English Left Debates Independence

The new Left Unity Party is conducting a debate amongst its membership on Scottish Independence. Allan Armstrong of Edinburgh RIC recently put the positive case for Yes, which we republish below. Several Left Unity branches have also organised a Scottish Solidarity Speaking Tour, the dates for which will be announced soon. Allan will also be speaking in Belfast and Dublin soon.

In the lead-up to the September 18 independence referendum, Scotland is currently awash with political debate. There is a direct correlation between class and voting intentions. The more wealthy and privileged you are, the more likely you are to support the unionist status quo; the more exploited and oppressed, the more you support independence.

Following the Scottish left’s setback after the Tommy Sheridan fiasco*, the SNP has been able to take the clear lead in the campaign for Scottish self-determination. A majority SNP government was elected to Holyrood in 2011. They initiated the independence referendum and set up the official ‘Yes’ campaign. In the process, the demand for genuine Scottish self-determination has been considerably diluted to win the backing of particular Scottish business leaders. They only want a local junior managerial buy-out of UK Ltd’s assets in Scotland, before resuming business both with their old British bosses and US Megacorp. By rebranding Scotland, they hope to get a bigger slice of the action.

Although the SNP’s ‘Independence-Lite’ proposals would remove Westminster’s particularly anti-democratic control over Scottish affairs, they still want to keep the monarchy and hence the long arm of the UK’s Crown Powers. They want to keep sterling and subordination to the City of London. They accept the continued role of the British High Command and participation in NATO, which they naively think can be combined with a ‘nimbyist’ opposition to Trident. There will still need to be a massive campaign in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote to ensure that the SNP leadership does not buckle in the face of NATO pressure.

The non-official ‘Yes’ campaign, which places little trust in the SNP’s ‘Independence-Lite’, is vibrant and open. There are many independent campaigning organisations, including Women for Independence, Asians for Independence and Africans for an Independent Scotland. There is also the Scottish left’s influential Radical Independence Campaign (RIC). RIC’s founding conference had 800 present, whilst its second conference had 1,100. To make a comparison with England, you would have to multiply these figures by ten, given the population difference.

In contrast, the ‘No’ campaign extends from the official Tory/Lib-Dem/Labour ‘Better Together’ coalition through the non-official UKIP, Ulster Unionists, Orange Order and other Loyalists, BNP and EDL/SDL. A ‘No’ vote has the firm backing of the City of London, as well as the US State Department and key EU bureaucrats.

The ‘No’ side dominates the official media. Never a day passes without the mainstream press and the BBC warning of the dire consequences we face if there is a ‘Yes’ vote. The worst examples come from Labour unionists. Scottish party leader, Johann Lamont, has said that, “The Scottish people are not genetically programmed to take political decisions”! Baron George Robertson, former New Labour defence minister and ex-NATO general secretary, claims that, “It would be cataclysmic for Scotland to become independent, it would aid the forces of darkness”!

Opinion polls show the gap narrowing between ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ supporters. In response, ‘Better Together’ has stepped up its self-styled ‘Project Fear’ to their even more desperate ‘Dambuster’ strategy. Westminster politicians, City of London and other business leaders, military spokesmen and well-paid hacks have launched a barrage of threats, including refusal to recognise the referendum outcome, economic sabotage and the erection of border posts.

The ‘Yes’ campaign has countered this with public meetings (scores throughout Scotland every week), street campaigning, mass voter registration and canvassing. This campaign has placed much emphasis on the social media and blogs such as bella caledonia. New books and pamphlets appear almost every week, reflecting the real thirst for politics, which the referendum campaign has opened up. There is a political buzz in the air.

So, what is the relevance of all this to socialists living in England and Wales? First, if there is a ‘Yes’ vote this will destabilise the Cameron government. It will seriously challenge the UK constitution. It will reduce the power of the UK state and make democratic reform difficult to resist. This can only encourage those who want real change. The potential unravelling of the UK’s constitutional set-up, combined with the current level of political mobilisation in Scotland beyond the control of the SNP government, ensures that we would be entering uncharted political territory. We live in interesting times.

Whilst the vast majority of the Left in Scotland support a ‘Yes’ vote, there is still opposition to supporting the exercise of Scottish self-determination amongst sections of the British unionist Left. The more benign tell us, “OK, good on you, we wish you the best”, but we have our own struggles to conduct. Essentially, they are saying that what is happening in Scotland is of little relevance to them and argue for non-participation in any campaign of solidarity.

Beyond this group lies a more dogmatic British unionist Left. They like to invoke Britain’s ‘progressive’ legacy. They represent a continuation of the old Whig notion, which sees Britain as a progressive ‘nation’. This stance morphed, under the old Social Democratic Federation/British Socialist Party, into the notion of a ‘British road to socialism’.

This was opposed, first by James Connolly after 1896, and by John Maclean after 1919. These two republican socialists pursued a ‘break-up of the UK and British Empire’ strategy. This reached its highpoint in the International Revolutionary Wave from 1916-21.

However, when this wave ebbed, an updated form of a ‘British road to socialism’, focussing on campaigning within the parameters of the UK state, emerged in the infant CPGB. This legacy was passed on to the wider British left. It was only when the UK state showed itself to be in irreversible decline from the 1960s that an ‘internationalism from below’ strategy once more became possible.

To counter this, the British unionist Left claims that ‘Britain’ has united the workers in these islands. The British trade union movement, the British Labour Party, or members of their own particular British socialist sect, all constitute responses to the existence of the UK state. They hope to carry forward a ‘great united’ British working class tradition.

There are considerable problems with this. There is now little evidence of such organisational unity in practice. The TUC and British trade union leaders, sometimes grudgingly, accept the UK state framework. They refuse to encourage defiance of the anti-trade union laws. These were left intact after 13 years of New Labour rule. Any all-Britain, or all-UK actions are confined to token protests. The one-day UK-wide public sector pensions strike on November 30 2011 was a classic example, followed immediately by an ignominious climb down.

British trade union leaders can play the hybrid British nationalist card – e.g. Scottish-British versus English-British workers – to divide workers. Labour-supporting trade union officials invoked defence of Scottish steel to stop Ravenscraig being picketed during the Miners’ Strike. Labour leaders in England have blamed political pressure in Scotland for the threat to jobs at the Portsmouth naval shipyard. Meanwhile, Glasgow’s Labour council have created Arms Length Management Organisations (Almos) to counter the threat of council workers’ united action. Here, far from assisting the unity of all British workers, Labour is involved in disuniting workers working from the same office building!

Therefore disunity is an existing problem, not one that will be created by independence. Within the UK’s boundaries there are already Scottish and Northern Irish unions (e.g. EIS and NIPSA), all-Ireland unions (e.g. INTO), British unions (e.g. PCS), UK unions (e.g. FBU) and all islands unions (e.g. Unite). Unity can be achieved across political boundaries, and is best maintained through democratic federal structures. We now need EU-wide organisation. State unity is not the same as trade union unity.

The pernicious effects of a British unionist approach go deeper than ‘One Nation’ Labour, or trade union leaderships providing little more than a free personnel management service for the bosses under ‘social partnerships’. Much of the wider British left also goes along with a passive acceptance of the UK’s constitutional framework. Within this, they hope to oppose austerity through escalating strike action, leading only to a change of government, not to a real challenge to the UK state.

Hence, their ‘Down with the Con-Dem coalition: In with Labour!’ Yet Miliband and Balls both support Osborne’s public spending limits and welfare cap. Labour are already in coalition with the Tories in seven of Scotland’s local councils.

Len McCluskey, after getting Unite to vote for Ed Miliband as Labour leader, pursued a strategy of trying to reclaim Labour for the left (or more accurately for leftist careerists). However, this strategy became totally unstuck in the Falkirk constituency. Grangemouth oil refinery workers paid heavily, in terms of jobs and conditions, when Unite abjectly capitulated in the face of Ineos boss Ratcliffe’s threats. In April, Miliband was able to organise a special Labour Party conference to further marginalise any trade union input into the party.

Left populist ‘Nat-basher’, and one-man ‘No’ campaigner George Galloway claims to oppose all that Blair and New Labour stood for, yet he sees some positive features in Miliband (it’s probably that ‘One Nation’ tag!). When asked what his alternative to Scottish independence is, he says he wants to reclaim Labour. Yet, the Labour leadership won’t even allow him back in the party, no matter how much he scrapes and begs!

The Scottish referendum has also created problems for some ‘revolutionary’ left unionists. UK politics is not following the course prescribed in their theories and programmes. They see no potential in the break-up of the UK, since this state provides their chosen framework to unite the ‘British working class’.

But the UK unites the British ruling class. The unionist state form allows those components of this class – English-British, Scottish-British, Welsh-British and ‘Ulster’-British – to protect their particular sectional interests on their home patch, whilst using this state to disunite the working class throughout these islands.

Despite having no mandate in Scotland, the Tories under Thatcher used this unionist state to test-run the poll tax on Scotland, one year earlier than England and Wales. New Labour corralled its Scottish MPs to vote for foundation hospitals in England only, in the face of an English Labour rebellion. The UK state’s retention of such reactionary features as a Protestant monarchy, and 26 Anglican bishops in the House of Lords, gives succour to Loyalist reaction in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

In a situation of continued imperial decline and economic crisis, the UK and Labour, far from encouraging some form of higher international working class unity, are retreating further and further into British chauvinism. A British ruling class, with its backs to the wall, is resorting to harsher and harsher measures. They look to Nigel Farage and UKIP to push British politics further to the right with their anti-migrant, anti-‘benefit scrounger’ offensive. ‘One Nation’ Labour meekly follows.

It would be the right who would benefit from any ‘No’ vote in September. The British unionist left, their heads in the sand, fall back on a propagandist approach and an abstract internationalism. Unity of the working class is confused with the unity of the state. Yet Labour is actively dismantling the social monarchist welfare state it assiduously built-up after 1945. Since Tony Blair came to office, Labour has hollowed out any remnant progressive notions of ‘Britishness’ in these islands. What remains is little more than sentimental nostalgia.

Some dream of a final federal British ‘solution’. They are unaware that this has long been the British ruling class’s last-ditch option, whenever their state is faced with potential break-up. Such federalism is brought out of the Liberal Party’s ‘deep-freeze’, where it has been kept for more than a century!

Another consequence of the British left’s tacit acceptance of ‘Britain’ is that some unsavoury aspects of UK state politics have become hardwired into many left organisations. Collective Cabinet responsibility and secrecy are mirrored in their bureaucratic centralism and domination by London, with a focus on Westminster politics. Rebuildling an effective socialist opposition involves mounting a challenge to this legacy.

Internationalism does not come about through the left reacting to ruling class initiatives within a UK state framework. The break-up of some states and the merger of others is part and parcel of capitalist globalisation within which popular struggles and democratic movements are reshaping the world. Genuine internationalism is about uniting working people regardless of borders. It is not making a fetish of defending existing borders.

The British ruling class knows its state is in decline and under mounting threat. Their most recent attempt to hold the line – the Irish ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’ for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – was designed to create the conditions for maximum corporate profitability in these islands. The Great Crash of 2007 has undermined this project.

This opens up exciting prospects for socialists. The Scottish independence referendum allows the left to take the political initiative on a socialist republican ‘internationalism from below’ basis, uniting workers in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Our immediate aim should be to promote active solidarity and create democratic, secular and social republics. In the process, we can develop those independent and democratic organisations, which enable our class to increase its political influence and to go on and take power.

This is the Scottish internationalist spirit, which RIC hopes will encourage socialists in England, Wales, Ireland and indeed, elsewhere in the EU. We look forward to winning support from members of Left Unity in working together.

* Footnote: By 2004 the Scottish Socialist Party had made enough of an impact on Scottish politics to have 6 MSPs in the Scottish Parliament. The SNP fell back in both votes and seats. The SSP initiated the republican Declaration of Calton Hill and organised the well-publicised and supported protest against the royal opening of the new parliament building at Holyrood. Had these successes been built on, the left could have taken the lead of the movement for Scottish self-determination. However, the SSP’s best-known MSP, Tommy Sheridan, became caught up in a scandal that went to court and divided the Scottish left. This left it open for the SNP to regain the political initiative.

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