My name is Steve Wallis. I am a revolutionary socialist, mainly living in Manchester, but also a member of Glasgow Shettleston branch of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) which won six seats in the Scottish Parliament on May Day 2003 (including two in Glasgow where the SSP achieved over 15% of the vote).

The leading `platform’ of the SSP is the International Socialist Movement (ISM). I intended to launch a Manchester branch of the ISM after a huge anti-war demo in Manchester in 2003, and nobody objected to this proposal at the ISM fringe meeting at the SSP conference that year.

However, despite distributing tens of thousands of leaflets in the name of Manchester ISM, there was no great enthusiasm for yet another socialist organisation in Manchester which had many already. I therefore set it up as this informal group on the internet.

I am now attempting to unite genuine revolutionary socialists within the SSP in a single platform, the Revolutionary Platform of the SSP (with a website and discussion group). I have now decided that it is better not to join the ISM, but influence them and other platforms from the outside. Hence I have renamed this group the Manchester International Socialist Mailing List. People from outside Manchester are welcome to join to get my regular mailings, and (as with all my groups) the archive is accessible without joining.

I am working with other socialists in the Manchester area to establish a Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA) - and established the Revolutionary Platform of the DSA group in October 2004 to promote this idea for uniting the left.