The people of Scotland have the right to decide whether they want to be part of a common political system with the people of England and Wales, or to separate.
For the majority of the readers of this paper, in England, that is the chief issue raised by the current moves for a referendum on Scottish independence.
The people of Scotland should have their say. The more clear-cut and simple the referendum question, the more democratic the decision will be.
For readers in Scotland, a second question arises: how should they vote in the referendum?
Lenin wrote much about socialist attitudes to national conflicts. One of his chief examples of principled socialist policy on a national conflict was the separation of Norway from Sweden, through a referendum in August 1905.
The Swedish monarchy and aristocracy threatened war if Norway went for independence. The Swedish socialists responded militantly: “Hands off Norway!” Lenin argued, “the dissolution of the ties imposed upon Norway by the monarchs of Europe and the Swedish aristocracy strengthened the ties between the Norwegian and Swedish workers”.
Yet, he said, the Norwegian socialists could without any breach of principle leave it “an open question as to what extent the autonomy of Norway [under Swedish rule] gave sufficient scope to wage the class struggle freely, or to what extent the eternal friction and conflicts with the Swedish aristocracy hindered freedom of economic life”.
Norway’s independence referendum was followed in November 1905 by another referendum, on whether the independent Norway should be a monarchy or a republic. (The Norwegian socialists lost: a majority voted for a monarchy).
The same follows for Scotland: vigorous support for Scottish self-determination leaves open the question of which way Scottish socialists should vote on independence. And if Scotland does vote for independence, socialists should press for a democratic decision — best by a democratic elected assembly, elected after full debate — on the political form of the independent Scotland.
Generally socialists favour larger political units, the reduction to a minimum of the barriers between peoples which state frontiers create, the levelling-up of conditions over wider areas, the unification of the working class over wider areas to fight for common conditions. The exception comes when the creation of a larger political unit involves the domination of a stronger nation over a weaker one, and so injustice, friction, and, usually, cramping economic disadvantage for the weaker nation.
The Scots are a distinct nation; but not very distinct, not as distinct as the Norwegians were and are from the Swedes. They share a language with England. There is a large degree of economic integration and a common labour movement. Of the people now living in Britain who were born in Scotland, 15% live in England or Wales; of the people living in Scotland, 15% were born outside, most in England.
Historically, the Scots were partners in the British empire, not an oppressed nation within it. That makes a strong argument for retaining the broader unit, i.e. voting against independence. The status quo is faulty, a sort of lopsided quasi-federalism.
A democratic federal republic in Britain — abolishing the monarchy; democratising politics; clearly defining Scotland, England and Wales as the federal units — would be cleaner and clearer. Within that, the aim of socialists would be to “level up” between the federal units and move to closer unity as fast as is compatible with the wishes of the populations.
Comments
Socialists and Scottish independence
I have been an International Socialist for almost forty years with my politics heavily influenced by my early years as a member of the UK Socialist Workers Party so as you can imagine I have never been a natural supporter of either the SNP or Nationalism.
But since the Labour Party's massive shift to the right in the 90s and its giving up of all pretence of being a Socialist party with the abandonment of Clause Four the only thing that gave it any remote claim to being a Socialist Party I have been voting SNP, I shall attempt to explain this and why Socialists should be unequivocally supporting Scottish Independence.
As the author correctly states "The Scots are a distinct nation" and Scots do have a distinct sense of having a Scots national identity which they have held onto despite Unionist efforts to wipe that out even going as far as taking the name of Scotland off the maps after 1707 and putting in its place " North Britain" of which the inhabitants would not be called Scottish but north British, in this question of identity I am no different from other Scots in that they see themselves as Scots [I personally never describe myself as British]
The mistake that Socialists and particularly English Socialists make is to dismiss the above as "petty nationalism", this is an accusation that is Bourne out of ignorance of the Left tradition in Scotland which has supported Scots home rule/independence since 1707 and more so in later struggles like the Carlton weavers strike 1819 and the Scottish Radical movement uprising and general strike of 1820 and later the Labour party adopting a safer home rule version whilst there was the Scots International Revolutionary Socialist John Maclean who was calling for an independent Scottish Socialist Workers’ Republic.
Having said that I always felt that [certainly in my own experience] Scots Socialists were made to feel that they should not be supporting Scots independence lest they be fuelling divisive "petty nationalism" and that it was like having a dirty little secret and should not come out of the closet
After the setting up of the Scots parliament with its STV voting system that made it possible for smaller parties to obtain seats I voted against Labour for the first time in my life and voted for the Scottish Socialist Party [SSP] which included Tommy Sheridan in its ranks and who had become a hero of a large section of the Glasgow working class.
The SSP carried on the Scottish left's tradition of Socialism and home rule/ independence and not only that they carried it on in the spirit of the Scottish Revolutionary International Socialist John McLean [first ever consul to the newly established USSR].
This gave Scots socialists who recognised the link between Scots independence and socialism an outlet [ability to come out of the closet if you wish] to argue the case for independence and keep their internationalist socialist credibility and Socialists could support independence without aligning themselves with the Scottish National Party[SNP] which for most of its history was a fairly right wing party [called Tartan Tories here at the time] until it realised it would have to shift to the left to in order to carry working class support or forever remain on the fringes of Scots politics.
Unfortunately the SSP having won seats in the new Scots parliament started to resemble a rock band who after years of struggling to make it to the top only to let some band member's over inflated egos become more important than the band as a whole leading to the band to split and its decline back to the pub playing circuit but not before and more importantly the disgusting betrayal of Tommy Sheridan and some of the SSP's leading members support for the Murdoch press made it impossible for me and other Socialists to support the SSP [such a wasted opportunity that could have had the labour party replaced by the SSP as the party supported by the Scots working class]
So what’s a boy to do now? Since the SNP had been in a minority Govt in Edinburgh it had carried out quite a few policies that any reformist Socialist party would have been proud of which along with the Labour party's rightward march made it a lot easier for Socialists to vote SNP and I was no different.
It’s important to point out that the SNP are in no way a Socialist party [then neither is the Labour party now] and as I pointed out it was the former SNP leader William Wolffe that argued against his party's right wing, and shifted the SNP to the left in order to gain working class support [indeed Alex Salmond was expelled from the SNP for being part of the left faction named the 79 Group]. But it’s true that Socialists have been like me voting SNP and others have joined it even though the SNP have some very wealthy business supporters.
Actually I foresee that if Scotland became independent there would be a realignment of the political parties and I suspect that without the glue of the common cause of independence to hold them together the SNP's left and right would split into two separate parties or merge with the remaining parties [if what would be the former unionist remaining parties had any credibility left, it’s an interesting hypothetical]
So if as Socialists we know that the SNP are not a Socialist party and an Independent Scotland would not be a Socialist workers paradise serving as a beacon for workers revolutionary struggles around the world then why should Socialists support an independent Scotland?
I have spoken to mainly English Socialists who have more or less asked the same question and when I examine their objections [and a couple have admitted to this] they are based on a selfish fear of living in England under a permanent Tory Govt [which would not be the case]and nothing to do with the will of the Scots working class.
The reasons that Socialists should support an independent Scotland is that the UK state is an imperialist state and with Scotland leaving the union and taking 95% of oil revenues and its subsidy to the UK with it this would severely weaken the UK state economically ergo militarily and make it a lot harder for it to go on backing up U.S global strategic imperialist aims by helping to bomb workers in other countries.
Also one of the most likely immediate effects of Scotland becoming independent would be the UK being disarmed as far as nuclear weapons are concerned and the removal of the threat of workers being nuked by the UK.
Socialists should ask themselves how many times they have marched in support of getting rid of Trident and the other UK nukes or just supported CND from the side-lines and now that goal is within their grasp are they willing to let it slip away because of ill judged rhetoric about supporting "divisive nationalism" or worse, a selfish fear of living under a permanent Tory govt.
So supporting Scottish independence rather than being "petty nationalism" is an internationalist anti-imperialist stance.
I mentioned the great Scottish Revolutionary International Socialist John McLean who called for an for an independent Scottish Socialist Workers’ Republic and his reason for that was that existence of the British Empire was a major block to international Socialism and that India could not be free till that empire was smashed or collapsed, he saw that the quickest way to achieve this was the breakup of the imperialist UK state and that by Scotland becoming independent would hasten that.
The Empire is gone and the UK state is in a much weaker position so much so that it would be even more difficult for it to survive as an imperialist power today than it was in John McLean's day.
And it is for this reason that Socialists should take the internationalist anti-imperialist stance in solidarity with workers around the world who are the next potential victims of UK imperialism and put their full weight behind supporting Scottish Independence
With fraternal revolutionary greetings and in solidarity
DWH
In reply
I’d accept that this is a fair enough summary of the left case (or at least one version of it) for positively advocating Scottish independence. But it obviously isn’t an argument that the AWL agrees with.
Some of it is simply factually wrong – although, at the same time, not really relevant to the issues raised by the referendum in 2014.
Clause Four, for example, was never “the only thing that gave the Labour Party any remote claim to being a socialist party.”
Its abandonment was certainly part of an ongoing shift to the right by the party. On the other hand, it did not mark some great leap in philosophical outlook comparable to, say, the German SPD’s formal abandonment of Marxism at its Bad Godesberg congress in 1959. From a Marxist point of view (and not just a Marxist one), the Labour Party was simply never socialist.
But the significance or otherwise of Labour’s abandonment of Clause Four cannot be determinative of one’s attitude towards the issue of Scottish independence.
Sweeping historical generalities about Unionist efforts to wipe out a Scots national identity are inconsistent with the actual historical relationship between Scottish identity/Scottish nationalism and Britishness/Unionism. Historically, they have not been in contradiction with each other.
See, for example, Colin Kidd’s “Union and Unionisms”, in which he argues – very convincingly, I think – that Scottish nationalism has historically been a form of unionism. The book is reviewed at:
http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2009/02/19/unionism-%E2%80%93-made-scotland
But the long-term past historical relationship between Scottish identity and Unionism has little or no bearing on how one approaches the issue of independence right now, in 2012/2014, especially if the reasons which determined that relationship in the past no longer pertain.
Has there been a “left tradition in Scotland which has supported Scots Home Rule/independence since 1707”?
There have certainly been periods when the Left has been vigorously pro-Home Rule (such as around the end of the First World War). There have also been periods when the Left has been hostile to Home Rule (such as during the 1930s). Maxton’s political evolution on the issue is symbolic of that change in attitude.
But I do not think that periodic support for Home Rule (or some form of devolution) amounts to a tradition dating back to 1707.
(In passing it might also be noted that the person responsible for ditching Clause Four also presided over the creation of a Scottish Parliament. Home Rule is therefore not the property of the left. In fact, the early Labour Party in Scotland adopted support for Home Rule as a piece of political baggage inherited from the Liberals.)
Claims that there is a left tradition of support for independence dating back to 1707 do not stand scrutiny either.
Maclean, it is true, supported independence in the early 1920s. But that does not amount to a tradition. And it was no coincidence that Maclean turned to supporting independence precisely at the time when he entered a trajectory of increasing isolation from the labour movement.
The political inheritors of the militancy of Red Clydeside were the ILP, not Maclean. The ILPers were certainly Home Rulers (at that time). But they were not pro-independence.
But the fact that there is no (continuous) tradition of left support for Home Rule/independence since the eighteenth or early nineteenth century does not necessarily mean that it would be wrong now, in contemporary circumstances, for the left to back independence. (After all, the left might have been wrong not to have always been in favour of Home Rule/independence.)
I leave aside DWH’s representation of the SSP in general and Tommy Sheridan in particular. I think it’s completely wrong. But one’s view of the history of the SSP, the split of 2006, and the subsequent political evolution of Tommy Sheridan are hardly a guide as to whether or not socialists should support Scottish independence.
(Except in the sense that if you think that the SSP’s line on independence was correct and the source of its strength (or at least one of its sources), then, inevitably, you are going to support independence – because that’s what the SSP’s line was.)
But even if everyone were to agree will all the above criticisms of DWH’s historical arguments (and his admiration of the more contemporary pre-split-SSP and post-spli-Sheridan), that does not logically preclude the possibility of a socialist case for independence in 2012/2014.
After all, what ‘glued together’ the Union in the past either no longer exists (most obviously: the British Empire, and the market it provided for Scottish industrial output) or relates to institutions which no longer enjoy the esteem they once held (e.g. the monarchy and the army).
(On these points, I think Tom Devine is generally correct.)
And what counted in the past as the ‘common sense orthodoxies’ of the British labour movement have declined in credibility as well.
From around the mid-1920s onward the Labour Party and the unions saw Westminster as the decisive forum to be conquered to bring about social change. (Not radical socialist change and the break-up of the capitalist state. But at least some progressive social reforms of the 1945 variety.)
But successive Labour governments have ‘failed to deliver’. And insofar as the last Labour government delivered anything at all, it was certainly not a redistribution of wealth and power to the benefit of the working class. The past orthodoxy of seeing Westminster as the decisive political arena has therefore lost the grip it once had.
So what, indeed, is a boy to do now?
Certainly not act illogically.
There is no logic in the argument: I no longer vote Labour because it no longer has even a remote claim to being a socialist party, and instead I vote for a different party (the SNP) which was never a socialist party, has no interest in being a socialist party, and never will be a socialist party.
The SNP has, it is true, implemented reforms which, in the past, would have been the kind of reforms expected of a Labour government. But its economic policies are neo-liberal. Hence Salmond’s gaffe of 2008 when he claimed that Scots did not oppose Thatcher’s economic policies, just her social policies.
And which was the one-and-only party to contest the last Holyrood elections promising to cut corporation tax (should it get the powers to do so)?
But when, finally – both in terms of DWH’s post and this response – we get to the supposed reason why socialists should now support independence, what we end up with is the line which has suddenly appeared in the pages of “Socialist Worker”:
“The UK state is an imperialist state and with Scotland leaving the union and taking 95% of oil revenues and its subsidy to the UK with it this would severely weaken the UK state economically ergo militarily and make it a lot harder for it to go on backing up U.S global strategic imperialist aims by helping to bomb workers in other countries. …”
“… For this reason socialists should take the internationalist anti-imperialist stance in solidarity with workers around the world who are the next potential victims of UK imperialism and put their full weight behind supporting Scottish Independence.”
It seems to me that the basic problems with this argument are:
- It runs counter to the general socialist approach referred to in the editorial (i.e. generally being in favour of larger political units, reducing to a minimum barriers between peoples, etc.) in the absence of an explanation (or an adequate explanation) as to why that general principle should not apply in this case.
- Insofar as an explanation is given, it is the tautology that independence for Scotland would break up the British state. But once breaking up existing states and capitalist structures is raised to the level of the decisive criterion, then that position should be taken to its logical conclusion, i.e. not only would the break-up of the EU would be ‘a good thing’ (which, effectively, is the position of sections of the left) but the break-up of the various imperialist states which constitute its core would equally be ‘a good thing’. This is not Marxism. And it would turn back the clock of history by an entire historical epoch. (In case this is dismissed as a caricature of DWH’s position, note that the decisive criterion put forward by DWH is that independence would “weaken the UK state economically and ergo militarily.”)
- It leads logically to a rewriting of history, in order to allow the pro-independence left to present itself as the long-standing champions and latest manifestation of the historical tradition of Scotland’s demand for independence from the UK (dating all the way back to 1707!). (As Bleiman and Keating put it in a book about Labour and Scottish nationalism written many years ago: if you want to persuade the labour movement to adopt a new policy, tell it that that policy has really always been part of its tradition – even if that requires the invention of such a tradition.)
- The notion that independence should be supported because it would be a defeat for, or at least a weakening of, British imperialism flows out of the general contemporary tradition of left ‘negativism’, i.e. the left can define what it is against (in this case: the British state) and instinctively backs any movement or demand which stands in opposition to what it is against (in this case: support for Scottish independence) irrespective of whether this is consistent with general Marxist and socialist principles (see, for example, the SWP’s line on the war in Kosova, the invasion of Iraq, and, now, Iran). That ‘negativism’ condemns the left which adheres to it to a permanent loss of political independence.
- There is a broader argument, which there is no space to develop here, relating to how the left conceptualises imperialism. Much of the left still sees imperialism in early twentieth-century terms, i.e. armies invade and conquer other countries and create foreign empires. The more modern form of imperialism – what the AWL has termed the imperialism of free trade – is largely ignored. But DWH’s reference to support for independence being justified because it would stop the UK from “backing U.S global strategic imperialist aims by helping to bomb workers in other countries” suggests to me that there are basic differences of opinion about the nature of modern imperialism in play as well.
- Left support for independence is an attempt to graft a left-sounding and rrrradical position (break up the British imperialist state!) onto the actual arguments being advanced for an independent Scotland (i.e. that an independent – capitalist – Scotland – would be better off outside the UK than within it). Putting it more crudely, the left wants to jump aboard what it sees as a pro-independence bandwagon, and its ‘anti-imperialism’ of smash-the-British-state is the ticket which allows it on board.
- Taking the above argument one stage further, left support for Scottish independence, it seems to me, is largely a product of the weakness of that left. In the Labour Party the left is reduced to a small fraction. Outside of the Labour Party the left is far weaker than it was previously (in recent decades, not just in comparison to the period when the SSP had half a dozen MSPs) and shows no sign of recuperation. Instead of confronting its own weaknesses and arguing the case for re-asserting the centrality of class, much of the left, in reality, is looking to independence as a short cut to a restoration of its own political fortunes.
So maybe, after all, the Labour Party’s abandonment of Clause Four really is linked to the left’s conversion to support for Scottish independence.