Scottish Labour Party

The Scottish Labour Party (SLP) was a socialist party in Scotland that was active between 1976 and 1981. It formed as a breakaway from the UK Labour Party. It won three council seats in 1977 but lost its MPs at the 1979 election and was dissolved two years later. History The party formed on 18 January 1976 as a breakaway from the UK Labour Party, by members disaffected with the then Labour Government's failure to secure a devolved Scottish Assembly, as well as with its social and economic agenda. The formation of the SLP was led by Jim Sillars, then MP for South Ayrshire, John Robertson, then MP for Paisley, and Alex Neil, the UK Labour Party's senior Scottish researcher. The split came just before the resignation of Harold Wilson as prime minister and party leader and the election of James Callaghan as his successor. Within a few weeks of its formation, The Glasgow Herald reported that a System Three opinion poll showed the party was taking a quarter of the Labour Party's electoral support in Scotland. The same poll also gave the SLP a higher share of support in Scotland (8%) than the well-established Liberal Party (6%). Neil was reported to be "staggered and delighted by this wonderful result" and warned that SLP could expect to make gains in areas of urban deprivation in the west of Scotland that usually supported Labour. Almost immediately the SLP became the focus for entryism from the International Marxist Group (IMG), and at the party's first congress in October 1976 the IMG was expelled, along with a number of branches whose members were not associated with the IMG. According to Henry Drucker's account, the IMG's role was rather limited; Sillars used this as an excuse for purging anyone he did not see entirely eye-to-eye with or who represented a significant threat to his leadership. The expellees formed a rival Scottish Labour Party (Democratic Wing), and this in turn later renamed itself the Scottish Socialist League (SSL). Gradually, those members of the SSL who had not been associated with the IMG drifted out, and the SSL was reabsorbed into the Trotskyist Fourth International.