: Alan McCombes
: Downfall The Tommy Sheridan Story
: Birlinn
: 9780857900548
: 1
: CHF 9.60
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 334
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
From prison cell to the political limelight, and back again, there is no doubt that Tommy Sheridan - tanned, handsome and armed with a soundbite for every occasion - was one of the most colourful figures in the drab, dusty world of party politics. Yet behind the charismatic exterior of the man who first came to public notice during the anti- Poll Tax movement and later led the Scottish Socialist Party to become a strong voice in the new Scottish parliament was a deeply flawed, manipulative individual whose own actions led to one of the most spectacular political downfalls in recent history. Written by his closest political associate for over twenty years, and based on a raft of documentary and eyewitness information, much of it appearing in print for the first time, this is the no-holds barred inside story of the rise and fall of one of the most fascinating figures in recent Scottish politics. Combining elements of tragedy, thriller and farce, it presents the stark, ugly truth behind Sheridan's victorious defamation action against the News of the World in 2006 and subsequent perjury trial in 2010, which contained some of the most dramatic courtroom scenes in Scottish legal history. Yet despite the lurid and sensationalist aspects of Sheridan's life and career, this is also a serious exploration of wider political and psychological themes which offers some salutary lessons at a time when public confidence in politicians has seldom been lower.

Alan McCombes is a freelance writer and journalist and previously editor of the Scottish Socialist Voice. A founder member of the Scottish Socialist Party, he was an executive member of the party and also its national press and policy co-ordinator. He lives in Glasgow.

2
1988–1992


A Taste of Fame


‘Militant Poll Tax Plot – Extremist Group In City Power Bid’ screamed the front-page headline in theEvening Times of 31 May 1988, alongside a photograph of a young man – now with rippling biceps – posing in a sleeveless vest in front of an anti-Poll Tax poster. A two-page spread prophetically forecast that ‘Mr Sheridan is poised to become the working-class hero of the city’s poll tax struggle’.

Tommy’s discovery by Glasgow’s evening newspaper wasn’t quite the equivalent of winningThe X Factor but it was the first step on a long road that led him to become one of Scotland’s best-known celebrities. If the Poll Tax broke Margaret Thatcher, it made Tommy Sheridan. This was a tax on the poor for daring to exist. And it was tested out first in Scotland, the part of Britain that had most resoundingly rejected Toryism over and over again. It was explosive. Scotland had a defiant history of working-class resistance, from Red Clydeside in the period after the First World War to the UCS work-in of 1971–72. It also had a parallel tradition of community solidarity, usually led and organised by women, going back to the Glasgow rents strikes in 1915.

Across Scotland, community councils and tenants’ associations were preparing for war. An amorphous coalition began to emerge, loosely pulling together a colourful hotchpotch of forces, from bedraggled anarchists to respectable church ministers. In Glasgow, old rivals on the political Left began to work together for the first time in a campaign that included Militant, the Communist Party, Labour Party activists, SNP members, trade unionists, anarchists and hundreds of women and men with no political affiliation at all. The goal was to build a mass non-payment campaign across Scotland, backed up by physical resistance to the debt collectors. It went far beyond the plans of some rebel Labour MPs and the SNP leadership for a more limited, token non-payment campaign by prominent individuals. There was no single architect of the strategy to combat the Poll Tax – least of all Tommy whose strengths were as a campaigner rather than a strategist. Months before he became involved, there were already local campaigns in existence around Glasgow and Edinburgh. Within Militant, the late Chic Stevenson, then a Labour councillor – and father of Gary Lewis – had been the first to propose that resistance to the Poll Tax should be a top priority. Another Glasgow Militant Labour councillor, Larry Flanagan, had written a small photocopied pamphlet in early 1988 calling for the Labour Party to lead a community-based non-payment campaign.

In April 1988, I tried to set a strategy down in writing in a pamphlet, with the slightly condescending title,How to Fight the Poll Tax, which sold thousands. Before it was publicly launched, the text of the pamphlet was endorsed by a Scottish Militant all-members meeting in the Daisy Street Neighbourhood Centre in Glasgow’s southside. But not everyone on the Left supported the mass non-payment campaign. In the same issue of theEvening Times which had catapulted Tommy into the public eye, a spokesperson for the Socialist Workers Party dismissed the grassroots movement, telling theEvening Times, ‘Militant’s strategy is diverting attention away from the Labour Party/STUC campaign. Militant is going to carry the can for the thing going down the plughole.’

It was an exaggeration to present it as Militant’s campaign. Nonetheless, the organisation, with a network of committed activists across urban Scotland, was central to galvanising the campaign at local level. We provided many of the direct action shock troops which made collection of the Poll Tax impossible and pulled out all the stops to deliver tens of thousands onto the streets in a series of protest marches – the biggest in Scotland for generations. At the same time, within Militant, we made a calculated decision to release Tommy from his other responsibi