Red Pepper » Scotland

Scottish independence: Breaking up is good to do

admin — Sat, 26 May 2012 19:23:55 +0000

Illustration: Hey Monkey Riot (Edd Baldry)
Between now and the referendum scheduled for the autumn of 2014, the question of Scottish independence will take centre stage in British politics. For the next two years our print and broadcast media will be swamped with unionist and nationalist politicians making the case for or against the survival of a political union that has lasted now for more than 300 years.
That debate is likely to be dominated by parliamentarians from both Westminster and Holyrood. In studios up and down the country, the SNP’s parliamentary leader Alex Salmond will slug it out with his unionist counterparts. However, what will almost certainly be missing from the arguments of these centrist politicians will be any socialist perspective on the merits or otherwise of Scottish independence.
There is a socialist case for Scotland becoming an independent country. It’s just that not too many socialists outside of Scotland have heard it. For a long time it wasn’t much heard in Scotland either. With notable exceptions such as Tom Nairn, who published his seminal collection of essays foretelling the break-up of Britain in 1977 and has continued to articulate the left case for Scottish independence ever since, most of the Scottish left initially dismissed the nationalist surge of the 1970s as the antithesis of everything that socialism stood for.
Nationalism substituted national identity for class. If the history of all hitherto existing society really is the history of class struggle, then only right-wing reactionaries would countenance the breaking of working class unity across these islands. The SNP were written off as ‘tartan Tories’ or even the ‘Scottish Nazi Party’. They had helped to bring down the Callaghan government in 1979. They had opened the door to let Thatcherism in.
The left thinks again
Eighteen years of Thatcher and Major caused many on the Scottish left to think again. For four general elections in a row, Scotland had voted Labour only to have Tory extremism stuffed down our throats. Voting Labour was no longer enough. We needed institutional protection from the pro-Tory tendencies of voters in the south. We needed a Scottish parliament to act as a buffer against Westminster governments we had never voted for.
Some in Labour hoped that a devolved Scottish parliament inside the UK would kill the SNP version of nationalism ‘stone dead’. Instead, the campaign for devolution ignited a debate across Scottish politics that saw the emergence of a nationalist left inside and outside the Labour Party. Ex-communist Jimmy Reid and ex-Labour MP Jim Sillars were just two of the better known socialists who started out on political journeys then that would lead them towards the civic nationalism of a renewed and by now a social democratic SNP.
Others, such as Tommy Sheridan, expelled as a Militant from Labour, would help found the Scottish Socialist Party with its central aim of establishing a Scottish socialist republic. In doing so, they helped to revive the memory of a lost nationalist left in Scotland that included the likes of John Maclean and James Connolly. Nationalism was no longer toxic for many on the Scottish left. The break-up of Britain began to be seen in a progressive light.
Of course, not all on the Scottish left were or are convinced. The Communist Party of Britain continues to cling to its vision of the British Road to Socialism. The left inside Labour insist that they can still resurrect the Labour Party of 1945 from the neoliberal disaster of New Labour. Many of the activist left inside the unions instinctively recoil from a cause that would not only break-up Britain but their own trade unions as well.
They argue that Scotland is too small and insignificant ever to challenge the global power of capital. They argue that the real divide in politics is between left and right rather than between Scotland and the rest of Britain. They see a Scottish breakaway as a betrayal of working class solidarity and unity across these islands. They insist only British institutions such as a devolved Scottish parliament with increased economic and tax powers could rise to the challenge of 21st-century capitalism.
Posing as internationalists, they ignore the late Jimmy Reid’s insight that without nationalism there can be no internationalism. Consumed by their loathing for the Scottish version of nationalism, they are blind to the debilitating implications of their own British nationalism. They cling desperately to a British Labour Party that has resolutely led them down a parliamentary road that leads away from socialism. They remain trapped inside and subject to a British state that they neither fully understand nor know how to reform.
The price of union
There is a price to be paid for being part of Britain. A permanent seat on the UN security council comes at the cost of expensive nuclear weapons based on the Clyde. After the US and China, Britain is the third highest military spender in the world – nearly £40 billion in 2011 alone. Britain is a warfare state that has engaged in 22 separate wars and conflicts since the end of the second world war. British governments spent £1.2 trillion bailing out a deregulated banking and financing sector that they had largely created in the City of London.
That price, of course, is paid by the working class across Britain in public spending cuts, privatisation, deregulation and the harshest anti-union laws of any EU member state. It is also paid in terms of Britain’s deformed version of democracy. The term parliamentary democracy disguises more than it reveals. We remain subjects of a hereditary monarch who is also commander-in-chief of our armed forces. Sovereignty or political power in the state is invested in the ‘crown in parliament’ and not with the people. We have an unelected House of Lords packed with place people. We have an electoral system that underpins a two-and-a-half political party system offering voters little real democratic choice.
Is this a Britain worth fighting for? Or could Scottish independence open up new possibilities for socialist advance not only in Scotland but in the other nations of Britain as well? Issues currently frozen out by Britain’s politics would re-emerge as at least debatable. The case for a republic would be heard again. Trident would have to leave the Clyde and on cost grounds would likely have to be scrapped. The savage Tory anti-union laws would go north of the border, and be undermined south of the border.
Devolution has already protected Scotland from the Tory attempts to privatise the NHS and destroy comprehensive education. Independence would shut out the current welfare reforms that threaten the vulnerable and the poor. It would also open the possibility of a Scottish manufacturing future that did not depend on building giant Royal Navy aircraft carriers designed to rain death and destruction on workers on the other side of the world.
The capitalist has no country and is at the same time everywhere and nowhere in particular. Capitalism is neither Scottish nor British. It is global. To influence or control it will mean national labour movements cooperating across their national boundaries. Labour movements on either side of the border between Scotland and the rest of the UK would be ideally placed to demonstrate how such co‑ordinated action could and should happen.
The choice is really very simple. Go on as before inside an antiquated and reactionary state that legally shackles trade unions and has no political space for socialism. Or begin to break that state apart in the name of progress and social advance and in doing so release the energy and the potential of a left across Britain that has for far too long been in retreat.
John McAllion is a member of the Scottish Socialist Party and a former Labour MP and MSP

Holyrood hopes

admin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:11:51 +0000

Whatever the outcome of the Scottish election in May, the government that emerges will be prepared to cut public spending. The main question is likely to be whether it is Labour-led and places the blame on the misguided policies of the Tories, or SNP-led, blaming the cuts on London rule. There is also the possibility of a coalition, though suggestions that the Greens might prop up Labour must be ringing alarm bells among activists in the light of their sister parties’ experiences in Ireland and Germany.
Whatever the electoral outcome, though, the new government will not be able to push through its cuts programme easily. In poll after poll, Scottish voters have shown that they support public spending, favour taxing the rich and oppose privatisation.

These views have long been reflected in the collapse of the Tories, who have just one Westminster seat in Scotland. Now, having joined the Conservatives in government, the Lib Dems are likely to be on the receiving end of a Scottish politics that has, for the past 30 years, supported policies to the left of the UK mainstream.

This dogged rejection of the free-market ideology imposed by a London government that never held a Scottish mandate was an important driver in the creation of a Scottish parliament. From the slaughter of key industries to the imposition of the poll tax a year before the rest of the UK, Scots said ‘we never voted for this’ and overwhelmingly backed devolution in a spirit of ‘never again’.

From 1999 until the financial crash, both Lib/Lab and SNP governments pioneered distinct Scottish polices. These ranged from free personal care for the elderly to the abolition of the right to buy public housing. Indeed, the SNP, with its opposition to PFI and support for free school meals and the abolition of prescription charges, has presented itself as a social-democratic party to the left of Labour.

Game changer

The financial crash and the formation of a Tory-Lib Dem cuts government at Westminster, however, is a game changer. The Scottish Parliament depends entirely on a London block grant to pay the bills. Under the Tory-led government, it will lose £5 billion over the next four years, 16 per cent of the total grant. This will increasingly curb the ability of Edinburgh to pursue distinctive policies as spending levels are slashed.

As in the rest of the UK, the debate over the budget deficit in Scotland has focused narrowly on the scale and tempo of the proposed cuts. No mainstream political party has dared suggest that the debt crisis could be tackled by raising revenues rather than slashing spending. This is despite the fact that the Edinburgh parliament could activate its currently dormant power to raise or lower basic income tax by up to 3p in the pound.

The SNP fought the first Scottish Parliament election in 1999 under the slogan, ‘A penny for Scotland’, promising to raise income tax by 1p in the pound to generate extra cash for public services. But it later dropped the policy, so all four mainstream parties are now pledged to operate within the budgetary constraints imposed by Westminster. Holyrood politicians face the prospect of operating between the rock of an electorate opposed to cuts and the hard place of a Westminster government imposing them.

Nominally, of course, there are broad areas – including education, the NHS, crime and the environment – that are run directly by Edinburgh. The money to run these services, though, is beyond its control. Thus Labour will have to square much brave anti-cuts talk before the poll with the reality of making cuts – very much against the views of its supporters – when and if it takes power. It will then be left telling voters that the only answer is to vote in a Labour government in London, echoing the story of the Thatcher years.

The reality is that, as well as having little real control over its own spending, Holyrood is also powerless to halt cuts in UK benefits to the sick and disabled, prevent Scots troops dying in Afghanistan, or stop the scandal of ruinously expensive Trident missiles being stationed on the Clyde. Indeed the Scottish Parliament has already voted against Trident, to no avail.

The SNP will face a similar problem to Labour if it retains power in May. It may initially blame cuts on London, but it will still make them. As the pressure mounts, any SNP government will face pressure to bring forward a bill for a referendum on independence – promised for this parliament but never delivered – in response to the limitations of devolution.
Growing opposition

Alongside the parliamentary dilemma facing whoever wins in May, there are growing signs of a burgeoning of community, union and student opposition to the Tory-Lib Dem agenda that will not necessarily accept compromises reached in Holyrood. For example, the Scottish government recently floated a deal – amidst a loud media fanfare – offering no compulsory redundancies in local councils in exchange for a pay freeze. It was rejected by two-to-one by the Unison union’s Scottish council.

Mike Arnott, secretary of Dundee trades council, gives a flavour of the increasing resistance to the austerity agenda, which he predicts will grow irrespective of the outcome of the May poll. ‘The trades council is making opposition to the cuts a key priority and we are already working with groups such as the pensioners’ forum and students,’ he says. ‘There are also moves to re-form a campaign group for the unemployed such as existed in the 1980s.’ A citywide anti-cuts network is developing, and Dundee trade unionists are involved in a move to re-found the long defunct trades council further up the Tay in Perth.

Although they are not affected by the fees issue that has so motivated their counterparts south of the border, students in Scotland have also taken part in militant demonstrations and occupations, largely focused on cuts. Speaking from the long-running ‘Free Hetherington’ occupation of a former student research club at Glasgow University, Jack Ferguson told Red Pepper of the formation of a student anti-cuts network across the city. ‘Council restrictions on demos make central Glasgow a virtual no demo zone,’ he says. ‘But inspired by groups like UK Uncut, we have staged highly mobile, fast-moving protests which have overcome that ban. A striking feature has been the self-organised involvement of school students in big numbers, who realise the college cuts already planned menace their future.’
‘The Free Hetherington has reopened a student union closed by the cuts and can be a trailblazer for similar actions across communities,’ Ferguson suggests. ‘The May polls won’t change this demand for justice.’ A sign that this protest movement is already drawing blood was the recent pledge by Scottish Labour not to introduce either student fees or a graduate tax.

Left reeling
At a time when they should be benefiting from this rising tempo of action, socialists in Scotland are still reeling from the bitter conflict around the Tommy Sheridan affair. The former Scottish Socialist Party leader and MSP’s recent jailing for perjury, and the years of division and conflict that led up to it, have been a major factor in the marginalisation of the left not just at Holyrood but in wider society.

Deep divisions persist, but the cuts present a reality that all must face. It is vital that those involved in the resistance are able to concentrate on the priorites of communities most affected by the cuts, and move beyond the rancour created by the Sheridan debacle.

Many on the left are taking a self-critical look at the culture of left organisations, drawing on insights from feminism and social movements. The challenges for the Scottish left are not fundamentally different from those elsewhere: any viable left alternative will need to mobilise the qualities and capacities of all its members, and ensure that leading individuals are genuinely democratically accountable.

Overhanging this already complex picture is the ever present issue in Scottish politics – the national question. If the only prospect is a devolved parliament acting as agents for Tory cuts, voters may once again ask whether it is time to back independence.

But even in its present constricted form, the Scottish Parliament has the power to do things differently. Research by the Scottish Socialist Party has revealed that by replacing the widely despised council tax with a new progressive Scottish service tax, with a sliding scale of payments based on income, the Scottish government could raise an additional £1.6 billion a year, thus protecting Scotland from cuts and job losses.

Whatever happens in May, the left has no current prospect of repeating its 2003 success, when six Scottish Socialists were returned to Holyrood. Instead, it urgently needs to find ways – such as a Scottish left convention and the development of policies which address real public concerns – to respond to both the social and national demands of the growing protest movement.

‘Sin Patron’ in Dundee?

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 20:44:35 +0000

Walking into Discovery Packaging in Dundee is just like walking into any small factory, with one exception. There is no director’s or foreman’s office. In fact, there is no evidence of any boss anywhere. But this is not just any factory. It is what would be called a ‘recovered factory’ in Argentina, where the ‘Sin Patron’ (‘Without Bosses’) movement has involved many such takeovers. A year on from the business failing and the workers occupying and taking control, Discovery Packaging is now being run as a co-operative.

Sitting in the former managing director’s office, now used as a reception area for visitors, is David Taylor, who has worked on and off at the factory for 15 years. He recalls the problems with the management of the company formerly known as Prisme. ‘There was no structure and no professionalism or pride in what we did. God knows how we got the contracts that we did. There were no work sheets, no keeping track of what was coming in and going out the door… it was an absolute shambles.’

In March 2009, all 12 workers at the factory were told without warning that their employers were going out of business with no funds to pay redundancy. A director they had never met arrived to evict them from the building. They refused to leave – or to allow any machinery to be moved – until a settlement was reached.

‘During the first few weeks we had no plans to set up a business,’ says Taylor, ‘but we still felt an obligation to our customers, so we fulfilled orders using material that was still in house.’ This work, along with donations from as far afield as Brazil, South Africa and Australia, sustained the occupation.

After about a month the workers decided to try to take over the factory permanently: ‘We felt that we always ran the company anyway. The directors were never here, the MD was always golfing. We were effectively running his business.’

‘I’ve always wanted to work for myself,’ Taylor continues. ‘When I had a manager that wasn’t as hard working or didn’t have the same vision as me, I hated it. I’ve been with managing directors on so many occasions and I’ve thought to myself: “How can that man run a business? He’s got nothing about him.”‘

So they decided to approach funders, contacting Scottish Enterprise Business Gateway, the Dundee Development Fund and several banks. They were refused, but were bailed out at a decisive stage in the occupation by a lone private investor. The investor put up enough capital to cover start-up costs, rental and down payments on machinery in exchange for a 50 per cent share.

Partly because of their reliance upon this capital, the ownership model is complex. However, Discovery is run on co-operative principles. No dividends are paid to shareholders; all profits are ploughed back into the company. Within the factory, shareholders work alongside a minority who are not shareholders. The wage structure is also complex, but is based on a policy of parity across jobs.

Insofar as Discovery’s origins lie in the expropriation of the firm from its owners, comparisons with Argentina’s Sin Patron movement are irresistible. There was no stand-off with the police and no protracted battle with the law here, as there was in Argentina, but without the initial occupation the workplace would never have been successfully ‘recovered’ from the former owners.

The model of work organisation also has its similarities with the Argentinean movement. People have to work unusually long shifts to ensure the firm’s survival. They have also learned each other’s jobs. But rather than being a deliberate means of eradicating hierarchies, as in Argentina, here it is an entirely practical tactic, enabling workers to maximise production.

Even so, the Scottish workers say the same things about
their work as their counterparts in recovered factories in Argentina. They have an immense pride in what they do. Working without a boss has restored an autonomy and dignity that comes from working for each other rather than for over-paid, absentee owners.

As David Taylor points out, this creates an entirely different way of thinking about working: ‘When we worked for the previous company, I used to hate coming into work. Now I don’t see this as coming in to work. This is coming in to something that is dead hard, but I love doing.’

In Studs Terkel’s classic book Working, he uncovers in his interviews with American workers a common search for ‘daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash.’ With no boss to get in the way, this is exactly what the workers at Discovery are finding for themselves.

Grown up and independent

admin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:14:24 +0000

The political landscape in Scotland is changing. The defeat of Labour in the Glasgow East by-election broke this news to those south of the border who can go for weeks and weeks without hearing reports of events in Scotland. The most important change is the distancing of our country from London.

For the first time we are able to see what it is like to be governed by a party free of British considerations and constraints. And it is liberating. Even with only devolution rather than full independence we are seeing the freedom exercised by the new government, able now to tackle the issues that the people most want to see being dealt with without interference or having to slow down every process by getting permission from London. Word has it that even the civil servants are loving it.

Don’t be afraid

But fear still looms large in the Scottish psyche. Three hundred years of being told that we’re not capable of running anything, even speaking of a genetic link to the failed Darien scheme or colony of New Caledonia on the Panama isthmus in the 1690s, does penetrate a nation’s sense of itself.

As psychologists will tell you, people prefer death to change, even when they know that change should be beneficial – there is something primal here perhaps. Given this, it amazes me that so many have held the belief in independence for so long and so passionately.

Support for independence did not come so easily to me. I was one of the non-believers, a lefty with a belief in internationalism and a deep-rooted fear of the small and the parochial, and a belief that real power and movement lay in big nations. But no longer.

For many of us the move started as the Labour Party lurched to the right. The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) stepped in, winning thousands of votes in 1998 and attracting republicans and nationalists too, as they campaigned on a left position on independence. In 2003 the SSP won six seats in the Scottish Parliament and became an effective left influence on the Holyrood parliament. This was crucial to the development of the Scottish National Party (SNP) – once people were across the bridge to a belief in independence ,they wouldn’t go back.

The left found this an easy transition to make. Meanwhile, the SNP was realising that Labour was moving to the right and Scottish Labour could do little to stop it. The SNP started taking up left positions on issues such as Trident, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and the war in Iraq – all with a Scottish slant, but one which rang true with the electorate. The party has now shaken off its ‘Tartan Tories’ tag, and with the Westminster government embroiled in a war in Iraq and tied to Bush and US foreign policy, and Trident being renewed and positioned 25 miles from Glasgow on the Clyde, Labour was and is in disarray.

The split of the SSP over the Tommy Sheridan debacle (see Red Pepper 146, Oct 2006) led more progressive voters to back the SNP’s positioning of itself as a centre-left party with a Scottish agenda, A feeling grew that the nationalists under Alex Salmond would not be as easy to push aside as a Labour leader in Scotland, ignored and insulted by his Cabinet colleagues in London. One minister had even managed to get the name of Jack McConnell (Labour’s leader in Scotland from 2001 until 2007) wrong in a TV interview.

Finding answers

We are now into new territory. Neither the Labour opposition in the Scottish parliament nor the labour movement in general seem to know how to react in this post-devolution Scotland with its first-ever nationalist administration. Does the left know what to do?

I would like to be able to say that the Scottish Independence Convention has all the answers but that would be a lie. We are an umbrella grouping for supporters of Scottish independence – founded on St Andrews Day 2005 – asking the questions, discussing, debating; listening to the thinkers, the agitators, the believers, the sceptics. The left is a huge part of that debate. Our organisation is aligned to no particular party but it stands to reason that the more progressive parties like the SSP, Solidarity and the Greens, as well as the nationalists, are fellow travellers because of their stated belief in independence (movement has been detected in the Lib Dems and Labour too).

The real answers to all our questions, lie in the hearts, brains and souls of the people of Scotland. We all have to tread warily because we hold the hopes and aspirations of a people: a precious, delicate thing. Hence the the delicate dance that is taking place at the moment: nobody wants to get it wrong.

In my teacher training I remember a visit to Summerhill school where the noted educationalist A S Neill espoused his theory that small was beautiful, that small was more powerful, more accountable and more progressive. He applied it to education, where at the time he was seen as quite off message because schools were then being built to house thousands of pupils in a single institution. It seems only right to me that staying and working closer to and for the people and culture you represent would be better on all levels.

I understand how difficult it is for the once proud Labour and trade union movement to cross the bridge to a belief in independence. It is hard to look at all that for which activists and foot soldiers have worked so hard over the years and to wake up one day to see that the people have moved on and that the relevance of the movement is part of another era.

I liken it to eras of music, in which the revolution of Sinatra was followed by Elvis and then Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones, then punk and on and on – the permanent revolution, yet each era still clinging to its belief that theirs was the best and the truest. Unfortunately in Scotland, the revolution – if you can call it that – got very stuck and the rot set in. Labour councils and MPs, once so sure of their absolute power, have now become moribund and irrelevant, open to corruption and bereft of ideology.

We see a Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party unable to deal with being in opposition, having believed in their divine right to rule as part of the Labour hegemony in Scotland for as long as they can remember. Then there is the tension with the Westminster MPs, who are so out of touch with their own supporters and members that they use bullying tactics to try to get these ‘uppity Jocks’ back in line.

Labour’s loss

I met a retired Lanarkshire Labour councillor at my dad’s 80th birthday party the other day. He sought me out because he wanted to talk politics. But the truth was he wanted to tell me his views. He had no desire to listen. While listening to his opinions about why he was anti independence (a rambling, ill thought through rant that basically just said ‘Naw’) and a poor defence of the war in Iraq, PFI, Trident and so on, I started to zone out and all I could hear was his pain and confusion. He felt abandoned by the people he believed he had worked his whole life to serve.

I understand that bitterness and anger, and I am sorry for their loss, but they have had 50 years to get things right. The poorest and most disadvantaged have seen little or no change under Labour – the party who was supposed to put their needs first has forgotten them.

For those afraid of the small, the parochial, the racist, the sexist, the triumphalist and the small-minded, I would urge them to read Arthur Herman’s book Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ invention of the modern world. Consider the radical thinking and experimentation that so influenced Europe and remember that being Scottish has little to do with where you were born, but is instead a state of mind that I believe is progressive, with a true belief in one’s fellow man and woman. The only way to release and harness that potential is to be truly independent. Independence will allow Scotland to break from the adolescent state of cultural paralysis that it has found itself in within the UK. A nation can’t thrive when it always has to ask permission from its elders and supposed betters. My hope is that we can mature into a grown-up nation – a friend and cousin of the English, the Welsh and the Irish. At the moment we Scots have finally left home, but we are still having to take our washing back.

Elaine C Smith‘s many roles include starring in the TV comedy series City Lights, Naked Video and Rab C Nesbitt