THE success story of tomorrow’s Scottish elections could be a tanned, sharp-suited, articulate Glaswegian with a prison record who is plugging the oldest political message of them all, full-blooded socialism: tax the rich, share the wealth, wipe out poverty.

With most of the main parties doing little more than marking time in the final days of the campaign, the polls reveal a big surge for Tommy Sheridan and his uncompromising vision of Scotland as “an independent socialist republic, an international symbol of fairness and justice”.

A System Three poll in yesterday’s Herald put Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party on 10 per cent for the second, regional, vote, overtaking the Tories, and giving the party a potential eight extra seats in the Scottish Parliament. Considering that last time round it scraped just one, it is a remarkable advance.

Mr Sheridan was more cautious. “Even one percentage point means the difference between spectacular success and a near-miss,” he said yesterday. “There’s still everything to play for.”

Part of the explanation for the SSP’s appeal could be found on Monday night in a run-down church hall on Glasgow’s south side, where candidates from all four mainstream parties, along with Mr Sheridan, confronted a small but committed audience asking searching questions about youth crime, poverty and the effect of coalition government.

While most of the panel struggled earnestly with the intractable issues of controlling drugs, and providing more facilities for young people, Mr Sheridan’s message came over with deceptive simplicity. “We believe in redistributing wealth . . . council taxes mean the poor are paying through the nose . . . we aim to put money in more people’s pockets . . . that is the best way of tackling unemployment.”

As the local hero who refused to pay the poll tax and served a prison sentence during his campaign against forced warrant sales, his street credibility was not in doubt. What is happening to the SSP now, however, goes wider.

Later that night, over coffee and biscuits in the kitchen of his comfortable Glasgow home, he reflected on how it had come about that a political message that should by now be languishing in the wheelie-bin of history, was apparently making a comeback.

“A lot of people in Scotland are still socialists, even though the Labour Party no longer is,” he said. “Labour is now a big business new Tory party, but in Scotland there are people who still believe in public ownership, redistributing wealth, taxing the rich. They’re the policies we have adopted.”

The further Labour moves to the right, he says, the more attractive the SSP becomes. If it can make the promised breakthrough tomorrow, then it moves from being a “one-man band, pat them on the head, patronised party, to being a credible political force”.

Far from being backward-looking, he argues, his party is in the vanguard of the new politics — against globalisation and what his manifesto calls “the mania of the capitalist free market”. He would like to see the abolition of the “unfair” council tax and its replacement with a service tax based on incomes, a £7.32 minimum wage and a 35-hour working week, all of which, he says, has been scrupulously costed. His opponents describe all this as “laughable and undeliverable”.

On the contrary, Mr Sheridan says, it is the best way to create new jobs. It was standard economic theory, he said, that the rich tended to hold onto their money while the poor spent it. By giving them more to spend and more time to spend it, the economy would be boosted. New businesses — he mentioned clothes shops and tanning parlours among them — would mushroom. “It is a basic economic fact that 99 per cent of our economy is small businesses,” he said. “What you do is you take it from those who don’t require their current level of wealth and redistribute it to the remainder.”

He would like to see a maximum wage with a ceiling of no more than ten times the minimum, say £70 an hour. He did a quick, thumbnail calculation and, with some generous rounding up, came out at £250,000-a-year as an upper limit. “Now if someone tells me they cannot live on £250,000 a year, I’ve got to say I don’t agree with them. We need a bigger role for real values — not greed or avarice but solidarity, co-operation, love and a bit of mutual tolerance and respect.”

There is, as he is well aware, no lack of opponents to tell him that his economics are haywire and his theories unworkable. To all of them he responds that it is they, not he, who are on the wrong side of history. And he quotes in his defence the Labour Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who, when asked how much it would cost to fight a war in Iraq, said: “As much as it takes.”

“I say that if we are to fight the war against poverty, then that will cost as much as it takes.”

Some time tomorrow night he will learn whether Scottish voters are willing to foot the bill.

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