The Scottish Independence Referendum: A blind alley for the working class

Since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis the question dominating bourgeois economics has been how to reduce the astronomical levels of public, banking and private debts and overcome the economic recession. And the question dominating politics is how to sell the necessary sacrifices to the working class, such as wage freezes (or at least pay increases below the rate of inflation) unemployment, cuts in welfare benefits, reduced services and poverty.

But we should not forget that, while the bourgeoisie finds a common enemy in the international working class, it is not a monolithic class; the economic downturn raises tensions within the bourgeoisie itself, as various capitalist interests find themselves fighting to protect their share of the profits from our labour. One of the common responses is to tighten control of national resources (including wage labour) even if this means reducing foreign trade.

Nationalism is the worst kind of poison for the working class. Parties on the right of the political spectrum – in Italy the Northern League, France’s National Front and England’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – shift the blame for falling wages and unemployment on immigration, when in reality this results from a lack of solidarity between indigenous and migrant workers. The “left” parties, by contrast, hide their own racism and nationalism behind hypocritical phraseology.

However, since it would be suicide to admit the true reasons for the economic crisis, which is international by nature, the mainstream bourgeois parties quickly follow suit, though they are careful to adjust their nationalist rhetoric to suit their particular constituencies. Hence the ruling British Conservative Party (the Tories) has been selling the idea of “repatriating” EU powers to Britain. As well as enabling the UK to clamp down on immigration, the Tories argue that by cutting Britain free from “Brussels bureaucracy”, British industry would gain a competitive advantage against other EU countries such as Germany and France. Meanwhile the British Labour Party claims to be responding to “what it is hearing on the doorstep” by announcing a “progressive immigration policy”, which includes a crack-down on foreign migrant workers.

If you strip away the rhetoric, the storyline is the same everywhere. It’s all the fault of the filthy foreigners. The last defence all these bourgeois parties in the face of a crisis is nationalism, patriotic flag-waving and bigotry. This is no different in Scotland, where the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) claims that a new capitalist mini-state offers the basis for a return to the prosperity and social reformism of the post-war boom.

THE SCOTTISH NATIONALIST “DEBATE”

For decades, the Scottish National Party (SNP) was a marginal party allied with similar separatist parties in the United Kingdom and across Europe. The idea of a fully independent Scotland had virtually no traction and the SNP’s electoral successes mainly relied on it providing an avenue for protest when the Labour Party – by far the largest party in Scotland for most of the 20^th century – led the UK government.

In 1990 Alex Salmond convincingly won the election to become leader of the SNP. Salmond showed all the characteristics of an astute political operator. He had previously been a member of the left-wing 79 Group, committed to a “republican, socialist Scotland”. On the other hand he had a background in economics and gained detailed knowledge of the banking and oil industries while working at the Scottish Office. Being more flexible than principled he always seemed to be attuned to the main chance.

Under this new leadership the SNP increased its number of MPs from four to six in the 1997 general election, which saw a landslide victory for the Labour Party under Tony Blair. After this election, Labour legislated for a devolved Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, a development that has already occurred along similar lines in most other countries. When the ship of state runs into choppy waters, the illusion is propagated that the working class can defend itself better through inter-class solidarity around the bastion of the “homeland” rather than through a general alliance of the working class; but in fact, regionalism is a form of politics that is perfectly in line with the development of capitalism’s own self-defence; the more that capitalism is centralised and destroys the myth and the reality of small-scale production, the more it needs to reconstitute an economically fictitious but socially and politically valuable local autonomy. Most of the nationalist rhetoric has focused on the “Westminster elite”. In fact, devolution in the UK has already seen the transfer of many of the state’s functions to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and further devolution is being discussed for the English regions.

While still formally committed to a fully independent Scotland, Salmond played an active part in securing the victory for devolution in the Scotland referendum of 1997. He needed all his skills as a political fixer to keep the party’s fundamentalists on board and prevent the formation of a significant left-wing separatist party opposed to NATO and the European Union.

A new Scottish Parliament was then convened at Holyrood in Edinburgh. Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) are elected by a mixed-member proportional representation. Some observers saw this electoral structure as a way of preventing a SNP majority – in reality it is a way of drawing in all the political bodies into the Scottish Parliament, for the more effective management of capitalism. During the boom years up to the financial crisis of 2008, the SNP argued that the strength of Scotland’s banking and oil sectors could enable an independent Scotland to play a leading role in the “Nordic Arc of Prosperity”, aligned with the Scandinavian countries. Membership of the UK, it was argued, was preventing Scotland from enriching itself. Likewise, the SNP could point to the “Celtic Tiger” economy of the Republic of Ireland, where wages were rising and property prices were skyrocketing. So long as the boom continued, it was an argument that had some force. But of course, capitalist booms always end in bust.

After several Labour or Labour Party-led Scottish governments, in August 2009 the minority Scottish National Party government tried to get its Referendum (Scotland) Bill 2010 passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2009-10. The other main political parties (Labour, Liberal Democrats and the Tories) ensured its rejection. The SNP labelled all of these parties, which organise on a UK-wide basis, as “Westminster parties” and emphasised its “Scotland-first” approach.

But when the financial crisis of 2008 led to the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the fall in oil prices (and the bankruptcy of Iceland, previously cited by the SNP as another role model) the rhetoric had to change. It reverted to a more left-wing line. The “Westminster parties” were all wedded to neo-liberalism, whereas the Scots had always been social democrats. Salmond now presented independence as the only way of protecting the National Health Service and creating jobs for young people. He embraced “Green” policies such as projects to protect the environment and create clean energy.

Salmond’s outlook at this juncture still finds many echoes and was summed up by well-known Scottish historian Tom Devine, who stated in a recent interview, “The Scottish parliament has demonstrated competent government and it represents a Scottish people who are wedded to a social-democratic agenda and the kind of political values which sustained and were embedded in the welfare state of the late 1940s and 1950s”.

In fact, Salmond was able to turn the economic downturn massively to his advantage. The spending cuts that ensued reduced the income of the working class while shoring up the banking system. But for various reasons, Scotland was protected from the worst severity of the cuts. For one thing, Scottish banks were the main beneficiaries of the bailout, largely financed by English taxpayers. Secondly, the so-called “Barnett Formula”, a mechanism used by the Treasury in the United Kingdom to adjust the amounts of public expenditure allocated to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, remained relatively generous to Scotland. Spending per capita is significantly higher in Scotland than in England. Third, despite its economic problems, per capita income in Scotland remains higher than in England and Wales, where there is a growing disparity in wealth between London and the South East and the other regions.

The finances from Westminster offered the Salmond SNP Governments the opportunity to continue spreading this largesse to the Scottish population. The “tartan populism” of the 2007-11 SNP government meant saw the abolition of student tuition fees, reduced education classroom sizes, the promotion of “green” energy, etc. If there were spending cuts, reductions in standards of living, unpopular new taxes and economic decline in Scotland these could all be blamed on the outdated UK set-up and the “out-of-touch Westminster elite”. A fully independent Scottish government would do better.

Thus the SNP went into the May 5 2011 Scottish elections with the promise to “give Scots the opportunity to decide our nation’s future in an independence referendum”. As usual with election manifestoes the SNP’s pitch was high on hype and short on declared aims and objectives. The promise of a referendum did not commit voters actually to the implementation of independence, just a further vote on the issue: a means of registering a protest, almost a parlour game.

The swing to the SNP in the 2011 election was virtually assured by the election of a Conservative-dominated Coalition Government in the 2010 UK General Election. The Conservatives can barely win a single MP in Scotland, so the SNP’s argument that in an independent Scotland, Scottish voters could at least be assured of “getting the government they voted for” carried some weight. Many Scots who had opposed independence now saw it as the “least-worst option” – a way to escape some of the consequences of the crisis in capitalism by moving government to Edinburgh.

The stunning victory of the SNP in 2011 saw the party gain an absolute majority of SMPs with just 44% of the popular vote. Given that only about a half of adults in Scotland voted, the SNP’s actually secured the support of less than a quarter of adults who were entitled to vote. This was hardly an overwhelming endorsement to the Independence option. There was still a lot to do if the prospect of independence was going to dominate the political scene in Scotland.

THE SCOTTISH NATIONALIST VIEW OF HISTORY

Alex Salmond and the SNP frequently claim that they have “nothing against the English” and that they simply want “control over our own affairs”. As we will see below, this rejection of crude chauvinism has not only broadened the Yes campaign’s appeal to English people living in Scotland, but also to “progressive” political factions on both sides of the border. However, this has not prevented the SNP from consistently referring to an anti-materialist view of history that presents Scotland as an “oppressed” country – one that was tricked into union. The SNP victory in the last Scottish election led to inevitable comparisons between the victorious Alex Salmond and those other “great Scottish heroes” such as William Wallace and Robert de Bruce in confronting English adversaries and asserting Scottish independence.

So it is worth briefly reviewing the course of Scottish history since the Middle Ages: is Scotland truly an “oppressed nation” that is in desperate need of “national liberation”?

In the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century the Scottish monarchy faced a succession crisis, which was exploited by the expansionist Plantagenet King Edward I2 to establish English hegemony. These ambitions came to an end under his son, Edward II, when an invading army was annihilated at Bannockburn in 1314. The SNP celebrated the 700^th anniversary of this event earlier this year, aligning it with the contemporary “Second Scottish War of Independence”.

Then in August of this year, Alex Salmond presented a “Declaration of Opportunity” in Arbroath, following a cabinet meeting of his administration.

Coming a month before the referendum on Scottish independence, the statement was calculated to appeal to nationalist sentiment with its invocation of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320. Wildly ahistorical claims have been made by nationalists that the declaration, which took the form of a letter to the Pope asking for his support against England from a group of noblemen loyal to Robert the Bruce, was Scotland’s equivalent of the American Declaration of Independence. In reality, the letter was an assertion by the pro-Bruce faction of their claims against rivals (Bruce had been excommunicated by the Pope following the murder of John Comyn, the legitimist claimant to the throne). It was strongly supported by the Scottish clergy, which resented its subordination to the English Archbishop of York. In 1328 Edward III signed the Treaty of Northampton, which renounced English claims north of the border. The Plantagenet dynasty’s expansionism would henceforth focus on the conquest of France in the Hundred Years’ War. Meanwhile Bruce and his descendants focused on trying to amalgamate Scotland’s ruling classes within a single kingdom.

Eventually a Scottish cardinal was appointed by a later Pope and the Anglo-Norman ruling class in Scotland made progress in asserting itself against the Celtic clans of the Highlands and Islands.

Nevertheless, the conflict between England and Scotland continued well into the English Tudor dynasty, which marked the beginning of the end of the feudal era in England. Scotland had entered into a secret alliance with France (the “Auld Alliance”, which lasted from 1295 to 1560) and the rivalry between England and France spilled into Scotland, notably with the slaughter of the Scottish forces at Flodden Field in 1513. With the growing power of England under the reign of Elizabeth I the relationship began to change (with intermarriage between the English and Scottish dynasties, religious reformation, the Irish plantations and common fears of external threats such as the Spanish Armada). The ground was prepared for the Union of the Crowns.

UNION OF THE CROWNS & UNION OF PARLIAMENTS

When Elizabeth I died without an heir, James VI, Stuart King of Scotland, was named her successor to the throne of England in 1603. He was crowned King James I of England. The Stuart kings and queens ruled both independent kingdoms (as well as Ireland) until the Act of Union in 1707.

The English Tudor reformation and the upheavals of the 17^th century were features of a long religious, cultural and above all economic transformation of society, one which freed the mercantile activity of the developing capitalist classes from the feudal nobility. However, while Scotland experienced a more thorough-going Protestant reformation, it lagged behind England in terms of social and economic development. James Stuart was a great advocate of a full union but this was blocked by the English parliament. The two countries were not yet quite ready to unite.

By the late eighteenth century capitalism was flowering in England largely thanks to its growing maritime power and merchant capital. Raw materials, such as cotton, tobacco and above all sugar were being produced on plantations in the New World with slave labour and converted into finished goods in England. The great feudal estates were being transformed by capitalist agriculture. Politically, these changes were reflected in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which asserted England’s independence from the great continental power of France and gave greater freedoms (the “English Liberties”) to the capitalist classes.

By contrast, Scotland’s attempt to create its own colonial empire ended in disaster with the Darién scheme, which was backed by a quarter of the money in circulation in Scotland and left the Scottish nobility heavily in debt. The scheme was finally abandoned in 1700 when the colony on the Isthmus of Panama (called “Caledonia”), which was already suffering from starvation and disease, was finished off by a successful Spanish siege.

The Scottish nobility and the emerging Scottish bourgeoisie were left with no choice but to seek a bailout from Scotland’s richer neighbour; an act which has gone down in Scottish nationalist mythology as a “stab in the back”, or as the Scottish romantic poet Robert Burns wrote in 1791:

We’re bought and sold for English gold,
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

The Act of Union of 1707 thus merged the two kingdoms into a new state, the Kingdom of Great Britain. Queen Anne was the last Stuart monarch, ruling until 1714. Since 1714, the succession of the British monarchs of the houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Windsor) has been based both on their descent from James VI / I of the House of Stuart and the Protestant religion, favoured by the bourgeoisie in both England and Scotland. In the early 18^th century this line of succession was briefly threatened by the Old and Young Pretender (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) who tried to rally Irish and Scottish highland clans to restore the legitimist Stuart line – attempts that were vigorously opposed not just by the English but also the rising Scottish lowland bourgeoisie. Full union in the 18^th century was therefore a capitalist project, coinciding with the rise of Britain as the first industrial world power. Whereas the third kingdom of the British Isles, Ireland, was largely left behind, Scotland and England emerged as a single capitalist entity that came to control up to a third of the world’s land mass. Scotland was never an “oppressed” nation in the Marxist (or any other) sense.

Indeed, if you read Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations”, during the Scottish Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, Scotland became one of the commercial, intellectual and industrial powerhouses of Europe. The economic development of Scotland was driven by access to English domestic and colonial markets. In particular, Glasgow went on to became the “Second City of the Empire” (after London) and vast fortunes were accumulated through the exploitation of British and colonial labour.

The most important advances of the British working class in the 19^th century were made in this context (for example the formation of the Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford in 1893, organised on a UK-wide basis and its first leader, Keir Hardie, was a Lanarkshire trade union organiser). The Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920, likewise organised on a UK-wide basis, although one of the leaders of Red Clydeside, John MacLean, erroneously argued for a separate Scottish party, claiming that traditional Scottish society was structured along the lines of “Celtic communism”. He argued that “the communism of the clans must be re-established on a modern basis” and raised the slogan “back to communism and forward to communism”. This absurd and ahistorical claim, that Celtic society forms a more solid basis for communism than “Anglo-Saxon”, also finds echoes today in the “progressive” wing of Irish nationalism.

INDUSTRIAL DECLINE, NORTH SEA OIL & THE INDEPENDENCE DEBATE

As is well known, in the 20^th century the United Kingdom underwent a massive decline in economic importance, which accelerated with decolonialisation after the Second World War and the rise of the newer imperialisms, in particular the USA and the USSR, and now China. The Clydeside shipbuilding industry, for example, has been virtually wound up, alongside that of north-east England and Belfast. The British working class has steadfastly stood together in many struggles against the subsequent loss of jobs and attacks on its living standards, although in Scotland as elsewhere it was led into many disastrous situations by the reformist and Stalinist leadership (notably the 1971 “work-in” at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, UCS, in Glasgow, Scotland, which repeated the mistakes of the factory occupations in Italy after the First World War). The British working class has never sustained a revolutionary and internationalist tradition through its own political party, which has been its greatest source of weakness.

Scottish separatism remained a minority current in national politics until North Sea Oil started flowing in the 1970s. A growing faction within the Scottish bourgeoisie was attracted to the idea that they could grab a larger share of the profits and tax revenues if Scotland separated from the rest of the UK. But even as it experienced a boost from the energy crisis of the mid-seventies, it found little support in these ambitions from the Scottish working class. The SNP was regarded as “tartan Tories”.

From the eighties onwards the challenge for Alex Salmond and the SNP has therefore been to walk a tightrope, balancing the pro-business agenda of the SNP while enticing a sufficiently large number of workers to vote for independence.

To this end over the past few years they have relied on various leftist parties and informal groupings, such as the Green Party, the SWP, the Scottish Socialist Party, Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) and former Scottish Socialist Party leader Tommy Sheridan. These elements have long since abandoned the Labour Party, which had grown corrupt and openly pro-business long before anyone had heard of Tony Blair.

We have therefore witnessed not one campaign for independence but two parallel campaigns.

On the one hand, the SNP has been busy telling everyone that Scotland must become independent not so much because Scotland is somehow oppressed or downtrodden, but, as a “Yes” campaign leaflet argued, because “Scotland is one of the world’s wealthiest countries”. The same leaflet continued, “Our economy produces more per head of population than the UK, France, Japan and most other developed countries”. It adds that, “Experts agree that Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world”.

Thanks to control over North Sea Oil and other revenues, the leaflet continued, “On Independence we would have sound public finance… Scotland more than pays its way. Estimates show that in each and every one of the last 33 years, we have generated more tax per head than the UK as a whole. Over the last five years our public finances have been stronger than the UK by a total of £8.3 billion – that is almost £1,600 for every person in Scotland”.

The leaflet concluded, “The issue is not whether Scotland is wealthy enough to be independent. The question is whether the Scottish or Westminster government should decide how we use our wealth”.

The official “Yes” campaign has been promising lower rates of corporate tax for business to attract more investment by multinational corporations to Scotland. The message could hardly be clearer: the Scottish bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie of any other country that invests in Scotland, will get a larger share of the booty from international capital. And part of the revenues will help the SNP to fund a native Scottish bureaucracy that would provide greater job opportunities for its supporters in the professions.

So how do we square this capitalist message with the idea that Scotland is “oppressed”? Well, on the other hand we have the “progressive” wing of the Yes campaign promising a socialist utopia after independence. The RIC in particular has been canvassing working class areas claiming that a Scotland freed from Westminster (and Tory government in particular) could return to the “Scottish” values of social democracy. These faux-socialists are pushing the lie that a Yes vote (despite everything that Salmond is saying) will not only represent a victory against the austerity measures pushed by the UK government, but will also empower “ordinary people”. The words that are most prominent in their campaign activity are the old left-capitalist canards such as “grassroots activism”, “community” and “regeneration of democracy”, combined with the predictable appeals to every imaginable form of left-liberal identity politics. Leftist activists and media commentators in England have been more than happy to jump on this bandwagon, claiming that independence in Scotland would lead to a rejuvenation of “grassroots democracy” throughout the UK, including the devolution of political and economic power from Westminster and the City of London to the regions (In practice, if any such change occurred, this would only serve to legitimise the reality of capitalist dictatorship. But an equally likely outcome is the strengthening of English chauvinism – many in the UKIP would like to ditch “socialist” Scotland as part of their project to create a more economically competitive England outside of the European Union.)

But even then the RIC the argument largely rests on North Sea Oil. An article on the RIC website states that “The only way to deal with the deficit and restore public services after coalition cuts as well as having money to invest to rebuild Scotland’s economy is by nationalising North Sea oil. This is the only radical way out for the Scottish people. This would see a more than tripling of oil revenues. It would take away Scotland’ exposure to the volatility of the oil price if a reserve fund was structured… It would also allow us to have our own currency and central bank and fund a green sustainable Scotland where peoples’ needs are met. It would allow Scotland to be independent of the Bank of England and the Treasury. We could take the Norwegian route who [sic] own a large majority stake in their oil industry and join the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) rather than be caught up in the EU membership game. This would allow us to trade with Europe and be European while not being part of a neo-liberal economic block”.

The article continues, “Yes ‘it’s Scotland’s oil’, but only if it is nationalised. Then we can build a prosperous, equitable and sustainable independent Scotland”.

Thus the best on offer is a Scandinavian model of social democracy financed by oil revenues, in the unlikely event that the industry will be nationalised after independence – an illusion that Alex Salmond and his pro-business supporters will be quick to dispel.

THE CURRENCY ISSUE AND THE COMMUNIST POSITION

It is pretty obvious that the British Lion, although old and sick, still has enough of its own teeth to avoid having its tail cut off by a bunch of chattering petty politicians with their idiotic debates on state television. Armed with the ballot box, the illusion they want to foster within the working class is one of the state being governed “by the will of the people” rather than by and for a single class: the bourgeoisie. Or, more precisely, by big business, which is neither English nor Scottish but global.

The televised debates for and against independence revolved around the currency issue. The “Better Together” No campaign, led by ex-Labour Party Chancellor of the Exchequer Alastair Darling, has made much of Salmond’s lack of a “Plan B” should the rest of the United Kingdom reject a currency union with Scotland based on a shared pound sterling. Salmond has already changed direction at least once on this issue, having supported Scotland’s admission to the Euro before the debt crisis. On the other hand, the focus on the currency issue has only served to demonstrate that the No campaign has absolutely nothing of value to offer working people in Scotland, which has proved to be a key factor in the success of the separatists.

The fact is that whether Scotland stays in the sterling zone or adopts its own currency, or joins the Euro, as we have seen across Europe and beyond, a currency cannot protect any country from the fluctuations in the global capitalist economy. Workers have paid the price of austerity whether they are in England, Greece, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey or wherever.

Perhaps a new financial order could even prove useful to the bankers and capitalists of the City, by providing the additional room for manoeuvre via a certain amount of regional autonomy on the commercial, monetary and financial level. And perhaps an independent Scotland would make it easier for British diplomats to engage in double-dealing and cheating their rivals.

Either way, none of this serves the interests of the Scottish working class. The whole “debate” is just leading workers up a blind alley under the cover of a massive democratic smokescreen, one that fosters the illusion that a vote in a capitalist ballot can change anything of substance. As we go to press the outcome of the referendum hangs in the balance. The No campaign has been forced to make tactical concessions that will give Scotland greater autonomy while falling short of full independence. But whatever the outcome of the vote on September 18, and whichever side is partying to celebrate its success, it will be the Scottish working class that returns to work with a hangover that will last for decades as the various factions of the Scottish and international bourgeoisie continue to squabble over who gets the biggest share of the wealth that they – the working class – produce. One thing is certain, the bourgeoisie will do whatever it can to set Scottish and English workers against one another, driving down wages as they compete for jobs.

The only way forward from our perspective is unified struggle by the British working class, ultimately as part of an internationalist communist party whose aim is to wrest political power from the bourgeoisie and initiate the socialist transformation of the economy.