The Scottish Left has always been diverse, cross-party and non-party. Indeed, historically, the accusation against the Left has been that it lacked cohesion, preferring in-fighting amongst itself to uniting against its common enemies on the centre and right of politics.

The Monty Python satire in the film “Life of Brian”, that ridicules the hatred between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front, rings all too true for anyone with experience of Left politics in Scotland and the U.K.

Scottish history is littered with examples of the Left turning in on itself. These span from Communist attacks on ILP stalwarts like Jennie Lee, through the Labour Left organising against Militant and vice versa, to the divisions on the Left over the national question.

There have even been splits within the nationalist Left, with the rump of Jim Sillars doomed SLP splitting evenly between those who joined the SNP and those who joined the Scottish Labour Party.

At the same time, increasing disillusionment with party politics has seen a haemorrhaging of Left activists out of party politics altogether and into non party single issue campaigns. CND, the grassroots anti-poverty campaign and the environmental movement are peopled by Lefts who scarcely disguise their contempt for official party politics.

Until now, I have viewed this splintering of the Left with regret, seeing it as disabling of any coherent opposition to the pro-market thinking on the centre and right that has come to dominate mainstream party politics in Scotland and in the rest of the UK.

A good illustration of this current weakness of the Left is the recent remarks made by Lord Owen, one of the key architects of the SDP breakaway from Labour in the early 1980’s. Interviewed on a locaI website, the noble Lord admitted that the Gang of Four had themselves considered taking the name “New Labour” for their then new party. lt was fear of alienating potential Liberal and Tory recruits that persuaded them to adopt the name of SDP instead.

The SDP may have failed to break the mould of British politics in the 80s but, according to Owen, it helped to create the centrist creation of New Labour under Tony Blair. Owen claims that today’s New Labour was what the SDP came into existence to create. He also claims that there is hardly a single innovative New Labour policy that the SDP did not espouse between 1980 and 1990.

If Owen is to be taken at all seriously in making these claims, and if a series of recent defections to New Labour by prominent Tory MP’s and activists are also to be given serious consideration, then very fundamental questions arise.

Where was the Labour Left when this appeasement of the centre and right was happening?

How can the likes of Owen, a chief contributor to the collapse of the Left in the 80’s, and who helped pave the way for 18 Tory years in power, now claim to be vindicated by the changes that have swept over Labour at the turn of the new century?

Has New Labour really vindicated the traitors who deserted Labour and left the working class exposed to Thatcher and Major?

Has it really betrayed those of us who remained loyal to Labour through one of the darkest periods in the party’s history?

ls it at all credible that the creation of New Labour has finally delivered Thatcher’s often stated goal of defeating British socialism?

Regardless of Owen’s monomania, these are questions that need to be examined and discussed openly and honestly by all of us who still claim to be socialists. This is so because the rapid and transforming revolution in communications that has fired the new global economy has changed everything, including the politics we all grew up with.

At the dawn of the new millennium our political world really has been turned upside down. The failed SDP and the successful New Labour projects were and are attempts to come to terms with this latest phase of capitalist development. However, in my view, they are coming to terms with it in entirely the wrong way.

We are being told that there are no alternatives to market driven political and economic strategies. Citizens around the world must now learn to meekly acquiesce in more open markets, deregulation, privatisation, lower taxes, reduced government deficits and leaner and meaner welfare states. Looked at from this standpoint, it is no real surprise to discover that there is now more that unites Scotland’s four “big” political parties than divides them. They all want to be the party of business and enterprise. They all vie with each other to keep taxes low. They are all opposed to government intervening directly in the economy. None of them propose any significant extension of public ownership or control.

What is surprising is that this transformation of politics has occurred without any real opposition from the Left. The Left’s inability to unite behind a coherent vision of a different kind of Scotland has simply allowed its enemies to ignore it and to establish without effective challenge their own vision of a free market Scotland operating comfortably within a free market global economy.

The mainstream ideas of Left politics – public ownership, redistributive taxation, publicly funded services, state intervention in the economy – are everywhere in retreat.

For me, a root cause of these developments has been the effect of the majoritarian first past the post electoral system. lt is quintessentially a two party system with the only real electoral contest between two broadly based coalitions, one loosely on the centre-left and the other loosely on the centre-right. Political perspectives outside of this spectrum are effectively marginalised.

To have any real influence the Left had to organise within the centre-left coalition capable of winning power. This justified the argument of the Labour Left working inside the Party, and of the Scottish Communist Party working outside but with the Labour Left to influence the thinking inside that coalition.

Critically, this wider context began to change during the years of Tory hegemony after 1979. Four successive electoral defeats demoralised Labour, leading ultimately to the phenomenon of New Labour that has marginalised the Left and driven the Party firmly onto the centre ground of pro market politics.

Left policies and ideas were unfairly scapegoated for Labour’s failure to win power. Lacking belief in itself the Labour Left did little or nothing to stop the New Labour revolution. The idealogical revolution required to shift Labour’s centre-left coalition onto pro-market territory was officially completed with the dumping of clause four, the true significance of which has only been fully grasped when it was too late.

The massive Labour victory of 1997,the arrival of the Scottish Parliament and, with it, a proportional electoral system further complicated and transformed this new political landscape. Suddenly, everything was different again. The whole basis upon which Scottish party politics had rested in the 20th century was shaken to the core.

The two big coalitions of Tory and Labour no longer had a monopoly on the levers of political power. Incredibly, the Liberals found themselves back in government. The SNP suddenly were the official opposition with 35 MSP’s. The Scottish Socialists and the Greens, even socialist independents, were now elected to our national parliament.

These structural changes have occurred after just one Scottish general election and are likely to develop further in successive elections. They must alter the way in which the Scottish Left thinks about the political challenges of the new century. The old thinking that viewed elections as essentially two-horse races between Labour and the Tories now no longer holds true. The SNP view that all they needed for independence was a majority of first past the post seats is no longer credible. The dismissal of Greens and Socialists as fringe groupings remote from power is simply wrong under the new prevailing political conditions.

As I see it, there are now all kinds of alternative political scenarios.

One is to argue for a realignment of the Left into a single new party, either under the banner of the Scottish Socialist Party or of a newly created Red/Green alliance. This would free Left activists from the restraints imposed upon them within Labour and SNP parties that are committed to market policies and to integration with greater European capitalism. While this has obvious attractions for individual Lefts struggling within both these parties, it also has obvious problems. It ignores the importance of the union link with the Labour Party. Any new political party of the Left that seeks to oppose a Labour Party backed by organised labour in Scotland is inevitably on weak ground. lt also ignores the emotional appeal of both Labour and the SNP for activists and supporters who think of these parties as “theirs”. Breaking with a cause they have backed all of their lives may be asking too much of too many.

Another alternative is to exploit the new political structures to create cross party coalitions of the Left around individual political issues. Tommy Sheridan has already achieved this very successfully around the abolition of poindings and warrant sales. His success could be a prototype for future cross party coalitions of the political Left. Equally, however, there are obvious problems with this approach. The disciplining of Margo McDonald by the SNP for mild criticism of the leadership, and the new Labour authoritarianism that has driven out Dennis Canavan and Alex Smith show that the respective leaderships of these parties share a determination not to allow cross party co-operation they have not sanctioned. Working across the party lines is likely to become more difficult as leaderships in all the main parties begin to reassert their authority in the new parliament.

These, of course, are only two possible alternatives. There are as many other alternatives as there are people on the Left thinking about politics.

Crucially, however, the Left must recognise that restructuring parties or creating new cross-party coalitions cannot of themselves provide a sufficient response to the challenges we now face. We still need to address the underlying problem of the absence of a coherent critique that makes sense of the changing world and offers a socialist response to it. Scotland is in crying need of new socialist ideas more than it is of new socialist parties.

What, for example, are the current arguments in favour of public ownership? The centre and right argue that ownership no longer matters so long as the quality of public services delivered is cost effective and provides value for money.

This thinking has led to the profit driven delivery of public services across a range of enterprises that used to be the preserve of publicly owned and controlled bodies: electricity, gas, coal, railways and buses. Unless it is successfully challenged, it is likely to lead to further private encroachment into those services remaining under public control.

Public private partnerships are creating privately owned and managed schools and hospitals across Scotland. At the moment this is confined to facilities management. So far the work of doctors, nurses and teachers has been declared off limit for the private sector. But with the World Trade Organisation pressing for the opening up of public services to competition, how long can that line be held?

The current massive investment in our water and sewerage infrastructure is financed by schemes that allow the private sector to build, own, operate and profit from an essential industry that is already beginning to slip out of public control. When, as is intended in the near future, the water and sewerage industry is opened up to full private competition, how long will our publicly owned water companies be able to resist the massive privatised water and utility companies currently waiting for the opportunity to move north of the border?

ln the face of these threats, the Left must begin to develop the arguments in favour of pubtic ownership. Moreover, these arguments must make sense in the face of the new realities. They must offer credible socialist alternatives to the current status quo.

For example, public investment in our infrastructure funded through taxation may be unfashionable but it is undeniably fairer and more progressive. The poor in the North of Scotland would not be facing 46% increases in their water charges if the investment there was publicly financed. Again, a privatised railway has stopped electrification of the east coast main line short at Edinburgh because to extend it northwards is not profitable. A publicly owned railway would put services to all the people of Scotland before private gain. Let us remind people of that.

We are told that community based housing associations are the only realistic future for socially-owned housing. lf that is so, why not let them borrow from the Public Works Loans Board? Forcing them to raise investment cash from private lenders at commercial rates ensures that rents will remain expensively high and will require to be subsidised through housing benefit.

Are taxpayers content that they should be helping to boost the profits of private lenders through their hard-earned taxes? These are just some of the arguments the Left should be marshalling in support of public ownership.

We should never tire of reminding everyone that public private partnerships are essentially a short-term fix for those who see the priority as limiting the levels of public spending and borrowing. ln the longer term, they are much more expensive and provide far less value for money. They also siphon public expenditure off into private gain.

These are just some of the arguments against the current orthodoxy of the private delivery of public services. There are others, and many other areas of policy where prevailing market orthodoxy needs to be challenged by socialist alternatives. There is never enough space to cover them all.

Hopefully, those who either agree or disagree with me will now be motivated to argue for or against what I am saying and thereby open up a debate on the Left that is long overdue and very badly needed.

President Clinton uses a phrase about the “brain-dead politics of the past”. A politics in the 21st century that does not include arguments for socialist change is already brain-dead. But then the current contest for the presidency of the United States makes that point far better than I ever could.