Role in The Scottish Socialist Party
McCombes is the policy co-ordinator for the SSP, a position that he has held for a number of years. In this role encouraged comrades to rethink the educational approach within the party and adopt more Marxist styles of engagement, influenced in particular by Paulo Freire. He has also argued that the party should embrace more diffuse structures than the traditional models of socialist parties - championing the introduction of issue based networks in addition to the geographic branch structure.
McCombes co-ordinated of the SSP’s successful election campaign for the 2003 Scottish Parliament elections which saw the return of 6 MSP’s.
He announced his candidacy for convenor of the SSP on 19 January 2005. At the party conference on 13 February, he won 154 votes from SSP delegates, losing by 98 to Colin Fox. He was a leading member of the ISM platform until its dissolution in 2006.
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