Them that got, are them that gets

Discontent has always provided fertile soil for nationalism. Many on the Left advance nationalism and support the nation-state as a bulwark against globalisation. This is a dangerous fallacy. Nationalism produces artificial borders between human beings based on arbitrary biological, linguistic and cultural differences, and it conceals class conflicts. There is no benevolent progressive nationalism. Nationalism is an opportunistic way to prey on people's prejudices and stereotypes. A  conception of national identity has long been useful to ruling classes wishing to divide their subjects in order to better rule them. Nationalism as a concept presupposes that a person places the interests of his or her nation above all others.

Behind the Saltire stands a ruling elite. In the end, everything that is done in the name of “Scotland” is done for the benefit of this ruling elite, even if it is at the expense of every other Scot. The flag is a tool the ruling class can use to tie all the Scottish people together, to bind Scots into believing that all that their government does is in their interest. You may wave the Saltire. Or you may look behind the flag and see who is trying to pull your strings and manipulate your emotions.

 Socialists reject the very notion of nationalism. We believe that there is no common interest between the people of a particular nation. The world is divided into two great classes, the workers and the bosses, their common class interests are so great that their cultural differences are irrelevant. We believe that human culture is much too varied to be neatly boxed up into any number of national identities. We embrace diversity and acknowledges the right of all to choose their own culture, language and beliefs. We believe that this can only be achieved by ending the fundamental division of our society, the class division. The Socialist Party challenges the very idea of classifying people into nationalities by concentrating on the common class interests that unite workers across national divides. Nationalism can never address the workers' real problems.

What is this thing with nationhood?

The capitalist class flood the air waves with illusory phrases such as, “national economic interest,” “national security,” “national unity,” “national competitiveness.” We are told that we all rise or fall together — as one nation and one people.

One of the key areas for nationalist talk is the economy. Patriotic voters are urged to ignore class divisions, shun unions, and join the bankers and bosses, sacrificing their own worker interests for the “good of the nation.” But let’s get real. Cuts, austerity measures, and wage freezes benefit only the rich, not the whole country. The capitalist economy can never work for all of us, because it’s designed for the wealthy, who relentlessly endeavour to widen the gap between rich and poor.

The Saltire or the Red Flag?

  You Can’t Beat The Enemy While Raising Its Banner

Groups seeking to seize and hold power use words their own way in order to place their efforts in the best light. Take, for example, the term “nation.” The rulers of every government wish to present themselves not as a tiny clique which has taken power by force or by fraud, but as representatives a whole "nation"and authorised to speak for it. Historically, for a “nation” to arise there had to come first the development of private property, of social classes, rulers and ruled, masters and servants. First arose the state, the chief general system of control used by the ruling class against the subject classes, and the chief instrument of war and conquest. The state must have definite territorial boundaries. If there is no private property and war, there can be no state; if there is no state, there can be no “nation.” The state is not the product of the “nation,” the “nation” is the product of the state.

National states did not exist before or under feudalism, for feudal conditions were not conducive to the development of large national communities. The feudal states were united by virtue of who ruled them, regardless of “national” considerations. The power was vested in the king, not in the nation. For example, in the Hundred Years’ War, the French vassals of the King of England naturally fought against the King of France. The feudal States were run by a given clan or kindred of a tribe that had become differentiated into masters and serfs bound to the land owned by the ruling family. Feudal states, in their backward economic relations, were unable to be national states and could evolve so only when capitalism, with its markets, commerce, money and corresponding development of the circulation and production of commodities, could unify the country.

One World

 Salmond says that devolution has failed to solve the problems facing people in Scotland and that an independent Scotland is the only framework within which these problems can be solved. The SNP argues that the problems facing workers in Scotland are due to"Westminster rule". If only there was an independent Scotland, they say, separate from the rest of Britain, then there would be full employment, higher wages, job security, better state benefits, a healthy health service and all the other things politicians promise at election times.

 Of course, devolution has failed. But that's because people's problems in Scotland were never caused by a lack of devolution in the first place. They were, and still are, caused by capitalism as the system of class ownership and production for profit. This is why independence is no solution either. As capitalism would continue in an independent Scotland, so would the problems. These problems are not caused by the form of government, and any government of an independent Scotland would still be compelled by the economic laws of capitalism to put profits before people, just as UK governments have been. An independent Scottish government would still have to operate within the constraints of the world capitalist system. It would still have to ensure that goods produced in Scotland were competitive on world markets and that capitalists investing in Scotland were allowed to make the same level of profits as they could in other countries. In other words, it would still be subject to the same economic pressures as the existing London-based government to promote profits and restrict wages and benefits. As if Ireland,which broke away from the United Kingdom in 1922 been any different. Since it is this class-divided, profit-motivated society that is the cause of the problems workers face in Scotland, as in England and in the rest of the world, so these problems will continue, regardless of whether Scotland separates from or remains part of the United Kingdom.

Independence would be a purely political constitutional change which would leave the basic economic structure of society unchanged. There would still be a privileged class owning and controlling the means of production with the rest having to work for them for a living. Just as now. Independence for Scotland therefore is a myth put about by the Scottish National Party, which further confuses the Scottish section of the working class and blinds them from the real struggle - the class struggle .

Neither London nor Edinburgh, but World Socialism!
Workers of the World unite for Socialism!

The Cliff-edge of Nationalism

Love of country, in the form of "patriotism," is a late creation. Under serfdom people were bound to the soil but they had no "country". Nor has capital any "country" even though capitalism is the precondition for building a "nation," and advocates "nationalism," and protects  "national market." The development of the capitalist and rise of nationalism has been symbiotic. However, as soon as it can, capital continues to expand and pursue the global market, using its own "nationalism" as a springboard. Simply put, nationalism is anything but natural; it is an ideology of capitalism, which serves to produce the conditions for capitalist accumulation and gives it a legitimacy. In other words, it is not some kind of natural human phenomena. It is a social, political and ideational construction. Once the nation state has been physically constructed as "political sovereign", nationalism provides the glue by which it rationalises and maintains itself, a political ideology,which takes on the role of a supposedly natural basis for social order. It is an ideology, which requires an identity with, and loyalty to, the nation, which, in turn, gives rise to the "national interest" and political duty. The highly statist and often authoritarian goals of these independence movements are seldom taken into consideration.

Many on the Left advance nationalism and the nation-state as a bulwark against imperialism. This is a dangerous fallacy. The role of nationalism has always been a source of conflict on the Left. For those on the Scottish Left the Socialist Party's consistent anti-nationalist position seems to support imperialism. But, imperialism functions quite independently of socialist attitudes toward nationalism and, furthermore, socialists are not required for the launching of struggles for national autonomy as the various independence movements have shown. Also contrary to some Leftist expectations, nationalism could not be utilised to further socialist aims, nor was it a successful strategy to weaken and hasten the demise of capitalism. On the contrary, nationalism frustrated socialism by using it for nationalist ends. It is not the function of socialism to support nationalism, even though the latter battles imperialism. To fight imperialism without simultaneously discouraging nationalism means to fight some imperialists and to support others. To support Palestinian nationalism is to oppose Jewish nationalism, and to support the latter is to fight the former.  It is not possible to support nationalism without also supporting national rivalries. With whom to side? With the Jews? With the Palestinians? With both? Where shall the Jews go to make room for the Palestinian people? What should the Palestinian refugees do to cease being a “threat” to the Jews? Such questions can be raised with reference to every part of the world, and will generally be answered by Jews siding with Jews, Arabs with Arabs, or  French with French, Poles with Poles and so forth. To be a good Indian nationalist is to disparage Pakistan; to be a true Pakistani is to despise India. And so it goes on.  The “liberation” of Cyprus from British rule only opened a new struggle for Cyprus between Greeks and Turks. There is no progressive nationalism. This is not about denying the right of a suppressed people to establish its independence; neither is it about dismissing the need to combat imperialist aggression and exploitation. Resisting one oppressor is not the same as supporting movements that seek to oppress its own people. To oppose an oppressor is not equivalent to calling for support for everything formerly colonized nation-states do. One cannot oppose a wrong when one country commits it, then support another country who commits the same wrong. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend is particularly applicable to oppressed people who may be manipulated by totalitarians and religious zealots. To oppose one evil with a lesser one must eventually lead to the support of the worst evil that emerges.

 Although socialists sympathies are with the oppressed, they relate not to emerging nationalism but to the particular plight of twice-oppressed people who face both a native and foreign ruling class. Their national aspirations are in part a sort of  “socialist” aspirations, as it includes an illusory hope of impoverished populations that they can improve their conditions through national independence. Yet national self-determination has not emancipated the labouring class in the advanced nations. It will not do so now in Asia and Africa. National revolutions promise little for the lower class. In a "free" Scotland social relations will not change and the conditions of the exploited class will not improve to any significant extent.

Cultural freedom and variety should not be confused with nationalism. That people should be free to fully develop their own culture is not merely a right but a desirable. Technological resources make it possible for people to choose their own lifestyles. The world will be a drab place indeed if the magnificent mosaic of different customs and traditions disappeared to be replaced by a homogenized world (which modern capitalism appears intent upon spreading with its MacDonaldisation). Similarly, a world completely divided and peoples at odds with one another, parochialising their seeming “cultural differences” to assert their ethinic or racial superiority would also be a backward step.

No matter how utopian the quest for world solidarity may appear in to-days world of conflicts, no other road seems open to escape fratricidal struggles and to attain a rational world society. Socialism will rise again as an global movement and on the basis of past experience, those interested in the rebirth of socialism must stress its internationalism most of all. While it is impossible for a socialists to become a nationalist, we are, nevertheless, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist. However, the fight against colonialism does not imply adherence to the principle of national self-determination, but expresses our desire for a non-exploitative socialist society without borders. While socialists cannot identify themselves with national struggles, we can as socialists oppose both nationalism and imperialism. It is not the function of Scottish socialists to fight for independence from England but to make Scotland part of a socialist society. We seek to “de-nation” Scotland, "de-nation" England, and integrated them into a socialist one world. When capitalism is overthrown  the world will be on the way to the disappearance of all nation states. Nationalism, in its essence, is a poison. Nationalism has always been a disease that divided human from human. It produces artificial arbitary borders between human beings on trivial linguistic and cultural differences, and it conceals hierarchical and class- based conflicts. There is no “benevolent nationalism.” There is no place in a free society for nation-states. So let us create a truly libertarian form of collectivism. When free associations of producers and confederations of communities replace the nation-state, humanity will have rid itself of nationalism.

An independent Scotland built upon inequality

The vote yes campaign for independence has been launched.

Nationalism divides society into more and more separate entities, create more divisions, more fears and suspicions and when the globe is totally criss-crossed with walls, fences, and border posts that we allow ourselves to become so paranoid, afraid and suspicious of each other. Officialdom drum “patriotism” into people’s heads. Ill-considered rhetoric, regurgitated mantras built on lies, fears and hatred need overturning without hesitation. Nationalistic slogans are uttered by right and left.

Revolutionary socialists have discarded the flag and the school history books with the details of so many deeds of butchery within its pages. That its workers should be patriotic is vital to each national ruling class and this, fertilised by official lies, is exploited by all governments. This appeal to workers to a fake identity with their own exploiters in the name of  “national” unity is utterly poisonous to the real interests of the working class.

What, after all, is one’s own country? One’s native land, every country, no matter under what form of government, is made up of two groups of men, consisting on the one hand of a quite small number, and on the other the immense majority of people. The first of these is seated round a well furnished table where nothing is lacking. At the head of this table, in the seat of honour, you find the great financiers, the large shareholders in companies, the factories and big shops, the landed proprietors; all are seated at this table. Also seated you have government ministers, officials of every department of civil, religious or military administration. That is your country, made up of this social inequality.

If you don't believe so, then just ask yourself why Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have the ear of Alex Salmond and you do not.

 The difference across Britain between the top 10% and lowest 10% in incomes is 95.8:1 in England (aided by the grotesque levels of inequality in London of 273:1), but only slightly less in Scotland, 93.4:1 and in Wales, 89.5:1. Despite the pervasive story of modern Scotland that we are an egalitarian land the reality is that Scotland is the most unequal part of the UK after London and the North West of England.

 If we went back to election turnout levels of only 25 years ago in the mid-1980s, nearly one million (977,742) Scots are missing from the democratic debate. The missing million Scots are mostly younger, poorer, and live in the West of Scotland and Central Belt, disengaged and disconnected because of apathy and alienation.

And do the Scots communicate more and have access to more information?  Broadband and PC access in Glasgow and the West of Scotland was at shockingly low levels versus the rhetoric of digital liberation. Ofcom explained, "The reasons for this are complex but lower income levels and older age groups are less likely to take broadband services". Yet the same research showed that there was a "Scottish effect" which went beyond material poverty: with lower income groups having 30% Broadband access compared to 55% across the UK; 16-34 year olds have 65% access in Scotland and 82% across the UK. And this digital divide has an even more pronounced "Glasgow effect".

 Many of us have found repugnant the actions and behaviours of the British state these last few decades but why do we automatically assume that Scottish self-government will be any different to the rotting edifices of the British body politic. For socialists the independence debate is about shifting from self-government to self-determination, not about what the Scottish establishment  institutions will and won’t do, or what they will let you do but about real political and economic control and new social relationships that will lead to our self-emancipation as a class, not as a nation

The United Scotsmen Movement

In Socialist Courier's earlier post on the 1820 Insurrection mention is made of one of its participants, James Wilson, who had earlier been a member of the United Scotsmen. This is a brief history of that organisation. While the doomed uprising of the United Irishmen in 1798 is well known to the present day, much less known are the United Scotsmen and their abortive democratic republican movement in Scotland. In Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh  stands the Martyrs Monument remembering five men, three of them English, imprisoned for campaigning for parliamentary reform. The five were accused of sedition in a series of trials and transported to Australia in 1794 and 1795 and sentenced by Scotland’s hanging judge Lord Braxfield. who had made his views plain: "A government of every country should be just like a corporation, and in this country, it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented".  One of those exiled was Thomas Muir, a Glasgow lawyer, who was Scotland's president-in-waiting if the United Scotsmen movement had prevailed.

The Society of the United Scotsmen was an organisation formed in Scotland in the late 18th century and sought political reform. It grew out of previous radical movements such as the Friends of the People Society and Friends of Liberty, pro-democratic organisations that were springing up, inspired by the events of the French and American revolutions. Its aims were largely the same as those of the United Irishmen and it was only upon a delegation of United Irishmen arriving in Scotland to muster support for their cause did the United Scotsmen become more organised and more overtly revolutionary. Corresponding societies, groups in favour of peaceful but radical constitutional reform, had spread in the Scottish lowland cities but the societies were brutally suppressed.  The weakness of the corresponding societies was their openness and transparency; easily penetrated by government spies, which meant their compromise had been inevitable. Owing to its aims and activities, the United Scotsmen had to remain a secret society, and organised themselves into cells of no more than 16 people. When any branch reached 16 members a new branch was formed in order to prevent extensive penetration by government spies. When more than 3 branches in any district were formed they elected delegates to a Parochial Committee, which in turn elected delegates to County and Provincial Committees and then to the National Committee, which met in Glasgow every six or seven weeks. Within the National Committee was a secret seven-man executive that governed the movement. The expenses of the delegates were funded from a sixpence joining fee and subscriptions of threepence per month thereafter. Only the delegates and the branch secretary would know who the delegates were. Delegates to the National Committee were told the name of a contact called the ‘Intermediary’ who would call for them and conduct them to the secret meeting place.which would send delegates to larger bodies on occasion. The United Scotsmen were particularly adept at gaining support from the working classes of Scotland who stood to gain by becoming politically enfranchised as the society sought. Those joining the United Scotsmen pledged: "that I will preserve in my endeavours to obtain an equal, full, and adequate Representation of All the people in Great Britain."

The aim of the society was universal suffrage and annually elected parliaments, with a strong streak of republicanism running through it as well. By the mid 1790s the society had around 3,000 members, which  was then actually more than the entire electorate of Scotland with a population of 1.4 million! The membership continued to grow. Precise membership figures are not possible, since the organisation kept no records at all, in the interests of security. Some estimates of as many as 22,000 have been made by modern historians. The two Fife villages of Strathmiglo and Auchtermuchty alone has over 2,000 members. The membership was comprised overwhelmingly of working men; handloom weavers, artisans, small shopkeepers, and the like.

In June 1797, Parliament, in fear of a French invasion passed the Militia Act as part of the attempt to strengthen its home defence forces. It provided for the forcible conscription of 6,000 men, to be deployed within Scotland, to defend against any French incursion. This was the first time conscription had ever been used in Scotland, and hostility to the Militia Act was  widespread and spurred the numbers joining the United Scotsmen during that summer. Workers proclaimed that "we are not going to risk our lives for [the gentry] and their property" , that they "disapproved of the War". Resistance first broke out on August 17 at Eccles in Berwickshire, where a crowd armed with sticks and stones prevented the Authorities from carrying out the Act.  In the Battle of Tranent,  August 28th 1797 a large crowd of mine workers and their womenfolk gathered in Tranent, East Lothian, shouting "No militia" and marching behind a drum. A large detachment of both Cinque Port and Pembrokeshire Cavalry were despatched to restore order, and met with fierce opposition from the protesters. Fighting broke out, and in the following massacre at least 12 civilians, including women and children, were killed. The Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, refused to indict the troops for murdering unarmed civilians and justified their actions in the face of  “such a dangerous mob as deserved more properly the name of an insurrection.”

The Tranent Massacre provoked an open rebellion in Strathtay under the leadership of Angus Cameron, a wright from Weem, who issued a call to turn local protests into an open uprising. Cameron and a James Menzies had been conducting nocturnal drilling throughout the summer and inducting new members into the United Scotsmen by means of the now illegal secret oath. Cameron, who was said to be a great orator, spread the rebel message addressing crowds in both Gaelic and English. 16,000 are believed to have rose at his call and captured Menzies Castle. They swept the area forcing the local gentry to sign bonds against the Militia and compelled the Duke of Atholl to swear not to implement the Act "until the general feelings of the country were made known". Rebels were despatched to Taymouth Castle near Kenmore, residence of the Earls of Breadalbane, to clean out the armoury. But before the people could be armed extra government roops had been sent to the area. Cameron ordered his supporters to melt back into the countryside. Cameron and Menzies were arrested in midnight raids on September 14th.

The United Scotsmen had also hoped to get support from the Dutch and there were plans for 50,000 Dutch troops to land in Scotland and to take over the Scottish central belt. However the Royal Navy intercepted the Dutch fleet and defeated them at the Battle of Camperdown in October 1797.

 The United Scotsmens aims in the rebellion were to establish a new Provisional Government with Thomas Muir as President. Various leaders of the United Scotsmen were arrested and tried. For example, George Mealmaker, Dundee hand-loom weaver and pamphleteer, was sentenced to 14 years transportation. Other leaders such as Robert Jaffrey, David Black, James Paterson and William Maxwell were all found guilty of seditious activity. The last record of a United Scotsmen member having been tried before the courts was the trial in 1802 of  Thomas Wilson, a Strathmiglo weaver, who was banished from Scotland for two years for spreading sedition amongst farm labourers.

The United Scotsmen had "united the lower against the higher ranks. They swear they will rather die to a man than be pressed as soldiers…. to defend the property of the rich." (Alexander Dixon letter to H. Dundas, 28 Aug 1797)

The Scottish Commons

The idea of individual (or private) ownership of fixed parcels of land is a relatively recent phenomenon, and by no means universal. Tom Johnston’s skill as a historian was to be able to demonstrate that the rapine, murder, massacre, cheating and court harlotry that led to the accumulation of land in the hands of Scotland’s feudal barons was rooted in historical fact. In particular, Johnston exposed how one of the greatest land grabs was engineered - that of Scotland’s extensive Burgh Commons.

The vast territories granted to Scotland’s Royal Burghs were designed to act as a bulwark against noble power. According to Johnston, such acreages, together with other common lands, extended in the latter part of the sixteenth century to fully one half of the entire area of Scotland.

But this valuable inheritance did not to last long:
"Until the Burgh Reform Act of 1833 the landowners and the commercial bourgeois class controlled all burghal administration of the common lands, and controlled it in such a way that vast areas of common lands were quietly appropriated, trust funds wholly disappeared, and to such a length did the plunder and the corruption develop, that some ancient burghs with valuable patrimonies went bankrupt, some disappeared altogether from the map of Scotland, some had their charters confiscated, and those which survived to the middle of the nineteenth century were left mere miserable starved caricatures of their former greatness, their Common Good funds gone, their lands fenced in private ownership, and their treasurers faced often with crushing debts. As late as 1800 there were great common properties extant; many burghs, towns and villages owned lands and mosses; Forres engaged in municipal timbergrowing; Fortrose owned claypits; Glasgow owned quarries and coalfields; Hamilton owned a coal pit; Irvine had mills, farms and a loom shop ...."
By the time the Royal Commission on Municipal Corporations in Scotland reported in 1835.
“Wick had lost in the law courts its limited right of commonty over the hill of Wick, and owned no property; Abernethy owned nothing, nor did Alloa. Bathgate was the proud possessor of the site of a fountain and a right of servitude over four and a half acres of moorland. Beith had no local government of any kind; Bo’ness owned nothing; Castle-Douglas owned only a shop; Coldstream was stripped bare, not even possessing 'rights in its street dung'; Crieff had two fields; Dalkeith nothing; Dunkeld nothing; and Dunoon, nothing”"

Nor is such overt municipal corruption and common land annexed ancient history. Take the case of the Cuillin of Skye which were put up for sale in March 2000. Much of the outcry which followed centred on whether or not MacLeod actually owned the Cuillin in the first place. Extensive research culminated in the Crown Estate commissioning a QC’s opinion which concluded in essence that MacLeod owned the Cuillin since his 1611 Crown charter was “capable of including the Cuillin” and he had enjoyed “possession” for an uninterrupted period of at least 20 years. It is important to note that the Crown never examined the question of whether MacLeod’s ancestors had actually been granted the Cuillin in 1611. It is clear that the land put up for sale had never been granted to MacLeod and to this day remains a Crown Common. But the laws of landownership in Scotland are constructed in such a way that render such questions irrelevant. Land which was never granted to MacLeod has become, by default and by neglect by the guardians of the public realm, part of the private possession of one man. It is hardly surprising that the Crown Estate never sought to dig deeper.

Many of the displaced people ended up in burgeoning industrial cities such as Glasgow, where their descendants formed an integral part of the Labour movement.

(The legacy of Scotland’s Burgh Commons is still present across Scotland, for example,in the North and South Inches of Perth, the racecourse at Musselburgh, the mussel beds at Tain, the links at Dornoch, the 1700 acres of Lauder Common and the other commons of the Borders which form the basis for the Common Riding ceremonies each summer)

http://www.scottishcommons.org/docs/scotlands_commonweal_2.pdf

Roman in the gloamin'

A great deal of patriotic pride has been associated with the idea that Scotland was never conquered by the Romans. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, there was a profound and fundamental shift in thinking across Europe in terms of how countries imagined their relationship with the Roman Empire. As new political ideas about authoritarianism and liberty were discussed, some writers and thinkers sought to identify their country’s national spirit with the indigenous peoples conquered by Rome. Rediscovering resistance to Rome went hand in hand with the nationalisms that swept across Europe in the 19th century. Scotland – despite its more recent incorporation into the United Kingdom – was no different, and a great deal of patriotic pride was associated with the idea that Scotland was never subdued to the might of Rome.

According to Rebecca H. Jones in "Roman Camps in Scotland", the idea of the “unconquered Scotland” is a myth. The idea of an intermittent pillage is debunked. She has shown that Scotland has more traces of camps – temporary or semi-temporary stopping places for the legions – than any other part of Europe. Rome’s presence north of Hadrian’s Wall was more persistent and more imposing than the idea of the sole hold-out in Europe might suggest. The decline of Rome’s significance in Scotland was more to do with apathy and poverty than with Braveheart-like sending them home again to think again. As the Empire fragmented and over-extended, successive Emperors thought to control the heart around the Mediterranean rather than bother with a province which gave little to the imperial coffers and cost a lot to keep going

The Robber Barons

Scottish "noble" families have survived for centuries. In many cases these are people who gained control of large areas of the country by the lottery of inheritance. Often their fore bearers murdered and stole for their estates or were awarded land as payment from a monarch. In the early 1990s at the top of the aristocratic ladder were Britain's 24 Dukes and Duchesses and no fewer than eight of them (33%) were Scots. They were the Dukes of Hamilton, Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch and Queensberry, Fife, Montrose, Roxburghe and Sutherland. Some of their titles predated the Union of 1707. Next are the Marquises, and again the proportion of Scots is high. Scotland in 1992 had only 9% of Britain's population but it had more than 25% of its Marquises, these being Aberdeen and Temair, Ailsa, Bute, Huntley, Linlithgow, Lothian, Queensberry, Tweedale and Zetland. Of the five women who are Countesses in their own right four are Scots: Dysart, Loudon, Mar and Sutherland. Of the 16 women in 1992 who were baronesses in their own right, five held Scots titles.

Their ancestors murdered and stole their way to a fortune in medieval times. The inheritors of this stolen wealth have continued to prosper under capitalism. The small landed clique has in their time held absolute power. The courts were packed with their lackeys, and their class sat in judgement over everyone else. In church, the hand-picked ministers sermoned from the pulpit, about the "rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate" and of how god "made everyone and ordered their estate".

Under their despotic rule Scotland's miners were enslaved along with their families until the end of the 18th century. Not only did they oppose trade unions, their tame Judges hanged and sentenced trade unionists to transportation for life. With their off-spring in the House of Commons and pater in the Lords they opposed every progressive measure, decade after decade. They made their peace with the aspiring Victorian capitalists and together they turned their fire on the working class. The new capitalist class soon acquired titles and land of their own. Marrying their sons and daughters into the nobility. Their descendants receiving a dash of the old blue blood.

This, landed elite, now provide a useful cover for today's robber barons that control the market system. With their romantic ancient titles, fancy robes, court ritual (most of it made up in the last century by the Victorians) and public school accents, the Monarchy and the Aristocracy are supposed to provide the glue that binds the nation together. They are the guardians of our heritage. An historical pageant of heroes, battles and daring-do. It's all a lie, a great big historical con-trick. The monarchy and their landed hangers-on are a parasitical class. Descended from murderers, thieves and rogues. For a thousand years they have used and abused the land for their own purpose, pleasure and profit. The lands that their descendants hold today are stolen property. Acquired, by theft and fraud. Their title deeds are murder, massacre and rape. The vast wealth of, Buccleuch, Cawdor, Atholl, Bute and their, ilk. was created, in the first place, by a medieval brigands.

The Atholls trace their line back to a murderous Flemish pirate called Freskin. The family, have a great fondness for plunder.

The "sly sleekit" Campbells in their various guises, are a family who have supplied some of the biggest rogues ever to disgrace Scotland. You name it they've done it. Treachery, theft and murder are just some of this mob's specialities. Nothing stopped this gang of thieves. They grabbed the lands of Cawdor through kidnap and child molesting. In the early 16th century the chief of the Argyle branch of the tribe had his son kidnap and marry the 12 year-old heiress to the land's of Cawdor.

The Scotts of Buccleuch have moved on from being cattle rustling reivers to the dukes. The original Scott was one Richard, a traitorous character who signed the infamous 'ragman's roll' and sold out to Edward the First. This family of bandits achieved their Dukedom not by so called noble deeds, but by marrying a young child off to a son of Charles the Second.

The Stuarts of Bute are descended, like the present head of the Windsor clan, from an illegitimate daughter of the first Stewart King Robert the Second. This character was a useless nonentity. The Stewart's were a dysfunctional lot. James the First was murdered by members of his own family. His grief-stricken widow had the perpetrators roasted over an open fire. James the Third was stabbed to death after a family feud, when he was defeated by his own son. The Stewart's brought ruin on Scotland time and time again. One of them betrayed William Wallace for £100 worth of land. It all came to a sticky end at Culloden, when the not-so-Bonnie Prince Charlie fled the field, and left his troops to the tender mercies of Butcher Cumberland

John the 3rd Earl of Bute had a great fondness for money, other peoples. He wangled himself the job of his dreams as First Lord of the Treasury. This 18th century upper crust wide-boy had very sticky fingers. He managed to steal a fortune before he was found out and driven from office by popular demand. The bold John had looted enough though to build himself a large mansion in London stuffed full of art treasures. The present 7th Marquis, also Earl of Dumfries (John Bute as he prefers to be called) the former racing driver, inherited a fortune of £110 million, needless to say he never offered to re-pay what his ancestor stole.

The Douglas, Hamilton and Home clans have rampaged across the centuries. These three dynasties are, linked, by a thousand threads. Its hard tell were one lot ends and the other begins.

The late Duke of Hamilton is Scotland's premier Duke and has more titles than you can shake a stick at. He is also a descendent of the Douglas clan.

The Douglas's are another tribe, which has that rascal Freskin the pirate in its lineage. Their most famous historical figure was the 'Black Douglas'. Portrayed as a Scottish hero, he was nothing of the kind. In reality he was a bloodthirsty psychopath. One of his so-called heroic deeds was to massacre a group of unarmed soldiers on their way to church on a Palm Sunday. He rose to prominence under Robert the Bruce.

Bruce like the rest of his kind knew how to play both sides. This Norman whose family had long held lands in England (his father was Edward the First's governor in Carlisle) put the interests of Bruce before anything else. He even fought alongside Edward against the Scots. He grabbed the throne after murdering another claimant 'Red' John Combine in a Dumfries church. Comyn not the brightest of a very dim bunch turned up to meet the noble Robert on his own and Bruce stuck the knife in. After defeating the English based Norman's and their local Norman allies at Bannockburn, Bruce carved up the country amongst his Norman pals.

As for the poor Scottish peasants, life went on as before. It was nasty, brutal and short.

The founder of the glorious Hamilton bloodline was a Norman robber baron Walter Fitz-Gilbert. This thug bolted north after murdering a bandit with a bigger gang than him. His passport, to the big-time came, through an act of betrayal. The bold Walter had sworn allegiance to Edward the First and got fixed up with a nice little job -keeper of Bothwell castle. On hearing the result from Bannockburn, it was make your mind-up time big style. He flew the English standard and welcomed all those fleeing the battle. Quickly turning his coat, he handed the lot of them over to the Bruce. This one act of betrayal made the families fortune.

The Hamilton's piled up a fortune from mining before nationalisation. Whilst the miners of Lanarkshire sweated in the bowels of the earth the Hamilton's sat back and counted the royalties. Such was the greed of this crew that they allowed their stately home Hamilton Palace to be undermined. It had to be demolished in the twenties.

The third leg of this noble treble is provided by the Homes. They claim decent from an old Scottish King called William the Lion. This individual's nickname was a huge exaggeration. The Homes turned murder theft and treachery into a fine art. Over the years they feathered their nest well with mining royalties. Douglas-Home who was a Tory Prime Minister in the sixties was the 14th Earl of Home.

The Drummond Castle Estate lands in Perthshire has been passed down the generations to Baroness Willoughby, daughter of the last Earl of Ancaster. The Ancaster’s acquired the land by marrying into the Drummond family. The Drummonds were gifted much of these vast estates by courting the favour of Robert the Bruce and then Robert II. The first Earl of Moray was the illegitimate child of James V and given numerous titles by his father. The Moray family’s estates were stolen from the Church. Much of this land still remains under the control of the current Earl whose late wife was the elder daughter of the 7th Earl of Mansfield.

The Earl of Airlie and The Marquis of Huntly are but two minor aristocrats in terms of landownership, and yet their position as landowners in their respective localities brings with the title certain forms of symbolic and ceremonial power.

The Earl of Airlie is reputed to own 37,300 acres of land north of Kirriemuir in Angus. The Earl is in many ways the quintessential Scottish aristocrat, living in the royal county of Angus alongside the Queen and the Earls of Strathmore, Southesk, Dalhousie and Woolton. His principal residence, Cortachy Castle, is set in heavily wooded land beside the River South Esk. Educated at Eton, and having served with the Scots Guards, he remains well connected with the ceremonial establishment. Like past Earls of Airlie who owned land in Glenisla, the Earl of Airlie's patronage gave him control over the proceedings of the Gathering of the Glenisla Highland and Friendly Society, a Gathering which dates back to 1852.
The Airlie family are illustrative of the fact that networks and family connections play a key role in preserving and supporting the landowning interest. Networks in conjunction with organisations such as the Scottish Landowners Federation help to sustain a core body of beliefs and attitudes with regards to preservation of sporting estates, the sanctity of private property rights, and exaggerated claims concerning the contributions which rural sports make to both the local economy and rural employment. Such connections and indeed the sporting season itself provide insights into the heart of the British and Scottish establishment. The late Queen Mother was the daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore (Glamis in Angus). The Queen (land in Angus and Aberdeenshire) herself has a cousin, the fifth Earl of Granville (North Uist Estate) whose daughter is married to Jonathan Bulmer (Amhuinnsuidhe Estate in Inverness-shire) whose brother David also owns Ledmore Estate in Sutherland. The second Earl of Granville's daughter was the mother of John Granville Morrison, Lord Margadale (Islay Estate). The Queen is also related to the Earl of Airlie (Airlie Estates) through his brother, Sir Angus Ogilvy who is married to Princess Alexandra of Kent. The Countess of Airlie is also Lady to the Bedchamber of the Queen. The Queen's aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester, is the third daughter of the seventh Duke of Buccleuch whose widow was the daughter of the 13th Earl of Home. The current Duke of Buccleuch's sister is the Duchess of Northumberland (Burncastle in Berwickshire).

The Marquis of Huntly remains in charge of Aboyne Castle Estate Trustees and yet perhaps the significance of the position is more symbolically displayed at the Aboyne Highland Gathering, a Gathering at which a nominal unity sometimes conceals the fact that at the same event there co-exist different seating arrangements, different styles of dress, different social codes and prescriptions, all of which serve to unite and segregate different social groups. At Aboyne the ceremonial display of flags is but one small indicator of the social spaces which different people occupy. At the opening of the Gathering the Royal banner or flag is the first to be raised, shortly followed by the banner belonging to the Marquis of Huntly, who fulfils the dual roles of feudal superior and local patron to the Aboyne Highland Gatherings and Games. Subsequent banners, raised on either side of the two flags, tend to provide not just a galaxy of colours but also an insight into the upper circles of power and social structure within the district, the Highlands and Scotland.

Ever since 1603 when James the Sixth moved the Scottish Court down to London, the Scottish elites have taken their cue from London. The process continued all through the 18th and 19th centuries as Scotland's 'Noble' families joined the Anglican Church, sent their children to English public schools and universities, married their English counterparts, and used their Scottish estates to fund their social life in London. This has had a profound anglicising effect on the influential upper reaches of Scottish society. To some extent the Scottish upper classes have become nominal Scots, Scots in name only. They are Scots who speak with English accents - or at least that variety of English accent which has become the language of power and influence. They are educated in English public schools like Eton College, Winchester and Harrow or English-style public schools like Fettes, Glenalmond and Gordonstoun which happen to be in Scotland. They prefer the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the universities of Scotland. They also have a distinct tendency to marry their counterparts south of the border, who, very often inherit their land and property. Which is one of the reasons so much of rural and highland Scotland is owned from addresses in the better-heeled parts of the Home Counties and the West Country.

There are nine Scottish Dukes; Abercorn, Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch, Fife, Hamilton, Montrose, Roxburghe and Sutherland. Six of them were educated at Eton, and only two in Scotland - The Duke of Argyll at Glenalmond and the Duke of Fife at Gordonstoun. And these schools while in Scotland have nothing to do with the Scottish educational system. There are sixteen 'Knights' of the Thistle, Scotland's highest order of chivalry. Only three were educated inside the Scottish system. There are 31 Queen's Lords Lieutenant in Scotland and there are There are 32 Queen's Bodyguard in Scotland, again most came from the same anglicised, social milieu of English public schools. The Scottish upper class - the social elite - is now more or less totally anglicised.


http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/mccrone.htm
http://www.redflag.org.uk/articles/issix/is6noble.html
http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/tjohnsto.htm
http://www.siol-nan-gaidheal.org/englishing.htm

Scots Land?

In Scotland's feudal system of land tenure all rights of ownership are vested in the Crown as Paramount Superior. All rights of land ownership are deemed to derive from the Crown which is the ultimate owner in Scotland. However, it is hard to believe in an advanced industrialised democracy that a natural asset as basic as land can still be largely controlled by a small band of aristocrats. Yet in modern day Scotland a system of land ownership which is feudal and hierarchical has remained substantially intact since the 11th century. A mere 579 private landowners own 50 percent of all land north of the border, giving Scotland the narrowest concentration of land wealth in the whole of Europe. Even in industrialised parts of the area such as the "Mid-Scotland and Fife" EU parliamentary constituency, a small group of private landowners and aristocrats still control much of the land. The aristocrats of the houses of Argyll, Buccleuch, Home, Roxburghe, Stair, Airlie, Lothian, Montrose, Hamilton, Moray, Westminster, Burton, Cowdray, Dulverton and others still control about 13% of Scotland. The private ownership of land has allowed a tiny minority of people to control economic and social activity in Scotland, a small number of people are able to disproportionately influence the lives and environment of others.

Tom Johnston in his 1909 book Scotland’s Noble Families wrote: “Show the people that our Old Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen by either force or fraud; show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rogues… A democracy ignorant of the past is not qualified either to analyse the present or to shape the future and so, in the interests of the High Priests of Politics and the Lordly Money-Changers of Society, great care has been taken to offer us stories of useless pageantry, chronicles of the birth and death of Kings, annals of Court intrigue and international war, while withheld from us were the real facts and narratives of moment, the loss of our ancient freedoms, the rape of our common lands and the shameless and dastardly methods by which a few selected stocks snatched the patrimony of the people."

He denounced the Scottish aristocracy on the grounds that three-quarters of them were descendants of foreign freebooters who forcibly took possession of our land after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

“Your land, eh?”, asks the miner.
“Yes”, replies the laird, “and my grouse and my deer.”
“And who did you get this land from?”
“Well, I inherited it from my father.”
“And who did he get it from?” the miner insists.
“He inherited it from his father, of course. The land has been in my family for over 400 years,” the laird proudly declared .
“OK, so how did your family come to own this land 400 years ago?” the miner asks.
“Well....actually.... they fought for it!”
“Fine,” replies the miner. “Take your jacket off and I’ll fight you now for it.”

If it was only that easy but the story demonstrates is not that all land is illegally held and so it can justify seizing land by force but that historically, legal and political systems have acknowledged rights to land on the basis that the ownership is already properly established. Historically, such claims can be relatively easily disputed and it is only the existence of an agreed code of law that prevents rival claims being entertained. Rights in land are entirely dependent for their legitimacy on the wider agreement of the society upon whose legal system such rights rest.

Professor Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), Advocate and Professor of Constitutional Law and History wrote in his Scotch Legal Antiquities,
“Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable - the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter - is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. They were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors - clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it came to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.”

Not only did the poor have no lawyers. They spoke no Latin either and were not in the habit of traveling to Edinburgh on a regular basis to examine the title deeds of the nobility. In Scotland, indeed in the whole of Britain, centuries of enclosure and eviction created a vast class of displaced people whose only recourse was to migrate to the industrial centres. This proved quite a convenient source of labour for the emerging industrial owners, who frequently converted their growing wealth into political power by purchasing land. This power was also reinforced through the provision of tied housing for their landless labourers.

Appealing to such concept as the "national heritage" allowed the Lords and lairds to insinuate their own histories and that of their families into that of the nation. They can present themselves not simply as the owners of appreciating economic assets, but as the "keepers of the nation's soul", the phrase used by the National Trust for Scotland. Scotland's lairds have sought to convert their own histories into that of the nation, so that, by implication, one cannot abolish one without the other. In recent years, landowners have also adapted their claim to authority not only based on their legal claim, but on the view that they are the proper managers - stewards - of Scotland's "natural heritage". It helps this claim that purchasers of land often view land as a means of consumption rather than production, that they have bought land for reasons of status conferment and consumption, rather than or as well as for its economic potential as a tradable commodity. In other words, they are making use of forms of what academics called cultural capital (rather than material/financial capital) to position themselves in the field. When they are most successful in doing this, management science conservationists have to work around and through them. They are involved in "objectifying" Scotland's natural heritage in such a way that assumes the rightness of the social order.

This "capture" of Scotland's heritage is an important weapon in class survival. The landowning establishment among Scotland's elite continue to have their links into financial and money-making circles, as well as considerable cultural power. The "mighty magnates" of 19th century Scotland - the men (and some women) who headed the great houses - were essentially a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial class, making their money from rents and investments. They were sufficiently astute to invest in the new industrial capitalism which ran Scotland economically and politically for so long, while being strongly represented on the boards of the major banks and finance houses. At the turn of the century, The Marquess of Linlithgow, for example, was a director of the Bank of Scotland, and Standard Life; the Duke of Buccleuch, of the Royal Bank, Standard Life and Scottish Equitable; the Earl of Mansfield, of the National Bank, and Scottish Equitable; and the Marquess of Tweeddale, of the Commercial Bank, Edinburgh Life, and Scottish Widows. Such hegemony has, of course, eroded significantly with the decline of indigenous Scottish capitalism and its replacement with multinational corporations. Nevertheless, the banks and finance houses still find it useful to have titled property represented on the board. Economic power in Scotland is an amalgam of old and new wealth, the individual and the corporate, the indigenous and the foreign, the private and the public. Commenting in the late 1970s, one journalist observed that Scotland's elites "all know each other - a tight circle of politicians, businessmen, civil servants, lawyers, trade unionists, churchmen, academics, and a nostalgic sprinkling of titled gentry" (C.Baur, The Scotsman, 18 September 1978).

The power and influence of thosed landed magnates has long been identified as one of the key features of landownership in Scotland. By and large there has been little movement in the Top Twenty chart of landowners in Scotland for more than a century. The mighty magnates of the 1990s such as the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Argyll, the Farquharsons of Invercauld, the Duke of Westminster, the Earl of Seafield, the late Duke of Atholl, and the Countess of Sutherland owned great acreage in 1875, the last occasion when a comprehensive land register was compiled. The 1871 official enquiry into landownership in Britain was designed to show that land was far more equitably distributed than the radical critics of the day made out. What it actually revealed was a pattern of monopolistic than almost any other country in Europe. In 1872, the 1500 largest landowners in Scotland held over 90% of the country, a figure which had only dropped a percentage or two thirty years later. A small group of landowning families has remained relatively stable throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and as such have witnessed the arrival and departure of various people who might fit more easily within any nominal notion of a capitalist class or business elite.
Those whose ownership of Highland estates has not been dependent upon old hereditary wealth or have been part of a traditional labouring aristocracy have been joined at various points throughout the 1990s by the nouveau riches such as Philip Rhodes the property developer, Ann Gloag owner of the Stagecoach bus company, Peter de Savaray, Malcolm Potier, Keith Schellenberg, Mohammed Al Fayed owner of Harrods, Professor Maruma the German spiritual artist, and Fred Olsen the Norwegian shipping magnate. Undoubtedly, the mighty magnates have also been joined in the 1990s by a number of corporate lairds and trusts such as the Bocardo Société Anonyme and Ross Estates Ltd, the Co-op Wholesale Society Ltd, Eagle Star, Gallagher Pensions Trust Ltd, Midland Bank, the John Muir Trust, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Church of Scotland and the Assynt Crofters Trust. The State itself through the Crown Estate, the Ministry of Defence, the Forestry Commission and Scottish Natural Heritage still owns vast tracts of land. Yet what is significant is not so much the decline and fall of a landed elite or a traditional aristocracy, or even the extent to which changing patterns of wealth behind estate ownership emerged, but rather the stability of landownership and in particular the enduring nature of Scotland's magnates and those members of a British aristocracy who own land in Scotland.

Scotland's landed class has to an astonishing degree survived almost a century of change. Survival strategies have included marrying into new money, setting up trusts, carving out a niche in the city, letting out sporting rights, promoting family and heritage and selling off fractions of the estate. Despite the cost of maintaining huge estates and crumbling castles, inheritance taxes, hostile governments, calls for land reform and public access to land, Scotland's magnates and those members of the British aristocracy who own land in Scotland remain remarkably resilient.

Take the reported exchange in the Westminster's voting lobbies between the Tory MPs Tim Sainsbury of the supermarket dynasty, and Nicholas Soames, a descendant of the Duke of ­Marlborough, when the latter was dressed in his hunting gear. “Going rat-catching, Nick?” asked Sainsbury, to which the noble Soames is said to have replied: “F**k off, you grocer. You don’t tell a gentleman how to dress on a Friday.”

The aristocracy may be in decline, but their fall is some way off yet !

Top 20 aristocratic landowners in Scotland 1995
Owner Acres
Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry 261600
Capt AAC Farquharson of Invercauld 120500
Earl of Seafield 101000
Duke of Westminster 95100
Crown Estate Commissioners 94015
Countess of Sutherland 83239
Viscount Cowdray 76600
Sir Donald Cameron of Locheil 76000
Duke of Roxburghe 65600
Baroness Willoughby de Eresby 63200
Duke of Argyll 60800
John A Mackenzie of Gairloch 56900
Earl of Cawdor 56800
The Queen 55270
Marquess of Bute 53990
Sir Ivar Colquhoun of Luss 50000
Lord Burton 48000
Earl of Dalhousie 47200
Lady Anne Bentinck 45000
Earl of Stair 43674
Total 1,554,488
% of Scotland - top 20 aristocratic estates 8.01%
Total Acreage above 5000 acres owned by aristocracy 2,554,399
As a % of Scotland's total land mass 13.16%
http://www.scottishaffairs.org/backiss/pdfs/sa19/sa19_Jarvie_Jackson_and_Higgins.pdf

Scotland 19,068,631acres 100%
Urban 585,627 acres 3%
Rural 18,483,004 acres 97%

Of the rural land, 2, 275,768 acres are in the ownership of public bodies
and 16,207,236 are in the ownership of private bodies.
Of this privately-owned rural land:
One quarter is owned by 66 landowners in estates of 30,700 acres and larger
One third is owned by 120 landowners in estates of 21,000 acres and larger
One half is owned by 343 landowners in estates of 7,500 acres and larger
Two thirds is owned by 1252 landowners in estates of 1 ,200 acres and larger

Two thirds of Scotland is owned by one four thousandth (0.025%) of the people!
http://tipiglen.co.uk/property.html

REGION
Fife
325,865 area in acres
41 number of owners
111,300 acreage held by these owners
34.5% percentage of region
Central
666,007 area in acres
92 number of owners
331,336 area in acres
49.7% percentage of region
Tayside (part)
377,979 area in acres
23 number of owners
201,376 area in acres
53.3% percentage of region
http://www.caledonia.org.uk/land/documents/leonard.pdf

Imperial Caledonia

The SNP's choice for the referendum date 2014 cannot be a simply a coincidence but a ploy on its symbolism. However, t he Scottish Wars of Independence and the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn were in reality a fight between two sets of Norman knights, English Norman and Scottish Norman, as in those days the ruling class in both countries was actually Norman.

The Act of Union was on behalf of the Scottish wealthy - a bailout. The disastrous Darien Scheme was backed by about a quarter of the money circulating in Scotland and its failure left the nobles and landowners – who had already been suffering a run of bad harvests – practically ruined. The Scottish ruling class voted to end its own parliament in Edinburgh. Did the Scottish ruling class, those "parcel of rogues", betray their country by accepting the Union? The hypothesis is only valid if we accept that those lords and merchants were somehow obliged to place "Scotland" above their own socio-economic interests. The surrender of Scottish sovereignty did not threaten the interest of them but indeed it specifically protected them. Scotland kept its own legal, church and education systems. More importantly, the Act of Union also gave the bankrupt Scottish ruling class access to the money markets of London. The Union was a very good deal for the Scottish ruling class. Most importantly, Scottish commerce got access to the growing empire that the English were carving out. Historically, the Scots were partners in the British empire, not an oppressed nation within it.

"It was not 'English capitalism' which caused the bones of countless Bengalis to bleach in the sun, but a fully integrated British capitalism in which the Scots played a leading role. Indeed, the capitalist class in Scotland was at the forefront, not only of colonial expansion, but also of the overseas investment characteristic of the imperialist stage of capitalism: during the late Victorian period Scotland invested abroad on a scale per head with no parallel among the other nations of the United Kingdom." - Neil Davidson (Scottish Imperialism and National Identity)

Today, the independence movement is again fundamentally a question of members of the capitalist class promoting their own particular self-interest.

The Scottish National Party represent the section of the Scottish elite which feels it could do better in negotiating with international financiers as a separate entity than as a part the United Kingdom. As an ex-Royal Bank of Scotland oil consultant, Alex Salmond no doubt intends cashing in Scotland's on North Sea oil reserves. Those oil and gas reserves play a large role in the opposition of the UK and unionist parties to separation. The major international oil corporations would have little problem with North Sea Oil being transferred from UK to Scottish political control, particularly if any new Scottish government was prepared to cut corporation tax even further. The SNP has been courting the oil companies, opposing both the Con-Dems’ proposed one-off windfall tax on their profits and downplaying the effects of potential oil pollution and spillage. However, North Sea oil still provides substantial tax revenues for the UK government. Therefore, any British government will strongly oppose such a move.

There exists a section of the “business community” like fund-manager Angus Tulloch and transport operator, Brian Souter, who fund the SNP, and they do so not because they want to raise Glasgow’s life expectancy from the lowest in Britain, but because they believe that Scotland’s super-rich will benefit.

The Scots are not an oppressed minority. Indeed, the idea that the Duke of Buccleuch is oppressed because he is Scottish is laughable. A worker in Glasgow or Edinburgh has more in common with his or her counterpart in Liverpool or Birmingham that he or she does with a landed Scottish aristocrat.

But even if it is likely that the Scottish working class will be promised a share of the oil revenues should they vote yes in 2014, like all politicians, Salmond will fail to make good on any pledge to increase working class living standards. And if the unionists prevail, Westminster politicians will also want to continue reaping the rewards for increased exploitation of the Scottish working class, not because they are Scottish, but because they are working class.

Many foreign corporations would quite happy if Scotland became a low tax haven as planned for by the SNP but it would probably lead to an economic "race-to-the-bottom" between the different nations and regions of the UK, with the promotion of competitive tax-cutting to benefit the corporations and the rich.

The wannabe Scottish ruling class will cooperate with the British ruling class and big business to prevent a too radical break-up of the UK and ensure that as much as possible remains of the UK state machinery by upholding the Crown Powers and protecting the City of London's economic control by retention of sterling. It leaves the Scottish ruling class in control within Scotland, but also free to profit from the existing global corporate economic order.

There was no golden age, not for the Scottish working class. Freedom is not intended for the people of Scotland, but for big business. The only independence is for corporations to maximise profits

Orwell on Nationalism

You can accuse us, socialists, of being unpatriotic if you so wish. We are proud to be anti-patriotic.

Socialist Courier previously posted an extract on patriotism by Tolstoy. We think it s also fitting to also offer extracts from a George Orwell essay on nationalism:-

"A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right...

... As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named... All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects... Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots...

...Celtic Nationalism. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation...But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. — but the usual power hunger is there under the surface ...."

George Orwell
1945

Independence for Shetland !!!

In the 14th century Shetland was still a Norwegian province. The Norn language, a form of Old Norse, continued to be spoken until the 18th century when it was replaced by an insular dialect of Scots known as Shetlandic, which is in turn is now being replaced by Scottish English. Udal law is a Norse derived legal system, which is found in Shetland. Scottish Courts have intermittently acknowledged the supremacy of Udal law in property cases up to the present day. Major differences from Scots law include shore ownership rights, important for pipelines and cables. It declares that the Shetland community owns the Sea and Seabed. The Crown Estate has had to admit the supremacy of Udal Law (and unlike the rest of the UK, swans are not legally the British Queen's property in Shetland.)

In 1468 Shetland was pledged by Christian I, in his capacity as King of Norway, as security against the payment of the dowry of his daughter Margaret, betrothed to James III of Scotland. As the money was never paid, the connection with the crown of Scotland has become perpetual. Christian had secured a clause in the contract which gave future kings of Norway the right to redeem the islands for a fixed sum of 210 kg of gold or 2,310 kg of silver. Several attempts were made during the 17th and 18th centuries to redeem the islands, without success.

After the islands were transferred to Scotland, thousands of Scots families emigrated to Shetland in the 16th and 17th centuries but studies of the genetic makeup of the islands' population indicate that Shetlanders are just under half Scandinavian in origin

From the early 15th century on the Shetlanders sold their goods through the Hanseatic League of German merchantmen. The Hansa would buy shiploads of salted fish, wool and butter and import salt, cloth, beer and other goods. The trade with the North German towns lasted until the 1707 Act of Union when high salt duties prohibited the German merchants from trading with Shetland. Shetland then went into an economic depression. By the late 19th century 90% of all Shetland was owned by just 32 people. The Crofters' Act in 1886 emancipated crofters from the rule of the landlords and enabled those who had effectively been landowners' serfs to become owner-occupiers of their own small farms.

The East Shetland Basin is one of Europe's largest oil fields. The extracted oil is sent to Sullom Voe, the leading oil export harbour in the UK, producing approximately 25 million tons of processed crude per year and 23 per cent of Scotland’s North Sea Oil revenues. Furthermore, scientists have that up to five billion barrels of oil could be found in unexplored volcanic rocks to the west of Shetland.

As a result of the oil revenue and those cultural links with Norway, a small independence movement developed. It saw as its model the Isle of Man, as well as Shetland's closest neighbour, the Faroe Islands, an autonomous dependency of Denmark.

In 2008 the Shetland Chief Sandy Cluness called for autonomy from Scotland for its 22,000 population. Cluness, the figurehead of the Shetland Islands council, who has no political party affiliation, advocates an independent Shetland assembly with tax-raising powers. Cluness believes that the Shetland council has been hindered by government centralisation and has called for a wide range of services including transport, policing, coastal protection, in-shore fisheries, further education and the arts to be administered from the capital Lerwick, rather than from Edinburgh. In the 1978 devolution vote the Shetland Isles voted against devolution .The general feeling was if we are not to be governed by Westminster, as part of the United Kingdom, then we would rather be on our own than governed by Edinburgh.

It has highlighted the weakness in the independent Scotland argument - if Scotland can gain its independence from the UK what is to prevent Shetland (which is closer to Oslo than Edinburgh) seeking its independence from Scotland, too. If Scotland does become independent again, then is it prepared to surrender a "cash cow" if Shetlanders chose to go it alone? Would an independent Scotland say to a breakaway Shetland "fair enough then, off you go and the oil is yours"?

"Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress"

The Referendum - Where We Stand

The Herald reports on the independence referendum and when it is most likely to come.

Independence for Scotland?

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. It leaves our lives and the problems the profit system causes completely unchanged. Exploitation through the wages system continues. Unemployment continues. A polluted environment, and the general breakdown of society all continue. As far as solving these problems is concerned, independence is just a useless irrelevancy.

Independence would be an extension of democracy, bringing power nearer to the people, so how can socialists not be in favour of this? Yet supporters of capitalism who talk about “democracy” always mean only political democracy since economic democracy - where people would democratically run the places where they work - is out of the question under capitalism, based as it is on these workplaces being owned and controlled by and for the benefit of a privileged minority. You can have the most democratic constitution imaginable but this won’t make any difference to the fact that profits have to come before meeting needs under capitalism. The people’s will to have their needs met properly is frustrated all the time by the operation of the economic laws of the capitalist system which no political structure, no matter how democratic, can control. If our rulers want to reform the machinery of capitalist government in this way, that’s up to them. But spare us the pretence that it’s some great extension of democracy. It is not imperfections in the political decision-making process that’s the problem but the profit system and its economic laws. And the answer is not political independence but the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

Socialists are not nationalists - in fact we are implacably opposed to nationalism in whatever form it rears its ugly head - and we see the establishment of an independent Scotland as yet another irrelevant, constitutional reform. One of the last things the world needs at the moment is more states, with their own armed forces and divisive nationalist ideologies. Nationalists like the SNP who preach the opposite are spreading a divisive poison amongst people who socialists say should unite to establish a frontier-less world community, based on the world’s resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity. Socialists and nationalists are implacably opposed to each other. We are working in opposite directions. Us to unite workers. Them to divide them.

In the end the point at issue - independence which leaves profit-making, exploitation and all the other social problems untouched - is so irrelevant that it is not worth taking sides. We don’t see any point in diverting our energies to changing the constitution but we certainly want things to change. We want people to change the economic and social basis of society and establish socialism in place of capitalism. Just because we are not prepared to back the efforts of Scottish nationalists to break away from the United Kingdom - and vigorously oppose their efforts to split the trade union movement - does not mean that we are unionists. 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. So we won’t be voting “yes” or “no”. We’ll be writing the word “SOCIALISM” across the referendum voting paper whenever it eventually takes place.

The Scots Left Behind

When someone comes across the Socialist Party for the first time, a common reaction is to consider us as just another left-wing political organisation. But digging a little deeper will show that our political position is very different from that of the Scottish Socialist Party or Sheridan's Solidarity. The first difference is that of our aims, the kind of society we wish to see established. Socialists are quite clear and uncompromising on this — our aim is a society without wages, money, countries or governments.

The Scottish "Socialist" Party despite its name, does not stand for socialism but is a left-wing nationalist - a Tartan Trotskyist - party. The SSP is a direct descendant of Militant and campaigns to get elected with non-socialist votes on a programme of attractive-sounding reforms to capitalism. It is a ploy to attract a following. But it's a bad tactic that can only encourage illusions about what can be achieved under capitalism. It glosses over the fact that capitalism is not a system that can be humanised or reformed or transformed into something better. What those who want a better society should be doing – should have done – is to campaign to change people's minds, to get them to realise that they are living in an exploitative, class-divided society and that the only way out is to end capitalism and replace it by a new and different system. The SSP, for instance, advocates the break-up of the British state and the creation of a free Scottish socialist republic. But a single Socialist country in a hostile capitalist world is just impossible, and the SSP aim is Scottish state capitalism.

We don't care if Tommy Sheridan, the leader of Solidarity Scotland’s "Socialist" Movement, told lies or not about his sex life. It’s only the political aspect interests us, and he has certainly told lies about socialism. Sheridan was a Trotskyist, originally of the Militant Tendency and Trotskyists, being Leninists, hold that workers are incapable of evolving beyond a “trade union consciousness” . So, according to them, putting the straight socialist case for common ownership, democratic control and production for use not profit to workers is to cast pearls before swine. Instead, according to Trotskyists, what must be put before workers are demands that the government introduce this or that reform within capitalism. Getting workers to support such “transitional demands” is the only way they calculate they can get the mass support which, when the government fails to respond, can be used to catapult their vanguard party to power. But this requires people on the ground who are capable of winning a personal following. Normally, the Trotskyist gurus ( McCombes co-author with Sheridan of Imagine) who direct their organisation from the shadows, are not up to this. They require front men - Tommy Sheridan. The trouble, from the point of view of the Trotskyist gurus in the background, is that such front men have, because of their following, a degree of independence and can prove difficult to control. Which is what happened in Sheridan’s case.

Both parties have done so much to discredit the idea of socialism by associating it with a state-run economy. In spite of all their revolutionary posturing both parties devote their time to chasing reforms of capitalism. Scotland is only a small part of an economic system which embraces the whole world. It could never enjoy any real autonomy or self-sufficiency in the face of the world market. From day one it will be buffeted by hostile economic forces entirely beyond its control. In no time at all, Scotland will be faced with two choices—either total ruin, or the complete restoration of capitalist economics. The SSP's and Sheridan's independent socialist Scotland would be neither independent nor socialist.

Members of the Socialist Party understand well the urge to do something now, to make a change. That makes us all the more determined, however, to get the message across, to gather our fellows to clear away the barrier of the wages system, so that we can begin to build a truly human society.

Independent - Nae Chance

Those who think that an independent Scotland would necessarily make things any better there is sorry news. The conflict between the national and international fractions of the capitalist class would remain and it is perfectly plain that the rich who run the current devolved Scotland would be the same as the rich who would run independent "free" Scotland. The Scottish capitalist class run the country with the connivance of the Executive and they would continue to do so with the connivance of an independent parliament.

Since the creation of the Scottish Executive, business representatives have had access as secondees to the Executive and civil servants have been seconded outwards to the private sector. Companies involved include, Inward, Scottish Power, Scottish and Newcastle, Stagecoach, Ernst and Young, PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Outward: Lloyds TSB Foundation, Scottish Power, McGrigor Donald (law firm and lobbyist), Scottish and Newcastle and business lobby groups Business in the Community and the Scottish Chambers of Commerce. The Executive also run a scheme to second staff from road building and consulting firms to their Road Network Management and Maintenance Division. The biggest firms in the area such as Babtie, Scott Wilson and Fairhurst bid to be included in the scheme in which they supervise road building projects and even assist with the procurement process for such projects. As Minister Andy Kerr noted inward secondments “foster and promote links, co-operation and a mutual understanding”. Not to mention the financial benefits of helping to decide which consultants get which road contracts. In Scotland the allegedly environmentally conscious members of the Business Council for Sustainable Development include road building consultancy Scott Wilson, two of the biggest users of natural (Water) resources Scottish Power and the brewers Scottish and Newcastle and the oil giant Shell. In such circumstances the distinction between civil servant, public official, elected representative and business operative begins to break down.

"Scotland is governed not simply via the institutions of formal governance (meaning the political institutions of Scotland), and not simply via the traditionally understood “Scottish elite”, meaning either the various elite groups in the Scottish village or the Scottish capitalist class. Scotland is also run by political and economic decision-makers only some of whom are based in Scotland. Other centres of decision making are obviously London and Brussels, the Headquarters of the WTO/IMF/World Bank and the board rooms of the transnational corporations, including those which have no interest or base in Scotland."
http://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/27829/

The Scots should turn a deaf ear to the siren song of Scottish independence where any prosperity would as always only be for the elite ruling class and not for the working class.

"The working man has no country" declared Marx