13.02.1997

Make Scotland workers’ cause

As the Tories make Scotland a national issue, how should the left respond?

Scotland and the constitutional question made their entry into the Britain-wide election battle this week. Given the importance that the demand for self-determination poses to the existing bourgeois constitutional monarchy, it was inevitable that it would do so. This is why it is so important that revolutionary organisations make the struggle for self-determination not simply a ‘Scottish’ issue, but one that must be taken up by the working class throughout the UK state. 

Both the Socialist Party (previously Militant Labour) and the Socialist Labour Party have been sorely lacking in this respect. We have already pointed out that in ML’s perspectives for 1997 there was no mention of Scotland (Militant January 10). An ML member told us at a national Socialist Alliance conference that during the election campaign ‘it would not be something members would be raising on the doorsteps in England’. The SLP does not have a common policy on self-determination for Scotland and Wales, as apparently it is something for the Welsh and Scottish to decide and should not concern the working class of all nationalities.

Yet the Tory Party has made Scotland’s relationship to the rest of Britain a national issue. In fact health secretary Stephen Dorrell was put in charge of marketing the Tories’ anti-devolution position to those of us south of the border. Unfortunately his chauvinist zeal went a bit too far when he announced that the Tories would take away any Scottish parliament - albeit a sop - delivered by the Labour Party.

Michael Forsyth was backed by John Major in saying that this was not Tory policy and that any constitutional “omelette” could not be unscrambled by the Tories. The central importance of this constitutional question was made very clear when Dorrell was immediately removed from his marketing post.

There is no denying that Labour’s so-called parliament would create a constitutional “omelette” with little advance for democracy. Bourgeois pundits have not tired of pointing out the problematic involved, particularly around the ‘West Lothian question’. Nevertheless it is being recognised that the Scottish question will not go away and from their point of view a constitutional omelette would be better than a threat to the very constitution itself.

The working class throughout the UK state must make this threat real. The democratic deficit in Scotland must be fought across national boundaries in order not only that the Scottish people win democracy, but that the battle for democracy is won for all those living under the same oppressive state.

The Scottish people have taken up the battle against the British constitution. This at the moment can be taken down a nationalist and reactionary trajectory if the movement in Scotland sees the working class as well as the state in Britain as its enemy. It can be disarmed into the sop of Labour’s parliament, which instead of democracy offers only bourgeois stability and rule in a different form.

We have also seen how the Tories are rewriting history to legitimise the cause of British nationalism. Michael Forsyth quoted the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320 against the Scottish National Party’s call for an independent Scotland in Europe, declaring that such calls went against the historical unity of Britain:

“The Declaration of Arbroath is the definitive exposition of our Scottish identity ... Our constitutional arrangements are the product of our history and at every stage of that history we have remained sovereign ... In 1707, by the Union of the parliaments, we became voluntary and equal partners in the UK by sovereign treaty.” (Scotland on Sunday January 26)

The fact that the formation of nation states in economic unity was a feature of the development of capitalism can easily be forgotten by those bent on validating their rule as if it always existed. The rewriting of history can feed not only Scottish nationalism - which itself is being successful in declaring the existence of a mythical Scottish nation since Malcolm Canmore came to the throne in the middle of the 11th century, and claiming the Victorian invention of national identity (such as the tartan) as its national heritage - but British nationalism as well.

Given a successful movement for independence in Scotland without its revolutionary championing amongst the working class in England and Wales, it would not be surprising to see the development of an English nationalism to bolster British nationalism as reactionary forces attempt to cohere a population against a Scottish revolt.

The movement for democracy is a potentially powerful one which the working class must become the hegemon of. This means infusing the movement with a revolutionary agenda which unites the class in not simply ‘scrambling’, but shattering the British constitution and the state it serves.

A revolutionary struggle can only be developed by fighting for genuine democracy in Scotland. British, Scottish and English nationalism can be brushed aside in this struggle by the working class waging a united fight around the demand for a federal republic which challenges the very basis of the constitutional monarchy.

Helen Ellis