Scottish socialists need to ensure any new party is guided by a republican strategy in both its politics and organisation, write the Republican Socialist Platform.

Over 50,000 people in Scotland are said to be among hundreds of thousands who have responded to the call from Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana for a new political party in response to Labour’s continuation of Tory austerity and complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These numbers are astonishing, even with the necessary caveats. They reflect a deep dissatisfaction with mainstream British politics, and particularly Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, among socialist, trade union and Palestine solidarity activists with no party to call their own. But as the Scottish Left Review goes to print, there are many unanswered questions about how the groundswell of support for this initiative will turn into a political party capable of mounting an effective challenge to the British political establishment and the insurgent far-right.

The situation is particularly murky in Scotland, where socialists have a long tradition of organising independently of comrades on the other side of the Tweed. A previous generation of English and Welsh activists debated how to replicate the success of the Scottish Socialist Party, which emerged from the poll tax campaign and brought that spirit of working-class struggle to the new Scottish Parliament. Now a reversed situation sees groups and individuals, including the Republican Socialist Platform, coming together across Scotland to discuss how we relate to a political project effectively led, at this stage, by a group of independent English MPs. Despite billing itself as a UK-wide project, nobody expects Corbyn and Sultana’s party to contest elections in the north of Ireland. Why, by contrast, is Scotland seemingly taken for granted?

Many, if not most of those likely to join here support independence. Even those who treat independence with less urgency will not accept relegation to the status of branch office of a new British party. At least some figures in the driving seat of this process appear to appreciate this, and the word “autonomy” is increasingly often thrown around in relation to both Scotland and Wales/Cymru. It is a useful starting point for a discussion that must go further. It is not an excuse for leading figures in England to simply dodge awkward questions from the hinterland.

The most important thing is that the 50,000 would-be members are given the opportunity to democratically decide what a new left party in Scotland looks like. The suggestion from some quarters that the new party could be a “federation” of small, already-existing groups would thwart this. In practice, such an arrangement would grant disproportionate power to a handful of individuals from unrepresentative groups, many of which are profoundly undemocratic and have a chequered history when it comes to participating in broad organisations. It risks introducing a culture of backroom and sectarian maneuvering which will turn off many of those new or returning to organised left politics. The Labour Party provides another dire warning of what happens when those making crucial political decisions – from party officials to MPs and government ministers – are not directly elected by and accountable to party members and their local branches.

There are also, of course, important political questions alongside the organisational ones. A new party in Scotland will face a very different landscape than south of the border. There is a mainstream alternative to Labour and the Tories here in the form of the SNP, which has fared better than others in dissuading its voters from decamping to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Whereas the new party may be the natural home of those in England and Wales who are appalled by Starmer’s steadfast support for Israel as it carries out a genocide against Palestinians, that political space is more crowded in Scotland, and we are very fortunate that is the case. The SNP’s stance is, of course, flimsy in practice. But it is already challenged by the Scottish Green Party, which many fail to accept also has working-class socialists in its ranks.

Success in Scotland will rely partly on a new party’s ability to recruit activists from movements which have brought tens of thousands onto the streets: not just the trade union and housing movements, but also the independence, climate justice, LGBT+ liberation, disability rights, feminist, anti-racist and Palestine solidarity movements. It will have to patiently build genuine roots in working-class communities where political disenchantment is higher now than at any time since 2014. The disappearance of hope from our political discourse has benefited the far-right more than it can ever benefit the left. The party will also have to confront issues which have divided the left, from independence and climate justice to transgender rights and Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine.

It therefore puts the cart before the horse to be already discussing running in a Holyrood election now less than nine months away. A rushed and botched campaign could take seats from the Greens to the benefit of Reform UK. It could result in the project’s early demise, as happened with RISE in 2016. It also dodges the question of what a new party can and should do outside of the electoral arena, organising communities against cuts and the far-right. Even the deadlock over independence could be overcome by a mass movement led by the 50,000.

There still needs to be a reckoning with the weaknesses of Corbyn’s Labour leadership, including its over-emphasis on electoralism and respect for the UK state constitution. Only the dismantling of the UK state will pave the way for genuine political change across these islands. The disgraceful centuries-long record of the British ruling class is of disciplining and imposing decisions on working-class people from above. Far-right slogans about “taking back control” powerfully tap into this sense of dispossession, but developing a more radical democracy within our own organisations can help to expose the shallowness of their rhetoric.

Part and parcel of this is challenging the centralisation of political and economic power among a London elite with our own democratic culture of internationalism from below, uniting working-class people across these islands and beyond on an equal basis. At a minimum, the decisions which inevitably need to be made about Scotland must be made by those of us in Scotland.

The Republican Socialist Platform was founded in 2020 to fight for a more democratic culture in the pro-independence left and a republican socialist politics championing emancipation, liberation and self-determination in its widest sense. The RSP publishes an online magazine called Heckle and contributes to joint organisations including the Radical Independence Campaign and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland.