12.12.1996

For a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales

For Scottish self-determination

Opinion poll after opinion poll reveals an overwhelming majority in Scotland yearning for radical change. Indeed many - and not only Scottish National Party voters - hunger for autonomy or even outright independence. Every grievance, every strike, every issue in Scotland is coloured by the unresolved national question.

The United Kingdom is a unity imposed from above. It is the unity of hereditary crowns, not the voluntary union of peoples. Hence there exists an inborn democratic deficit. Scotland has no right to freely determine its own future within the monarchical constitution. Instead Scotland is expected to humbly go cap in hand to Westminster.

Before Elizabeth Windsor grants her royal assent, the most paltry reform must be debated and agreed by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. And, of course, given the huge discrepancy in populations, and thereby parliamentary personnel, between Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the one hand, and England on the other, the Scots can only secure their demands courtesy of English MPs and peers.

British imperialism’s relative decline has created new tensions and fault lines (not the return of almost entirely spurious ancient enmities). As the ruling class frantically and destructively turns inwards in the drive to increase the rate of exploitation and thus restore some level of world economic competitiveness, the old popular identification with the state begins to fray. In the perceived absence of a viable socialist alternative sectionalism comes to the fore. The masses in Scotland thereby see themselves as nationally disadvantaged within the United Kingdom.

Being at the same time wily careerists and fawning royalists, the Labour leadership - along with its STUC, Church of Scotland and Liberal Democrat allies - proposes a devolved Scottish parliament within the United Kingdom. Blair says that if next year the Scots help further his selfish ambitions and he gets into No10, they will get a referendum (for the Scots a worrying and unwanted retreat from his previous solemn commitment that Labour would immediately table legislation).

Labour’s parliament, Labour’s referendum is an insult. Blair and his Millbank cronies, not the Scottish people, will decide and carefully hone the wording of the referendum. That, they hope, will ensure the result is the one they want - ‘democratic’ consent to a toothless parliament in Edinburgh.

Blair’s parliament is in fact a cynical devise, a prophylactic designed to preserve the status quo, a change to prevent change. It does not even formally embody popular sovereignty. Legally binding statutes will prohibit its members from actually modifying by one iota Scotland’s constitutional relations. What Blair offers is hardly more than a glorified county council. The people of Scotland will not become citizens. They will remain the crown’s subjects. Blair’s parliament is a cheap sop and as such must be treated with contempt.

Consistent democracy requires that any referendum includes the option of a parliament with full sovereignty: in other words, a constitutional assembly with the right to annul the 1707 Act of Union and to freely decide on Scotland’s options, up to and including full independence. If Blair refuses to concede this minimum demand, then we will campaign for a mass boycott of what can only be described as a bogus referendum. To be really effective, that has to be backed with deeds. Blair’s sop must be answered throughout Scotland and the rest of Britain with mass meetings, demonstrations, political strikes and civil disobedience upholding Scotland’s right to self-determination.

Unlike bourgeois nationalists and their various ‘left’ apologists, we communists do not favour the break-up of Scotland, England and Wales. Even if the majority in Scotland favour independence, communists will still argue for unity. Not to do so would be a dereliction of our proletarian internationalist duty and a concession to nationalism. We favour the coming together and merger of the world’s people, not their endless division into tiny and ineffective nation states. The working class is best organised in large, centralised units. At the very least that means within the framework of the state we aim to overthrow. Under present circumstances there would be nothing remotely progressive about a Scottish army, a customs post at Gretna Green and the splitting of the deeply bonded trade union movement.

Separation only becomes a communist demand if unity is imposed by force, if the relationship between England and Scotland was primarily characterised by violence. It must never be forgotten that 1745 - the heroic last stand of Scotland, according to nationalist myth makers - was in actual fact nothing of the kind. It was a dynastic, not a national liberation struggle. The Jacobite rising attempted to reinstate the Stuarts onto the united English and Scottish thrones. True, the Young Chevalier rallied a number of Catholic highland clans. However, he was opposed by other clans and above all by protestant England and protestant lowland Scotland.

In contrast, between Ireland and England/Britain there is a whole history of force and violence. Communists therefore demand the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland and the unity of Ireland.

In Scotland and the rest of Great Britain we fight to obtain the closest unity of the working class in but against the state. To overcome the disunity created by the constitutional monarchy, communists put forward the alternative of the federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. This is both a democratic and a transitional aim. The federal republic establishes the voluntary union of the peoples of Great Britain. If this is achieved, as we intend, using proletarian methods, it also means the revolutionary destruction of the constitutional monarchy and thus the realisation of our minimum programme.

Unfortunately a whole spectrum of the left - from the sullen to the enthusiastic - supports Blair, not revolutionary democracy. Scottish Militant Labour, the Democratic Left, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of Scotland et al utterly fail to grasp the necessity for independent working class politics: ie, the making of the workers into a hegemonic political class, which theoretically and practically masters the whole gamut of social contradictions.

Workers in the lackadaisical schema of this semi-Labourite left are meant to concentrate on trade unionism and local bread and butter issues. Of course, that leaves them doing exactly what they already do spontaneously. However, when it comes to the politics of the United Kingdom state, workers are supposedly incapable of pursuing their own solutions. Our modern-day Mensheviks therefore urge workers to pressurise and make demands on the ‘lesser evil’ wing of the establishment. That explains why the semi-Labourite left will ‘critically’ vote for Blair’s sop.

Stemming as it does from vulgar evolutionism, economism and empiricism, the method of these opportunists, when it comes to immediate demands, leads to results that are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from mainstream Labourism. Something by way of reform, no matter how pathetic, is always desirable to those who imagine that a Labour government somehow represents, either for the workers or society at large, a step towards their predetermined socialism. Eschewing the revolutionary minimum programme, they have no scientifically elaborated strategy with which to actually advance the protracted class war needed to overthrow the existing state.

Of course those who set their sights on little more than nothing in the here and now usually end up with little more than nothing. The politics of piecemeal change are the politics of disappointment. That is why the flip side of strikeism, localism and voting Labour is posing left. The semi-Labourite left typically oppose the communist minimum demand for a federal republic with abstract and disembodied calls for socialism: ie, a socialist Britain or a socialist Scotland. The same ‘leftist’ trick is used over Ireland - SML and the ‘official communists’ being past masters. The semi-Labourite left has no wish nor intention of siding with the IRA against the British Army. Against this minimum democratic demand they pose what is in this context a pro-imperialist version of socialism.

Absolving themselves of what they dogmatically and wrongly describe as the ‘bourgeois’ task of ending the monarchy and winning a republic in Britain, they say the only real answer is socialism. (Why not communism?) Naturally this leftist pose is never applied by the likes of these to wage or other economic demands. When it comes to trade union politics, the semi-Labourite left is in its element. It does not turn up its nose with a haughty reference to the maximum demand for the abolition of the system of wage slavery - which, like the call for socialism and communism, is quite correct in terms of propaganda.

So, in rejecting the communist minimum programme, the semi-Labourite left finds itself at one and the same time making maximalist gestures and tailing Blair. Their socialism produces a sop. Something, they argue, no matter how pathetic, is better than nothing. Hence, in the name of practicality, instead of fighting for the destruction of the constitutional monarchy, these reformist-revolutionaries tell the population to make the best of Blair’s nostrum.

This so-called step forward, say these so-called realists, the SNP included, can be used in a way that leads to greater things. The SNP imagines it a springboard towards an independent capitalist Scotland within the European Union. The semi-Labourite left, SML, the CPS, along with the Socialist Labour Party, have another idea. They seriously believe an upgraded Scottish parliament - ie, an organ of the capitalist state - can introduce their socialism.

Of course, socialism for the semi-Labourite left is not the self-liberation of the working class, the free association of revolutionary proletarians and the first stage of communism. Their socialism is national, statist and bureaucratic: ie, it is objectively anti-working class and thus anti-socialism.

While the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB urges a boycott of Blair’s referendum, that does not automatically lead to the call for a boycott of elections to a Scottish parliament - if it sees the light of day. That must be decided in the concrete. What must be emphasised though is that if communists do stand they will do so not in order to use the Scottish parliament to legislate in ‘socialism’ or some such reformist nonsense.

Communists will operate as tribunes of the people. Every act of oppression by the state will be mercilessly condemned, every violation of democracy thoroughly exposed, every movement and struggle of the masses will be militantly supported. In a word, our comrades will use parliamentary immunities, privileges and rights to boldly agitate for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state, its Scottish parliament included. Our Party has no illusions in the talking shops of the enemy class, whether they be located in the city of Westminster or the city of Edinburgh.

Jack Conrad