Forget the SNP - It is the SPGB people need

So the results are in. The UK remains under the grip of the Tories and Boris Johnson. While Scotland once again has the Scottish National Party as the overwhelming majority party. 

The SNP is the party of a certain segment of the Scottish capitalist class. The SNP has gone out of the way to reassure the business community, including the transnational corporations, that they have nothing to fear because an independent Scotland would not threaten their interests. There can be no question that the SNP will act to protect the interests of the capitalist class, even though this means defending the interests of huge transnational corporations based outside of Scotland. The SNP has been skilful in presenting one face to the people and a very different one to the corporations. To the former the SNP claim to be social democrats who believed in greater equality and to the latter, the SNP stands for a strong economy and continued growth. The SNP leaders support a continuation of capitalist exploitation in an independent Scotland. This was summed up in their  proposal to bind the trade unions into ‘partnership’ . In practice, this means accepting attacks on their wages and working conditions for the so-called “national interest”. The SNP has "tacked leftwards" in rhetoric, though not at all in policy implementation. The SNP seek to be masters in its own house. The SNP seek to make maximum use of the state to foster the development of the Scottish capitalist class. Voting for nationalist parties simply helps to confuse and divide an already confused and divided British working class even more. Scottish workers should not be fooled by sugar-coated patriotism used by the bosses to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

Nationalism abandons notions of workers solidarity and seeks an outcome that necessitates the dividing of workers, denying any role for English or Welsh trade union activists. The history of the British labour movement is the history of the intertwined fates of the Scottish, English, and Welsh working class, for example, the legendary Keir Hardie was an MP for a London and then for a Welsh constituency. The links between Scottish, English and Welsh working people have forged through common struggles and shared experiences a potentially powerful political force. Rising support for nationalism means Scottish workers are turning their back on class unity and joint struggle with their brothers and sisters south of the border, and strengthening reformist illusions that hope lies in a new constitution and a sovereign Edinburgh parliament.

The left nationalists urge Scottish workers to reject this historic solidarity with their English and Welsh fellow-workers, on the grounds that it is impossible to achieve progress at a British level; only in Scotland. But they are wrong if they think that a more radical, more socialistic agenda will emerge in an independent Scotland. The new Scottish state would find its policies constrained exactly the same sort of undemocratic, technocratic, neo-liberal rules of globaliSation that left nationalists stringently oppose. As with the formation of the Irish Republic, the political landscape will be dominated not by a consciousness of class but of “national interest”.

A new Scottish state would have an overwhelming incentive, like Ireland, to cut business taxation to gain a competitive advantage over its larger neighbour and would actively discourage collective co-ordinated action by workers across all of the nations of the United Kingdom. Scottish English and Welsh workers do not respond to an abstract appeal for “international solidarity”, they don’t need one, they act out of their already existing unity. The fact is that we live in a single state with a single economy and trade unions have created an organic unity with identical interests and a common consciousness. Independence will tear the fabric of unity apart. In Britain a division of the working class along national lines would be a huge step backwards for the workers movement, even from the weakened state it is currently in.  For though class struggle is at a very low level, those struggles that have taken place, including in Scotland, have arisen out of nationwide disputes.  The creation of an independent Scotland would break that unity and make the task of advancing the workers movement more difficult.

 

For too long, the left nationalists has accepted the orthodoxy that there exists a “right to national self-determination”, and that we should support any struggle to that end. At first hearing, the very sound of a “struggle for national self-determination” suggests that it is democratic and progressive. To throw off the yoke of imperialism, to fight the oppressive occupiers and the foreign corporations. The Left is wrong, and that the damage caused by this mistaken idea is second only to that caused by the corruption to the socialist cause from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

 

SCOTLAND NEEDS SOCIALISM