Unison director of organising KEVIN LUCAS explains the Organising to Win strategy, its successes to date and key tests on the union’s horizon
FOR over a decade now, political debate — and politics itself — in Scotland has now been acutely polarised between those supporting independence and those supporting enhanced devolution.
This has caused often rancorous and unedifying divisions on the radical left.
The upward trajectory of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) from 1999 to 2004 marked a move by those supporting a socialist version of independence to reconfigure the debate away from the widespread notion that independence must be gained first and then social and economic questions could be settled later on.
The new Scottish Parliament looks set to continue a cycle of managerial tinkering while public services face the axe, writes STEPHEN LOW
JOHN CALLOW examines what went wrong for the Czech communist party in the recent parliamentary elections, where it failed to meet the threshold to return deputies and some now talk of the party abandoning its commitment to socialism
LAURA PIDCOCK and PAUL O’CONNELL introduces Rise, a political platform for working-class activism
VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’


