12.10.1995

Take the power

THE SNP is now Scotland’s second largest party, but the annual conference in Perth revealed an underlying sense of impotence. The SNP’s devotion to the parliamentary route makes it dependent on Westminster law-makers granting independence for Scotland.

George Robertson, Labour’s Shadow Scottish Secretary, took the opportunity to crow that Labour’s devolution proposals would provide a virtually insurmountable obstacle to the nationalists achieving their aim.

There is a surer way for Scots to win the power to control their own lives. This is through mass politics and having the vision to see Scottish problems from a communist perspective and not a nationalist one. The fight for Scottish freedom should be a fight for English, Welsh and Irish freedom too. The right to self-determination can be exercised in many ways - from complete independence, through solutions involving centralising some things and devolving others, to voluntary union. However, it can only be properly exercised under the control of ordinary people. The British state is loyal to the rights of property, not the interests of ordinary people.

SNP leader Alex Salmond is posing to the left of Labour in recognition that it is the working class which is suffering most from the British democratic deficit. He needs workers’ votes to satisfy his ambition to sit with the other European capitalist politicians in Brussels and decide the fate of other nations across the continent.

Workers in Scotland are in the forefront of the struggle against Britain’s undemocratic constitution and need to turn it into a struggle for human freedom for everyone.

Phil Kent