14.08.1997
For queen and country
Just about the entire Scottish establishment has now signed up for Blair’s sop parliament
Last week one of the worst kept secrets in Scottish politics was officially acknowledged. The Scottish National Party’s national council followed the lead of its executive and committed the party to calling for a double ‘yes’ vote in the devolution referendum and taking up three seats reserved for it on the executive of Scotland Forward.
A whole array of establishment organisations, groups and parties are now lined up behind SF, the official campaign for ‘yes, yes’. Alongside New Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and a minority of Tories are the churches, trade unions and a variety of business interests.
All are united in the campaign to deny the Scottish people their right to self-determination. They are for accepting a sop in a rigged referendum where the only other option, supported by the Tory majority, is the status quo. And amazingly self-proclaimed revolutionary groups - Scottish Militant Labour and the Socialist Workers Party - have joined the establishment lash-up.
The overwhelming SNP support for jumping on the SF bandwagon represented a victory for Alex Salmond’s ‘devolution to independence’ strategy. Winnie Ewing, SNP president, echoed this by describing home rule as the base camp to the eventual summit of independence. The lonely voice opposing this line was former SNP leader Gordon Wilson. He argued that by supporting devolution the SNP weakened its commitment to full independence - but then surely the SNP’s retention of Elizabeth Windsor as head of state in its ‘independent’ Scotland must also question that commitment.
The SNP’s willingness to throw itself behind Labour’s proposals and to collaborate with Scotland Forward opens up the debate as to the role of the Dewar/Blair parliament: will it be a way of strengthening the union and the United Kingdom, or will it be the first step to some other constitutional arrangement? At the risk of stating the obvious, Labour holds the former position, while SNP, Tories, Liberal Democrats and SML, from a positive and negative perspective, prefer the latter interpretation.
The Labour government is quite clear - its white paper is peppered with references about a Scottish parliament defending the integrity of the British state: “Devolution is about strengthening the United Kingdom” (Scotland’s parliament p13) is just one example. It calculates that a Scottish parliament with limited power will dampen down the national question in Scotland and so modernise and preserve the union.
The contradiction between this and the SNP’s perspective of that parliament is obvious, but the unity of Labour and the SNP on preferring reform from above to mass action from below is equally obvious. It was inevitable that the warm welcome given to the SNP by Scotland Forward was going to be too much for some. Jim Stevens, unionist and Scottish Labour executive member, pointed this out in a stinging attack on SF where he described it as “a cross-party alliance too far”, declaring that the white paper will be “the graveyard of Scottish separation”.
In contrast Donald Dewar however was “absolutely delighted” by the SNP support and declared he would be happy to share a platform with Alex Salmond. This response shows the Labour leadership wants to incorporate the nationalists into the campaign for a parliament with limited powers, thus undermining the influence of the SNP and its project of ‘independence in Europe’.
There is only one alternative voice being raised to demand Scotland’s right to decide its own future. The Campaign for Genuine Self-Determination is calling for an active boycott of the September 11 referendum.
The job of revolutionaries is not to tail behind the establishment, to choose the ‘best’ from what is on offer. It is to demand what we need, to ensure that Scottish national aspirations are channelled along independent working class lines.
Nick Clarke