04.03.2010

Left mirror of UK state

Allan Armstrong of the Scottish Socialist Party's international committee argues for the break-up of Britain - giving nationalism a socialist coloration in the name of 'internationalism from below'

As Nick Rogers points out in his report of the February 13 second Republican Socialist Convention, held in London, I believe his comments are “indeed typical of the ‘Brit left’” (‘Debating with left nationalists’, February 18).

Nick says: “Treating England as a foreign country is bad working class politics and fails to recognise the reality of the British state.”

The first point I would make is that Nick must hardly have been listening. The whole thrust of my contribution at the convention, taking on Peter Tatchell’s abstract republicanism, was exactly to highlight the imperial and unionist nature of the British state, and the formidable anti-democratic powers the British ruling class has under the UK’s crown powers.

Nick, somewhat revealingly, talks of me “treating England as a foreign country”. Now England certainly is another country. This is even recognised under the terms of the union - which recognises England, Scotland, Wales and part of Ireland (officially Northern Ireland, but colloquially and wrongly Ulster) as separate entities. However, I have never used the word ‘foreign’ to describe England. Is that how Nick describes Ireland, France or any other country in the world? There are some words and phrases, such as ‘social dumping’ and ‘foreign’ which I think form part of the language of hostile nationalist forces and should be rejected in socialist discourse.

Now, the CPGB takes some pride in the solidarity work of Hands Off the People of Iran, a united front organisation it initiated. Do CPGB members consider Iranian socialists to be “foreign”? Does the CPGB secretly think that joint work can not be effective because British and Iranian socialists do not live in the same state? Nick invokes a mythical international unity provided by the British left. However, a great deal of the CPGB’s work has been trying to combat the opposition of the largest ‘Brit left’ organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, to Hopi. The largest socialist organisation in Scotland, the Scottish Socialist Party, voted to support Hopi at its 2008 conference.

The SSP is more than willing to go to meetings in England, Wales and Ireland, organised by others, to argue the case for united action across these islands. Internationalism from below is a hallmark of how the SSP tries to organise. Our international committee organised the first Republican Socialist Convention in Edinburgh, with socialists from all four nations. The SSP has subsequently sent speakers to both England and Ireland.

Whatever reservations we may have had about the limited time for discussion of the national question, socialist republicanism and internationalism from below at this convention, we engaged fully, providing two platform speakers and another three members in the audience.

So let us now look at the second largest ‘Brit left’ organisation, which was invited to participate, the Socialist Party. I will quote Nick’s explanation for its failure to turn up at a meeting with representatives of the largest socialist organisation in Scotland. “Quite possibly SPEW deliberately avoided a potentially embarrassing meeting.” Embarrassing for who? Certainly not the SSP.

Nick also says: “We should encourage a class-based identity that encompassed migrants and the working class internationally.” So how does the British left, which Nick champions, match up to this? Last year we saw the EU electoral challenge by the left British chauvinist ‘No to the European Union, Yes to Democracy’ campaign (with its notorious opposition to ‘social dumping’), bureaucratically cobbled together by trade union officials, the SP and Communist Party of Britain. It also had the somewhat incongruous left Scottish nationalist bolt-on provided by Solidarity (although to their credit, many of its members refused to engage, and one prominent member advised people to vote SSP).

In contrast the SSP stood as part of the European Anti-Capitalist Alliance EU-wide electoral challenge, bringing Joaquim Roland, a car worker member of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France to address meetings in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.

So, given the choice of No2EU and the EACA, where did the CPGB stand? Quite frankly it made itself look foolish. It never raised the idea that No2EU should form part of the EACA’s international campaign. It placed nearly all emphasis on demanding that No2EU put support for citizen militias in its manifesto (support for migrant workers facing combined state, employer and union official attacks would have been far more appropriate). Then, failing to get support for citizen militias, told people to vote instead for the Labour Party and hence the very non-citizen militia, British imperial troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere! Even the SWP and SP did not stoop this low.

When Nick mentions his support for “a class-based identity that encompassed migrants”, he also fails to mention the woeful record of the ‘Brit left’, in Respect or the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party over this issue. The SSP voted at its 2008 conference to give its support to the No One Is Illegal campaign.

At the convention Chris Ford made the valuable point that the UK state, far from uniting the working class on these islands, divides it. The ongoing partition of Ireland is only the most striking case. The bureaucratic institutions of the British Labour Party, and the trade unions (TUC, STUC, WTUC, and the northern committee of the ICTU) frequently divide workers and play one national group against another.

Luxemburgist

Nick takes up the argument made by Toby Abse, to elaborate his own position. Toby argued that the successive acts of union (1535-42, 1707 and 1801) had the effect of creating a united British nation, and that the British working class and its institutions were now organised on an all-British basis. Therefore, following Luxemburg, he believed that attempts to address the national question in Scotland or Wales were either irrelevant or divisive. To be consistent, Toby should have argued that all UK state institutions, currently devolved on a ‘national’ basis, should be abolished, since they must from his viewpoint promote disunity.

However, Nick, who has certainly also called himself a Luxemburgist in the past, is now a member of the CPGB, so in opposing Toby he has to make some contorted arguments. The CPGB believes there is a British nation and a British-Irish nation (the Protestants of the ‘Six Counties’) but only Scottish and Welsh nationalities. So Nick goes on to say that, “In Scotland and Wales there clearly was a strong sense of national identity and national questions existed.” First, you would wonder why, if the historical thrust of the creation of the UK has been to bring about a united British nation (for most of the ‘Brit left’, Ireland quickly drops from view!) and a united British working class, why should you consider it at all worthwhile to make any concessions to what could only then be reactionary national identities.

The reality, however, is that the UK state was formed as part of a wider British imperial project, which tried to subsume Welsh, Scots and Irish as subordinate identities. Whilst the British empire ruled the roost, there was a definite thrust towards a British nation, but this was partly thwarted by the unionist form of the UK state. Once the British empire went into decline, those still remaining hybrid imperial identities - Irish-British, Scottish-British and Welsh-British - have gone into decline too, as more people have asserted their Irish, Scottish and Welsh identities. This decline in British identification has been most rapid amongst workers and small farmers, whilst support has been clung to most fiercely by the ruling class and sections of the upper middle class.

Only amongst the unionist and loyalist section of the people living in the Six Counties has a more widespread British identity been retained (although this has moved from Irish-British to Ulster-British). Indeed, it is in the Six Counties that the true nature of British ‘national’ identity is shown most starkly. It is here, amongst the loyalists, that fascist death squads and other forms of coercion have created the worst repression, way beyond anything achieved by their ‘mainland’ British admirers, in the National Front or British National Party. The British Conservatives have just linked up with those more ‘genteel’ Ulster Unionists, but still sectarian and reactionary.

The moves to break up the UK have their origins in wider ‘lower orders’ movements, such as the Land League in Michael Davitt’s days, the independent Irish trade union movement of James Connolly (founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party) and Jim Larkin’s days. It was John Maclean (founder of the Scottish Workers Republican Party), with his support, particularly amongst Clydeside workers, who offered the most consistent challenge, from 1919 onwards, based upon active campaigning for the Russian Revolution and the ongoing Irish republican struggle. He adopted a ‘break-up of the UK and British empire’ strategy, which was sharply marginalised as the post-war international revolutionary wave came to an end between 1921 and 1923, allowing a left British and reformist perspective to strongly reassert itself.

In other words it has been the national question which has been to the forefront of the democratic and republican struggle in these islands. Without seeing this, you are left, like Peter Tatchell, supporting a rather formal republic, with no real idea where the support is coming from. Nick conjures up the “demand for a federal republic … both in England and in Scotland and Wales”. This is but a left cover for the last-ditch mechanism used by the British ruling class, from the American to the Irish War of Independence, to hold their empire and union together. The Lib-Dems keep the federal option in their locker, to be dragged out whenever other mechanisms such as home rule or devolution fail to hold the line.

Colin Fox also made clear in his contribution that the British ruling class could even accommodate a formal republic, if it felt it was necessary. So Nick’s republican suffix to his proposed federalism provides another paper cover. We saw the nature of such republicanism in the Rupert Murdoch-backed campaign for a republic in Australia. What it amounted to was a repatriation of the current crown powers, and their investiture in the presidency. Not surprisingly, this proved not to be a winning formula!

Middle class nationalist attempts to renegotiate the union have also emerged, as the British empire went into decline. The Irish Home Rule Party, Cumann na nGaedhael, the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Social Democratic Labour Party and (I would argue) the post-Good Friday Sinn Féin have all fitted this mould. Whatever, their formal political position (eg, an independent Scotland, or a united Ireland), as these parties have become the vehicles for local business and middle class interests, this has been matched by a retreat from their original stated goals, and new compromises with the UK state.

Just I would argue that the CPGB’s blanket support for the British unionist and imperialist Labour Party candidates at the last Euro election provides a classic example of left British nationalism in action, I would also argue that any socialists pursuing a strategy which tail-ends their local nationalist party - eg, the SNP - act as left nationalists.

National movement

The strategy behind the SSP’s republican socialism, exemplified in the Calton Hill Declaration, is to take the leadership of the national movement here from the SNP. To counter the SNP’s own ‘international’ strategy - support for the global corporate order, for the use of Scottish troops in imperial ventures, for the British queen, and acceptance of a privy councillorship (Alex Salmond) - the SSP’s IC counters with a genuinely international strategy based on anti-imperialism, anti-unionism and internationalism from below.

The British left tries to mirror the UK state in its organisational set-up. This attempt to apply an old Second and Third International orthodoxy was always contradictory. Applied to the UK, it just seems to confuse the ‘Brit left’. Occasionally debates emerge within the CPGB about, whether to be a consistent Leninist, it should not reconstitute itself as the CPUK, and in the process, add its own twist to Irish partition. Both the SWP and SP operate essentially partitionist organisations in Ireland, highlighted by their failure to raise the issue of continued British rule (with its southern Irish government support) in elections there.

The UK currently acts as a junior partner to US imperialism. It has been awarded the US licence to police the corporate imperial order in the north-east Atlantic, and to ensure that the EU fails to emerge as an imperial challenger. Apart from its membership of Nato, the provision of military bases, and such ‘police’ actions as bringing the ‘terrorist state’(!) of Iceland into line to bail-out the banks, the UK performs this wider role, with the 26-county Irish state acting as its own junior partner.

Politically, the ‘peace process’ (with the Good Friday, St Andrews and now the latest Hillsborough agreements) and devolution-all-round (Scotland, Wales and the Six Counties) represents the British and Irish ruling class strategy to provide the political framework to most effectively maintain profitability for corporate capital in these islands. In this, these two states can draw upon the support of the EU and the USA, as well, of course, their ‘social partnerships’ with the official trade union leaders.

The SSP has realised that the British and Irish ruling classes have a political strategy, which covers the whole of these islands. You could be forgiven for thinking that much of the ‘Brit left’ finds it difficult to see beyond Potters Bar or, where its members do live further afield, thinking their politics just depends on the latest dispatches sent out from their London office.

Nick somewhat condescendingly says: “The English must make clear that they had no wish to retain either nation [Scotland or Wales] within a broader state against the will of their people” (that’s very good of you, Nick!), but then bizarrely adds: “… neither would they force them to separate”. Well, Nick, we all know the ‘Brit left’ have no intention of forcing us out of the British unionist and imperial state and its alliance with US imperialism. That is the problem.

The SSP, though, is quite prepared to take the lead in making this decision ourselves. However, we will continue to insist that the break-up of the UK and ending of British imperialism are something that workers throughout these islands have an immediate interest in achieving, and will continue to argue our case to socialists in England, Wales and Ireland. We do want unity, but not the ‘Brit left’-imposed bureaucratic unity from above: rather a democratic ‘internationalism from below’.