Edinburgh Sucks! | Were SSP treated too harshly?

Colin Fox

Were SSP treated too harshly?

By The Basa ⋅ July 4, 2005 ⋅

In today’s Herald and Scotsman the Margo MacDonald/Jim Sillars household have taken joint efforts to call to question the treatment dished out by our Parliament against the SSP last week.

In a letter to George Reid the independent MSP states:

“We created a precedent and I fear that a great many, perhaps most, of us made the decision to exclude four SSP MSPs without having taken enough time to consider the matter fully.

“I am unsure as to how the penalty imposed regarding the loss of MSPs’ allowances will impact on the staff employed by the four SSP members concerned. This is only one example of where a longer cooling-off period might have yielded a more considered decision. It was a heavy-handed way to deal with an incident in which no business was lost, there was no violence and no foul language.”

In his letter to the Scotsman today, “>Jim Sillars (Mr. Margo MacDonald) former Labour, SLP and SNP Member of Parliament says:

As a sceptic of the whole G8 business, I was neither impressed nor depressed by the SSP stunt in the Scottish Parliament last Thursday. But I am concerned at the outrage it seemed to provoke among other MSPs, leading to the sentence of a month’s suspension from parliament, including loss of allowances, which punishes employees because of employer behaviour - a strange principle for Labour MSPs to support.

Both members of the household must have sat down and written the letters after the bacon rolls yesterday in their Grange Loan residence (where flats are currently being sold at £360,000 and £480,000 showing that politics does pay!) and tried to put some reasonable calm on what I believe was a real rush to judgement and definitely an over reaction.

Like Sillars, I am no fan of the SSP (and they are no fan of me which the Scottish Socialist Youth newsgroup over at www.ssy.org.uk can testify) but I believe that our MSPs have to take another look at this and come up with something that is more in proportion to the act.

However, Colin Fox was just totally wrong when he launched a public fund-raising appeal to help pay the party pay for the loss of wages at yesterday’s G8 Alternatives summit in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall was the wrong thing to do and my condemnation of that continues. It is just wrong to take advantage of people who are in the city for a completely different reason - or, maybe this is just capitalism.

More Info: An act of vengeance and
MSP critical of ‘heavy-handed’ treatment of Socialist protestors