21.09.1995

For a Scottish Workers’ Republic

Reply to ‘No concessions to nationalism’ (Weekly Worker 104) from the Scottish Republican Forum (a united front of left nationalists, socialists and communists who share a republican perspective)

PETER MANSON in his article deploys an ingenious argument: nations and nationalities have the right to self-determination in principle, but should not put it into practice. How far do you think you would get telling workers that you support the right in principle of workers to strike, but they must never put it into practice on the grounds that the striking workers will split the existing unity of inaction! We are sure Peter Manson will agree with us that the revolutionary tactic in the case of workers in dispute with employers or state is to:

1. support and encourage those workers advanced enough, organised enough or desperate enough to take action;
2. to assist in spreading strike action as wide and as deep as the situation merited;
3. to politicise the struggle as far as we were able to.

It is obvious that the Labour Party and the TUC, both bastions of the UK and now irredeemable facets of the British establishment, do the exact opposite; they discourage workers from action, they limit action as much as they can, sell out as quickly as they can and mislead workers in struggle as far as they can. The consequence of this is that workers are not united, except in temporary circumstances in defiance of the trade union and Labour Party bureaucracies. Indeed, the level of success the Labour Party and TUC have in disuniting workers is painfully apparent from the following two examples: steel closures and dock closures. In the 1980s the steel workers in Wales and Scotland are urged by our British Labour Party and TUC (wearing their ‘regional’ colours) to pit themselves against each other in a desperate attempt to prove that each group was harder working, more productive and more exploitable than the other. The same dismal exercise in futility befell the dock workers of Davenport in England and Rosyth in Scotland in the 1990s.

The reality we face is the unity of the ruling classes and its agents compared with the disunity of the workers.

The question then is: How do we build workers’ unity - politically, socially and economically? By insisting that the right to self-determination is put into practice in all its aspects. The right of the office/factory/school/hospital, etc, branch to engage in industrial action and to call on others to support. The right of communities to organise and declare their homes ‘no- go areas’, as happened in the anti-poll tax revolts, rent strikes in Glasgow earlier this century, and, until recently, areas of the Six Counties. And finally the right of nations to break away from the state that oppresses them.

Now we take issue with Peter over the Six Counties. He betrays a certain slippage of point of view when he says, “For the IRA, against the British army” (Our emphasis), but in the next line asks, “Are the Scots oppressed by the English in the same way?” (our emphasis) Perhaps Peter could explain his choices of oppressors at some future date, but let us deal with the substantive point here. The British army, with its Scots, Irish, Welsh as well as English regiments, have undertaken several centuries of oppressive actions on these islands as well as abroad. The difference between the levels of oppression the peasants and, latterly, workers of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England have experienced is one of degree. The stronger, more organised the resistance to the British state has been, the more brutal the oppression.

For the moment our ruling class judges that MI5, the Special Branch, and agents provocateurs will keep the lid on things in England, Scotland and Wales. Both Welsh and Scottish republicans have been subject to harassment, frame-ups imprisonment and probably assassination. In 1985 Willie McRae, a republican within the SNP National Executive, was found shot in his car. The crown is involved in whitewash attempts even now to ‘prove’ it was suicide. The armoured police charges against the miners in the 1980s, against the anti-poll tax protesters in Trafalgar Square and against anti-fascist marchers in London show that state oppression is alive and kicking in England too (and is not this how the state first responded to Civil Rights marches in the Six Counties 25 years ago?).

Let us return to the national question in the Scottish context again. Now Peter’s problem is that he cannot conceive of independence being anything other than meaning Scotland has its own ‘bourgeois parliament’. Peter gives the Scots no other choice than continue with the oppressive British state or get an Edinburgh version of Westminster, courtesy of the SNP. Scottish republicans and communists are much more ambitious than that, have much more confidence in the Scottish working class than that.

While the SNP want ‘independence’ from Westminster, full stop, we want independence from all aspects of the ruling class, especially its Scottish contingent; we want the break-up of the UK, abolition of the monarchy, starting with its derecognition by a Scottish Workers’ Republic, and an alliance with workers in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England and elsewhere to deal with international capital.

Peter fears that ‘making concessions to nationalism’ means making concessions to the right “in the present period of reaction”. He makes the same mistake in respect to the grievances of the Scots (and no doubt the Welsh also) as the Labour Party and the Socialist Workers Party do in respect to the grievances of the residents of Tower Hamlets in the face of the threat from the BNP. Urging people to vote Labour because the nationalists are a threat to unity or because the BNP are nasty ignores the reality that people are sick to the back teeth of bad housing, rotten jobs, chronic unemployment and of the sham of parliamentary/local government ‘democracy’ and the UK parties.

Precisely because there is an upsurge in nationalism in Scotland we must counterpose it with the need for a Scottish Workers’ Republic, which will lead to the break-up of the UK state and hence pave the way for a genuine unity of workers throughout these islands and beyond. This is how we must combat xenophobia and racism.

Our activities are based on much more than opportunistic tail-ending an increase in SNP support. Peter should perhaps reappraise his thinking on this question and his commitment to the principle of self-determination, if his attitude to it, and the importance he attaches to it, is determined by the position of the SNP in the opinion polls. If Peter imagines that, at the point at which “the call for independence becomes so all-embracing that separation appears inevitable”, anyone will start listening to him and his comrades, then dream on. The question for the moment is either support the Tories and Labour in their fight to save the Union or join republican communists and socialists in our fight to harness the drive for self-determination and ensure it retains a progressive direction.

We note and welcome the recent formation in England of the Republican Forum. The republican road to the break-up of the UK is not an exclusively Scottish affair (How can it be when the war in the Six Counties has strained its fabric to breaking point?). We note here that, on the question of building the unity of the working class, the issue of establishing a federal republic versus a federation of republics has yet to be debated by ourselves in the Scottish Republican Forum.

We are combating the nationalism of the right in the only coherent way there is. We repeat again: the unity of the UK is the unity of the once disparate elements of the ruling classes of these islands. Our unity is yet to be built.