Last week the Labour Conference came and went with some carefully choreographed nationalist populism. It was made clear that, however the party may have felt, its leadership would leave neo-liberal Britain untouched if they came into power. Milliband also used a recovered cancer patient in a truly sickening demonstration of uninformed fear mongering.
This event hammered home to me the most beguiling question in Scottish politics today – why are the Labour Party faithful so reluctant to accept Scottish Egalitarianism? As a very intelligent tweeter pointed out to me recently: egalitarianism is a far more accurate description of the forces behind the Yes Campaign than nationalism. Those looking for evidence of this need simply have a look at the speeches at last month’s rally.
I do not direct this article to the relatively solid minority of right wing unionists, who have an obvious and fundamental conviction that the UK must remain intact.
I’m concerned instead with those who position themselves on the left in Scotland and maintain a pro-UK stance. I must confess this group fascinates me far more than their allies on the Scottish right. I am convinced that many within Labour are well aware that the prospect of Milliband as Prime Minister and Lamont as First Minister is not the alternative vision for the union Scottish voters seek. Britain needs far more than a Reagan inspired cost of living campaign to create an economy that ‘works for all’. It needs massive structural change.
Though Lamont often describes support for Scottish self-determination as both evil disease and arcane hobby: I’m sure that she has many colleagues who have a more nuanced and less contradictory views. In the same vein I am confident that many Labour supporters do not subscribe to the something for nothing narrative, or indeed the party leadership’s privatising tendency.
We must therefore assume that many in Labour are genuinely committed to left wing politics and are far more radical than any of their leaders would like to admit. Many are also committed trade unionists. Yet whatever future plans they may harbour for a global dictatorship of the proletariat, in the present they need to stop standing the way of progress.
Insistently I am told that, in seeking a better society north of the border I am betraying the working classes of Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and every other great industrial city in England.
Leaving aside Labour’s consistent betrayal of its roots when in power, I don’t see why solidarity cannot function across borders: when it can and frequently does. By the same token if I thought for a moment that any of the cities, or regions of England could benefit their citizens through local democratic action of their own, I would not see this as a betrayal of Scotland. I would see it as an example.
In a perverse dance with a chimerical middle England, the working class majority has been scorned, derided and othered for short term political gain by Labour and Tory alike. The process of building social cohesion in England will be far more convoluted, to put it mildly, than it is in Scotland, precisely because they have yet to appreciate the particular solidarity realised north of the border.
To stay in the union is to acknowledge the need for a race to the bottom in equality terms. Unlike nationalism, egalitarianism is not an arcane concept; for equality is what defines the shape of our daily lives, our hopes, our possibilities.
Bizarrely, by describing Scottish self-government in these terms, I provoke far more ire from those who support Westminster than the tartan clad fanatics of Labour’s imagination.
Class Warriors
All too often the unionist left reveal the bleak core of their defence of a state which, uniquely in Western Europe, has never experienced a full scale popular revolution. Take for example Neil Findlay and Tommy Kane in the Scottish Left Review’s Time to Choose.
The view that independence will provide the platform for socialist advance is based on naive hope rather than grounded in reality. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly true that the current economic and political reality within the UK is regressive, with little sign that things are going to fundamentally change soon. However, even with that knowledge we believe the debate has to be framed around what offers the best potential for change in the future.
This sounds like a remarkably defeatist approach from such firebrands of the left. The real ‘narrowness’ in Scottish politics today is this: that sections of the left insist on unionism, when as the above quote demonstrates the positive, progressive case for sticking with Westminster is conspicuous only by its absence. As it happens the best critique that I have read of a post-indyref Scotland comes from a Jacobin (who happens to support Yes) Rory Scothorne.
As Rory points out, Thatcherism remains the ghost at the feast of all conversations on Scotland’s future. However what is often omitted from this dialogue is that the Iron Lady’s real significance is twofold – her inability to understand Scotland and the fact that she relished the role of class warrior. This combination wrecked all vestiges of class-consciousness at a UK level. Hence the demise of socialism in England and the ongoing divorce of the trade union movement and the Labour Party.
Given the state of the UK today, expressions of Scottish egalitarianism: such as meaty projects like the Common Weal, are wished out of existence in the hope that a caricature of the SNP can suffice for opposition. In their delusion Labour think that they can replicate their anti-BNP/UKIP set piece battles in England. As so often happens in Scotland, the political reality has a peripheral role in the conversation.
What independence evidently offers is change. In seeking to borrow good practice from other governments in northern Europe, the point is not simply to copy what they’re doing, but to build a new consensus around the idea of equality. In a nation as conservative and welded to neo-liberalism as the UK radicalism consists of fairly mainstream tenets – the acceptance of a role for a state, the ideals of public good and equality – words that are absent from the Westminster discourse. The potential of Scotland to become the first society to escape from the cold grip of neo-liberalism should fill all of the Scottish left with a Maclean or Maxton like zeal. Scotland has its own left-wing traditions and these should have the opportunity to find fruition, through whatever constitutional means available. A bloody minded approach defined by a cognitive dissonance that pretends nation states don’t exist and that the SNP are fascists is nothing short of the betrayal of a Scotland desperately in need of change.
Whether unionist or not, the radical left needs to make their demands, not just their criticisms, vocal. If that is done with enough panache over the coming years, the results for Scotland could be transformative. Whatever the political landscape in a new Scotland, we need to escape the highly conservative and centralised political structures of the UK if we want to build an alternative.
In fact, in the absence of the imminent global overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, this goal seems entirely laudable. In a world in which capitalism and democracy no longer go together we have to make workers understand their significance at a local level. Why Scottish Labour’s left would seek to exclude themselves from this process is baffling. Especially given their own government’s record on inequality.
We must remember where we are. We live in a state governed by a two party system in the pay of global high finance with a tax haven at the crucible of power. In British terms, the Danish model of renewable community ownership or the Norwegian oil fund would be derided instantly as far left policy. As Marx says we have to understand the circumstances in which we operate: in British politics this is a cross party right wing consensus. In Scotland we have precious opportunity to forge a new one.
In Britain there is no tradition of building up social cohesion and solidarity at a national level. Remember it took two world wars to get the UK on the road to socialism. What terrible catalyst would be required to make her follow that path again?
There are many on the left who clearly prefer the enormous injustice of the current status quo to a socialist Scotland. Like a religious cult they expect the day of judgement to be just around the corner: a situation in which their virtues will shine all the clearer.
I would argue that the real crime is not the creation of new states, this is an inevitable historical fact. The real crime is exploitation and its denial. The vision of a new Scotland reclaiming lost ideals of social cohesion and public good fills me with optimism. This isn’t about the denial of history – it’s about an understanding of solidarity.
Arguing for a socialist Yes: reclaiming the local
The last century was one in which numerous macro solutions to humanity’s ills were tried and failed. The overwhelming hope of socialists in this century has to be radical change at a local level.
Because I am writing this in the United Kingdom, the ears of many will prick up and hear the beginnings of conservatism in the above statement.
Such responses take us to the heart of why Britain remains a highly conservative country; it ignores the fact that true radicalism has to be local in character; though its impact can echo across the globe.
For far too many on the left in this country, taking democracy nearer to the people becomes parochial. The audacious fury of Neil Findlay is always instructive in this regard: so furious in fact that he is able to claim that the union could deliver social change against three decades of undeniable fact. The link between our appalling health outcomes and the failure of successive UK government’s to tackle de-industrialisation with anything other than soundbites and statistics is quietly ignored.
The real lesson that we can take from our Nordic neighbours, and it’s not a ‘model’ any more than universal suffrage was a ‘New Zealand Model’, is the importance of local democracy.
Now there are many who would argue that focusing on localism is just an excuse to leave the wider structure intact. They must be looking at the problem through a very Anglo-Saxon lens. Real socialism shouldn’t feel the need to wait for a messianic revolution to try and enact utopia at a local level. Take the small Andalusian town of Marinaleda for example: the socialist municipality that has full employment and builds houses for its citizens in the heart of Spain’s economic crisis. With 2,700 citizens, it could provide a model to revive towns in the bleakest parts of Scotland’s central belt.
This blindness in the present state for the capacity of local control of resources to provide the bedrock for an equal society, must be addressed now while we have the public platform to discuss constitutional questions. Solidarity must be universal in its reach, but time and time again we see that action and empowerment cannot be enforced from a higher plane.
By relentlessly confronting the No camp with their own inability to describe how they think Scotland (or England) could be better governed, we can win the argument hands down. Johann Lamont’s slogan that constitutional change is an irrelevance will be exposed for the barefaced opt out that it really is. We need to move towards the crux of the matter and learn to talk of self-determination and empowerment as the norm not the exception. We have an opportunity to call out those on the left who support the union and claim to be progressive, while denying the importance of who makes the decisions, who raises, spends the cash and on what. We can also succeed in making the constitutional argument relevant to every Scottish community. Positive moves in the Northern and Western Isles on this front could be an early indication of how this process of devolving from Holyrood and beyond can function as part of the Yes narrative.
To those bristling at such delusion from a closet Salmondista in red clothing I would cite in my defence the figure that many agree was the last socialist to hold any real sway in the United Kingdom, Tony Benn:
Democracy is what is controversial in Britain. Not socialist rhetoric, nobody cares about socialist rhetoric, anymore than they care about what bishops say on a Sunday about brotherhood, so long as nothing happens till next Sunday. But when you raise the democratic question, then I tell you you’re in trouble. I’ve learned that all my life. Not only are you in trouble at the top, but you’ve mobilised support down the line. People really are interested and leaders are opposed to it.
Whether or not we end up making all of our laws in Edinburgh or London: we will still live in a state that is ludicrously over centralised by European standards.
The almost exclusive ownership of the localist agenda by the British right has caused a profound disconnect between the ability of communities to affect change for the benefit of their inhabitants. Taking its cues from the anti-elitist Powell, the Thatcherite machine was able to rip up entire villages and neuter local government, while still claiming that it stood for localism, or the common man, over central government. Like the coalition’s Police Commissioners, the Neighbourhood Watch was conjured up to give locals a say in protecting their own property and precious little else.
History has shown us that we will only get a perverse caricature of local democracy from a UK government. This tradition is alive and well. As we’ve heard on the coalition’s recent offer of powers on the Bedroom Tax but not tax powers: only the axe will be devolved.
On the unionist left there is a deafening silence: punctuated by the odd rant featuring the north of England, socialist dogma, and Blairite soundbites (often mixed together in a surreal and very bitter cocktail).
All these things considered my plea to members of the Scottish Labour Party is as follows:
Please understand that my support for independence is defined entirely by the possibilities a Yes vote offers, not a dogmatic belief in nationalism. I am told, time and time again, that those who share this opinion with me are fundamentalists, committed to an arcane concept, nationalism, that is not about the reality of what I or my children will live through. This view is patently incorrect.
I have no interest in defaming any other Scot’s love of the place they call home, however they intend to vote in the referendum. To do so would defeat the entire exercise. We have a short time on this earth and a short time to make it better. I do not believe that the United Kingdom is capable of delivering anything other than the bleakest of futures for the majority of its citizens. It doesn’t do a good job of protecting their rights, empowering them, or bringing them together. Equality in Britain in the past two decades has exploded. The parliament that your party was instrumental in creating is more transparent, gender balanced and forward looking. I think it can do a better job at reflecting Scotland’s needs on all matters than Westminster can, it’s as simple as that.
I know that because of such realisations, the press, the media and prominent politicians brand Yes supporters like me as either naïve or on a trajectory that will inexplicably result in fascism. Even though, historically, fascism was the product of unionism, not self-determination. By contrast we should be proud that our path to self-government is tolerant, inclusive and defined by a lack of violence and aggression at every turn. Change the kind of language you use now and you can be proud of this too.
Finally I don’t know anyone within the Yes Campaign who thinks that independence is a magic bullet. All of us realise that, if we achieve a majority for independence on 18 September, the real tasks begins the day after. The challenging, but remarkable work of building a new society, is one in which all Scots can participate in. Where would we start? I leave you with the following statement from Marinaleda’s website, which was neither too poor, nor too wee, to chart its own path:
We have always thought that liberty without equality is nothing, and that democracy without real wellbeing for real people is an empty word and a way of deceiving people, making them believe they are part of a project when in fact they are not needed at all.
It seemed to us that in this field there should be no limits; that the people should have a dream of collective welfare and must then in fact turn to struggle, because the Left if it is genuinely revolutionary cannot reject, either in thought or in action, any of the people’s seemingly unachievable aspirations.
In this way we were able to win each and all of the things that we were obviously lacking.