Nationalists turn

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Our silence on cops ASSAILED by falling ratings in the opinion polls and poor election results, the Scottish National Party at its recent annual conference in Ayr set about tearing itself apart in a frenzy of internecine warfare.

In a sharp swing to the right, conference resolved to proscribe all political groups in the party and to suspend anyone who refused to comply with the injunction within three months.

Although the resolution is ostensibly aimed at all political groups, the main target is the '79 Group" the left oriented tendency that has tried to win the party to socialist positions.

On the eve of the conference, right wingers, led by Gordon Murray, Provost of Cumbernauld, and Winnie Ewing, the Euro-MP, created an artificial device, Jo Thwaites want to stack juries with people of their ilk ... The 2 million people a year convicted of imprisonable offences are unlikely to be well-to do stockbrokers and managers but for the most part will be ordinary members of the working class -not desirable elements from the Tories' point of view.

-abo POLICE investigating themselves is still OK. So says the all-party Commons Home Affairs Committee Report. They do say that there should be a new system, rather like the Scottish one where there is a Procurator Fiscal, who is nominally independent from the police.

Under the new proposal there would be a Crown Prosecutor who would be responsible for judging complaints against the police but fand here's the catch) the Director of Public Prose the Campaign for Scottish Nationalism, to panic delegates into proscription of the left. Gordon Wilson, party chairperson, then made an emotional and personal appeal for unity, thus creating the conditions for a 308 to 188 vote for the ban.

This debacle marks a definite stage in the degeneration of the SNP. having briefly achieved. electoral success in the late sixties and early seventies, on a wave of disillusionment with Labour's refusal to pose meaningful alternative to the Tories, a revulsion against the increasing bureaucratisation and centralisation of the modern capitalist state and a quaint attachment to long dead historical traditions, the party swept forward on a wave of ersatz nationalism.

That head of steam has EXCUSE ME.

WHICH WAY TO THE cutions could over-rule the • Crown Prosecutor! So back to square one.

This proposal and others in the report fall well short. of recommendations made in the Scarman Report that there should be a fully independent complaints system.

Yet, out of seven Labour MPs on the committee, only two have disassociated themselves, Robert Kilroy-Silk and Alf' Dubbs. What about the other five?

By lan McCalman long run out however, and in a desperate effort to make nationalism relevant. the '79 Group" strove to give it a leftist coloration. They have obviously failed and must now seek to make an appraisal of their ideollogy and their political future.

Although radical demagogues, such as Jim Sillars. tend to grab the headlines. there are amongst the Group people of more significant political weight. such as Stephen Maxwell.

It is up to socialists now to engage in a dialogue with such people and to win them over to a principled socialist programme and the cause of organised That can only be successful, however, if it is carried out in a spirit of unremmitting hostility to the dead-end ideology of nationalism.

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