The collapse in support for Labour has raised the prospect of a victory for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the Scottish Parliament elections in May.
Hundreds of thousands of working class voters are turning away from Labour in Scotland. As in England and Wales, workers are sickened by Blair and Brown’s callous attacks on the health service, their tax rises for the poor and tax handouts to the rich, the quagmire of Iraq and the war threats against Iran, the huge spending on nuclear weapons, the cash-for-honours corruption and the constant stripping away of civil liberties.
Scottish workers remember the Tories too – how Thatcher closed the pits and imposed the hated Poll tax on them before the rest of Britain, how communities were broken up as Scottish manufacturing was destroyed.
The utter failure of the socialist left to capitalise on this crisis of support for Labour, and the ignominious split in the Scottish Socialist Party last year have left the way open for the Scottish National Party of Alex Salmond to emerge as the main opposition to Labour north of the border. They could become the biggest party in the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. If so, they say they will call for a referendum on full independence for Scotland.
The Scottish Nationalists are not a working class party. Although they call themselves “left-of-centre”, and try to appeal to antiwar and pro-NHS sentiment to attract votes from working class people, the SNP is a capitalist party. As they come closer to power, they are attracting serious support from the super-rich. Recently Brian Souter, the vicious right wing boss of bus company Stagecoach – who hates unions and gays with equal venom – has donated £500,000 to Salmond’s party. And Sir George Mathewson, former chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, the world’s fifth biggest bank, has called for Salmond to be First Minister.
What attitude do communists take to this?
First, any worker who wants to fight back against capitalism needs to oppose any support for the SNP in the elections. A vote for the SNP is a vote for capitalism in Scotland. Whether they form an executive alone or in coalition with the other parties, an SNP government would be a government against the working class, a government for the Souters and Mathewsons.
Second, communists believe that the separation of Scotland from Britain would not be a step forward for the working class. Alex Salmond points to the examples of Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland as models for the “prosperity” that an independent Scotland would have. No worker should be fooled by this.
Under globalisation, being a small country does not protect workers one bit from the constant attempts of capitalists to boost profits by slashing away at welfare and giving tax breaks to the rich.
Third, communists recognise that the collapse in support for Labour poses a huge crisis of leadership for the working class movement. The disgust felt by millions must be used to rally trade unionists, socialists, campaigners against closures, antiwar activists and youth to a new working class party across Britain.
The purpose of a workers party is not to create a patchwork quilt of smaller capitalist states but to overthrow the state in which their members live and replace it with a working class state that can progressively take economic ownership out of the hands of capitalists and run it under the democratic control of the workers themselves.
In the event of a referendum on independence, in response to a straight question, “Do you want Scotland to separate from the UK and be independent”, communists would call for a “No” vote. This is not because we support the United Kingdom. We stand for a united fight of the working class to get rid of the monarchy, the House of Lords and all undemocratic institutions and establish a socialist republic of Britain.
If, however, a majority of the Scottish people expressed in a referendum their desire for independence, then communists would actively support their democratic right to separate. This would mean the whole working class – especially the workers of England and Wales – taking direct action to prevent any attempt by Westminster to prevent Scotland exercising its right to self-determination. Any attempt to retain Scotland within the Union by force or fraud, would only deepen nationalist sentiment in Scotland and further divide the Scottish workers from the rest of the British working class.
The general approach of communists is based on proletarian internationalism. We believe that the working class has no country. Every modern capitalist nation state is divided primarily between a ruling minority class of capitalists and a majority class of workers. Under the banner of nationalism, the ruling class tries to bind the workers to their capitalist exploiters; the so-called “national interest” is a way of making workers think that they share the same interests as the ruling class.
This is why the flirtation that the SSP and Solidarity has with the SNP and Scottish nationalism is so dangerous for the British working class. Just at the time that we needed a new working class party across the country, the left in Scotland cut themselves off from their comrades in England and Wales by forming a party in Scotland only. Now even that limited national project has ended in an acrimonious divorce and division for the Scottish left.
We reject with contempt the British nationalism of Gordon Brown – who is attempting to rally voters against the SNP with a disgraceful appeal to the “great traditions of Britain” – in reality a tradition of exploitation of workers at home and atrocious imperialist conquest and robbery abroad, from India and Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries to the looting of Iraq today.
We also reject the Scottish nationalism of Salmond, Souter and Mathewson. Of course the Scottish working class has a heroic tradition – the tradition of Red Clydeside, of the revolutionary shop stewards movement, of John Maclean’s internationalist opposition to the First World War, of the great struggles of shipyard workers and miners from the 1960s to 1980s, of the great Poll Tax rebellion. These struggles were waged alongside and in the forefront of the rest of the British working class.
Therefore, communists oppose the campaign for Scottish independence, while recognising the right of Scotland to separate from the UK if the Scottish people – despite our advice – so choose. But above all we fight for a new working class party in Britain, as part of an international party of social revolution, to fight for the final overthrow of the British capitalists and to create a workers’ republic in which the Scottish, English and Welsh workers can democratically plan production to meet need not greed.