Your Party Scotland’s first councillors must fight on a socialist no-cuts platform

Socialist Party Scotland statement

Your Party Scotland has its first elected representatives with the defection, announced today, of three Glasgow Scottish Green councillors.

This is a welcome development and could be an important bridgehead for building an even more powerful and fighting anti-cuts movement in Scotland’s largest city.

As the former Scottish Green members who have left, including the councillors, say in their statement:

“As members, we felt we could no longer be complicit in decisions which do not align with our socialist values.”

Those decisions include Scottish Green MSPs voting for cuts budgets for years at Holyrood. In Glasgow, Scottish Green councillors have voted in the past for cuts budgets.

Even where the Green Party England and Wales have controlled councils in Brighton and Bristol they have implemented cuts. Something that the new leader Zak Polanski has not pledged to fight to change.

As one prominent former Scottish Green member explained:

“Where every single one of the existing Holyrood parties is complicit in passing on brutal cuts to public services, it’s clear to me that only Your Party can be taken seriously in standing firm against austerity and working to materially improve the lives of the working class.”

However, fulfilling that pledge to stand “firm against austerity” requires more than words. It demands an ironclad determination to use the council positions held by Your Party to refuse to implement austerity. That means putting forward a no-cuts budget and building links with the council trade unions to fight for its implementation.

Specifically in Glasgow, the council trade unions have a long-standing policy of demanding from councillors a no-cuts budget as a first step towards building a mass campaign to win back the hundreds of millions stolen from Glasgow through austerity by Westminster and Holyrood.

The three Your Party Glasgow councillors should urgently meet with the Glasgow City Council trade unions to discuss how they can work together to advance a genuine anti-austerity and pro–public service policy.

It is therefore welcome that Glasgow City UNISON – within which Socialist Party Scotland members play a leading role – is writing to the three councillors to request a meeting to advance those discussions.

As the first Your Party councillors in Scotland, the three could set an example of what a fighting socialist policy on cuts looks like. With a council budget due to be drawn up in the early months of 2026, there is an immediate opportunity to create a new tradition in Glasgow by proposing a no-cuts budget.

This would also set a template for the Holyrood elections just a few weeks later, giving Your Party candidates a clear platform that differentiates them from all the others who have an appalling record of making working-class communities pay for austerity.

On the other hand, if that opportunity were squandered, it would damage not just the reputation of the councillors themselves but also the party as a whole.

Liverpool road

Socialist Party Scotland and our predecessor, Militant, have a long history of fighting for such a socialist approach — including in Liverpool, where the strategy of a no-cuts, needs-based budget was pioneered between 1983 and 1987 by the socialist council.

The council refused to implement the cuts demanded by the Thatcher government in 1984 and mobilised a mass movement of the city’s working class, including a one-day general strike that forced the Tories to concede tens of millions in extra funding for the city.

That money was used to build thousands of council houses, new nurseries, sports centres, and to improve services throughout the city.

That example can and should be repeated today — especially by Your Party — if it is to become a fighting pole of attraction for the working class in Glasgow and beyond. 

Given the housing crisis, the horrendous cuts to public services and rising poverty in Glasgow and beyond, it is an urgent task to build a fighting socialist alternative based on the trade unions and wider working class. 

Socialist Party Scotland members who have joined Your Party will work to achieve such a fighting socialist stand within the trade unions and Your Party in the months ahead.