Richie Venton

Richie Venton (born 1953) is a regional and trade union organiser in the Scottish Socialist Party. A former Militant organiser and a founding member of the SSP, he was a high-profile activist in the Scottish independence referendum campaign and spoke at a number of public meetings and debates.

Venton was a full-time regional organiser for the Militant tendency in Merseyside during the 1980s, when Militant controlled the Labour Party in Liverpool. His work with the entryist group saw him expelled from the Labour Party in 1986, alongside Derek Hatton and others. In the aftermath of Liverpool's failed rate-capping rebellion, Venton said in an interview: "I have no regrets. Liverpool could still be the graveyard of capitalism and the birthplace of socialism."

In Downfall, Alan McCombes writes: "Richie Venton, a dynamic Irishman originally from Fermanagh, who had been a Militant organiser in Liverpool during the Derek Hatton era, came up to Scotland to assist the Pollok general election campaign [in 1992] — and never went back. Richie brought a wealth of campaigning experience into the socialist movement in Scotland and [...] would become one of the key organisational driving forces behind the SSP."

Richie Venton is the SSP's national workplace organiser and regional organiser for the West of Scotland. In 2009, Venton organised the Glasgow Save Our Schools (SOS) Campaign, which protested plans to close 11 primary schools and nine nurseries. The campaign involved a sit-in by mothers staged at two closure-threatened schools.

Speaking about the Scottish Socialist Party in the final weeks of the Scottish independence referendum campaign, Venton said: "We are the socialist wing of the Yes campaign. We don't want to just swap flags, but to change utterly the conditions the working class majority population of Scotland live under."

As part of the steering group of Trade Unionists for Independence, Venton worked extensively to persuade trade unionists of the case for a Yes vote. In March 2014, Venton faced Richard Leonard, GMB's political officer, in a debate on the subject of Scottish independence hosted by the union's nationwide Skills Development Scotland branch at their AGM. Speaking to Newsnet Scotland in its aftermath, union branch secretary Derek Cheyne said the audience "seemed to be quite positively on the Yes side". In September 2014, Venton spoke at another referendum debate organised by the Usdaw branch at IKEA, Glasgow, after which a straw poll found no members present backing the No side.

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