12.06.1997

National question - a key debate

Edinburgh Scottish Socialist Alliance and Red magazine organised a successful day school on Sunday June 1 on the national question in Scotland and Ireland

Morning session: Ireland

Unsurprisingly, Ireland was a hotly contested debate with speakers from Republican Sinn Fein, the Connolly Association, Scottish Militant Labour and CPGB presenting very different perspectives.

Ireland is a vital question for Scotland both historically and within the context of the fight for self-determination today. It illustrates the importance of having a principled revolutionary approach to self-determination. Reformism with a ‘self-determination’ gloss has traditionally seen much of the left mouth support for a united Ireland while at the same time calling for those fighting for that demand to lay down their arms. The Socialist Workers Party and Militant Labour/Socialist Party have recently been active in calling for a return to the ceasefire.

Ritchie Venton, for SML, argued that there was no capitalist solution to the Irish question. His organisation would not support the protestant majority in the sectarian Six Counties being forced to become a minority in the equally sectarian Twenty-Six Counties.

Portraying the Twenty-Six Counties as the equivalent of the Six Counties in terms of discrimination and sectarianism allows SML to dodge taking sides. It omits the fact that the Six Counties was set up as a sectarian statelet despite the wishes of the vast majority of the Irish people. The only way that this statelet has been maintained has been through discrimination and terror - the reason the IRA re-emerged was precisely because of the anger of the catholic working class at their brutal treatment at the hands of the British state and their loyalist agents. ‘Not taking sides’ leads necessarily to a pro-British stance. Democratic guarantees for the protestant people within a united Ireland are vital. But the question must be set in context - it is the same as arguing for such rights for white South Africans.

SML argues there can be no capitalist united Ireland - only a socialist united Ireland. And to get there, it calls for those fighting for self-determination to lay down their arms and return to ‘bread and butter’ issues. The centuries-long conflict must be submerged into humdrum trade unionism. But urging imperialism’s peace on the working class of Ireland delays rather than accelerates the development of an independent working class movement that can unite both catholics and protestants against the enemy state.

Economic and social issues must be linked with political questions. It was initially around housing and employment issues that the civil rights marches of the late 1960s in Ireland began. They soon flared into an armed struggle for self-determination precisely because of the link between the social issues and the political nature of the state. That and the fact that despite the stitch-up in 1922 the sense of national injustice and the yearning for self-determination remained.

All of this is not to say that there can be no criticism of the republican movement. Indeed, as I argued, the historical tragedy for the Irish masses is that they have been led by revolutionary nationalism rather than revolutionary socialism.

Nationalism unites on the basis of the merging of class differences and the allegiance of the working class to capitalists or aspiring capitalists. Speakers from the James Connolly Society said that Gerry Adams would not sell out. But, as I pointed out, Ireland’s history is littered with fine revolutionaries turned traitors.

However, criticisms of the republican movement must be put in the context of our own failures. They must also be advanced on the basis of principled support for those fighting for democratic rights against our common enemy.

Comrades from the CPGB are putting forward an amendment to the proposals of the SSA National Council discussion document on Ireland (see above). We will be fighting to make a revolutionary link between the Irish and the Scottish ‘democratic deficit’ - for self-determination, nothing less.

Anne Murphy

Afternoon session: Scotland

Platform speakers from the Republican Worker Tendency, Scottish Militant Labour and the Communist Party of Great Britain laid out their views and solutions to the national question and their attitudes towards Blair’s Scottish parliament and referendum.

Allan Armstrong (RWT) stressed the need for the SSA to adopt a republican viewpoint not just on the Scottish question. It must inform the SSA’s general politics. He advocated the break-up of the UK state along nationalist lines. His justification for this was that the existing state had united the ruling classes of its component national parts but had actively disunited the workers. Instead, what was needed was popular internationalism from below, based around the idea of communities of resistance. On the referendum, he described how the majority of the establishment in Scotland - including big business - either enthusiastically or reluctantly saw devolution as the best way of keeping power.

The SSA should campaign independently and not get drawn into the crap of the Scotland Forward campaign, which wants to polarise the debate between Labour’s sop and the status quo.

The thrust of the contribution of Alan McCombes (Scottish Militant Labour) was that while Blair’s proposals would not deliver real self-determination, they offered a limited extension of democracy which must not be refused. Independence represented a weakening of the British state, and devolution New Labour-style was a democratic advance. Thus he argued that it was our duty to critically back a double ‘yes’ vote in the referendum.

Mary Ward (CPGB) described the undemocratic denial of Scotland’s right to self-determination within the UK and how the principles of internationalism and democracy must be our starting point on the national question. To defeat the reactionary side of nationalism we muse advocate the fullest extension of democracy and self-determination, up to and including separation. However, we are for the voluntary, revolutionary unity of the working class in Scotland, England and Wales through a democratic federal republic.

On the referendum, she thought the SSA was making a serious mistake in calling for a double ‘yes’ vote and backing Scotland Forward. She called for an active boycott of the referendum with the aim of building mass civil disobedience around the slogan, Self-determination - nothing less’ and concluded that Blair’s sop was designed to contain the democratic aspirations of people in Scotland, not to meet them.

Nick Clarke