, middle-class Labour and Tory activists are distinguishable from each other only by the colours of their rosettes. Nobody who attended a referendum count will forget the sight of those suited, well-fed, rosy-cheeked, exclusively middle-class Labour and Tory activists hugging each other with delight. They fit in well together. They campaigned together. They have been hand-in-glove for so long, with Labour doing the bidding of the Tories, that they have become mirror images of each other. 

Scottish Labour needs to tell their Big Lie because they simply can't face up to the truth: that since Thatcher took over as prime minister, Labour councils did her bidding, Labour MSPs vote with Tory MSPs 90% of the time, and Labour activists happily collected data during the referendum to be handed over to the Tories for the purposes of winning Tory councillors, MPs and MSPs at election time. 

Labour need to accuse the SNP of being Tartan Tories because they just can't face up to the truth: it's Labour who are the Tartan Tories. 

There are 127 days until the next General Election. Three days less than the maximum lifetime of Jim Callaghan's government if it hadn't collapsed. It's not a long time, is it?

Yet Jim Murphy, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, has consistently refused to rule out Scottish Labour MPs going into a Grand Coalition with the Tories again. The SNP has explicitly ruled out a deal with the Tories. That Labour refuses to signals that the real Tartan Tories - the Labour Party - are preparing to be the same Tory lapdogs they've always been.

We're not the Socialist wing of the SNP - stop asking us to be

One of the more disturbing factors about the astonishing rise of the Scottish National Party since the independence referendum has been the tangible intolerance of a minority of their more zealous recruits. 

This has been manifested mainly in the apparent belief of some of them that the Scottish Socialist Party is a plaything of the SNP, and should behave accordingly. 

Part of my duties within the SSP is to help operate the Party's social media accounts, and we have experienced a barrage of tweets from some SNP supporters demanding that we withdraw from the general election in favour of a party with which we share almost no common ground on the basis that we share some of their views on the constitution.

One such tweet, received on St Stephen's night, read thusly:

@The_SSP_ will u ask ur members to vote @theSNP in GE for the good of Scotland

Naturally, I replied in the negative. Actually, we are rather hoping that members of the Scottish Socialist Party will vote for the Scottish Socialist Party in the General Election.

When the SSP said we would stand in the General Election, as we have in every General Election and Holyrood Election since our foundation, there were shrieks of outrage from a minority of SNP supporters. Dark threats were made of withdrawal of support, with one particular genius saying ''I never vote SSP anyway and will not be giving you my second vote in 2016 if you don't step down from the General Election''. I'm unsure about how to go about rebuilding the party from this shattering electoral blow.

At this stage, I ought to point out that this is not coming from any SNP candidates, leadership, hierarchy or even activists, at least the latter not to any great extent. It seems to be coming from some of those who have barely chapped a door or done a street stall for the SNP, but seem to have lost the run of themselves during the referendum and now see themselves as a sort of tartan Che Guevara.

And I must say that it's interesting that those who accuse us of ''splitting the Yes vote'' always seem to direct their ire at the SSP - they never seem to be outraged at the SNP for standing in every constituency, nor at the Greens for standing. 

These people fundamentally misunderstand politics. 

The Independence Referendum was - and there's a clue in the name - a referendum. The General Election is - and there's again a handy hint in the name - an election. There is no Yes vote in the General Election. 

During the referendum, we worked very closely with our SNP and Green partners. During the referendum. But we don't agree with each other on day-to-day politics, certainly not to the extent that Labour and the Conservatives have, almost morphing into mirror images of one another. And even at that: when the SSP put the best interests of our party to the side and called for a Yes slate of candidates for the General Election, the SNP and Greens both refused!

I don't criticise the SNP for refusing - with 90.000 new members and looking likely to win most constituencies, they're sensible to be selfish. But their zealous new fans should consider this, and look closer to home when whining about Yes unity. 

Secondly, why should we support SNP candidates in the General Election? We're not the SNP. If we agreed with the SNP's manifesto, we'd all go and join them. We are the SSP. We believe in the full, immediate implementation of socialism in Scotland. 

We believe in a republic, where the SNP is monarchist. We believe in a Scottish currency, the SNP believe in using the Pound Sterling. We wish to withdraw from Nato, the SNP is pro-Nato. We don't believe in criminalising working-class soccer fans; the SNP think that's a jolly good wheeze. We support free public transport, the SNP don't. On a multitude of issues, we disagree with the SNP. That is the point of political parties. And that is why we have elections. 

Our aim is socialism, not independence for the sake of it. If we believed in independence for the sake of it, we'd be nationalists, not socialists. We believe in independence because it is the only way to build real socialist policies in Scotland. 

Do I want to see the Labour Party smashed to smithereens in Scotland? Yes - a thousand times yes. But it's not just the SNP hoping to win over disaffected Labour supporters to - we're hoping to sweep up some ex-Labour voters. And the discerning observer might recognise that in a marginal constituency, some Labour voters disgusted with the New Labour takeover of the party will be far more inclined to vote SSP than SNP. Indeed, our understanding is that our votes are likely to come disproportionately from Labour voters rather than SNP voters. 

We are a small party and we do not expect a great deal of success in a General Election where the system is stacked against us. But argue against us on the basis of our policies. Talk about our proposed ten pounds per hour minimum wage. Debate with us our policy of free school meals for all children. Discuss our plans for a publicly-owned Scottish Pharmaceutical Corporation to manufacture generic medicines for the NHS and to provide drugs to developing countries at cost price. Have a look at our manifesto. If you think it's pish, don't vote for us. If you think the SNP's is better, vote for them. If you think Labour's is better yet, vote for them. 

But don't tell us that we have no right to put our policies to the people at a General Election. Not the right, even: it's more than that. As Scotland's Socialist Movement, we have a duty to provide a socialist alternative to the austerity policies and cuts agenda proposed, to a greater or lesser extent, by all of the main capitalist parties, including our SNP colleagues. 

And I'll just end on this note: not only us, but the SNP, spent much of the referendum trying to drum it into voters that the Yes campaign, independence itself, wasn't just about the SNP. To then turn around less than a hundred days after the referendum and demand that we stand down from a General Election because independence is all about the SNP shows a breathtaking hypocrisy and a ludicrous sense of entitlement. 

The SNP leadership is sensible and pragmatic. I've met most of them over the years. They're nice - I've a lot of time for them. There have been no shrill demands from Jackson's Entry that we sign our party over to them - and even if we did, we don't own our voters and supporters; there's no guarantee that our act of electoral suicide would benefit the SNP in any way - and they appreciate that the Yes campaign is a multi-party effort and the next Yes campaign will also be a multi-party effort. They also appreciate, as we do, that whilst we share a desire for independence, it is over for the time being. We cannot have Scotland on pause, regardless of the shrieks coming from the zealots and extremists. 

The Scottish Socialist Party is the left wing of the Independence Movement, not the left wing of the SNP. Stop asking us to be the latter: it's never going to happen.

Why Labour Lose

I was going to write a piece comparing the outcome of the Independence Referendum and the resulting, spectacular, demise of the 'Scottish' Labour Party in its aftermath. 

My plan was to find constitutional referenda in the European Union which were close, and which resulted in the 'winning' side being obliterated at the subsequent election, and to perhaps assess, using these data, how long it might take the 'Scottish' Labour Party (Address: One Brewer's Green, London, S.W.1 - one does rather hope they don't go home for lunch) to recover from their disastrous coalition with the Conservative Party and UKIP.

The four criteria I set upon to reflect Scotland's referendum were simple: 

i) The referendum and subsequent election must take place within a democratic framework - so, for instance, I rejected the use of the Greek Constitutional Referendum of 1968 held by a military regime, which was ratified by a pragmatic, sensible and not-at-all scared 92,1% of the electorate.

ii) The referendum had to be close (are you a Scottish newspaper? Then, for 'close', read 'bitter and divisive, and continue for a thousand words about how political debate threatening the established order is evil and negative), ideally around the 10% gap produced by the Scottish electorate in September. Thus, e.g., I rejected the Icelandic referendum of 2010 which was rejected by 98,1% of the voters.

iii) The referendum had to occur in the modern era to reflect the particular circumstances in which modern Scotland finds its campaigning: the collapse of trust in newspapers and the broadcast media and the huge rise in importance of social media in modern campaigning meant, alas, that regardless of how fascinating the Norwegian Constitutional Referendum of 1905 was, it would not fall within my remit. 

iv) The referendum had to be called by the government of the day, and had to be defeated by either a single opposition party or a coalition of opposition parties - so Bulgaria's referendum last year on nuclear power, called by the opposition Socialist Party, didn't count in my calculations.

Thus armed with my frame of reference, I set out to find out when 'Scottish' Labour (Brewer's etc. etc.)  could possible expect to recover. 

And guess what - I couldn't. 

I actually had to switch the goalposts - not, perhaps, to the musteline extent which so distressed Owen Patterson - to produce a result.

There is a surprising lack of results even so: there was not a single constitutional referendum in modern Europe in which the main/nominal centre-left party supported a right-wing government in a closely-contested referendum campaign, won, and went on to form the government after the next election.

Results which don't quite fit the criteria but are still notable in our context:

• In Finland in 1994, a vote on membership of the EU was won by 56,9% to 43,1% by the Governing Centre Party, who were promptly reduced to less than 20% of the vote at the subsequent election, losing power to a Social Democratic Party achieving the best result of any political party in Finland. 

• The French UMP (conservative) government held a referendum in 2005 on the European Constitution which was defeated by 55% to 45%. Notably, the opposition Socialist Party held an internal referendum to decide its stance on the referendum (the Oui side was fronted by a future President, the Non side by a former Prime Minister).It is for history to decide if such a process would have avoided the exodus of members from Labour in light of the campaign in Scotland, but my feeling is that the resentment felt against the leadership of the 'Scottish party' internally at what amounts to a constitutional coup without reference to the membership cannot do other than cause ill-feeling within Labour. While this sort-of fits the criteria as a the main opposition party supporting the sovereign government on a constitutional referendum, it rather falls down as the political-class coalition was defeated. There wasn't a situation where one party was seen to be grudgingly whipping its voters along to a result they didn't particularly want, as there is now in Scotland.

• It is a great Irish tradition to hold a constitutional referendum every third Tuesday. For our purposes, the referendum on the 30th Amendment (on the Fiscal Pact), which was passed in 2012 by 60,4% against 39,6%, is the closest to ours, albeit not in importance. Despite the scale of the victory - which still doesn't come close to the 2:1 margin the No parties in Scotland often claim they won by - the party proponents of a No vote  - all of which may be described as the establishment parties (c.f. in Scotland, the Westminster Parties) - have seen their support dwindle in the opinion polls, whilst the left-wing parties which opposed it have enjoyed unprecedented rises in support. 

• The Danish euro referendum in 2000 saw Yes (to EMU) defeated by 46,8% to 53,2%. The far-left supported and won a No vote. In the subsequent election, the Social Democrats were swept from power, having shared a referendum platform with the Conservatives and Liberals. 

Conclusion

In Scotland, the Labour Party is suffering because it is in a position unique in Europe. Politically, it was of major importance in Scotland, whilst constitutionally, it is now barely of any importance at all. Labour is neither in Government in Holyrood nor Westminster, whilst in the latter it does not even enjoy the position of the second most-important party, which is the junior coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats.

News of Labour's poll ratings in Scotland
reaches Clive The Dug

There are no Labour ministers in the Cabinet, nor in the Westminster Government. Not even a European Commissioner to provide a modicum of relevance. It appears unlikely that Labour will ever be in government in Scotland after the 2016 elections, such is the Fianna Fáilisation of the party, and it is a near certainty that they will never be a single-party majority government, either in Holyrood or Westminster. The very best-case scenario for Labour in Scotland, therefore, is that they are out of power from 2007 to - at the very least - 2020, and much more likely 2025. A party which has no chance of power for the best part of 20 years is a party which has little chance of survival - and given that it looks increasingly likely that independence has been deferred, not defeated, Labour may only be nearing its cycle of irrelevance in 2025, in a Scotland which has become independent and in which Labour is seen as something of a national enemy, perhaps analogous to the Latvian Russian Union. 

It is a loud voice in Scottish politics, but one of no legislative relevance. Its most senior elected representative in Scotland is the leader of the Labour group on Glasgow City Council. It found itself campaigning on the side of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government; on the side of the CBI, the BBC, the USA and the BNP. 

Where in the 2011 Scottish election and the 2010 election in Scotland they were fishing in a pool of a broadly centre-left electorate (i.e. the entire electorate minus the 10-20% of Conservatives), there are now 45% of the Scottish electorate which will not countenance - ever - voting for the Labour Party under any circumstances, the vast majority of whom are in what used to be Labour heartlands in Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Dundee. They now have a pool of voters of only 55% - but still excluding that 10-20% of voters who are committed Conservatives who would not under any circumstances vote Labour. 

Thus, within four years they have gone from knowing if they got a majority of the 80% of the Scottish electorate who might consider voting for them that they would probably be in power to realising suddenly that they have to win almost all of a vastly-shrunken pool of between 35-45% of the electorate to have any chance of being in government.

It's no surprise that the charmless Jim Murphy is writing in the Daily Mail - a pro-Apartheid, Tory newspaper - demanding that the Scottish electorate puts all this nonsense about the referendum behind us and gets back to voting Labour. 

Make no mistake about it - the referendum and its aftermath has rattled the British political class to an extent to which they have never been rattled before. They are out of their comfort zone and they don't know how to react. That's why Gordon Brown wants to 'reset Scottish politics' to a time before Labour became anathema to half the population; why Murphy wants us all to forget Labour's three-year campaign for the right of the Conservative Party to govern Scotland regardless of the fact we consistently reject the Tories.