For class unity and world socialism

The Scottish Socialist Party has said the party will not participate in a new Yes Scotland organisation if it puts the economic recommendations of Andrew Wilson’s Sustainable Growth Commission at its centre. Colin Fox said the SSP would instead make its own separate case for independence in the event of a second referendum being called. He said the economic outlook presented in the SNP’s growth report was “straight out of Tony Blair’s playbook.” 

“The key to victory in a second independence referendum is winning over working class No voters unconvinced by the 2014 Yes case and whose votes are essential to win,” he said writing in The National. “However I feel duty bound as a member of the wider independence movement to say Andrew Wilson’s voluminous Sustainable Growth Report offers nothing to working class Scots under austerity’s cosh these ten years past. Rather it offers them another ten years of the same! The Scottish Socialist Party will not participate in a Yes campaign that puts this report at its centre. It risks driving hundreds of thousands of former Yes voters into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn." 

Left-nationalists never learn.  The Socialist Party puts our class before all else, whereas, Colin Fox collaborated with millionaires for Scottish independence.  Some accuse its members in Scotland of being unpatriotic. We are in fact proud to be anti-patriotic. But just because we are not prepared to back the efforts of Scottish nationalists to break away from the United Kingdom does not mean that we are a Unionist party. We don’t support the Union. We just put up with it! Socialists are just as much opposed to British nationalism as we are to Scottish. Our rulers have decided to ask us our opinion on the matter. We should be flattered, but don’t be fooled. Constitutional reform is of no benefit or relevance to us. 

The Socialist Party argue that every nation-state is by its very nature anti-working class. While we certainly sympathise with those oppressed and displaced on national grounds, we refuse to simply identify with the many "solutions" offered up by the liberals and leftists in support of the victims. The “nation” is a myth as there can be no community of interests between two classes in antagonism with one another, the non-owners in society and the owners (the workers and the capitalists). The state ultimately exists only to defend the property interests of the owning class at any given point in history – which is why modern states across the world send the police and army in to break strikes and otherwise seek to protect the interests of the capitalists and their businesses at every turn.