25.02.1999

‘Union’ Jack and defence of the British ‘nation’ - part 2

Allan Armstrong of the SSP completes his response to Jack Conrad’s ‘Unenlightened myths’ (Weekly Worker November 19 1998)

Conquest, class and Federalism

Geographical determinism and ‘revolutionary centralisers’ are unconsciously relegated to the back-burner when Jack approaches the period of capitalist ascendancy. Instead, ‘objective’ economic forces take their place. The key sentence in Jack’s analysis of the seemingly ‘inexorable’ rise of the ‘British nation’ is the following: “The industrial revolution and the fruits of a worldwide British commercial empire cemented a merger of the main peoples in Britain.” Class struggle and the nature of the politics involved in cementing “a merger of the main peoples in Britain” are largely airbrushed out of his analysis.

Jack adopts the Whig view of history. Under the impact of the Enlightenment and the rise of liberalism, the early Whig political theories associated with the rise of the UK were given a new social and economic historical underpinning by David Hume, William Fergusson, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mills, in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This provided the basis for viewing firstly the rise of commercial society, then the industrial revolution, as the major contributors to the development of the British ‘nation’ through “a merger of the main peoples”.

But industrial development did not automatically lead to a merging of peoples in the new factories, mills or workshops. Certainly, many industrial centres in the UK did witness a wider mixture of peoples (and not from the constituent nations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), but also black ex-slaves and Asian (for example Lascar seamen) settlers and refugees from Europe. In some cases, workplaces employed very ethnically mixed labour forces; in other cases specific jobs were reserved for particular ethnic groups; whilst in yet others - for example, the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast - there was institutionalised ‘ethno-religious’ exclusivism. Similar divisions could also be seen in the residential areas serving the major new industrial centres.

A much clearer understanding is gained by seeing that developing capitalism, itself continuously contested through class struggle, transforms the conditions of possible state and nation formation. The actual outcomes were not the result of some ‘objective’ process which followed inevitably from the industrial revolution. Class struggle determined whether it was greater national unity or continued and increased disunity which prevailed. Internal class struggle or external conquest decided the social and political character of new nations and states.

Jack does get nearer to the real reason for the development of a ‘British nation’ when he also states that this was the result of “the fruits of a worldwide British and commercial empire”. For, it was the possibilities of colonial exploitation which led to the creation of a genuinely British ruling class, made up of English, Scottish and later Irish and Welsh components. It was this British ruling class which promoted a top-down ‘British nation’.

However, this emerging British ruling class was unable to form an incorporating British state. They opted instead for a union state, which constitutionally, and hence administratively, recognised the existence of separate English, Scottish and Irish nations. The Scottish and Irish-born sections of an increasingly British ruling class still jealously guarded remnant national ‘property rights’, whilst pooling their resources for the more effective exploitation of the ever-widening British empire. But the more the ‘lower orders’ fought for and gained greater political representation, the more devolved the administration became - in Ireland in particular, but also in Scotland and increasingly in Wales too. The political ‘reappearance’ of Wales in the 19th century, after the extension of the franchise to a Welsh-speaking, or recently Welsh-speaking, middle class happened despite Wales having politically ‘disappeared’ as a result of the earliest and only fully incorporating Act of Union in 1535!

All of this is very hard to explain if you adopt Stalin’s theory of nation-building, with its “common culture” following directly as the result of a growing “common economic life”, greater “economic cohesion”, and the “development of the means of communication (not least in print)”. For, all of these largely economic developments were far more advanced in the UK than in Georgia, the example given by Jack. The unionist, as opposed to unitary, nature of the UK state is much easier to understand, when you see that an emerging British ruling class had to struggle to promote its top-down ‘British nation’ identity through its UK state. The British ruling class had to confront widely held English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (and other) national and ethnic identities. Ironically, the wider development of national consciousness associated with the rise of democracy also gave a more coherent form to the subordinate nations too. This was particularly the case with Wales.

Each subordinate nation was divided by class too, with popular traditions, which also allowed for ‘internationalism from below’ and more conservative traditions, which made alliances with the British ruling class. This made the conservative wing of the subordinate nation more receptive to the top-down promotion of ‘British nation’ identity. So resilient were the popular vernacular traditions that a ‘British nation’ identity never fully displaced these other national identities, even at the height of the British empire. Instead there were hybrid British and English/Irish/Ulster/Scottish/Welsh/ Indian/West Indian/black identities. This left the British ruling class along with its UK state and ‘British nation’ very much a ‘hostage to fortune’. When circumstances changed and the British empire declined, so too did the wider ‘British nation’ identity.

The rise of anti-imperialist movements within the British empire - of organisations of black and Asian minorities in ‘Britain’, and of national movements in Ireland, Scotland and Wales - have all forced an increased questioning of the top-down ‘British nation’. Their struggles have helped to expose the contradictions underlying the ‘progressive’ development of the UK. They have reopened the fault-lines in the state of a ‘nation’ created top-down.

Jack even stumbles upon the real nature of the UK and its ‘British nation’, but he has to immediately deny it! The ‘British nation’ is just another example of the “state communities such as Belgium, Spain or the former Soviet Union”. As an older, more established state, the UK may have been more successful in promoting the English language, but there still remain Welsh, Gaelic (and now Asian) language minorities, whilst the states Jack mentions have each tried, at times, to impose French, Castilian or Russian throughout their territories.

Jack’s social democratic theory of nation formation is also highlighted in his lofty referral to “a spreading English language”, associated “with the development of capitalism”. This decidedly economistic view downplays the role of state oppression. Official English did not just ‘spread’, but was often imposed by the state at the expense of Gaelic, Welsh, Scots and, as many working class kids in England, Scotland Wales and Ireland would also be able to testify, through the attempted suppression of local dialects in schools.

Also, because the UK rose to be the dominant world power in the 19th century, it had the economic, social and political clout to more effectively promote ‘Britishness’. But even the Belgian state, now federalised, had some success in the 19th and early 20th centuries in promoting ‘Belgian’ nationality. For a long time the largest Belgian political parties were organised on an all-state basis. As a relatively new state with minor and declining imperial influence, it is not surprising that Belgian identity should more easily give way to Flemish and Walloon identities. The UK state may have been around for longer and been more successful in promoting a ‘British nation’ identity, but this too is undergoing a process of reversal with the decline of British imperialism.

At each and every stage, the greater territorial unity of the UK state was brought about by either conquest, as was the case in Wales and Ireland, or through a deal between ruling classes, as happened in Scotland in 1707. There were no struggles from below of a British ‘nation’ trying to constitute itself as a British nation-state. This is different from those national movements which led to revolutions for Italian and German unity, particularly in 1848-9, some time before Cavour and Bismarck pursued their campaigns for Italian and German unification by ‘revolution from above’.

Furthermore, if a particular ruling class resorts to conquest to increase its territories, then the brutalisation involved in this process leaves its mark on the state. It has severe consequences for the subordinate classes among the conquering nation too.

The US state, for example, was moulded by a legacy of the bloody conquest of native Americans and the enforcement of black slavery. This can perhaps explain the particularly difficult conditions under which labour, socialists and communists have tried to organise in the USA. The USA has unfortunately produced too many heroes of the class struggle who were also martyrs, like the Wobbly, Joe Hill. In the USA, conquest and enslavement have been such central parts of the state and nation’s territorial formation that brutality remains a very visible feature to this day. This is highlighted by the lengthy imprisonment of American Indian activist Leonard Peltier and the threatened execution of black activist Abu Jamal Mumia.

In the case of the UK, conquest was mainly a feature of the territorial incorporation of the ‘peripheries’, particularly Ireland and the Highlands, and this left its mark both on the UK state and in its methods of operating, particularly in Ireland. But it was in the British colonies that brutalisation became central features of the colonial administrations, as capitalism was introduced from above, through conquest and enslavement.

The UK state has been formed by a combination of external conquest, ‘revolution from above’, and even ‘counterrevolution within the revolution’. This has involved various class struggles depending on the period of history under examination. We can also see periods when classes and peoples, previously viewed as ‘backward’ or reactionary, were transformed by struggles in new historical circumstances.

When Henry VIII brought about the incorporating Union of Wales in 1535, it was partly associated with the ending of the remnant communal landholding. This was also very much a feature of the conquest of Ireland and the incorporation and military suppression of the Highlands. In Tudor England, however, Ket’s Rising against enclosures contributed to the successful defence both of freehold land and a yeomanry. This helped to make Norfolk a major centre of revolution in Cromwell’s time.

The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland followed from a complex century of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggle involving a variety of classes. The first period of revolution was initiated in Scotland by the cross-class alliance of the Covenanters in 1638 directed against the growing royal absolutism of the Stuarts. This inspired a revolt in Ireland in 1641 against the recent conquest of the old Gaelic order and seizure of remaining communal land. The Scottish example also spurred on the rise of the Puritan party in England, based on the rural gentry, merchants and manufacturers from 1642. As the revolution intensified, the Covenanter alliance in Scotland split, producing more revolutionary leaders and drawing more support from the ‘lower orders’. The more revolutionary wing was drawn into closer alliance with the puritans in England, whilst the moderates split off and joined the royalist counterrevolution.

A similar process took place in England. However, here, not only the gentry, merchants and manufacturers were drawn in, but also yeomen, artisans and apprentices. This helped to create a clear revolutionary republican force, the Independents, led by Cromwell. However, in Ireland, the English and Scottish ‘revolutionary’ forces revealed their ‘counterrevolutionary’ aspect, since like the crown before, they had no interest in ending the yoke over the Irish - wanting only their land or enforced labour. It was this which drove the ‘native Irish’, or ‘woodkerns’, into the arms of reaction.

Seeing the possibility of greater enrichment at the expense of the Irish, many Cromwellian supporters increasingly turned their back on their previous near-millenarian revolutionary ideals. They began to lord it over their fellow Independents too. This produced the decisive struggle within the revolutionary forces, putting the Levellers in opposition to Cromwell. The Levellers drew their support from the ‘lower orders’. They opposed Cromwell’s attempt to send them to Ireland and instead saw the ‘native Irish’ as possible allies against the attempts both of the old crown forces and the newly rich revolutionary elite, now represented by Cromwell, to re-impose the ‘Norman yoke’.

The Levellers were crushed at Burford in Oxfordshire in 1649. The possibility of an alternative path of development, based on a mixture of freehold and common proprietorship, and of a completely different relationship between the peoples of these islands, was aborted. However, later struggles for Irish national liberation, drawing in the mass of downtrodden Irish peasantry, were still marked by their desire to overthrow the legacy of Cromwell. This highlights the earlier point that states formed by conquest or ‘revolution from above’ leave deep scars. These are likely to be ‘picked over’ again and again, when new historical opportunities present themselves.

The revolutionary forces in England outstripped those in Scotland, forcing Cromwell to invade the country of his former allies, to prevent royalist reaction taking root. He created an English imperial republic. However, by suppressing the Levellers and enriching his supporters in Ireland, he gave new impetus to the larger landholders and merchants, and set the pattern for England’s agricultural development. Instead of a freeholding yeomanry there was to be increased economic, social and political domination by large landowners. Cromwell represented the ‘counterrevolution within the revolution’. His actions paved the way, after his death, for his former allies, now also fearful of challenges from below, to invite back the Stuart monarch, the better to unite the old ruling class with the new. Former revolutionary republican General Monck became Lord Albemarle under Charles II.

However, under the restoration, reaction pushed things so far back, particularly when James II took the throne, that the Covenanters were forced to reorganise in self-defence in Scotland. Only this time the majority were now drawn much more clearly from the ‘lower orders’. They formed the revolutionary United Societies in the 1680s. They led the revolution from below in Scotland in 1689. Monmouth’s failed rebellion of 1685 in England, also consisting mainly of the ‘lower orders’, had seen the reappearance of the Levellers’ sea-green emblem. However, when the ‘Glorious Revolution’ did arrive in 1688, Monmouth’s prior defeat ensured that it was very much a ‘revolution from above’ in England. The new constitutional monarchy of William of Orange was largely the creation of the new Whig section of the ruling class. But its rule was strongly contested in Scotland - not just by the Jacobite right, but more importantly by the Covenanter left.

Ireland, however, once more experienced ‘revolution’ in the form of conquest. The resultant massive land transfers, permitted under the draconian penal code directed at Catholics, helped to greatly increase the overall power of the large landholders and create a new reactionary political force to replace the old Jacobite and catholic lords. These landlords have remained a continuing reactionary block with wider UK influence. They were responsible for setting up the counterrevolutionary Orange Order, which not only confronted the United Irishmen, but had cells in the armed forces used at the time of Peterloo and the radical rising in Scotland. The continued existence of a huge, unassimilated, constantly resentful, Irish catholic peasantry, coupled to the official catholic nature of the infant UK’s prime colonial competitor, absolutist France, also contributed to what was to become a central feature of the new ‘British nation’ identity. The UK state continued to promote Protestantism. The fading legacy of this still remains in the established Church of England and the constitutional requirement for a protestant monarch, even though civil society has moved on. In the ‘Six Counties’, however, British national identity remains virtually inseparable from Protestantism. The Orange Order is still ‘defending’ a ‘protestant Britain’ at Drumcree.

But in the 1690s a UK state-promoted British ‘nation’ identity could only begin to take place through crushing the recent legacy of Scotland’s ‘revolution from below’. If the increasingly powerful Whig landlords and merchants were to enjoy the fruits of their ‘Glorious Revolution’ from above, this legacy had to be dealt with decisively. The immediate counter-revolutionary Jacobite threat had been contained by the actions of the United Societies at Dunkeld in 1690. Later, to consolidate his rule and overawe both enemies and ‘friends’, William authorised the Glencoe Massacre of 1691. There were many features of the new Scots parliament, which William and Anne and their landlord supporters found objectionable. The landlords were particularly incensed at the loss of direct patronage over the clergy, which greatly weakened their social and political power and could block their attempts to evict their tenants.

Therefore, the main thrust of the 1707 Act of Union was to eliminate the more revolutionary legacy in Scotland. The voting on the union of parliaments, after extensive bribery of the ‘parcel of rogues’ in the Scots parliament, divided on clear class lines. The more rich and influential, the bigger the majority for abolition. However, amongst the ‘lower orders’ the response was clear. The Act of Union was met by rioting in the streets, particularly in the recently revolutionary Edinburgh and Dumfries.

When the War of American Independence took place from 1776, it is again possible to identify the class conflicts involved. Although the more revolutionary farmers and tradesmen formed the vanguard of the revolution, they were marginalised and repressed. Instead the new United States were consolidated under the control of large land and plantation owners and the big merchants. The more radical ‘lower orders’ failed to ally with the black slaves or native Americans. Refusing to support a wider emancipation, they helped to strengthen the position of the new rising ruling class over them. The USA was able to establish itself as an imperial republic. Cromwell’s English imperial republic, defeated over a century before, now took firm root, but on American soil.

However, although further revolution was aborted in the USA, the republican example still provided impetus for revolutionary challenges in France and in Ireland, Scotland and England. Here, what began as noble-led movements for constitutional reform gave way to consecutively more revolutionary challenges from the ‘lower orders’, particularly after 1789. Those peasants who had been written off by the upholders of ‘the great Whig tradition’ as bearers of the deepest catholic reaction, particularly in France and Ireland, now showed their revolutionary ardour. And the struggle to overthrow the UK state increasingly took the form of ‘internationalism from below’, particularly with the formation of the United Irishmen, United Scotsmen and the London Corresponding Society.

With the defeat of the naval mutinies in England and the Strathtay Uprising in Scotland in 1797 and the crushing of the United Irish Rising of 1798, the state-promoted British ‘nation’ took on a new impetus. Already built up as a consciously counter-revolutionary identity against the French Revolution, the British ‘nation’ was now extended across the Irish Sea, with the 1801 Act of Union. The fact that the largely landlord parliamentary representatives from Ireland could join the same political parties - Whigs and Tories - as their English and Scottish class brethren, shows that a British ruling class was being further cemented.

However, with the extension of the franchise, as a result of the massive suffrage campaigns, including that of the Chartists, it became more necessary to emphasise the subordinate nation identities in the UK - particularly Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The newly enfranchised middle class too wanted to enjoy the fruits of the British empire, but they also wanted ‘protection’ on their national ‘patch’. This is why the Liberal Party, the great middle class party of the 19th century, was increasingly forced to adopt home rule for these three nations, either through mainly external pressure in Ireland, or internal pressure in Scotland and Wales.

However, the Liberals represented the many successful industrialists who rose from the middle class to join a widened British capitalist ruling class. These people saw little need for the national career protection advocated by the middle class in the Liberal Party. Their sights were clearly empire-wide. Faced with the prospect of home rule, they ‘jumped ship’ and became first the Liberal Unionists, before merging into the Conservative and Unionist Party. In Ulster, south Wales and Clydeside, the Liberals were split and eclipsed as a result.

With the extension of the franchise to male skilled workers, it became even more necessary to emphasise the multi-nation nature of the UK. The top-down promotion of British ‘nation’ identity might deeply penetrate the working class, particularly in the heyday of British imperialism. The Conservative and Unionist Party and the Orange Order made considerable inroads into the working class in this period. In the latter years of Queen Victoria, an imperial monarchy was revamped along populist lines, the better to extend the ‘British nation’ to the ‘lower orders’. But, even when it came to whipping up support for imperial war, another prime device for promoting a common ‘Britishness’, the army recruiting posters, still had to appeal to Paddy, Jock and Taffy.

Trying initially to relate to those growing numbers of workers disenchanted with the Liberal Party, the newly founded Independent Labour Party also found it necessary to adopt home rule all round. This was to reflect and contain the much stronger remnant national identities amongst the working class, not yet displaced by the imposition of ‘Britishness’, or being recreated to meet new conditions. The Independent Labour Party itself had quite varied characteristics according to which nation or region it was organised in. Keir Hardie, the Scots-born christian socialist and pacifist leader of the ILP, displayed all the characteristics of this hybrid British/Scottish national identity. It was ‘Britishness’ born out of imperialism which allowed racism to colour his politics. When oppressed Lithuanians fled the tsarist empire to seek work in the Lanarkshire coalfields, “Hardie demanded their removal on the grounds their presence is a menace to the health and morality of the place”! Rightwing Labour historian Kenneth O Morgan states that “Hardie had been linked … with British socialism, not with the Glasgow parochialism of the Clyde or the very Celtic communism of John Maclean”! It was ‘Britishness’ too which led Hardie to seek compromise with the Liberals and to emphasise reform through Westminster in his many campaigns to be elected MP in Scotland, England and Wales.

From Keir Hardie to Tony Blair, ‘Britishness’ has been a prime conduit for the subordination of the vernacular radical and revolutionary traditions of the working class in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Furthermore, since the British ‘nation’ is an identity promoted from above by the UK state, it invariably pulls its advocates amongst the ‘Brit left’ and the British Marxists into a defence of the British state too. ‘Internationalism from below’ is completely foreign to this political current.

Their most ‘advanced’ defence of the British state is support for a ‘federal republic’. Yet federalism and constitutional republicanism represent the ruling class’s last ditch attempt to hold on to their state. It is at this point that the previously abstract politics of British Marxism joins with the politics of the ‘advanced’ section of the British ruling class to oppose any real revolutionary challenge from below aiming to break up the UK state. What differentiates the ‘revolutionary’ British Marxists from their merely radical brethren is the former demand a higher price for their accommodation - a federal republic; whilst the latter will settle at a cheaper price - monarchist devolution.

Any examination of federalism in the history of the UK, British nation and empire highlights its counter­revolutionary role. Thus, as early as the American War of Independence, the radical reformer, Major Cartwright, “handed the king an address pleading for ‘American legislative independence within a renovated empire’.” Then they “would gladly take their new place as members of ‘the grand British League and confederation” (G Newman The rise of nationalism Routledge, p201). Faced with colonial revolt in British North America in 1837, James Roebuck, MP for Bath, advocated a federal republic to offset US interests. Lord Durham met Roebuck and, acting on behalf the government, drew up a federal scheme which preserved “the supremacy of the crown of England” (J Kendle Federal Britain Macmillan, p22). During the turbulent years of the Irish Land League campaign and Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, the Radical MP, Joseph Chamberlain, proposed a federal solution with an imperial parliament for Westminster, a supreme court and subordinate legislatures for England, Scotland, Wales, Ulster and the rest of Ireland. In 1920 a federal solution for the UK was drawn up by the Speakers Conference, involving Tories, Liberals and Labour; to deal with the rising challenge of the Irish national movement. And today, the more far-sighted ideologues of the British ruling class, such as Andrew Neil, are also contemplating a federal republican future for ‘Britain’.

Now in 1891 Engels advocated a federal republic for England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Earlier both Marx and Engels had advocated Irish independence. However, by 1891, the powerful Irish Land League, representing the tenant farmers, had been outmanoeuvred and sold short by its parliamentary advocates, whilst the Irish parliamentary party itself had been hopelessly split over the Parnell affair, marginalising the once strong home rule movement. It appeared possible that the new land reforms might take the ‘sting’ out of the British connection. The revolutionary impetus of the Fenians or Irish Republican Brotherhood appeared to have exhausted itself. British socialists were beginning to organise in Ireland. The popular classes in Ireland were at a low ebb.

However, more concerted class struggle did arise again. It was mainly based on the new working class, including unskilled and women workers. James Larkin and James Connolly found that, in order to organise at all, they had to break the stranglehold of the British trade union bureaucrats and found the heroic Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Connolly also had to fight the ‘Brit left’ of his day to win recognition for the Irish Socialist Republican Party at the Second International Congress. In Paris the Irish delegation formed part of the revolutionary wing, whilst the British joined the compromisers. Developing class struggle made Engels’ 1891 formulation redundant.

Lenin recognised the right of Ireland to exercise self-determination and break from imperial Britain. Lenin was also fairly scathing of those who advocated federalism once the issue of self-determination had been raised in a concrete situation: “The right to ‘self determination’ means neither federation nor autonomy (although speaking in the abstract, both come under the category of ‘self-determination’). The right to federation is simply meaningless, since federation implies a bilateral contract” (VI Lenin ‘The right of nations to self-determination’ Questions of national policy and proletarian internationalism Progress, p91). Put in another way, ‘it takes two to tango’! Those who try to prevent workers breaking up existing states (including imperial reactionary ones like the UK) on the grounds that ‘working class unity’ must be preserved, are behaving like the worst trade union bureaucrats who try to stop members taking action in one area, by telling them to wait until everywhere else is ready. Often it is precisely decisive local action which is needed to provide a catalyst for wider action.

When it came to World War I, both the ‘Brit left’ ILP and British Marxist SDF split between openly pro-war and pacifist factions. In contrast, Connolly, who had been organising amongst the most oppressed sections of the working class, began to turn the Irish Citizen Army towards insurrectionary plans, against Irish home ruler John Redmond’s attempts to recruit the Irish Volunteers for the services of British imperialism.

John Maclean, on Clydeside, also worked amongst the most oppressed workers. He campaigned amongst a very mixed working class. In contrast to the “British socialist”, Keir Hardie, the “parochial” Scottish John Maclean, campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the Lithuanian miners, and of course for the Irish too. Least affected by notions of Britishness, they helped to give Maclean the political strength to organise against the war.

After the failure of the 1919 40-hours strike, Maclean looked to what was being achieved instead through a political challenge in Ireland. Following Connolly, he took up the slogan of a workers’ republic, in his famous 1920 address, “All hail, the Scottish Workers Republic!” Maclean had not become a Scottish nationalist, but a Scottish internationalist, joining with the struggles in Ireland, India and Egypt for the break-up of the UK and British empire, which he wanted to push on to world communism. The international revolutionary wave of 1916-21 clarified the truly revolutionary road for communists living in the UK. Although this view was marginalised and apparently lost after the defeat of the international revolutionary wave from 1921, it points the way in a future revolutionary challenge to the UK state. The choice lies between the ‘British road to socialism’, with its bureaucratic, top-down ‘internationalism’ and its successive rearguard attempts to shore up the ‘British nation’; and ‘the break-up of the UK road to communism’ and its championing of ‘internationalism from below’.

Jack, however, still sees the creation of the ‘British nation’ as an undoubted plus for humanity. Unfortunately, for Jack a hiccup has occurred. The ‘objective, inevitable progress’ of the British ‘nation’ is now under threat. “It has only been with the visible decline of British imperialism that Scottish nationalism has seriously emerged. The closure of the old steel, shipbuilding, engineering and mining industries, the discovery of North Sea oil and the election of four successive Tory governments created genuine nationalist sentiments amongst the Scots, and not only those who voted SNP.” Now perhaps if British imperialism was not allowed to go into decline the ‘progressive British nation’ could be allowed to continue until ‘the revolution’!

There is not a word in Jack’s particular analysis here that most current British social democrats, whether of old or New Labour allegiance, could disagree with. Their prescriptions, of course, differ in the face of recent political challenges. New Labour wants to boost British imperialism by bombing Iraq and imposing the ‘pacification process’ on the ‘Six Counties’. It also wants to reform the UK state through ‘devolution all round’ and a modernised second chamber to replace the House of Lords - all this to be fronted by a populist monarchy.

Jack, to his credit, opposes the bombing of Iraq - but then, so do those old Labour social democrats, Tony Benn and Tam Dalyell. Jack, along with the majority of British Marxists (SWP and Socialist Party) and increasing numbers of the old left Labour, seems to accept the partition of Ireland now that Sinn Féin has gone constitutional nationalist. Furthermore, along with Andrew Neil, Peregrine Worsthorne and an increasing number of the Tories, the Liberals and no doubt soon the Labour Party too, Jack can see that Blair’s devolution policy is unlikely to hold the line for the UK. The unity of the UK state will instead need a federal response.

Last year, when confronted with Blair’s rigged Scottish devolution referendum, the CPGB-PCC came up with a stay-at-home abstentionism on September 11. This did not exactly chime with the rest of the British Marxists and the ‘Brit left’. But the CPGB-PCC’s federal Britain position leaves it well placed in the future, as the crisis facing the UK unfolds, to play a similar role to that Militant played over Blair’s devolutionary proposals - critical cheerleaders for the British ruling class’s political project to maintain the unity of their state and the ‘British nation’.

Faced with such a crisis, will the CPGB-PCC ignore the white and the blue and try to rescue the red in the ‘butcher’s apron’? Maybe ‘Union’ Jack would like to consider why it is that two of the crosses in this flag are red? Just which class is being martyred when it gives its loyalty to the ‘British nation’?!