Emancipation & Liberation

(This is a reposting of the article originally posted in September, which appeared to have become contaminated. Since it is a frequently visited posting, and still has relevance, particularly in the light of the announced date for the Scottish Independence referendum, it has been reposted.)

i) Why are there significant nationalist parties and a National Question in the UK in the twenty-first century?

In Scotland, the SNP is now the leading political party; in Wales, Plaid Cymru is the third (until recently, the second) placed party; whilst in Northern Ireland the top six parties identify themselves as either British unionist or Irish nationalist.  The answers to the questions posed above are to do with the nature of the UK state.

The UK state was formed in a number of key stages. These were marked initially by the demise of the Welsh mixed feudal and kinship-based order in 1284, after its conquest by Edward I, the Plantagenet king of England and overlord of Gascony. In 1536, Wales was absorbed into the centralised feudal English state under the Tudors and divided into counties. What remained of the old Welsh ruling class gained representation in the English Parliament and eventually became part of the wider English ruling class. Wales ceased to exist as a political entity until the end of the nineteenth century, and was administered as if it was part of England under English law. However, the majority of the population remained Welsh speaking until the beginning of the twentieth century, a considerably higher proportion than Gaelic speakers in either Ireland or Scotland.

Scotland’s regal union with England under the Stuarts followed in 1603. The continued political interests of the Scottish aristocracy were served by their influential position within the Church of Scotland and the Scottish Parliament.  Scotland retained its own legal system and currency.  However, after a failed attempt to pursue an independent Scottish colonial policy through the Darien Scheme, and a series of famine years in the late 1690’s, the Scottish ruling class voted to end its own parliament in Edinburgh. They settled instead for direct representation in the Union Parliament in London in 1707. First though, they secured their autonomous control of the Church of Scotland and the Scottish legal system.  These arrangements were made in the class interests of the majority of the Scottish aristocracy, who had increasingly become commercial landlords, and of the rising class of Scottish merchants seeking imperial outlets. The new Union also helped to secure the UK state, and both its influential English and Scottish supporters, from French-backed Jacobite threats to the new post-1714 Hanoverian order.

Ireland entered a regal union with England under the Tudors in 1542, after earlier attempts at conquest had been rolled back to the English controlled Pale around Dublin. However, Ireland was not effectively brought under the monarchy’s control until the final crushing of the mixed Irish feudal and kinship order. This order still prevailed in most areas of Ireland outside the old Pale up until 1607.  The political and military opportunity for this suppression was provided by the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns under the Stuart dynasty. The heartland of the old Gaelic order in Ulster was destroyed and thoroughly planted. These new Plantations followed from the earlier more tentative policy of English and Scots Plantations in Ireland, which had begun in the sixteenth century. The ongoing process of dispossession culminated in the Penal Laws, which were enacted from 1695.  What remained of the old Irish ruling class was faced with the choice of converting to the established Anglican Protestant religion, or of losing its lands. Only those Church of Ireland (Anglican) members of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ Ascendancy were represented in the Irish Parliament.

In 1801, the Union of the British and Irish Parliaments was made in the shared interests of the British ruling class and the ‘Anglo-Irish’ Ascendancy, which by now owned virtually all of Ireland’s land. This was done to ward off the possible reoccurrence of the revolutionary democratic challenge, which had recently been presented by the United Irishmen – Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter – allied to revolutionary France. It also meant that the existing Irish Protestant elite could preempt the threat represented by any possible future Catholic voting majority in Ireland.  The United Kingdom now reached its maximum territorial extent, including England (with Wales), Scotland and Ireland. The parliament at Westminster dealt with the politics of both the British Union (UK) and Empire. Its business was confined to the members of a British ruling class drawn from all four countries.

The elimination or cooption of non-English elites did not produce a united British nation though. Under the terms of the parliamentary unions, the Scottish and the ‘Anglo-Irish’ ruling groups were still able to maintain their own protected national institutions (e.g. the Church of Scotland and the Irish Yeomanry). At the same time, they worked as junior partners to the English members of the new British ruling class. Together, they further developed their now shared UK state. This enabled them jointly to pursue the profits to be made from the British Empire. Although the new unified British ruling class was able to forge a top-down, British national identity for itself, it did not create a new unitary British nation incorporating all the peoples of these islands – English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh; or a unitary British state, which reduced an older Scotland and Ireland to mere historical terms, like Aquitaine or Picardie in France, after the French Revolution.

During the Industrial Revolution, a new middle class was formed from the owners of industrial, commercial and financial capital.  It gained entry to a further extended British ruling class between the 1832 parliamentary Reform Act and the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1845. However, these newcomers did not promote a unitary British state either, in the manner of the French middle class after 1789. They were much more cautious.  This was because of the challenge from first, the plebian Radical movement after 1815, then from the new industrial working class wing of Chartism after 1837. Both these movements were seen as threats to the rule of property, whether it was in capital or in land. Therefore, in the face of these dangers, those new liberal members of the ruling class, representing the rising industrial order, allied themselves with the old conservative ruling class, representing commercial landed interests. They accepted the inherited British unionist nature of the UK state, with its coercive Crown Powers, helpful for keeping control of the ‘lower orders’.

The new members of the ruling class, representing industrial capital, were also looking for more effective ways to profit from empire. Under the prevailing mercantile capitalism of the seventeenth century, Spain and Holland had vied for domination; followed in the eighteenth century by France and the UK. With mercantile capitalism, each imperial power sought its own monopoly on trade within an empire jealously guarded by navies and armies. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, British industrial capital economically dominated the world and enforced a regime of ‘free trade imperialism’. Where economic might alone was not sufficient, then it could be supplemented by a little ‘gunboat diplomacy’. British hegemony was not confined to its formal colonial and commercial empire. Its economic tentacles extended all around the world. The British ruling class managed all this politically through its control of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster with its Home and Foreign Offices, and its domination of ‘law and order’ and local government; economically through its ownership of banking, commercial and trading houses in the City, and of industry and land; and militarily through the Royal Navy and British and colonial armed forces.

However, the rise of a new industrial capitalist order had not gone unchallenged. A counter to these developments initially arose in the revolutionary democratic movements in the UK associated with the International Revolutionary Wave, which developed from the French Revolution initiated in 1789. At this time, a full-blown industrial capitalist order did not exist. Attempts to enclose the commons, evict tenants, to impose generalised wage labour, to end customary prices for basic foodstuffs and for labour performed, and to abolish outdoor relief were all fiercely resisted.

From 1792, many joined the United Irishmen, the United Scotsmen, the London Corresponding Society and other organisations, in an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance, before this was finally defeated in 1798 in Ireland.  Later, the Radical wing of the Chartists supported the break-up of the British and Irish Union. However, with the defeat of the Chartists in 1849, the recently extended British ruling class gained the ascendancy now that the new industrial capitalist order had finally triumphed. The UK clearly became the most powerful state in the world. The effect of British ruling class hegemony was to tame the earlier Radical and working class movements. The overwhelming majority no longer sought a new social order, but looked for a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ within a capitalist system, and for opportunities of personal advance within the British Union or wider Empire.

Therefore, the failure to create a unitary British state and national identity has largely been a reflection of the choices made by the British ruling class, including its distinct Scottish and Protestant Irish components, to opt for a unionist state instead, the better to maintain their pro-property alliance. The UK set-up has allowed for subordinate national elites, and newly enfranchised sections from the ‘lower orders’ in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, to hold on to, or to create new perceived nationalities, but as subordinate elements of a hybrid British identity – Scottish-British, Irish-British (more recently Ulster-British) and Welsh-British. In Ireland, it was the repeal of the Test Acts (1828) and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) that helped to widen the earlier more exclusive ‘Anglo-Irish’ identity by creating a new Irish-British identity, which could be adopted by members of non-established Protestant denominations, and even by some better off Catholics, after Catholic emancipation in 1829.

During the century of British imperial world domination (1815-1914), no UK political party considered bringing an end to the distinct forms of national rule resulting from the unionist form of the state, which sustained those hybrid British identities found in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. These were central to maintaining wider support for the UK as a unionist, as opposed to a unitary British state, even through the period of High Imperialism (1895-1916).  The divisions which arose between the liberal unionists (Liberal Party and their Irish constitutional nationalist allies) and the conservative unionists (Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties), from the 1880′s, were over the best way to preserve the Union and Empire – political Home Rule or administrative Home Rule.

These divisions amongst the British ruling class were also accentuated as the British Empire began to face serious challenges, initially from France, then from Prussia/Germany in particular. British capitalists’ support for ‘free trade’ had remained unquestioned, as long they enjoyed the massive profits arising from being the first country to have undergone a successful industrial revolution. When inter-imperial conflicts intensified, voices advocating such protectionist measures as imperial preference began to be heard in the UK. Furthermore, many amongst the ruling class, who had recently accepted the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, began to harden their opposition to any further liberal unionist constitutional reform. This was because of the ruling class’s increasing doubts about their previously unquestioning belief in the  ’natural supremacy’ of the UK and British Empire.

Today, the UK still remains a state promoting the interests of capital. Furthermore, it remains a unionist and imperial constitutional monarchy, presiding over English, Scottish and Welsh nations, part of the Irish nation (‘the Six Counties’), various Crown Dependencies (i.e. the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) and those remaining imperial Overseas Territories (e.g. the British Virgin Islands, the Falkland Islands and the Chagos Archipelago). British ruling class attempts – whether its members thought themselves to be British or hybrid-British – to preserve their Union throughout these islands have been linked to their determination to maintain a wider imperial role. The British ruling class, through the City, has insisted upon keeping sterling as the UK’s own international currency.  It has held on to various Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, which provide it with tax havens beyond any effective UK government scrutiny. It maintains an overblown British military capacity, which includes nuclear weapons. It hangs on to its costly, top-heavy political, judicial and administrative system, with its royal court, aristocratic House of Lords, bemedalled military officers, bewigged judges, and aloof senior civil servants, all surrounded by pomp and ceremony. These people all declare their oath of loyalty to the Crown, not to Parliament, and certainly not to the people. This is because the Crown Powers provide the British ruling class with the constitutional means to bypass any formal democratic procedures, including Parliament, whenever this proves to be necessary for them.

 

ii)  The creation and expansion of hybrid British national identities amongst the different classes in these islands and the Empire

It has been shown that the specifically unionist form of the UK state allowed Irish-British and Scottish-British national identities to continue at elite level. These national identities were given a wider base of class support as the franchise was extended downwards to encompass different classes amongst the ‘lower orders’ in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In the prolonged period from 1801-1921, when it at was at its fullest territorial extent, the UK had a single imperial and unionist parliament at Westminster. Yet, during this period, there was still a further development of the existing devolved Irish and Scottish administrations, and the first elements of a new Welsh administration were established.

Since the old Welsh ruling class had been absorbed into the wider English ruing class, when Wales had been incorporated into England, there was no political recognition of the Welsh-British until the franchise was extended to the Welsh middle class in the nineteenth century. Many from the ‘lower orders’ still spoke the Welsh language, which, along with membership of a number of Welsh, non-established, Protestant denominations, contributed to the emergence of a new Welsh-British identity. An alternative Welsh-British identity was also able to develop amongst an increasingly English-speaking working class, particularly in South Wales. A more conscious ‘Anglo-Welsh’ identity emerged in reaction to these developments, particularly amongst the English-speaking, larger landowning and middle classes. This ‘Anglo-Welsh’ identity was also sustained by the Anglican Church of Wales, which remained established until 1920.

England was the dominant nation within the UK, with its own population exceeding the combined total of the other three constituent nations several times over. This meant that the emergence of an English-British identity was less clear-cut. For many English people, Britain/British meant England/English, and the two sets of terms were interchangeable.

Despite remaining and continuing national differences, it was clearly the British Empire that provided the real economic and ideological cement that held British, English and hybrid British identities together within the Union. This remained the case so long as the UK was a major independent imperial power. Class still divided those adopting these hybrid British identities. Different classes imbued these hybrid identities with different meanings, celebrating their own alternative histories. Nevertheless, the wider political potential of any opposition, emanating from ‘lower order’ Radicals, Lib-Labs, Labourists and later, British Socialists, was constantly undermined by these parties’ acceptance of Union and Empire and the existing constitutional order.

The promotion of hybrid British identities has remained an important feature of unionist and imperial politics. This could be seen in appeals targeted at ‘Paddy’, ‘Jock’ and ‘Taffy’ to enlist before the First World War. Imperial wars have also been used to gain wider support for UK state institutions. This was highlighted when Irish Home Rule leaders, such as John Redmond and Joe Devlin, acted as recruiting sergeants for the carnage of the First World War. Today the SNP supports Scottish regiments, which have long served British (and now US/British) imperial interests throughout the world.

 

iii)  The appearance of independent national political organisations within the UK

In Ireland, the defeat of the 1798 Rising, and the subsequent 1801 Act of Union, broke the United Irishmen, the key force behind the early revolutionary democratic challenge to the UK state. The United Irishmen had represented the first attempt to create an independent national political organisation in these islands. Daniel O’Connell led a later struggle for Catholic Emancipation. This was achieved in 1829.  However, whilst having its mass base in Ireland, this campaign was aimed at reform of the constitution throughout the UK, not just in Ireland. O’Connell worked in conjunction with the Whigs. He even considered the possibility of the Irish becoming ‘West Britons’.  O’Connell’s later attempt, through the Repeal Association, to remove Ireland from the parliamentary union, but still keep it under the Crown, failed in 1843. His politics remained subordinate to those of the Whigs. He was strongly opposed to any of the Chartists who showed more sympathy with those seeking to end the Union. This was because of the particular class challenge they represented.

During the mid-nineteenth century heyday of British ‘free trade imperialism’, political competition throughout these islands was largely conducted between sections of the British upper and middle classes under Tory/Conservative and Whig/Liberal banners. This was true whether they came from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland. The particular national poles of those hybrid identities, found amongst the upper and middle class Irish-British, Scottish-British and Welsh-British, were largely reserved for private, social and cultural occasions. Both the existing and would-be members of the British ruling class were confident about their shared future, as they basked in an “Empire upon which the sun never sets”. This was why these hybrid British national identities did not take on any party political form at the time.

It took until the 1880’s for new independent national political organisations to appear in Ireland. The launching of the quasi-revolutionary Irish Land League (ILL) brought the mass of tenant farmers into active politics. However, one of the ILL’s key leaders, Charles Parnell, brought about his own ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’ with the backing of the Irish middle class and better-off farmers. In 1882, after agreeing to call off the rent strike and other forms of non-legal action, Parnell established the Irish National League (INL) as a constitutional nationalist party.  The INL pressed for a tenant buyout of Ascendancy-owned land, backed Irish-owned industry, and campaigned for Irish Home Rule. However, an underground of committed Irish republicans still remained.

In Scotland, the Highland Land League (HLL) made the first attempt to break through the established two party system of the Conservatives and Liberals in 1885. The formation of the HLL had been inspired by the socio-economic gains of the ILL, and by the political advances made by the INL. The HLL put up independent Crofter candidates and won four seats. They gained support from workers and Radicals in the Central Belt. The HLL favoured Scottish and Irish Home Rule, with its most Radical leaders linking this to a vision of  ‘land for the people’.

Scottish workers were, in turn, inspired by the successful election of Crofter MPs. Scottish miners, in particular, extended the earlier, largely agrarian inspired notion of ‘land for the people’ to cover all land, including its mineral resources. This demand was to be promoted either by means of the taxation of mineral royalties (a Radical policy inspired by Henry George), or by land nationalisation (a Socialist policy advocated by the Social Democratic Federation). The miners, in their turn, led by Keir Hardie, were influential in forming the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, five years before the (intended all-UK) Independent Labour Party was launched in Bradford.

The rising middle classes of Ireland, Scotland and Wales (as well as in the ‘White’ British colonies) used their growing economic power to make increasing political claims for themselves. Key sections pressed for Home Rule within the UK (or British Empire) for their own nations. Their particular Home Rule reforms would provide them with ‘protected’ jobs in these nations, whilst still guaranteeing them access to the wider jobs and spoils of Union and Empire. The middle class supporters of Home Rule within the UK, and of White colonial self-government within the wider British Empire, hoped that their suggested political reforms would satisfy the ‘lower orders’.

However, they were constantly looking over their shoulders. They feared those workers and small tenant farmers, who might raise their own economic and social demands, and push for more advanced political change. They might create their own independent political organisations to achieve these ends, based on either a social republican, or later, a socialist republican perspective, which fundamentally challenged the UK state and British Empire.

 

iv)  The retreat of hybrid British identities in Ireland in the face of new challenges and their maintenance in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as long as British imperialism remained relatively strong

In Ireland, the possibility of an Irish-British national identity gaining more widespread acceptance was greatly reduced in the aftermath of the disastrous Great Famine (1845-9), especially amongst Catholic tenants.  However, Irish-British identity still commanded significant support from the ‘Anglo-Irish’ Ascendancy, and amongst the Protestant middle class, tenant farmers and artisans. This was particularly the case in industrial north-east Ulster, which played an important role in the British imperial economy. This link also helped to push the majority of working class Protestants into giving their eager support to the Union and Empire, encouraged by the Conservatives (and later the Liberal Unionists), the Orange Order, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland and Presbyterian street corner demagogues.

Amongst those largely Catholic Irish, the specifically Irish aspect of their national identities took on a greater significance.  Middle class Home Rulers, though, still retained some attachment to the wider British Empire, buttressed by the Catholic hierarchy’s support.  The United Irish League’s (successor to the split INL, after the Parnell/Kitty O’Shea scandal) opposition to the British imperial Boer War (1899-1902) (also matched by some British Liberals, and most ILP members and Socialists) was not upheld when it came to the First World War (1914-18).

However, a significant minority amongst the ‘lower orders’ rejected the imperial notion of a shared British national identity altogether, whether hyphenated or not. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (first founded in 1858 and reconstituted in 1867) had promoted the notion of an independent Irish republic, based on an Irish nation (initially formed by uniting Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters as the Irish-Irish, as opposed to Irish-British, in the context of an Ireland still within the Union).

When the IRB accepted the ‘New Departure’ in 1878, encouraged particularly by Michael Davitt, this led to the formation of the Irish Land League. The ensuing Land War provided the idea of an Irish republic with a wider political base of support. Republicans in Ireland differed amongst themselves over their visions of a future society. The most advanced amongst them sought popular democratic control over their nation’s natural resources, especially land, and sometimes over its principal industries and transport. In their thinking, this would lead to the formation of a social republic (e.g. Michael Davitt) or, later on, a socialist republic (e.g. James Connolly).

The strength of the British Empire continued to buttress Scottish-British and Welsh-British identities for a considerably longer period than a hybrid British identity did in most of Ireland. Like north-east Ulster, industrial Clydeside and South Wales played important parts in the British imperial economy. After a succession of economic, social, cultural and political reforms, made to accommodate the ‘lower orders’, the UK state gained the support of Liberals and Radicals, Lib-Labs, and later of Empire-accepting Labour Party members and Socialists. They all pressed for their desired economic, social and cultural reforms within the existing unionist and imperial order.

In Ireland, it took the shock of the First World War, with its exposure of British imperial weakness, to push small farmers, labourers and workers into concerted action to break from their previous majority support for Irish constitutional nationalism and to fight for an Irish Republic. The socialist republican, James Connolly, along with the Irish Citizen Army, a workers’ militia initially formed during the 1913 Dublin Lock-out, played key roles in initiating this Republican struggle, marked by the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.

Following on from this example, John Maclean introduced the idea of the break-up of the Union and Empire to the Scottish working class. Previously adhering to the ‘British road to socialism’ of the British Socialist Party (BSP), Maclean first adopted James Connolly’s strategy in 1919. In that year he witnessed the resilience of the Irish Republican opposition (including the Limerick Soviet) fighting for political aims, and compared this with the relative weakness of the trade union opposition fighting for economic demands (the 40 hour week struggle of engineering workers) on Clydeside.

Having rejected the shortcomings of existing British socialist organisations, particularly the BSP, he formed the Tramp Trust Unlimited, and toured Scotland to promote his pamphlet, Ireland’s Tragedy – Scotland’s Disgrace.  Maclean’s endeavours, in this regard, eventually led to the foundation of the Scottish Workers Republican Party in 1922. They were partly curtailed by his early death in 1923. However, Maclean’s final years also coincided with the ending of the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave, marked by the crushing of the Kronstadt Soviet in the infant USSR.

This same period of political and economic setbacks witnessed the success of the British ruling class attempt to reassert its control over the working class upsurge, which followed the First World War and the Russian Revolution.  In 1919, the challenge of the 40 Hours Strike of engineers on Clydeside and the Laganside was faced down. Tanks and English troops were used in Glasgow, whilst Loyalists evicted militants and Catholic workers from the Belfast shipyards. In 1921, militant miners, whose leaders were originally bought off by the Sankey Commission (hinting at the possibility of the nationalisation of the coal mines), were left isolated by the other members of the Triple Alliance of miners’, railworkers’ and transport workers’ unions on Black Friday, after the Commission failed to deliver.

Meeting considerably more resistance in Ireland, the British ruling class was finally able to reassert its control over the situation following the War of Independence. This war had come about after the UK government’s refusal to recognise Sinn Fein’s overwhelming electoral victory in the 1918 General Election.  The Black and Tans were launched against the Irish population in 1920. British state backing was given to the Unionist pogroms in Belfast between 1920-22.

Eventually, a partitionist Anglo-Irish Treaty was imposed in 1922. This recognised a now separate Irish Free State under the Crown in 26 counties. Home Rule within the UK for Northern Ireland was provided for 6 of Ireland’s counties, where a new Stormont was constituted. The new Ulster Unionist Party ensured that it became, in effect, ‘a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People’. A new Northern Ireland statelet was created for the Protestant majority who were to form a new hybrid national identity there. They became the Ulster-British (albeit at the cost of abandoning 3 Ulster counties), now that the old Irish-British leadership had lost its political ascendancy over the other 26 counties, and the Irish-Irish had become Irish.  The British state armed the pro-Treaty forces in the 26 counties in order to crush the Republican resistance in the Irish Civil War (1922-3), and to keep the Irish Free State under the Crown.

In Scotland, at this time, the growing Labour Party was taking on more significance than its pro-Home Rule affiliate, the Independent Labour Party, which had been founded earlier. The Labour Party took less interest in constitutional reform and concentrated on Westminster as the focus for its economic and social reforms, especially after the defeat of a Scottish Home Rule Bill during the first minority Labour government in 1924. The infant CPGB, which had a significant base in Scotland, took inspiration from another unionist state, the USSR. Here the CPSU leadership, drawn from a number of the Union’s republics, played an analogous integrating role in the USSR, to that of the British ruling class in the UK state. The CPSU was hostile to any meaningful exercise of national self-determination within its territorial boundaries. The early CPGB adopted a similar attitude to any move for national democracy in Scotland (and also in Wales).

Therefore, the first fractures in the British unionist and imperialist set-up, which had been highlighted during the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave, were prevented from opening up further.  The British ruling class was able to reimpose its control over these islands, and indeed throughout its Empire. The British Empire reached its maximum territorial extent as result of the imperialist carve-up and redivision, which occurred after the First World War.  The Nationalist parties, which did emerge in Northern Ireland (the rump Nationalist Party began to take its seats in Stormont in 1924), in Wales (Plaid Cymru in 1925), and in Scotland (the SNP in 1934), remained fairly marginal, apart from occasional short-lived spurts (e.g. Robert MacIntyre’s SNP victory in the Motherwell by-election in 1945) until the 1960’s.

 

v)  British ruling class attempts to buttress their power through reform of the union in the face of the imperial decline and the further retreat of hybrid British identities, especially amongst the working class

In their attempt to coopt other classes in support of their wider imperial aims, it can be seen that the British ruling class was forced to concede reforms of its Empire and Union, whenever it has faced strong enough national democratic challenges. In the case of Ireland, where direct political control was lost over 26 counties, after the War of Independence, the British ruling class first developed what would later be known as neo-colonial methods of control, exercised at a distance, through local parties that still accepted the wider British imperial hegemony. Within the UK (and even in those parts of the Empire where direct British colonial control still remained) reforms had been, or were later,  introduced which gave greater recognition to the national poles of the various hybrid British identities – Irish, Scottish and Welsh (and Canadian, Australian and New Zealander).

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, administrative devolutionary measures had been considered enough to achieve this within the UK itself (e.g. a Secretary of State for Scotland in 1885, a Welsh Department of the Board of Education in 1907). During the era of High Imperialism, the conservative unionist majority (Conservatives and Liberal Unionists) amongst the British ruling class could still confidently obstruct any specifically political Home Rule proposals advocated by liberal unionists or constitutional nationalists (Liberals, Radicals, Lib-Labs, Labourists, the INL and its successors), although they sometimes supported measures of administrative Home Rule.

However, Conservative unionist intransigent opposition to constitutional reform had proved impossible to maintain during the International Revolutionary Crisis from 1916-21 and the Irish Republican challenge to British rule. Therefore unwittingly, the earlier majority British ruling class hostility towards political Home Rule had contributed to the first phase of the break-up of the UK state, leading to the departure of the Irish Free State (albeit still under the Crown until 1948).

As British imperialism went into further decline, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and particularly from the 1960′s, the underlying historical trend towards the political break-up of the British Empire and the UK state and  the erosion of ‘Britishness’ began to reassert itself.  In the UK, this occurred despite continued economic integration throughout these islands, with big business (British, American and European) taking over previous nationally based businesses, or driving them to the wall; and, as the network of shared transport, communication and media, which linked the constituent nations of the UK, drew ever closer.

This continued imperial decline has taken place over a protracted period. The British ruling class has conducted a concerted rearguard defence of both Empire and Union, especially when it faced particularly severe challenges, e.g. during the Second World War (1939-45). Nevertheless, particularly since the 1960’s, as the territorial extent (with the loss of most of its colonies) and the effective political reach of British imperialism have gone into rapid decline, greater numbers of workers and others in Scotland began to downgrade the British imperial part of their hybrid national identities and upgrade the specific Scottish national part. The first political indications of this were the SNP electoral breakthroughs. Winnie Ewing was elected to Westminster in the Hamilton by-election in 1967.

In Wales, during the 1950’s, this process revealed itself a little earlier, partly due to the continued political significance of the Welsh language, but it was then held back.  The UK state was able to promote ethnic (cultural) enmity along language lines to divide English and Welsh speakers. Those Welsh cultural nationalists, who prioritised the defence of the Welsh language over democratic political reform, gave unwitting support to the UK state in its divide-and-rule endeavours. Nevertheless it was the impact of Plaid Cymru that first highlighted the rise of new nationalist parties in the UK. Gwynfor Evans was elected to Westminster in the Carmarthen by-election in 1966.

It was only in the Northern Ireland, that a continued strong British identity – Ulster-British – was able to vigorously maintain itself, albeit almost entirely amongst the Protestant section of the population.  Significantly, this Ulster-Britishness has always been strongly associated with an exaggerated support for the Empire, Union, King (or Queen) and the established Protestant religion. Furthermore, it required a starkly repressive Orange statelet (financed by UK state subventions), with its gerrymandered Stormont, a draconian Special Powers Act, a Protestant unionist dominated RUC, and a variety of Special forces drawn from Orange and other Loyalist organisations, to maintain this.

However, amongst the Irish section [1] of the population living in ‘the Six Counties’, a more confident Irish nationalism began to assert itself in the late 1960’s. Local liberal and labour unionist attempts to woo those with an Irish identity in Northern Ireland were never that convincing, since their advocates quickly bowed to pressure from the conservative Ulster Unionists backed by various Loyalist organisations. These reactionary forces were determined to exclude Irish/Catholics (usually seen by them as being identical) from any political say in Stormont and most of Northern Ireland’s local councils. The unionist Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) did win some limited Catholic support (which hinted at a possibility of cementing an Irish-British, as opposed to an Irish national identity in the North), but not in the West Belfast heartland, where Irish workers voted for Republican Labour candidates. The NILP remained committed to unionism.

The initiators of the Civil Rights Movement sought the reform of Stormont, hoping to win working class Protestant support. However, a significant section of the Republican Movement (later to emerge as the Official wing), who had been influenced by the Communist Party of Ireland (itself partitioned until 1970), saw this as but the first stage to achieving a united Ireland (a strategy taken up again by today’s Sinn Fein). Many, though, on the most radical wing of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Peoples Democracy (PD), had been influenced by the direct action wing of American Civil Rights Movement and by the heady days of ‘68’. Some PD leaders saw their struggle as the first phase of wider international revolution.

As in the period between 1920-2, any opposition emanating from the Irish national communities was met by a Loyalist counter-offensive, backed in 1969 by the RUC and the B Specials. The RUC attacked the Bogside in Derry, a Loyalist pogrom (including out-of-uniform Specials) was launched in streets off the Lower Falls Road in West Belfast, whilst the isolated Short Strand in East Belfast also came under armed Loyalist assault in 1970.

In the late 1960’s, a determined UK state-backed, liberal unionist attempt to integrate the Catholic Irish economically, socially, culturally and politically into Northern Ireland, might have split any renewed specifically Irish national challenge.  If the Catholic Irish might still have found it hard to become Ulster-British, they could possibly have been won over to a wider Irish-British identity, in a similar manner to those considerable numbers of Catholic Irish who had moved to Scotland.

Such an attempt might have been possible if Stormont had been abolished immediately and a UK state programme of civil rights imposed upon Northern Ireland, in an analogous manner to the attempt by the US Federal Government to enforce civil rights in the South. However, the rise of national democratic movements elsewhere in the UK initially made the British ruling class nervous about the uncertainties opened up by constitutional reform, especially when they lacked reliable local moderate unionists to help maintain UK state control in Northern Ireland. Therefore, the UK state continued to give backing to the intransigent but reliably loyal Ulster Unionists. The British ruling class also faced the added worry that Northern Ireland lay strategically on the northern gateway to the Atlantic, in the context of the ongoing Cold War, and Ireland was not signed up to NATO (although still very pro-US and anti-Communist).

In Scotland, it had been the Labour Party, which provided those from a Catholic Irish background with a political conduit into local government and Westminster.  Many had been won over to support for the Union in Britain, and for a long time, they opposed any political Devolution (as Home Rule came to be called) for Scotland. Scotland still remained a more hostile environment for the Catholic Irish, whereas such feelings tended to be more locally restricted in England, e.g. Liverpool – at least until the emergence of ‘The Troubles’. It took some time before Scottish society began to open itself enough to permit the development of an alternative Scottish-British or Irish-Scottish identities for those from a Catholic Irish background. Before this many  considered themselves to be Irish-British. They provided the strongest working class support for the unionist British Labour Party in Scotland.  This was partly as an insurance against their fears that any future Scottish Parliament could perhaps become another ‘Stormont’.

Liberal and labour unionism remained weak in Northern Ireland though. The one-party Orange sectarian regime had both regular and irregular Unionist armed forces at its disposal, whilst also being able to call upon bigoted Loyalist forces when necessary. Ulster Unionist and Loyalist intransigence blocked the door to any meaningful reform of Stormont, which could integrate the Irish and lead to their acceptance of an Irish-British identity.

In the absence of any other reliable support for continued UK rule, the British government sent troops to Northern Ireland, in 1969, to uphold the position of the now strongly challenged Ulster Unionists and their Orange statelet. Both the Labour government, and the following Conservative government elected in 1970, recommended some liberal unionist concessions to split the Civil Rights Movement, and to win over moderate middle class Catholic support. But this was a bridge too far for most Ulster Unionists. They stuck by the old Loyalist certainties – “No surrender”, “Not an Inch”. And, as an indication that the Unionist regime enjoyed continued UK government support, it was permitted to introduce internment without trial. Arrests were confined solely to the Irish (Republican, Nationalist and Socialist), despite the murders, pogroms and other attacks made by Loyalists.

 

vi)  The initial failure of liberal unionist political devolution and the entrenchment of Westminster Direct Rule by 1979

The British ruling class has a long collective memory, and the re-emergence of national democratic challenges in the 1960’s reminded some of them of the old Home Rule policies, which had emerged amongst the liberal unionists in the Liberal Party (not to be confused with the conservative unionist, anti-Home Rule, Liberal Unionists), in the face of challenges from the Land Leagues, the Irish National League and its successors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Therefore, in response to the growing national democratic movements in the 1960’s, Harold Wilson’s Labour government set up the Crowther (later to be called the Kilbrandon) Commission in 1969.  Its work continued under Heath’s Conservative government and it reported in 1973. The Kilbrandon Commission recommended liberal unionist reform of the UK constitution. What had once been termed ‘Home Rule’  was now to be called ‘Devolution’.  Yet, the Conservative government and the Labour opposition saw no great urgency to implement these recommendations following the failure of the SNP or Plaid Cymru to make any further breakthroughs in the 1970 General Election.

However, the polarised situation in Northern Ireland, with the re-emergence of an armed Republican resistance, particularly after Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972; a more vigorous Nationalist party – the Social Democratic & Labour Party (SDLP); the rapid development of Loyalist gangs and paramilitaries; and further right Unionist parties – the right populist, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the semi-fascist, Vanguard Progressive Unionist Party (VPUP) – eventually forced the Conservative government to initiate constitutional reform (with Westminster cross party support) and pass the Northern Ireland Constitution Act in 1973. It brought about the abolition of Stormont. However, this was only meant to be a temporary measure, before the setting up of a new power-sharing devolved assembly in Northern Ireland. A somewhat reluctant Brian Faulkner, leader of the conservative unionist Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), along with the Oliver Napier of the liberal unionist Alliance, and Gerry Fitt of the constitutional nationalist SDLP, signed the Sunningdale Agreement, hoping to bring about this reform of Stormont.

Once again, most conservative and reactionary Unionists and Loyalists strongly opposed any liberal unionist constitutional reform. They formed the United Ulster Unionist Council (with the rejectionist, further right section of the UUP led by Harry West, the DUP led by Ian Paisley, and the VPUP led by William Craig). The Ulster Army Council (UVF and UDA), and the Loyalist paramilitary-led Ulster Workers Council were also formed. These three organisations coordinated a campaign of political opposition, paramilitary intimidation and strike action that brought down the Sunningdale Agreement. This agreement, initially drawn up under Heath’s Conservative government, had become the responsibility of Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government in 1974, highlighting these parties’ shared unionist approach.

Following the collapse of Sunningdale, Northern Ireland, like Scotland and Wales, became subject to Westminster Direct Rule, albeit without a UK-wide party with direct representation at Westminster.  The Conservatives, Labour and Liberals provided Britain-wide parties in England, Scotland and Wales to address the interests of their various class backers within these constituent nations of the UK. (The UUP broke its last organisational links with the Conservatives in protest against Sunningdale.) Indeed, much of the running of the Northern Ireland statelet was handed over to the security services, with consecutive Northern Irish Secretaries of State acting like colonial governors.

In contrast, though, electoral gains by both the constitutional nationalist SNP and Plaid Cymru, in the two 1974 general elections, persuaded the new Labour government to continue pursuing liberal unionist constitutional reform in Scotland and Wales. In 1978, they introduced Devolution Bills for the two nations. Both the SNP and Plaid Cymru supported these bills. However, Labour was presiding over growing British economic and wider imperial decline. Sections of the British ruling class began to mount strong opposition to any prospects of further ‘dangerous’ liberal reform. They wanted to batten down the hatches of UK plc in the face of an increasingly turbulent international economic situation.

The repressive methods used to assert UK state control in Northern Ireland, in the attempt to break continuing Irish Republican resistance, appealed to some sections of the British ruling class. They thought that some of these techniques might have a wider application in the future.  They looked to the Conservative Party, pushing for a new right wing leadership under Margaret Thatcher. Labour’s incumbent Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Roy ‘Stone’ Mason, was also an advocate of UK state repression and a leading figure in Labour’s shift to the Right under Callaghan after his government kowtowed to the IMF.

Therefore, it was not surprising that there was a sizeable section of the Labour Party, particularly in Scotland and Wales, which opposed any liberal unionist constitutional reform. They were permitted to campaign openly against the Labour government’s Devolution Bills. They were assisted by the Left British unionists. In Scotland, Labour’s Tam Dayell, Robin Cook and Brian Wilson (who adopted a pro-Highland, anti-Central Belt position), and in Wales, Labour’s Neil Kinnock and Leo Abse (who adopted anti-Welsh speaking Wales positions), supported by some of the far Left (e.g. initially the ‘revolution not devolution’ SWP), tried to put a Leftist gloss on the conservative unionist counter-attack on liberal constitutional reform.

Those members of the ruling class opposing the Devolution Bills enjoyed a decided advantage. Under the Crown Powers, the UK constitution allows the ruling class’s agents in Westminster, the judiciary, the senior civil service and the military and security officers to bypass parliamentary scrutiny and to resort to some decidedly anti-democratic methods. These could be seen most clearly in Northern Ireland, where, in an attempt to defeat the Republican opposition and to cow the Irish section of the population, Diplock courts (with normal defenders’ rights suspended), internment without trial, shoot-to-kill and state backing for Loyalist death squads had been introduced.

Such draconian measures were not needed though in Scotland and Wales to face down the loose alliance of pro-devolution liberal unionists and constitutional nationalists. Instead, the anti-devolutionists got Labour MP, George Cunningham, to put an amendment requiring the support of 40% of the total electorate before Devolution would be enacted. They wheeled out former Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Douglas-Hume, to promise a better devolutionary deal in Scotland under a Tory government in the future. Senior civil servants were told to bury any government reports or papers which might aid the nationalists.  Some mock military exercises were targeted at putative armed nationalist forces, and agent provocateur activity was promoted on the Scottish nationalist fringe. Attempts were made to divide English and Welsh speakers in Wales.  ‘Non-political’ ‘Elizabrit’ was persuaded to make an anti-nationalist Christmas Speech in 1977. The two Devolution Bills were defeated in referenda held in 1979. This prompted a general election, which led to a Conservative government under Thatcher.

The liberal unionist political impulse had been brought to a juddering halt. Thatcher was a conservative ultra-unionist, who warmly admired the political methods of the rejectionist Ulster Unionists. She enjoyed close links with the imperially trained British security services. Her new government, elected in 1979, soon stepped up the combined employer, unionist and imperialist offensives.

 

vii)  A failed liberal unitary Britain attempt to reform politics in Northern Ireland

It might have been thought that, after the latest challenge from the Irish community and the failure of UUP one-party statelet, which had controlled Northern Ireland from 1922 until the abolition of Stormont  in 1972, unionists in Northern Ireland would have appreciated the closer political links to the rest of the UK brought about by Westminster Direct Rule. Back in 1801, their Irish unionist antecedents had overcome Orange Order objections and accepted the abolition of the Irish Parliament, although they had continued to give (sometimes clandestine) support to the Orange Order, as an insurance policy against Irish national ‘lower order’ challenges. Furthermore, in Northern Ireland, even after the abolition of Stormont, as in Ireland after the Act of Union, devolved administrative institutions still remained in place; so Ulster-British identities could still have been preserved, under continued Direct Rule, just as Scottish-British and Welsh-British identities had received continued institutional support.

In an attempt to make political capital out of such possibilities, the Campaign for Equal Citizenship was launched in the 1980′s with the involvement the British and Irish Communist Organisation and the prominent dissident Ulster unionists, Robert McCartney and Clifford Smyth. Campaigns were also launched within both the British Labour and Conservative parties, to get these two ‘mainland’ parties to organise directly in Northern Ireland, so that British ‘national’ politics could be conducted solely through Westminster. After making some initial headway, these campaigns to encourage greater British political integration fell away.  The majority of traditional Ulster Unionists – whether UUP or DUP – were still wanting to maintain Protestant supremacy and not confuse matters by recognising Irish Catholic rights throughout the UK.

The new Westminster Direct Rule arrangements in Northern Ireland hardly provided a successful liberal, or even a conservative precedent for any would-be British nationalists making the first tentative moves towards a more unitary British state. Successive British governments ensured that effective control in the province was given over to the British armed forces and security services. Their powers to intervene even included the right to approve new building projects (this was to ensure the unimpeded movement of troops in Irish peopled areas). Any economic and social concessions were only made in an attempt to placate workers and others who were often beyond effective state control throughout ‘The   Troubles’. Ironically, the one thing which united the mainstream Unionist and Nationalist parties in Northern Ireland, from the late 1980’s, was an insistence on the return of Stormont, even if they supported this for diametrically opposed reasons.

 

viii)  The Irish Hunger Strike (1981) and the Miners Strike (1984-5) – a comparison between their long-term political impacts

The 1970’s had initially seen a liberal state response to an increasing working class challenge, as well as to the rise of new national democratic movements. The successful 1974 Miners’ Strike, which had brought down the Conservative government, led to a period of debate amongst the ruling class about how the working class challenge could best be contained. The incoming Labour government initiated the Bullock Report published in 1977. This adopted a liberal approach to industrial relations and recommended ‘worker participation’ in the running of industry. In reality, these ‘workers’ would more likely have been trade union officials, especially at the higher levels of industrial management. Most of the Left opposed worker participation at the time, because it was understood to represent an opening to corporatism, under the auspices of the state, the employers and the trade union bureaucracy. Workers’ control of, not participation in, the management of industry was the answer for many on the Left.

Furthermore, just as the Labour government bowed to right wing pressure over liberal reform of Northern Ireland, so it ignored Bullock’s liberal ‘worker participation’ recommendations. Instead, under pressure from the IMF, the CBI, and an increasingly right wing Conservative Party, Callaghan’s Labour government tried to roll back workers’ pay demands in a period of rampant inflation. Under the Social Contract from 1974, and the Concordat, following the 1978-9 ‘Winter of Discontent’, Labour looked for help from the TUC and trade union bureaucracy to discipline any shop steward and rank and file worker initiated independent (unofficial) action.

When the Labour government collapsed in 1979, after its Scottish and Welsh Devolution referenda debacles, the Conservatives were returned. Thatcher soon initiated a relentless campaign to break independent trade union power. Defeats of selected groups, such as the steel workers in 1980, and the Warrington print workers in 1983, paved the way for comprehensive anti-trade union laws. ‘Anti-trade union’ is a bit of a misnomer here, since the effect of these laws has been very different upon the trade union bureaucracy compared to the rank and file. The former has greatly increased its privileges at the expense of, and its power over, the latter. This bureaucracy has jealously protected its position by clamping down on any attempts to organise effective industrial action, which might jeopardise its position.

The Conservatives did impose a ban to prevent GCHQ workers from remaining members of their union in 1984. However, they also provided state funding for official trade union courses to encourage employee ‘responsibility’. They worked closely with right wing trade union leaders, such as those in the EEPTU, who signed deals that signed their members up to private health schemes. The Conservatives’ real victory over the whole Trade Union Movement though came as result of the defeat of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. This was a titanic battle, and its leader, Arthur Scargill, attempted to thwart the draconian anti-trade union laws and state backing for scab unions – the UDM and EEPTU. However, he also thought that victory would come through winning the official support of the TUC and the Labour Party, rather than the independent organisation of those many trade unionists and supporters who might have defied their obstructive tactics.

Thatcher made it very clear that she considered the miners to be “the enemy within”, and that the miners’ industrial action threatened the UK state. Therefore, the worried leaderships of the very constitutional Labour Party and TUC did what they could to marginalise the miners. The Conservative government, in the meantime, made concessions to Scottish teachers, dockers and Militant Labour-led Liverpool Council to avoid fighting on too many fronts, knowing that, once the miners were defeated, they could pick off these groups later.

It had been but eight years between the British ruling class’s tentative support for the liberal industrial relations reforms suggested by Bullock to their total support for anti-trade union laws and state repression of the miners. So, how did their initial support for liberal unionist constitutional reform of the UK fare over much the same period? The British ruling class’s strongest commitment to such liberal reform was shown between 1973 (the Northern Ireland Constitution Act and the Sunningdale Agreement) and 1978 (the Scottish and Welsh Bills to introduce Devolution). However, it has already been shown that ruling class support for liberal constitutional measures was dead in the water by 1979.  The conservative unionists had apparently triumphed earlier on the political front than they were later to on the industrial front.

However, in Northern Ireland, events then took a different course, leading to another British ruling class response. The Republican Movement, having suffered considerable setbacks, under both the Labour and Conservative governments’ criminalisation offensive, was able to win back wide support from the Irish community during the 1981 Hunger Strikes. This culminated in the election of IRA prisoner, Bobby Sands, to Westminster. Furthermore, the ensuing death of Sands and nine other hunger strikers did not represent the same massive defeat for the Republican Movement, as did the defeat of the miners, four years later, for the wider British Trade Union Movement. After the Hunger Strikes, the Republican Movement was able to make significant political gains largely because, unlike the British Labour Party, it did not depend on the support of those who accepted the political limitations of the existing UK constitutional order. Between 1984-5, a minority amongst the South Yorkshire miners came to understand that the British state’s police occupation of their villages bore a striking resemblance to the British state’s army occupation of the Irish peopled villages in South Armagh. In a sense, they were coming to a similar conclusion to that of John Maclean 66 years earlier in 1919, when he realised that open political struggles against the state could sustain themselves more effectively than indirect economic struggles.

And in Ireland, by the 1990′s, as in the 1920′s, the British ruling class was forced to go beyond its initial preferred policy of isolation and repression used to break the power of any major opposition it faced. It had to make some real concessions to the Irish Republicans. This outcome contrasted with the more thorough defeat of organised labour. In 1921, the British ruling class had been able to build upon its initial success, in getting the Triple Alliance leaders to climb-down on Black Friday, to go on to crush the General Strike in 1926; just as they built on their defeat of the Steelworkers’ Strike in 1980 to go on to break the National Union of Miners between 1984-5. However, when it came to the challenge represented by the Irish Republicans, in the two periods, the British ruling class had to make greater concessions than their original 1920 Government of Ireland Act, when they came up with the 1922 Anglo-Irish Treaty; just as they eventually had to move beyond the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement to accepting the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, despite initially resorting to armed repression in both cases.

 

ix)  The British ruling class’s ‘New Unionist’ strategy to cover the whole of these islands starts and stalls under the Conservatives

Once Thatcher had taken office in 1979, she had originally confidently dismissed the constitutional nationalist SDLP in Northern Ireland and later, the 1984 New Ireland Forum proposals of Garret Fitzgerald’s centre right Fine Gael government in Ireland. These had offered the British government either a confederal or a joint authority solution for Northern Ireland. Thatcher, though, still remained closely allied to the rejectionist UUP.

However, continued Irish Republican resistance, including the 1984 Brighton Bombing, and Sinn Fein successes in local council and Westminster elections, forced the British ruling class into a rethink. As a result, ‘the lady who was not for turning’ made a spectacular U-turn in 1985. She signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which involved precisely those Irish parties that Thatcher had so vehemently sidelined the previous year. It also meant distancing the Conservative government from the rejectionist Ulster Unionists.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement (the very name of which showed the low priority Thatcher’s Conservatives gave to the notion of administering three and a bit nations within the UK) revived the idea of a power-sharing Northern Ireland assembly. The Ulster-British would get the backing of the UK government, and the Irish government would provide some guarantees of representation to Irish living in ‘the Six Counties’, through the opening up of an office in Maryfield in Belfast. The Anglo-Irish Agreement represented the first hesitant step towards a British ruling class ‘New Unionist’ strategy of constitutional reform to buttress its position throughout these islands.

In protest, all the rejectionist UUP and DUP MPs resigned their seats at Westminster. Their party leaders, Jim Molyneux and Ian Paisley, organised massive ‘Ulster says No’ rallies against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. They hoped to repeat the success of those conservative and reactionary unionists, when they had defeated the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974. The Ulster Clubs brought together similar forces to the United Ulster Unionist Council, whilst Ulster Resistance was set up as a paramilitary force like the Ulster Army Council, but this time openly uniting Paisley’s DUP with the Loyalist UVF and UDA. However, with unemployment widespread, even amongst the unionist population, there was no equivalent of the Ulster Workers Council this time.

The British military forces did not give the Loyalist paramilitaries the same free rein to intimidate, which they had enjoyed in 1974.  The security forces also continued to target the Republican Movement, resorting to the full range of repressive measures that they had been using against them for years. The Conservative government wanted to create the space for more moderate Unionist and Nationalist political forces to emerge. As it happened, the moderate constitutional nationalist SDLP gained one seat, Armagh and Newry, from the UUP, in 1986, in the string of by-elections prompted by the UUP, DUP and other Unionist resignations. This was not exactly the outcome sought by the rejectionists. Thatcher suddenly became a hate figure amongst Ulster Unionists.

In Scotland, this was the final straw for the remaining Orange Order and UUP-supporting members in the Conservative and Unionist Party (there had been an organisational break between the C&UP and the UUP in 1974).  The Federation of Conservative Students had tried to make links with UUP rejectionists, and some Scottish members hoped to re-establish the party’s traditional links to the Orange Order in Glasgow, to shore up sliding Conservative electoral support. The Orange Order, though, transferred its support to the new Scottish Unionist Party. This remained a strongly pro-Ulster unionist organisation and continued to reject Scottish Devolution, even after the Conservatives came to accept it following the 1997 Devolution referenda results.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement only improved the electoral position of the constitutional nationalist SDLP and the liberal unionist Alliance for a short time. The rejectionist Ulster Unionists remained entrenched, with support moving from the UUP to the even more hardline DUP. However, despite the stepped up repression of the Republican Movement, and some initial setbacks for Sinn Fein, both in local council elections and at Westminster, the IRA was able to continue its armed resistance, and Sinn Fein retained considerable support amongst the Irish section of the population.

Therefore, once Thatcher had been forced to stand down, in November 1990, in the aftermath of the Conservatives’ poll tax defeat, John Major’s incoming Conservative government dramatically extended the scope of ‘New Unionism’.  A further consideration in the Conservatives’ tentative moves towards ‘New Unionism’ was the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989. With the threat from the USSR rapidly receding, the British ruling class could reassess its strategic reasons for upholding Ulster Unionist ascendancy (however awkward that proved to be due to their inflexibility) in Northern Ireland. Already, in November 1990, Peter Brooke, the Conservative Northern Ireland Secretary, issued a statement that “Britain has no selfish strategic or economic interest” in Northern Ireland. Much has been made of the ambiguity of that word “selfish”. However, more revealingly, is what the statement misses out – not so much the “strategic or economic”, but the UK state’s political interest in holding on to Northern Ireland.

Continued UK control of Northern Ireland provides the British ruling class with some political purchase over 26 counties Irish governments. More importantly, it underpins the British ruling class need to maintain the full extent of its wider UK state, if it is to continue to uphold an imperial role in the world. A state that can not hold together its own territory is hardly likely to be seen as an imperial contender by others. The threat from the USSR had been one of the main concerns in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s, when both Labour and Conservative governments decided to buttress the Ulster Unionist regime in Northern Ireland. However, with that threat now removed, after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the maintenance of the UK state’s full territorial extent, in the face of the threat posed by national democratic movements, including those now reviving in Scotland and Wales, moved once more to the centre of British ruling class attentions.

Under the Downing Street Declaration of 1993, signed by John Major, the UK Prime Minister, and Albert Reynolds, the Irish Fianna Fail Taoiseach, the Republican Movement was invited to help set up and participate in a new power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, on the condition of their verified disarmament. The Loyalists were also invited. The Declaration was met by opposition from both major Ulster unionist parties, big sections of the Loyalists, and from some in the Conservative Party. With Major’s authority slipping daily, he was unable to deliver. The IRA leadership still faced internal pressure, as well as the possibility of dissident breakaways. With little apparent progress, the IRA called off its ceasefire and undertook the Canary Wharf Bombing in 1996.

The Conservatives had tried to bottle-up constitutional reform within Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales they still retained a traditional conservative unionist approach to such reform by completely opposing political Devolution. However, the combination of the devastating impact of Conservative de-industrialisation policy in Scotland, and their decision to test out the poll tax here first, put the Scottish Conservative vote into tailspin, especially after 1992. The Thatcherite loyalist, Michael Forsyth, now Scottish Secretary, took a leaf from the Welsh Conservatives, hoping that a little cultural nationalism could head off the growing demand for political reform. The Stone of Destiny, removed from Scone Palace by Edward I and installed in Westminster Abbey in 1296, was returned to Scotland on the seventh centennial anniversary of its removal. This theatrical gesture impressed very few people.  Conservative support in Scotland continued to fall. Voices demanding more democracy for Scotland grew.

There was not the same sense of impending electoral collapse in Wales, but support for the Conservatives, which had held up better outside the traditional (but now rapidly declining) industrial areas, than in Scotland, began to fall-off. Furthermore, Welsh Conservative attempts to make inroads into Welsh-speaking Wales were being reversed, due to the devastating impact of their economic policies in rural central and northern Wales. Conservative support became more confined to the English speaking Welsh Border, and their extensions along the North coast and South coast (Vale of Glamorgan and south Pembrokeshire) and the better-off Cardiff commuter belt.

 

x)  Welsh workers slowly learn the need to confront conservative unionist divide-and-rule tactics

Those defining themselves as Welsh-British, whether in North or South Wales, had been the slowest (apart from the Ulster-British) to downgrade or abandon support for the British pole of their hybrid national identities. The newfound support for Devolution, which emerged in Scotland, particularly after the Conservatives tested out their hated poll tax here in 1989, was slower to show itself in Wales. To split English and Welsh speakers, the Conservatives continued to promote a divide-and-rule agenda after its possibilities had been shown during the 1979 Welsh Devolution referendum.

Due to the continued strength of the Welsh Language Movement, the Conservatives had begun to move away from their traditional Anglo-Welsh approach, hoping to benefit from playing up a linguistic divide. They started to make concessions to Welsh cultural nationalism. The Conservative gain of the Anglesey/Ynys Mon parliamentary seat in North Wales by a Welsh language learner, in 1979, had signalled the tentative beginnings of this process of rapprochement. After Gywnfor Evans’ hunger strike in 1980, the Welsh language, Sianel Pedwar/Channel Four TV station had been set up; and after persistent campaigning by Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg/Welsh Language Society, the Welsh Language Act was enacted in 1993, both under Conservative governments. This rapprochement, signaling a partial abandonment of the traditional Conservative Anglo-Welsh approach, was perhaps most publicly consummated in the marriage of Conservative leader, William Hague, to Welsh speaking Ffion Jenkins in 1997.

The Conservatives’ growing support for measures of cultural Devolution was not matched, however, by any commitment to promoting the socio-economic conditions under which either English or Welsh speaking workers or small farmers could thrive. In the 1980’s, it took the mutual recognition of shared economic interests, by the largely English-speaking South Wales miners (on strike from 1984-5) and by the Welsh-speaking North Wales slate quarriers (on strike in Blaenau Ffestiniog from 1985-6), in the face of relentless Conservative attacks, to begin the process by which Welsh workers’ North/South, ‘Gogs’/'Taffs’ antipathies, and their majority previously shared hostility to the exercise of Welsh national self-determination, encouraged by many Welsh Labour leaders, began to be overcome. Support for Welsh Devolution, which was very much a minority interest in 1979, began to rise in trade union and Labour circles.

 

xi)  New Labour fleshes out ‘New Unionism’ with its ‘Devolution-all-round’ proposals

Once the Conservatives had been exposed as increasingly corrupt and divided, following four terms in office, Blair managed, by 1997, to persuade the majority of the British ruling class that New Labour would be the best bet for maintaining their influence. New Labour would continue and extend neo-liberal economic policies, but these would need to be repackaged (sometimes a mere relabelling was enough – from Private Finance Initiative/PFI to Public Private Partnership/PPP). The trade union leaderships had long been tamed, so could be safely brought on board in a distinctly subordinate role. After the defeat of the miners, Labour had abandoned even the token actions they had mounted against the Tories under the rubric of ‘New Realism’. Now New Labour, taking a leaf from Fianna Fail governments in Ireland, encouraged ‘Social Partnership’ deals between the government, employers and trade union leaders. Social partnerships largely reduced trade union leaders to acting as a free personnel management service for the bosses.

Backed by both the majority of the ruling class and workers, New Labour gained a massive electoral victory in May 1997. They showed more commitment to constitutional reform than the conservatives had. The House of Lords was reformed in order to create a major source of patronage for the New Labour government.  Blair’s government had inherited the Conservatives’ ‘New Unionist’ combined ‘Peace Process’ and constitutional reform strategy for Northern Ireland. However, New Labour fleshed out this ‘New Unionism’ to cover the whole of the UK. The central constitutional reform, though, was ‘Devolution-all-round’, coupled to the ongoing ‘Peace Process’. Together, these were designed to create the optimum political conditions throughout these islands to maximise corporate profits. The ICTU with its Northern Ireland Committee, the STUC and WTUC, all wedded to social partnership, endorsed these new political partnership proposals, with their equivalent imbalance of power between those participating.

Northern Ireland remained at the heart of New Labour’s concerns, precisely because the national democratic challenge had been most intractable there. Blair was able to take advantage of the refusal of the UUP to enter into direct negotiations with Sinn Fein. He privately persuaded the previously rejectionist David Trimble, leader of the UUP, that under New Labour’s proposals, Ulster Unionists had the fullest UK government backing for maintenance of the Union, and that Blair would stand firm against any Republican Movement departure from the ‘New Unionist’ script he had set out for them under the ongoing ‘Peace Process’. Heavily prompted by Blair, but still with considerable hesitation, Trimble brought the majority of the UUP on board. He remained concerned though that he might end up in a similar position to Brian Faulkner, the ditched pro-Sunningdale UUP leader of 1974. Therefore, against the DUP, Trimble used the argument that the ‘inclusive’ intentions, of what came to be known as the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, could better be thwarted from inside rather than outside New Labour’s proposed institutions, as Paisley was arguing.

With the Republican Movement, Blair emphasised that there was constitutional provision should a majority in Northern Ireland ever express its desire to join the Irish Republic. He, no doubt, remained confident that the original 1921 Partition boundaries, drawn up to prevent such an eventuality, would still do their job. Furthermore, by tying the official acceptance of Republican participation in the running of Northern Ireland, to the ending of the 26 counties Irish state claim, under Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution, Blair was also ensuring that future Irish governments would continue to confine their Northern Irish policy to what was acceptable to the UK state.

Scotland played a pivotal part in New Labour’s extension of ‘New Unionism’. Support for constitutional reform was strongest here, and Labour was the dominant party, so it could hope to control any changes. ‘Sectarian’ – in reality ethnic/cultural – divisions were much less marked compared to Northern Ireland. Whatever their national/religious identity or party politics, the overwhelming majority of people in Scotland consider themselves to be Scottish (whether hyphenated with British or not), which was not the case in Northern Ireland, where there remains a division between those considering themselves to be Ulster-British or Irish. The Scottish Unionist Party, which had tried to build on those ‘sectarian’ divisions that still exist, has had little wider influence. Even the Orange Order eventually transferred its support to the British Labour Party in Scotland, seeing it as the largest and most effective upholder of the Union.

After the bitter disappointment of the earlier 1992 election, Scottish Labour leader, Donald Dewar, had set about heading off any prospects of radical constitutional reform. He insisted that the radically inclined Scottish Constitutional Convention, set up in 1989, which had produced the Claim of Right, should fall in behind British Labour’s more moderate liberal Scottish Devolution proposals. In particular, he rejected any notion of a multi-option referendum, allowing for a vote for independence, which the SNP wanted.

In Wales, Plaid Cymru was more than happy to fall in behind Labour in supporting Welsh Devolution. Plaid Cymru remained relatively weak in the populous traditional industrial South, where Labour dominated. There still remained considerable internal conservative unionist opposition to Devolution within the Welsh Labour Party. These people went on to front the ‘No’ campaign, which also included the Conservative Party. New Labour was taking a chance in Wales, but Blair wanted to give the new UK constitution some appearance of overall coherence. This meant giving political recognition to the nations of Scotland and Wales, and to the unique position of Northern Ireland [1], in an attempt to take the sting out of the existing national democratic challenges. The extent of the powers to be devolved from Westminster, to each of the three other constituent parts of the UK, reflected the level of support in each area – a type of asymmetrical devolution originally pioneered in post-Franco Spain, which had also been confronted by significant national democratic challenges in Euskadi and Catalunya.

Under New Labour’s ‘Devolution-all-round’ proposals, three separate referenda were organised consecutively in Scotland (September 11th, 1997), Wales (September 18th, 1997) and Northern Ireland (May 22nd, 1998). The order in which they were conducted was a reflection of the different degrees of difficulty likely to be confronted in winning a majority. It was hoped that any positive earlier vote would influence each later referendum result in turn. Under New Labour’s referenda, held between October 1997 and May 1998, 74.3% voted ‘Yes’ in Scotland (with 63.5% voting ‘Yes’ to an additional tax raising option), a very narrow 50.3% voted ‘Yes’ in Wales, and a large 71% voted ‘Yes’ in Northern Ireland (where government propaganda had skillfully made it into a vote for or against ‘Peace’). However, plans to devolve some powers to regional assemblies in England were abandoned due to lack of interest.

 

xii)             The contrasting political nature of the effects of ‘New Unionism’ in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales

The ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’ rounded out the British ruling class ‘New Unionist’ strategy to cover all of these islands.  This strategy has been understood as representing a liberal response to national democratic challenges, but it is not that clear cut. In Northern Ireland, the burning desire for peace, amongst both the Irish and Ulster-British populations, has obscured a significant political feature of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement (1998), with its further ‘tweekings’ under the St. Andrews Agreement (2006) and the Hillsborough Agreement (2010).

Under the liberal guise of bringing about peace (for now), these agreements are designed to manage a ‘sectarian’ (in reality, national) divide, rather than to overcome it.  The new constitution for Stormont entrenches the position of Unionists and Nationalists when it comes to crucial votes. These votes require that at least 60% of Members of the Assembly (MAs) agree with the proposal, and that this overall vote must include at least 40% from each of the two groups of constitutionally designated  MAs – Unionist and Nationalist.  Yet Northern Ireland includes people with other politics – e.g. Socialist Republicans (who do not necessarily consider themselves Irish nationalists), Greens and Feminists. There are also sections of the population who do not necessarily completely or partially identify themselves as Ulster-British or Irish.

The British government’s promotion of such divide-and-rule measures represents a long-standing conservative unionist (and wider British imperialist) strategy for maintaining ruling class control. The main difference, between pre-1972 and post-1998 Stormont, is that now the UK state has to exert its influence by brokering between the political representatives of two ‘communities’, rather than depending upon only the Unionists, as in the past. Therefore, it is only liberal in the sense of representing a concession made towards the opposition, rather than an attempt to address the real problem, which is the maintenance of the ethnic/’sectarian’ divide, albeit on a different political basis. And, if necessary, the UK state can still override the reformed Stormont, by resorting to the anti-democratic Crown Powers.

After the Northern Ireland Assembly elections of 1998 and 2003, the UUP formed a loose governing coalition with the SDLP, with the shrinking hope of marginalising the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively. By 2007, the former revolutionary nationalist, but now constitutional nationalist, Sinn Fein was able to form a new Stormont governing coalition with Paisley’s previously famously rejectionist, right populist DUP (which had recently won over much of the remaining rejectionist support of the UUP). The DUP took up office, finally convinced that Sinn Fein was prepared to rein in the aspirations of its own base, and support the Police Service in Northern Ireland (PSNI) (as the RUC was now rebranded) when required. The DUP’s leading members, who now extended well beyond Paisley’s original fundamentalist Protestant base, also wanted to cash in on the ‘fruits of office’. The latest 2010 Hillsborough Agreement showed though that the DUP remains committed to watering down even the original Good Friday Agreement.

The Northern Ireland settlement ensures that all Stormont government partners, whether British unionist – like the DUP, UUP and Alliance, or Irish nationalist – like Sinn Fein and SDLP, work together to run Northern Ireland as part of the UK. Whenever differences arise between Unionists and Nationalists, they turn to the UK government to arbitrate. However, the prospect for any long term ‘Peace Dividend’ has faded, especially in the context of economic crisis and public sector cuts.  These particularly affect the most marginalised communities. This has contributed to the return of the use of physical force both by Loyalists and dissident Republicans.

Indeed, the current furore in Scotland, over Rangers and Celtic FC supporters’ clashes, represents a knock-on effect, ‘over the water’, of the still unresolved clash of British and Irish national claims in the post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland. Successive Scottish governments (Labour/Lib-Dem and SNP) have attempted to portray and address the Rangers/Celtic or ‘Old Firm’ ‘troubles’, and the continued threats to Celtic’s Northern Irish-born Catholic manager, Neil Lennon, as an issue about Scottish Protestant/Catholic ‘tribal’ antipathies. However, the problem has relatively little to do with any remaining Protestant antipathy to ‘papists’, or any still lingering Catholic antipathy to ‘prods’.

Catholics, who have come to accept an Irish-British identity, or now accept a Scottish-British identity within the UK, have been able to make marked economic and social progress in Scotland for some decades now.  Those old Scottish ‘Protestants first’ employers have largely gone with the closure of their traditional industries. State and local government (a major source of employment in Scotland) do not discriminate on ethno-religious grounds when recruiting workers. Of course, anti-Catholic attitudes still remain, both in Scottish establishment circles and in wider society. However, strong religious identification has weakened throughout Scottish society, and mixed marriages and other mixed relationships are common.  Successive Scottish devolved governments have distanced themselves from ‘sectarian’ behaviour, and have officially sponsored an anti-’sectarian’ programme of education and legal reform. The Church of Scotland and Conservative Party have ditched their Orange wings, and made positive overtures to Catholics. The SNP has made real efforts to overcome its earlier perceived Protestant/Presbyterian identity. It has tried to woo Catholic hierarchy support to encourage more of their church members to consider themselves as Catholic Scottish, in preference to Irish-Scottish (or Irish-British – the old Labour legacy).

The Labour Party in Scotland has been the major avenue for Catholic political advance in Scotland, particularly in the West. Such avenues were largely blocked to Catholics in Ulster Unionist-dominated Northern Ireland. The Catholic hierarchy in Scotland has also managed to carve out an influential niche for itself. It has publicly pushed for laws that would impose anti-abortion and anti-gay measures upon non-Catholics (which more secular-minded Catholic Labour supporters have resisted and, which some traditionally anti-Catholic Protestant fundamentalists have supported).

In the process, the Catholic hierarchy has encouraged its co-religionists to become either Irish-British or, more recently, Scottish-British subjects, who accept the legitimacy of the UK state.  The hierarchy has also encouraged Catholics in Scotland to reject any strong political (as opposed to sentimental) identification with Irish nationalism, particularly Republicanism. It is conceivable, in the future, that the Scottish hierarchy could encourage Catholics to become Scottish, just as the Irish hierarchy belatedly accepted the move from an earlier Irish-British to an Irish identity, during the War of Independence, both to maintain its own power and to rein in any more radical politics.

However, in attempting to achieve its reactionary social agenda, and also to maintain its controlling position over separate educational provision, the Catholic hierarchy has also helped the upholders of the UK state to disguise the real nature of the divide between supporters of British unionism and Irish nationalism, particularly in the Central Belt of Scotland. The hierarchy characterises this divide, not as being due to the political mobilisation of ethnic/cultural identities, but as being the result of an ingrained anti-Catholicism endemic to Scotland. In its special pleading it, it is noticeable that the hierarchy has offered no support to Scottish gays (indeed the opposite), who face much more serious discrimination, nor much concern about the oppression of women.

Such a stance is also an obstacle to the secular approach needed to move beyond the continued existence of separate schooling on a religious basis. By maintaining that deep-seated anti-Catholicism in Scotland is irreformable, the hierarchy is able to justify the continued need for separate Catholic provision on defensive grounds. The fact that state ‘non-denominational’ schools remain linked to Protestantism is all grist to the mill, both for the Catholic hierarchy and for Protestant supremacists. Socialists have to fight for genuinely secular schools.

However, the main wider social force, which has contributed to the current conflicts is not essentially based on religion, but has to do with national identity. Scotland’s remaining strong family links with Ireland and Northern Ireland, ensure that, what is portrayed as a clash between Rangers and Celtic football fans, or between Protestants and Catholics, is really a clash between Ulster- (and Scottish-) British Unionists and Loyalists on the one hand; and Irish, Irish-British, and increasingly Irish-Scottish Nationalists and Republicans on the other. This division will not be overcome, on the basis of the distorted analysis and misguided policies put forward by the unionist Labour Party, the constitutional nationalist SNP, or the Catholic hierarchy; nor without ending the constitutionally entrenched ‘sectarian’/national divide in Northern Ireland, which allows such enmities to fester.  As in Northern Ireland, these tensions could yet worsen, in the context of the economic crisis and the massive public sector cuts. These particularly hit the most marginalised communities in Scotland’s Central Belt.

The post-1998 Scottish Devolution settlement is, though, a more genuine liberal unionist measure, than the reformed Stormont, in that it does not constitutionally underwrite ethnic difference – every MSP’s vote in Holyrood is held to be equal; there is no ‘ethnic’ count.

Although Scottish Labour assumed it would remain in full control of Holyrood (and found no real challenge to this from their Lib-Dem Coalition partners in the first two coalition governments), by 2007 they were replaced by an SNP minority government. This greatly upset a Scottish Labour Party used to all the perks of office, and to the extensive patronage it had dispensed at national and local level.

However, the Devolution set-up has also been designed to tame the Nationalist parties, and to get them used to participating in the running of the UK state’s devolved machinery of government. The SNP, like the even more timidly constitutional nationalist, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and now the former revolutionary nationalist, Sinn Fein, has warmed to this role, and become decidedly ‘Independence Lite’ in the process.

It is probably in Wales that Devolution has shown its most liberal face. For, unlike Northern Ireland, where ethnic divisions have become more entrenched through their constitutional recognition, the political trajectory in Wales has been largely away from ethnic/cultural division. The cultural divide, earlier promoted between English speaking and Welsh speaking Wales, could still be seen in the results of the 1997 Welsh referendum, where the strongest support was shown in the Welsh-speaking areas and where opposition was strongest in the English-speaking, middle class areas.

Consecutive Labour/Lib-Dem and Labour administrations initially ran the new Welsh Assembly, which had been narrowly approved in the 1997 referendum. As in Scotland, the main concern of Labour was to assert effective British unionist control over the process of change and to limit its scope. In Wales, Blair took advantage of the sex scandal involving Welsh Labour’s initial strongly pro-devolution First Minister, Ron Davies, to impose a reliable New Labour loyalist, Alan Michael, in 1999. Davies had been an advocate of further devolutionary measures; Michael a supporter of imposing Westminster control.

However, with Labour not enjoying an Assembly majority, the Welsh Assembly opposition was able to remove Michael from the First Minister’s post in 2000. In the consequent election for First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, seen to be, like Davies, a supporter of further devolutionary reform, was elected. After the 2007 Welsh Assembly election, Welsh Labour’s Morgan even entered into a One Wales coalition with Plaid Cymru. It is difficult to imagine such a liberal unionist/constitutional nationalist alliance being formed in Scotland, where conservative constitutional unionism (with its willing subordination to the British Labour leadership), especially under Scottish Labour leader, Ian Gray, has become even more marked.

Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru cooperated in preparing the ground for a new Welsh Bill, which recommended devolving legislative powers to the Welsh Assembly, in a similar manner to those already existing in Scotland. The March 2011 referendum result was much more convincing than in 1997, and the earlier territorial cultural divisions had largely been overcome.  Even the Welsh Conservatives ‘went native’ and supported the measure, although there was still a combined minority Conservative and Labour conservative unionist opposition organised as True Wales. Plaid Cymru is such a moderate constitutional nationalist party, that to many it appeared to have reached the limit of its constitutional ambitions.  Once the new legislative Assembly had been agreed, Plaid Cymru’s vote fell in the following 2011 Assembly elections, and it dropped to third place behind the Welsh Conservatives. This has permitted Welsh Labour to once more form a single party government. This means its leaders once more have a greater number of offices to hand out to their own careerists.

 

xiii)  The British ruling class is determined to hold the line on ‘Devolution-all-round’ to maintain its imperial position in the world

The overwhelming majority of the British ruling class has rallied around the New Labour initiated ‘New Unionist’ ‘Devolution-all-round’ strategy. This is highlighted by its continuation under the Con-Dem coalition. Any opposition, to limited liberal unionist reform of the UK state, has largely been confined to the Tory Right wing, a few Labour unionist diehards, and to UKIP.  Significantly, they have met with little success. In Northern Ireland, the cerebral conservative unionist Cadogan Group, followed by the more recent, reactionary conservative unionist, Traditional Unionist Voice, have remained committed to continuing Ulster-British majority rule. Yet, they have been unable to halt the advance of further power (in reality office) sharing. This is because some amongst the Right have come to appreciate the words of Enoch Powell, that wily old advocate of a British unionism in a period of imperial decline – “Power devolved is power retained”.

The historical break-up of the UK is not an inevitable process in the short or medium term. To delay this prospect, the British ruling class has come to appreciate that changes are necessary to retain as much of its influence as possible throughout these islands, and that die-hard conservative unionism could prove counter-productive in achieving this end. However, British ruling class preparedness to make concessions depends on the strength of the opposition it faces. Above all, it remains committed to maintaining an imperial role for itself. This is because it still greatly benefits from imperial profits. Today these are extracted, not so much by importing cheap primary products and by exporting higher value manufactured goods, but from finance and commerce; whilst the continuation of off-shore tax havens greatly augments ruling class incomes.

Nevertheless, this ruling class appreciates the fact that it no longer has the independent power to exert its imperial weight around the globe. This is why it has opted for a junior imperial role, subordinate to the USA. The USA was first able to assert it imperial hegemony over the UK as a consequence of the impact of the Second World War (underscored by the terms of the Lend-Lease Scheme made to the struggling British government). However, it was the Suez Crisis of 1956, which finally persuaded a reluctant British ruling class that any attempt to pursue an independent imperial role was now past.

Even the UK’s ‘independent’ nuclear forces need US state permission for their use. The British ruling class efforts to maintain its ‘Special Relationship’ with the US state, at all costs, has meant that the UK now acts as US imperialism’s number one ally in helping to maintain the current global corporate order. Under Blair, the British liberalism of New Labour entered into a symbiotic relationship with the American conservatism of Bush’s Republicans. It provided cover for the Neo-Cons’ gung-ho imperialism. UK military forces have been locked into the very centre of NATO – US imperialism’s armed wing. Baron George Robertson moved from being New Labour’s ‘Defence’ Secretary to head up NATO.

US governments have taken their senior partner role quite seriously. Democrat administrations, in particular, have played a key part in nudging the majority of the British ruling class into acknowledging the necessity for some limited political changes in their Union in regard to Ireland, and for it to address its earlier strained relationship with Irish politicians. President Clinton underwrote the ‘Peace (in reality pacification) Process’ by making Sinn Fein politically acceptable. He personally visited Belfast in 1995. In May 2011, President Obama triumphantly followed up ‘Elizabrit’s more hesitant visit to ‘26 counties’ Ireland, in their joint attempts to ‘normalise’ political relations in these islands, i.e. to gain complete acceptance in Ireland of the US/UK role in maintaining the global corporate order in the north east Atlantic. In return, successive US governments have provided their backing for the British ruling class’s ‘New Unionist’ settlement for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The ‘Peace Process’ and ‘Devolution-all-round’ together provide the best political framework to advance both states’ interests throughout these islands.

Just as US state backing for Israel prevents any meaningful political solution to the Palestinian problem, or indeed to the wider crisis-torn Middle East, so US backing for the British ruling class is a major reason why the underlying historical trend to the break-up of the British Empire and the UK state is still being held back. The combination of US state threats (i.e. the warning to the SNP by Lisa Vickers, the former US Scottish Consul, that Scotland could not just leave NATO without consequences) and the UK’s Crown Powers (which enable the British ruling class to bypass Westminster) provide a formidable obstacle to any attempt to win Scottish political independence.

 

xiv)  Obstacles to any SNP attempt to winning political independence in its proposed referendum

Since the May 5^th election, this year, the SNP has formed a majority government at Holyrood. This has raised the prospect of the promised independence referendum, put on hold under the previous minority SNP government (significantly, with the backing of the SNP’s big business backers).  So, how far will the British ruling class be prepared to move to accommodate the new SNP government’s demands?

With sufficient pressure, the British ruling class could be pushed into accepting further devolutionary measures. The recent successful referendum to achieve legislative powers for the Welsh Assembly showed that the possibilities for further liberal unionist political reform have not yet reached their endpoint. Whether the SNP’s recent Holyrood election success will persuade the British ruling class to beef-up its very limited Calman Commission proposals, for further devolutionary measures in Scotland, remains a moot point. However, if any independence campaign does get off the ground, the British ruling class and the mainstream Unionist parties still have the option of placing their formidable weight behind a ‘Devolution-Max’ option, to ensure that all the most important political and economic powers remain under their central control.

Both the Labour and Conservative Parties have advocates of greater political devolution such as Henry McLeish and Murdo Fraser respectively. However, they will be opposed by such constitutional conservatives as John McTernan (Scottish spin-doctor) and Baron Foulkes in the Labour Party, and by Lord Forsyth and Jackson Carlaw in the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party keeps the option of a ‘federal UK’ in its locker, only to be wheeled out, on behalf of the ruling class, when pressures to break-up of the UK become really serious. However, at present, it is the conservative unionist wing of the Lib-Dems who are in control, highlighted by the obstructive role of the Con-Dem Coalition’s Scottish Secretary, Michael Moore, over the SNP’s proposed independence referendum.

Defence is likely to remain a thorny issue between British Unionists and Scottish Nationalists. With regard to the continuation of nuclear bases and facilities at Faslane and Coulport, there would be significant opposition from a British ruling class, still wedded to having its own ‘independent’ UK nuclear force for purposes of imperial posturing. Yet, with enough mass pressure, it may still be possible to have Scotland moved out of NATO’s nuclear frontline, in line with current SNP policy (although for how long?) With the demise of the USSR, the USA has closed down North Atlantic military bases (e.g. Holy Loch in Scotland and Keflavik in Iceland). However, the USA expects Scotland to remain in NATO’s Orwellian-named ‘Partnership for Peace’. This would allow its military bases to be used as required (e.g. for rendition flights or staging posts for continued imperial airborne sorties), in a similar manner to the Irish government’s permission for the USAF to use Shannon Airport.

Although, American owned (and other) corporations would also be quite happy if Scotland became a low tax haven, the British ruling class would see this as a possible threat to the economic prospects of the other constituent nations and regions of the UK. However, if the Conservatives’ ultra-free market right wing came to dominate any British government, this could encourage 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 major international oil corporations could also quite easily consent to North Sea Oil being transferred from UK to Scottish political control, especially if any new Scottish government was prepared to cut corporation tax even further. Salmond has been avidly courting the oil companies, opposing both the Con-Dems’ proposed one-off windfall tax on their profits and downplaying the effects of Shell’s recent North Sea oil spillage. However, North Sea oil still provides substantial tax revenues for the UK government. Therefore, any British government will strongly oppose such a move. Indeed, so important is this in their economic calculations, that the UK government has already unilaterally redrawn the England/Scotland boundary, as extended into the North Sea, to ensure it still controls much of these major oil and gas reserves.

Furthermore, the British, American and key European (German, French and Spanish) ruling classes are all currently united behind the existing British ruling class ‘New Unionist’ strategy to maintain its power over these islands. The notion of a Scotland, not reined in by the UK state Crown Powers, not participating in NATO, and not committed to a neo-liberal economy is anathema to the British ruling class and its international backers.

Despite any differences of interest mentioned earlier (over US military needs in the North East Atlantic and over the global corporations’ desire for the lowest taxes), the British ruling class is likely to retain wider international ruling class backing for whatever measures they deem fit to prevent the emergence of a politically independent Scotland.

 

xv)  The wannabe Scottish ruling class and the SNP will cooperate with the British ruling class and big business to prevent any radical break-up of the UK

So, how do the Nationalist parties fit into the ongoing decline of British imperialism and the longer-term historical tendency towards the break-up of the UK?  Ironically, those wannabe ruling class members, amongst each of the national middle classes, will cooperate with the British ruling class to ensure that as much as possible remains of i) the UK state machinery – by upholding the Crown Powers; ii) of the City’s economic control – through the maintenance of sterling; and iii) of the state’s military capacity – with, in the SNP’s case, saltire-flagged British regiments and shared military bases. Right wing SNP government minister, Michael Russell, has termed this strategy as seeking ‘Independence within the Union’. Basically this means giving all the institutions of the UK state, located within Scotland, a good lick of tartan paint.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of High Imperialism, hybrid identity British liberal unionists in Scotland and Wales, and constitutional nationalists in Ireland, had advocated Home Rule within the UK and British Empire. Today, their equivalent middle class wannabes in Scotland advocate ‘Independence Lite’ under the Crown, the City of London and the British High Command. They fully accept the current global corporate order and are increasingly prepared to work within NATO. Today’s constitutional nationalists are also constantly looking over their shoulders. The absence or the continued decline of British national (including hybrid) identities amongst workers (and others) in the large areas of the ‘Six Counties’, in Scotland, and increasingly in Wales too, has given rise to more radical economic and social visions associated with more advanced national democratic aspirations. These include the break-up of the UK state and notions of social republicanism and even of socialist republicanism. In the current period of working class retreat this can be obscured. However, following from the defeat of the Conservatives’ hated poll tax in 1990, tested out first in Scotland, and the unforeseen Conservative electoral victory of 1992, a Daily Record poll recorded 56% support for a Scottish republic amongst its largely working class readership in 1997.

Nationalist leaderships, of the SNP in Scotland, of Plaid Cymru in Wales, and of the SDLP and (especially post-Good Friday Agreement) Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, have tried to contain and manage any working class aspirations. Like those liberal unionists (Liberal, Radical and Lib-Lab) and constitutional nationalists (INL and its successors) in the past, they fear workers may raise their own economic and social demands, and push for more advanced political changes, by creating their own independent political organisations. The main concern of today’s Nationalist parties is to negotiate and manage the further break-up of the UK state, in a manner that leaves their wannabe ruling class backers in control within their own national territories, but still leaves them free to profit from the existing global corporate economic order. This order is primarily maintained by the US/British imperial alliance.

Not having their own independent state power at present to ensure their control, or possibly the necessary reserves of coercion in the future, these Nationalist parties have to resort to getting the support of the UK, USA and EU states and their economic and military alliances.  That is one reason why the Nationalists do not challenge the anti-democratic Crown Powers, since they too may need these to handle any future significant working class resistance. The Crown Powers provide those resorting to them with a whole array of anti-democratic weapons beyond any meaningful parliamentary scrutiny.

Therefore, we can see why the incoming SNP majority government has emphasised its commitment to the monarchy. This provides decorative cover for the use of these Crown Powers. The recent banking crisis also witnessed SNP-supporting Sir George Matthewson quickly rushing into the arms of the then British Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to prop up his ailing Royal Bank of Scotland. We can also see why the new SNP government has highlighted its commitment to sterling, i.e. the City and its imposed economic straitjacket. The SNP has long been committed to support for the Scottish regiments of the British army, which have served British imperialism from Culloden to Crossmaglen, and from the Heights of Abraham to Helmand Province. It also supports the retention of British RAF bases in Scotland, such as Lossiemouth and Leuchars. Therefore, it is easy to see why the new SNP government wants to share British military bases and facilities in its ‘independent’ Scotland. And the SNP government has welcomed the Con-Dem government’s promise to post 6,000 British troops, currently stationed in Germany, in Leuchars to compensate for the closure of the air base there. British ‘Troops In Now’ is not a traditional national democratic demand!

 

xvi)  The SNP will play their part in upholding the hegemony of US/UK imperial alliance in the global corporate order

Furthermore, in addition to its attempts to manage the break-up of the UK, in a way that still leaves its major controlling institutions intact, the SNP has also sought allies amongst the major global corporations and the US state. The main attraction the SNP offers is to dangle major tax concessions before the global corporations, making Scotland a low tax haven. The SNP government’s promises to potential big business backers are far more sincere than the electoral ‘promises’ made to win working class support. The current SNP government is so tied to corporate tax concessions that its principal demand upon the Con-Dem Coalition, under their proposed Calman-initiated reform bill, is to get the powers needed to cut corporation tax.

There is strong evidence that the majority within the SNP government considers the realistic outcome of the proposed Scottish independence referendum would be the achievement of ‘Devolution-Max’, particularly the implementation of fiscal autonomy. This would also satisfy the SNP’s recent big Scottish business backers – including Sir George Matthewson, Sir Tom Farmer, and Sir David Murray (their commitment to all the trappings of privilege are shown by their knighthoods).  It would also largely satisfy prominent SNP figures such as Michael Russell and Kenny MacAskill. Furthermore, SNP Finance Minister, John Swinney is known for his support for that ultimate neo-liberal measure – flat rate taxes. So, if the SNP were able to steer the Scottish economy even further down the neo-liberal road, the demands of big business and the ultra-rich for such measures would undoubtedly increase (even to the extent that the SNP’s best-known backer, Sir Sean Connery, might be persuaded to return from tax exile!)

The SNP has a paper policy of opposition to NATO. However, this has been abandoned as an election commitment, in a similar manner to an earlier New Labour promise to renationalise the railways. There is nothing the SNP’s Defence spokesperson, Angus Robertson, likes better than to be photographed in the cockpit of a Tornado plane at Lossiemouth, in his Moray constituency! As yet, the SNP is still opposed to the continuation of nuclear military bases in Scotland, something the USA could easily live with. However, in its concern to appease the junior partner of US imperialism, the UK, there has even been talk in the SNP about the possibility of leasing out such military bases. Scotland would then have its own ‘Guantanamac’ bases. Former SNP firebrand, Jim Sillars, has publicly argued for a bonfire of any remaining radical SNP policies. He naively hopes that if the US and British ruling classes are sufficiently appeased, they will not obstruct any independence campaign.

The SNP does not oppose the current imperial wars in Afghanistan or Libya. Now that Barack Obama is US President, and is prepared to have the UN (which the USA can dominate through the Security Council) front US/NATO military initiatives, the SNP has also dropped its former opposition to the UK’s, and hence Scottish regiments’ participation in imperial wars. It looks like the new American consul would not have too much to get upset about in any SNP ‘Independence Lite’ Scotland.

Although very unlikely to achieve ‘Independence-Lite’, it is possible that the current SNP government could create the pressure to bring about further liberal unionist political concessions – ‘Devolution-Max’. The SNP’s Kenny MacAskill and Labour’s Henry McLeish have jointly written, Where the Saltire Flies. This indicates the possibility of forming a tacit constitutional nationalist/liberal unionist alliance to use any independence referendum to achieve, not the SNP’s first option – ‘Independence Lite’, but a second option – ‘Devolution-Max’. Either scenario would leave the British ruling class and its US allies with extensive powers, but the latter would have the additional attraction to big business and many of the better-off in Scotland that it would put a firmer brake upon the underlying historical tendency towards the break-up of the UK and the continued weakening of British imperialism. It would also avoid any unsettling international consequences for the British ruling class, corporate capital and Scottish business, e.g. Scotland’s relationship with the EU and NATO, and the implications for continued UK membership of the UN Security Council after the curtailment of the UK parliament’s authority over a significant area of its territory.

The UK’s principal imperial ally, the US state, is aware of its need for continued British support, as it too now enters a period of relative economic decline, and possible new imperial contenders, such as China. The ever-increasing readiness of US governments, whether Republican or Democrat, to resort to their state’s overwhelming military power highlights their need to compensate for declining US economic power. The dangers associated with this strategy ensure the need for a more, not less rapid break-up of the UK, to help to undermine this dangerous imperial alliance.

Today, the swingeing cuts being imposed on all parts of the UK, and the impending constitutional crisis, offer Socialists an opportunity to build up our strength once more. Only this time we must not hand over any fruits of victory to Labour or the Nationalists. This means a commitment to a socialist republican ‘internationalism from below’ strategy to break up the UK state and to unite workers in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. It also means joining with workers and those other exploited and oppressed peoples of the world in an anti-imperialist alliance against corporate global rule.

Allan Armstrong, 30.9.11

 

[1]             The term ‘Irish’ is used in preference to ‘Catholic’ or ‘nationalist’, since, although the overwhelming majority of those considering themselves to be Irish are Catholic nationalists, their number includes Socialist Republicans and others, who do not necessarily consider themselves to be either of these two things. Amongst these people are those who adopt a more internationalist class perspective.

[2]             Perhaps the New Labour architects of ‘Devolution-all-round’ thought that Northern Ireland would take on more of the characteristics of a ‘nation’, once a collaborative Irish government, as part of the ‘Peace Process’, had won its own referendum to remove the controversial clauses 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution laying claim to Northern Ireland.

Philip Stott, member of the SSP and the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) gives his analysis of the Scottish Independence Convention and the trajectory of the SSP.

It’s been more than a decade and a half since the soothsayers of capitalism pronounced the triumph of the market and read the last rites for socialism. Events since then have not worked out as well as the free-market ideologues had initially hoped. Neo-liberal policies and capitalist globalisation – the twin hatchets that the capitalist class internationally have used to slash away at workers’ rights and the social conditions of the majority of the world’s population – have produced mass opposition in its wake. The deepening social revolt in Latin America, the first continent to suffer the laboratory experiment of neo-liberalism and privatisation has shaken imperialism. While not yet carrying through a socialist revolution, events in Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries underline a growing tide of revolt against capitalist policies internationally.

The so-called developed west has seen the emergence of important class battles in Europe on pensions, jobs, wages and attacks on working conditions. This has provoked major strike movements in Belgium, Italy, Ireland and Greece in the last few months.

US imperialism, the colossus who bestrode the world unchallenged, has been exposed as having feet of clay. Bush’s hopes following the Iraq invasion, a reliable source of cheap oil and a strengthened hand for imperialism’s policies in the Middle East, are sinking into the quagmire. Iraq is becoming a nightmare for imperialism with no exit strategy. There is a majority inside the US now opposed to Bush’s strategy. While in Iraq the horrors of the occupation and the policies of the US and UK has led to tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and a developing civil war with incalculable consequences for Iraq and the entire region. The weakening position for imperialism and their allies in the Middle East was also underlined by the election victory for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza recently.

Alongside these and other important developments is a tangible reawakening of interest in socialist ideas among sections of young people and the working class. The Committee for a Workers International has parties and organisations in almost 40 countries across the world and in many of these sections we have seen significant growth in the last year or so. (see Committee for a Workers International)

As well as building our own revolutionary Marxist forces, the CWI has advocated the need to build new mass parties of the working class as an important step to challenging the neo-liberal offensive. Even where these parties don’t adopt initially a clear socialist and internationalist programme they would represent a step forward.

SSP

This is also the approach we have taken towards the SSP in Scotland. We were founding members off the SSP in 1998 and have worked to build the party since then, while arguing for an alternative political strategy and programme to that of the SSP leadership. We believe there are big possibilities in Scotland to reach a new generation with socialist ideas and the SSP has the potential to do that. Our differences with the SSP leadership, a number of whom including Tommy Sheridan and Alan McCombes formally broke with the CWI in 2001, were over their rejection of the need to defend and build support for a Marxist programme while building the politically broader SSP. Their break from the policies and methods of the CWI has also led to political mistakes which are jeopardising the very future of the SSP.

It’s against this background of new opportunities for socialists in Scotland and internationally that the setbacks suffered by the SSP have been so disappointing. They have dealt a serious blow to the morale of party members and those who saw the SSP as a refreshing alternative to the pro-capitalist establishment in Scotland. Public support for the SSP has fallen significantly and without doubt it has complicated the task of building a more powerful and viable socialist force. The CWI has dealt with these setbacks and outlined a strategy for recovery for the party in our statement, Which way now for the SSP? (CWI Scotland)

The enforced resignation of Tommy Sheridan as national convenor by the SSP Executive Committee was the catalyst for a crisis that has done severe and possibly lasting damage to the SSP. But it is important to understand that these events were a reflection of a fundamentally mistaken political approach by the party leadership to the tasks of building a mass socialist party; above all how, and on what programme, is a new party to be built and sustained. This mistaken approach is continuing and can further weaken the SSP unless a political change of direction is undertaken and rapidly.

In our view the SSP leadership completely mis-judged the public impact that Tommy Sheridan’s resignation would have on the fortunes of the SSP. This was a reflection of a lack of an appreciation of the public standing Tommy Sheridan had, and still has, and the way in which his role in the mass struggles like the poll tax (when he was a member of the CWI) and since then played a decisive role in laying the basis of support for what was to become the SSP. Even more seriously, in our view, it exposes a leadership, or sections of the leadership of the SSP, that has lost its ability to connect with the working class.

The CWI has fundamental political differences with Tommy Sheridan. In fact we were the only platform to challenge, in the form of a motion to the SSP National Council, Tommy Sheridan’s support for the mixed economy during the 2003 general election campaign. While Tommy Sheridan was arguing there was no need to nationalise companies like Tesco, the CWI counter posed the need to bring the multinational companies into public ownership under democratic working class control and management to form the basis of a planned socialist economy.

Left nationalism

We have also opposed Tommy Sheridan and others in the leadership of the SSP on their increasing turn to left nationalism.

This has been graphically represented by the text of the Declaration of Calton Hill, the approach taken towards the Independence Convention, and the now clearly expressed and formulated strategy of the need to break apart the UK before it is possible to advance the cause of socialism. It is likely that independence and the break up of the British State will be posed long before the forces of socialism are strong enough to defeat capitalism in Scotland (Alan McCombes’ statement on the Independence Convention, October 2005)

Two and an half years have passed since the SSP EC brought forward their proposal to launch the Independence Convention. The CWI opposed this proposal when it was brought to the National Council in August 2003 for three key reasons:

• 1. What was proposed was a parliamentary bloc between the SSP, the SNP and the Greens. There would be virtually no independent working class forces involved which would mean the SSP would be locked into a campaign dominated by pro-capitalist forces.
• 2. Support for independence has dipped significantly since the formation of the Scottish parliament and there would be little popular support for such an initiative at this stage.
• 3. The SSP leadership were
  preparing to submerge the political banner of the SSP into a pro-independence front that would promote the benefits of [capitalist] independence. Quote from original draft of SSP EC statement proposing the launch of the convention.

We warned the SSP membership that: Rather than strengthening the forces of socialism such a ‘popular front’ for independence would serve only to weaken and disorientate the forces of socialism while bolstering those of nationalism. (Socialists and the National Question, CWI statement, August 2004)

These warnings have proved to be accurate. Since then we have had the launch of the Convention at a meeting overwhelmingly dominated by the members and supporters of the SSP, Greens and particularly the SNP; but with virtually no independent working class representation. The SSP EC described the launch meeting of the convention as having: “confirmed that the independence movement in Scotland is overwhelmingly antiwar; opposed to nuclear weapons; concerned about global and domestic inequality of wealth; and in favour of a diverse, multicultural Scotland where asylum seekers are welcome.” (SSP EC motion to 2006 conference) is a clear warning of the direction they are proposing to take the SSP.

To describe the independence movement and therefore the SNP as reflecting these aims is wrong in fact and in principle. The SNP are staunchly pro-capitalist, for cuts in corporation and business rates and wish to model the Scottish economy on the Celtic Tiger where Irish and migrant workers are facing a neo-liberal onslaught on wages and conditions. Just a few days after the convention’s launch, Alex Salmond attacked Gordon Brown for levying a windfall tax on oil profits, claiming it would cost Scottish jobs and weaken the Scottish economy. So concerned are they about inequality of wealth that they want to implement policies that would further widen the gap between the rich and the rest. The anti-war SNP also supports troops from Muslim countries taking over from the current US/UK occupation of Iraq.

What the EC’s position does illustrate is a conscious attempt to politically minimise the differences between the pro-independence forces. If this goes unchallenged it will increasingly see the SSP tail-end the SNP. Already there are vocal demands from some SSP members calling on the SSP to back the SNP in the 2007 constituency elections for the Scottish parliament. Given the political trajectory of the SSP leadership over the last couple of years this is actually a logical proposal; as is a post-election coalition between the SSP and the SNP.

It would be difficult to overstate the damage this can do to the SSP. The SNP are seen by big sections of the working class as part of the same political establishment as New Labour. The advances made by the SSP between 1999 and 2003 were precisely based on the fact that the party was seen as an alternative to the pro-business political establishment. The SNP have lost support in the last four elections – reflecting the softening of the mood on the national question in Scotland and their move to the right politically. The profile of the SSP as a fighting, class based anti-capitalist and socialist alternative to the business parties has been diluted by the turn towards the SNP and left nationalism and can potentially prove fatal for the SSP if not halted.

Independence

No account is taken by the SSP EC of the limited backing that independence has among the Scottish population at this stage. While any union has to be voluntary, and the UK state does not fall into that category, separation must also be a voluntary measure – with the active support of a majority of the population. That is not the case at the moment. The idea of the convention offering a fast, broad highway towards independence (Alan McCombes, Scottish Socialist Voice No 182) is a complete illusion. There is no fast highway to independence. There will be ferocious opposition to the break up of the UK from British and Scottish big business reflecting their class interests at this stage. There are alsosignificant doubts, and even opposition, among sections of the working class to the idea of an independent capitalist Scotland being an advance. A capitalist Scotland that under the SNP would continue the brutal attacks on workers’ rights as in Ireland and increasingly in Norway, Denmark and other nation states served up as economic models by the SNP.

Under these conditions the road to independence is likely to involve many twists, turns and setbacks. The CWI in no way rules out a re-emergence of a strong mood, and at some stage possible mass support for independence in Scotland. We support the demand for a referendum on independence as a democratic right. We have consistently supported and fought, for decades, for the democratic rights of the Scottish people, including the right to an independent state where a majority support it. But it is essential that socialists explain, as the CWI has done, that only a policy based on the need to break completely with capitalism can a solution to poverty and inequality be found. That is why we support the founding programme of the SSP which called for an independent socialist Scotland which we believe should form part of a voluntary and democratic confederation of socialist states alongside England, Wales and Ireland as part of a socialist Europe.

The building of a more powerful force for socialism in Scotland requires an unambiguous, ideological struggle against the ideas of the SNP today and the possibility of the emergence of left nationalism as a mass force in the future. To their discredit the SSP leadership are doing the opposite and are in the process of politically disarming the SSP of its socialist and class based ideas. This in turn will weaken the ability of the SSP to counter the radical, semi-anti capitalist ideas of left nationalism that don’t propose to go beyond the framework of capitalism. Instead there is a danger the SSP can become the champions of these ideas if the current political approach of the leadership does not change.

Republican Communist Network

This consistent and principled opposition by the CWI platform towards the SSP leadership’s turn to left nationalism has not been shared by the RCN platform. On the contrary, the RCN welcomed with open arms the Declaration of Calton Hill. The RCN in their journal, Emancipation & Liberation No. 7, prepared for the 2005 SSP conference stated: FULL MARKS FOR REPUBLICAN INITIATIVE. They even went on to call on the SSP: to advance the party’s other initiative, the Scottish Independence Convention, on sound republican principles. As we have explained in this article the Convention proposal from the SSP EC represented not a turn to the left but a turning away from a principled socialist and Marxist position.

Unlike the RCN who praised the Calton Hill Declaration, the CWI
warned:

There are many ideas contained in the declaration that could be supported; an end to poverty and a redistribution of wealth; the removal of nuclear weapons; the abolition of the monarchy; an end to racism and oppression etc. But the declaration was constructed in such a way that the entire emphasis of the document was that an independent Scottish republic could achieve these goals. There was no mention of socialism in the declaration and as a result the danger is that it will promote illusions in what can be achieved in an independent capitalist republic. It should not be forgotten that the USA is a republic, and has a written constitution, as is France, but because they are based on the class rule of a capitalist elite the majority of their populations are consigned to a life of struggle and insecurity. It was therefore wrong of the SSP leadership to draw up a document that consciously omitted any reference to the need to stand for socialism.
Building a socialist Scotland or an independent republic – International Socialist issue No 23

Events in both France and the US since then have underlined this approach a thousand times over. The continuing programme of attacks on French workers being carried out by the Chirac – de Villepin government, the recent riots – fuelled by poverty discrimination and racism – of the most downtrodden sections of French society underlined that a republic, even one based on equality and liberty, would not fundamentally alter the class character of the state.

A capitalist republic?

The RCN might wish to ponder the fact that the French government introduced emergency powers, including curfews, the powers of mass arrest and other draconian measures during the riots. These repressive powers were available to them despite the lack of Crown Powers and other feudal remnants. Similarly, in the US the occupation of Iraq and numerous wars and police actions have been sanctioned by a republic and one with a written constitution no less. Let’s recall that the Calton Hill declaration commented: We believe that a written Constitution will guarantee, under law, everyone’s right to freely vote, speak and assemble; and will guarantee the people’s right to privacy and protection, and access to information on all its Government’s doings. In practice it would do nothing of the sort.

The US Patriot Act, and an arsenal of repressive legislation, has been enacted in the US as part of the war on terror, despite a constitution. The December 2005 New York transit strike saw workers fined two day’s pay for every day they went on strike and their union fined $1 million per day as a result of the anti-union laws. For the SSP leadership, with the RCN’s fulsome backing, to draft such a declaration was a mistake and can only reinforce illusions in what would be possible in an independent Scottish capitalist republic.

Democracy

Does that mean, as the RCN have accused the CWI of in the past,
that socialists and Marxists should reject the fight for democratic rights as an unimportant issue?

The CWI and the parties affiliated to it have a long record off opposing anti-democratic legislation. From the Criminal Justice Act to ID cards and other anti-terror and anti-immigrant legislation to fighting for the repeal of anti-union laws, to opposing repressive measures against the Catholic population in Northern Ireland. Internationally, sections of the CWI in Pakistan, Chile, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka among others have worked under brutal military dictatorships or semi-Bonapartist regimes, where the struggle for the most basic of democratic rights like the right to vote, organise free trade unions, the right to carry out any political activity etc did not exist. This meant that the demand for basic democratic rights have formed an essential part of our day-day fighting programme, while emphasising the need for mass mobilisations to win democratic concessions from the ruling elites.

Nor are Marxists neutral on the form that a capitalist state would take. We fight for the maximum amount of democracy and space for the working class and the oppressed to conduct a struggle in defence of their rights. It is a basic principle of Marxism to explain the limitations of bourgeois democracy and to argue that maximum democracy is only possibly under a socialist society where the economy, what was left of the state, and the day to day running of society would be planned, controlled and managed by the majority of the population. Unfortunately the RCN do not take this approach. Instead they elevate the struggle for a democratic republic stripped of the monarchy and Crown Powers as the central battle to engage in. This is how the comrades justify it:

The Crown Powers provide the British ruling class with a constitutional sanction to go about their affairs, in whatever manner they deem necessary. They provided cover for the Iraq war preparations, long before the Westminster vote. The same Crown Powers are used to give backing to the massive encroachment on our civil rights represented by shoot-to-kill, gagging the BBC, dawn raids on ‘failed’ asylum seekers’ families, and turning an official blind-eye to US ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights landing in Scotland.

The SSP & the Scottish Independence Convention; a Scottish Internationalist and Republican response, RCN

Let’s imagine for a minute that the British state did not have a monarchy or Crown powers, like say the US or France. Would it still be possible for the British government backed by the ruling class to go to war? To attack asylum seekers and curtail the freedom of the press? Not only would these attacks continue but they would inevitably happen because the capitalists are forced onto the offensive against the rights of the working and middle class; to attack the democratic rights of the population particularly in a period of economic decline and an increasing challenge to their rule by the working class they exploit. The ability to defeat these attacks and to prevent imperialist wars depends on the action of the working class and the poor internationally.

The RCN go on to say about the type of independence the SSP should be fighting for: Therefore, the only campaign which even offers the prospect of political independence is one which is designed to break the ruling class’s Crown Powers. (The SSP & the Scottish Independence Convention; a Scottish Internationalist and Republican response, RCN)

But real independence, real democracy, requires a complete break with capitalism and the building of a democratic socialist society. Why limit a struggle for political independence and real democracy to only abolishing the feudal elements of the British or possible future independent Scottish capitalist state? Why not deal with root of the problem i.e. capitalism?

A two – stage approach

The RCN want to limit the socialist movement to: outline[ing] an internationalist and republican strategy to win support for a campaign based on the sound principles outlined in the Calton Hill Declaration. (The SSP & the Scottish Independence Convention; a Scottish Internationalist and Republican response, RCN). Eventually, through building such wider support we can begin to organise the large political mobilisations which can make a Scottish republic a reality. If the SSP are in the lead of such developments, then such a republic will both offer us more democratic freedoms and open up further doors, for economic and political advance, including John Maclean’s vision of a Scottish Workers Republic and international socialism. (E & L No 9)

The RCN are guilty of arguing that if only we at least had a Scottish republic we would then have the democratic freedoms to advance the struggle for socialism. Why is it not possible to build support for socialism now? Inherent in the RCN’s approach is the idea that a successful struggle for socialism is not possible without first achieving a democratic republic. There is more than an echo here of the discredited theory of stages, first advanced by the Russian Mensheviks, in opposition to Lenin and Trotsky. They argued that the task of socialists was to support the overthrow of the Tsarist dictatorship and establish a democratic capitalist Russia, modelled on the successful bourgeois democratic revolutions that overthrew feudalism in England, France etc. Only after a period of modern capitalist development would there be the material and economic basis for socialism, they argued.

It was Trotsky in his theory of the permanent revolution who drew the conclusion that the bourgeois in Russia were too weak, too tied to the feudal landlords and imperialism, to be capable of carrying through the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. The carrying through of these tasks including land reform, the introduction of democracy, creation of a nation state, and the development of a modern capitalist economy instead would require the leadership of the working class, alongside a movement of the poor peasants and would be merged with the tasks of the socialist revolution, i.e. the breaking of the feudal and capitalist elements of the economy and the state. In practice that is precisely what did happen as the democratic phase of the Russian revolution – February 1917, which solved none of the problems of war, hunger and exploitation – rapidly gave way to the October revolution and the coming to power of the working class through the Soviets, led by the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky.

Ignoring the experience of the worker’s and socialist movement over the last 100 years, the RCN are making a major political mistake by advancing a position that seeks to consciously postpone the idea of the socialist revolution until after the achievement of a democratic republic. By elevating the need to deal with the democratic questions – the abolition of the monarchy and crown powers prior to the winning of a socialist society – to an overarching principle they are effectively saying socialism must wait. This type of approach has led to many a lost opportunity and even defeat for revolutionary movements in the past.

Key role for the working class

The experience of the Marxist and socialist movement internationally has underlined again and again that the democratic tasks of a revolution, if they are to be made far-reaching and permanent, are indissolubly linked to the socialist transformation of society. While fighting for the maximum in democratic rights for the working class and the population generally under capitalism, we have a duty to explain the limitations inherent in capitalist democracy and at all times put forward the case for socialism. That means explaining the key and central role of the working class as the decisive force in carrying through such a task.

The position of the SSP leadership, particularly Alan McCombes who has written extensively on theses issues, indicates a turning away from the working class as the main agency for political change in Scotland. In an article written for the Scottish Socialist Voice (SSV) after John Swinney’s resignation as leader of the SNP, Alan McCombes wrote:

A victory for either Roseanna Cunningham or Alex Neil – both of them capable and charismatic figures – would have the effect of regenerating interest in politics generally. It would help to shift the ideological centre of gravity in Scotland further to the left and, at the same time, strengthen support for independence. All of this would create a more politicised climate, favourable to both the SNP and the SSP.

(SSV No 182)

Apart from grossly exaggerating the left credentials of the SNP contenders, these comments underline that Alan McCombes has assigned to the nationalist movement the key role in radicalising Scottish society. The CWI have rejected this idea. It is the working class moving into action against attacks on pensions, jobs and conditions, alongside the development of the anti-war movement and the movement of young people that will provide the forces that will shift the ideological centre of gravity in Scotland further to the left. The CWI fully recognises that the national question has had and will continue to have a politicising effect in Scotland. But at all times we need to link the national and democratic struggle for the need for a socialist solution.

The RCN are also guilty of playing down the role of the working class when they say: The Britain-wide trade union strike wave, which started soon after the initial struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, was contained more easily by the incoming Labour government of 1974.

While after the defeat of the1984/85 miners strike: The miners’ power was broken; whilst Tory and Labour governments had to make a series of concessions to the Irish Republican resistance.

It is frankly ridiculous to dismiss the movements of the working class from 1970-74 in this way. They included two miners’ strikes, the UCS occupation on the Clyde, strikes of steel workers, car workers – 90% of which were unofficial – building workers, the Saltley gates mass pickets, the jailing of building workers and dockers which brought Britain to the verge of a general strike. These momentous class battles halted the Heath government’s plans on anti-trade union laws and delayed the capitalists’ offensive on workers’ rights. Overall 44 million days were lost through strike action in these four years.

Even worse, from the point of view of the RCN, is the attempt to elevate the methods of individual terrorism by the republican movement in Northern Ireland to a higher form of a struggle than that of mass action by the working class. The analysis made by the RCN of the experience of the Republican movement in Northern Ireland is wrong and contrasts vividly with that of the CWI.

When the IRA campaign began in earnest in 1971, it drew mass support from Catholic working class youth in response to state repression, particularly internment, and to poverty and unemployment.

Thousands of young people looked to the IRA because they felt that the mass civil rights campaign had not been listened to and that the IRA’s methods of individual terrorism offered a more effective way of fighting back. The silence of the leaders of the labour movement, who drew back from any involvement in an increasingly difficult situation, meant that there was no class explanation on offer that could have provided an alternative to the thousands of young people who were getting caught up in paramilitary organisations at this time.

The only way to overthrow or defeat a modern capitalist state is through mass action by the working class. Individual terrorism substitutes the actions of a small group of individuals for the mass actions of a class and can never succeed.

The Provisional campaign was doubly counter-productive in that it was based on a minority of the population and, no matter what the intent, had the effect of antagonising the Protestant majority and of dividing and weakening the working class.

By the mid to late 1980s, the campaign had effectively run its course. The IRA had the capacity to carry on at a low ebb for a further period but the leadership had come to realise that there was no hope that the military campaign would succeed.

(Socialist View, November 2005, Socialist Party (CWI) – Ireland)

The emphasis the CWI has put on united working class action was underlined recently by the recent strike action by postal workers, Catholic and Protestant, in Northern Ireland. Royal Mail bosses were forced into a climbdown by this action. The potential for a united working class movement to defeat the bosses’ offensive and cut across sectarian division was graphically illustrated as these workers organised a march up the Shankill Road, across the peace line and down the Falls Road. Sectarian politicians on all sides made speeches at the peace line but only the CWU members and the Socialist Party with our banner “For workers unity” marched the whole route. On both the Shankill and the Falls local communities came out to cheer and support the postal workers.

A way forward If the SSP is to recover and move forward as a viable vehicle for the struggle for socialism it has to do so on a clear political basis. That means putting forward a fighting day-to-day programme that addresses the immediate issues facing the working class. On pensions, the war in Iraq, privatisation, poverty, wages and on any number of questions the SSP can put forward a distinctive alternative to the neo-liberal assaults on the working class. By building and rebuilding a reputation for defending the interests of the working class and the oppressed the party can move forward. With a principled approach to the national question, defending the democratic rights of the Scottish people while explaining the need to join the struggle for socialism the SSP can also advance its position.

However, that will require the SSP leadership to alter its course, away from the increasing tendency to downplay socialism and the increasing trend towards nationalist ideas. If not, an opportunity will have been lost that will complicate the task of building Scottish Independence Convention a mass socialist alternative to neo-liberalism and capitalism in Scotland. The world has turned since the “End of History” was declared by the supporters of capitalism after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe. Capitalism is a failing system. The period we are moving into will see new and growing opportunities to strengthen and deepen the support for socialism and Marxism. We believe that the CWI has an important role to play in that process. The debates on political differences can hopefully help to clarify the way forward for the SSP and the wider workers’ movement.

John Mitchell, an independent Scottish republican and member of the SSP

As always Allan Armstrong’s analysis of the Scottish Independence Convention (SIC) is a welcome, well-developed and considered response. Indeed Allan’s critiques in previous editions of Emancipation & Liberation have helped clarify my own thoughts on this matter. It seems strange that anyone proclaiming themselves a republican could take issue with what is said in his latest contribution. However, as Allan points out, there are ‘republican socialists’ who have seemingly relegated republicanism, let alone socialism, to the distant future in order to participate in the pan-nationalist alliance, Independence First. Given these theoretical somersaults currently taking place Allan’s principled republican stance aims to remove the ambiguity from the SSP’s republican agenda.

Overcoming RCN objections to the SIC?

Despite Allan’s valid criticism of the SIC though I get the feeling that much of the RCN objection could be overcome on paper simply by altering any future referendum on the constitutional question to accommodate a republican position within a multi-option STV set-up. Perhaps, however, I am wrong?

If, as seems likely, the SIC plans to limit itself largely to the question of a referendum this move would allow the SSP the total freedom to campaign within and outwith the SIC on a republican basis.

Could the SNP, which walked out of the Constitutional Convention in the 1989 over the issue of a multi-option referendum, now turn around and deny that democratic option when they are already committed to holding a referendum on it within the first term of a future independent Scottish parliament? Well, probably! But it would take an opportunist turn which surely the SSP and, nominally republican, Greens, could expose to their embarrassment. But would this republican option change the SIC? Would even the formal rejection of the Crown Powers by the SIC fundamentally change it?

You see the one major criticism I have to make of the RCN paper is that in attacking ‘nationalists’ in the SSP (the left prefix having been dropped somewhere along the way) it only advances a left republican position as an alternative. This is a criticism that can justly be levelled against previous contributions from the RCN on the ‘national question’ as well, and is a matter to which I shall return.

Certainly the thrust of Allan’s latest paper is that the differences centre on the matter of the Crown Powers. However when Allan criticises the ‘stagist’ approach of independence first, then a republic, then (presumably) socialism, the RCN’s alternative is merely to jump one step ahead and offer a republic first then (presumably) socialism. The stages haven’t disappeared; it’s just that there are less of them!

Crown Powers:-Principle or Diversion?

Allan’s basic criticisms of a post independence Scotland (under the crown) are correct, but the thing is that even a post independence Republic would still face many of the same pressures. Whilst there may not be the opportunity for the ruling class to exert the direct political control exercised through the Crown Powers, there will still be the direct economic, and therefore political, control exercised not just by the native ruling class, but also by perfidious Albion herself.

For confirmation of this we need only look across the water to the 26-Counties, and Allan’s comments thereon. (Whilst the situation there may be muddied through the unresolved national liberation struggle, to all intents and purposes a 32- County Republic would differ little in these terms from the 26-County version.)

Allan rightly points out that it is a low tax haven for the global corporation, where Shannon Airport is used repeatedly by the US Airforce in a breach of Irish neutrality and where the 26-County government jails the Shannon 5 on behalf of Shell. Elsewhere he notes that Irish UN ‘peace keepers’ helped to provide cover for the joint Belgian Union Mining company/CIA initiated overthrow of the radical Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1960. While Allan rightly berates the SNP for highlighting the 26-County ‘Celtic Tiger’ as a model form of independent nationhood, he neglects to mention that this model arose without a Crown Power in sight!

Indeed the 26-County statelet has, both as Free State and Republic, acted as a junior partner to British Imperialism. Put into the superb terminology Allan uses to analyse the relationship between Washington and London it could read thus:

The Irish Republic has won the political franchise to manage the Southern part of Ireland on behalf of the global corporations and US/British Imperialism.

There is no reason to believe that the removal of Crown Powers from a post-independent Scotland would result in a different scenario. That is unless the republican agenda that removes these powers is inherently anti-imperialist, but that anti-imperialism has to have a far wider remit that restricting itself to the use of Crown Powers.

Again taking the example of the 26-Counties Allan notes that the Guinness family made their peace with the Irish Free State after 1922. However when he correctly observes that we could expect a similar move by Scottish unionist business as it repositioned and remarketed itself as Scottish, if Scotland becomes ‘independent’ under the Crown, he fails to clarify that the exact same situation would exist were Scotland to become independent under a Republic! Capitalism will continue unhindered whether an independent Scotland retains the Crown Powers or not that is so long as we allow the question of the anti-democratic Crown Powers to assume the prominence that are being ascribed to them presently. For example Allan also states that, If the new Scottish constitution wasn’t republican from the outset, a new Scottish ruling class would still be able to resort to those Crown Powers. Whilst this is unquestionably true it must be noted that the absence of Crown Powers has not altered the strength or ability to oppress the working-class of, for example, the US ruling elite. In any case in times of ‘national emergency’ or ‘crisis’, some sort of Emergency Powers Acts can always be voted through on behalf of the ruling class by any parliament, giving a democratic facade to the same situation.

Building an anti-Imperialist Workers’ Republicanism

To build an anti-imperialist republicanism it is essential to challenge not just the lingering political effects of Imperialism but its underlying economic rationale. After all we are dealing with a form of total economic control exercised not though ‘gunboat diplomacy’ or direct political control, but through the continued existence of the capitalist system. Without challenging capitalism, we will not fundamentally challenge the structure of imperialism.

That’s not to say that complete self-determination for Scotland will not present problems for British Imperialism, of course it will. Imperialism does not like constitutional upheaval unless it is in its own interests, and taking history as a precedence there are no conceivable circumstances under which it would be in the interests of Imperialism to breakup the British imperialist state.

Likewise there are no conceivable circumstances under which the genuine anti-imperialist could, or should, oppose the struggle for complete self-determination from the British imperialist framework, such a position belongs unquestionably in the camp of Social Imperialism. The question is how to show leadership of the national liberation struggle and move it decisively to the Left, not jumping on any bandwagon that comes along.

However we can be under no illusions that even under a Scottish Republic the economic interests of British imperialism would still rule the roost. It was for these very reasons that Connolly issued the warning that,

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country.

It is a message over a century old that has not lost its relevance and which we ignore at our peril.

After all, the political front of all states under capitalism is merely a screen behind which the ruling class exerts its control. It is only by confronting Britain’s imperial interests which exist through its economic control, not just its direct political control, that a genuine anti-imperialism will be unleashed.

Primary to this is not the question of Crown Powers, but that ownership of the land and resources of Scotland are the common property of the Scottish people. A notion which immediately attacks the basis of capitalism and private property, that is it attacks the underlying economic basis of imperialism. A sentiment that is found within Connolly’s influence on the 1916 Declaration of Independence which asserts the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland. It’s about drawing together a whole programme of such demands that place the Left to the forefront of the national liberation struggle and that brings to the fore a radical, progressive and working-class agenda.

Yet the crux of the RCN argument with the SSP majority is that a Republic is a more democratic form of bourgeois democracy than ‘independence under the Crown’. Let’s be clear that any anti-imperialism that constricts itself to questions of bourgeois democracy rather than the social relationships which govern society under Capitalism is just as guilty of the stagist approach taken by the so-called nationalists within the SSP.

The time is past ripe for the establishment of socialism in Scotland. In any developed, industrialised nation the question of socialism should never be off the agenda for the working-class. In those industrialised nations with an unresolved national liberation struggle, notably in these islands, Scotland, Wales and Ireland the only answer is the Workers Republicanism of James Connolly and John MacLean. Republican Socialists should have no time for reforming capitalism, for installing new regimes to manage capitalism in Scotland or generally propping up the decaying rule of imperialism.

Comrades it is this reformist agenda that is the heart of the problem in the SSP. Allegations of nationalism merely attack the symptom rather than the cause. Instead the only genuine anti-imperialism is one which calls for no separation of the class struggle from the national liberation struggle; on with the class war; onto the Scottish Workers’ Republic!

Independence under the Crown or a Scottish Republic?

Allan Armstrong examines the case put by the proponents and opponents of the Scottish Independence Convention in the SSP and develops the RCN’s distinct republican approach.

The political nature of and the ambiguities in the Pro-Convention camp

After last May’s election to the Scottish Parliament, Alan McCombes, on behalf of the SSP leadership, put forward a proposal that our party should give its backing to a Scottish Independence Convention. The principle was agreed at last August’s National Council meeting. This proposal has probably produced more internal debate than any other issue since the party’s foundation. This has also spilled over into a historical debate conducted in books, pamphlets, magazine articles, letters to Scottish Socialist Voice and at Socialism 2003.

There have been two responses – Pro and Anti. To date we have seen the following major contributions from the Pro-Convention camp:-

• 1. After May 1st: Which way forward towards independence and socialism? by Alan McCombes and the SSP Executive Committee.
• 2. Socialism, the national question and the Independence Convention in Scotland by Gregor Gall (formerly of the SW Platform, but now supporting the leadership on this issue.)
• 3. The Independence Convention and socialist strategy by Duncan Rowan of the ISM Platform(1)

So far, the contributions from the Pro camp have come from two political perspectives – Left social democratic and Left nationalist. Gregor’s contribution calls for a transitional approach to socialism. He argues that a movement for a Scottish Independence Convention offers the prospect of creating at least a more favourable, i.e. Social democratic, political settlement in Scotland(2). Gregor provides survey evidence to show that the forces favouring independence come mainly from the supporters of progressive reform in Scotland. Therefore, in the present political situation, independence would strengthen these forces and provide a better terrain upon which to advance towards socialism.

In Alan’s own contribution the two political perspectives are somewhat uneasily combined. One ambiguous statement has been interpreted by the SSP’s Left nationalists (the SRSM – and influential office bearers like Kevin Williamson) as giving unqualified support for Scottish independence. Alan states that, Even on a non-socialist basis, we should support independence as a progressive democratic advance…(3) This, of course begs the question – What sort of non-socialist independence? Could we be party to the creation of a Scottish Free State which retained most of the key features of the British state, but gave them a good lick of tartan paint?

Although the SSP supports ‘an independent socialist Scotland’, Alan, and most others, would agree that this is not how the issue of Scottish independence is likely to be presented at first. The option of an ‘independent socialist Scotland’ is not going to be found on any Independence referendum ballot paper, even if the SSP wins the political leadership of the Scottish Independence Convention. The numbers of SNP local council and Scottish, Westminster and European parliamentary representatives (fluctuating levels of support notwithstanding) show that the idea of a capitalist ‘independent’ Scotland currently has more political purchase than any support for socialism, with or without a Scottish prefix.

The need for a democratic republican approach

The RCN takes a distinctive approach to the issue of the Scottish Independence Convention. The very political ambiguity, which has been a continuing feature of the SSA and now the SSP, is also present in the idea of the Scottish Independence Convention. Any campaign, which the SSP mounts for such a Convention, can only help us advance the cause of socialism if it offers substantial democratic change. This article will make the case for building the Scottish Independence Convention on democratic republican principles. The RCN has always placed a high priority on contesting the UK state’s Crown Powers. Anti-monarchism is not the same thing as consistent democratic republicanism. The former only opposes the UK’s hereditary office-bearers. The latter challenges all the state’s antidemocratic powers. This is why at SSA/SSP Conferences we have proposed that any elected MSP’s should refuse the oath of allegiance which gives sanction to these powers. Whilst we are a minority Platform, this demand has always been well supported at Conference, with a third of delegates voting in favour in 2002, i.e. a majority of non-Platform delegates.

The RCN believes a widespread republican sentiment already exists in Scotland. If we build on firm democratic republican principles, this sentiment can be organised as a political force demanding a Scottish republic. This would end any prospect of anti-democratic powers being transferred to the new representatives of a Scottish ruling class in a ‘Scottish Free State’. A Scottish republic isn’t yet socialism, but it represents much firmer ground on which to advance than devolution, federalism under the Crown or ‘independence’ under the Windsors.

Since it is popular democratic advance we seek, our strategy should incorporate this principle, by seeking the widest participation from the beginning. This means rejecting a narrow cross-Party pressure group approach, with its emphasis on party political representatives supplemented by the ‘great and good’ (or the ‘unco guid’!) Our aim should be for a Constituent Assembly with wide-ranging popular representatives. Many of these would be drawn from the network of trade union, community and cultural campaigns, which the SSP should encourage from the outset. Gregor’s contribution also recognises this need.

Furthermore, we should realise that the British ruling class strategy to maintain its control covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, not just Scotland. Jack McConnell can call for support from Labour and other unionists throughout Britain when necessary to prop up his administration in Scotland. SSP proposals will meet with nothing but hostility from the rulers of the UK and their state. We have to draw upon socialist and democratic allies throughout these islands to further our strategy. This means we need to adopt an Internationalism from below perspective.

Economic or political independence?

First, we have to consider exactly what we mean by ‘Scottish independence’. We need to draw a distinction between economic and political independence. Economically, Scotland is fully part of the global capitalist system. Scotland would remain so even if it had a politically independent state such as Norway’s. Commentators have long bemoaned the branch plant nature of Scotland’s economy. However, this type of situation is now a global phenomenon. The transnational companies broke up much single plant, integrated production in response to the major international working class offensive which took place from 1968 to 1975. They have dispersed the manufacture of component parts to many plants in different countries. The assembly plants along the production chain now usually rely on multi-sourcing for their components.

In the 1970’s it might have been possible for a government to nationalise a particular industry – say Chrysler’s Linwood car plant. Now there are few important integrated industries left in Scotland. If a particular industry was to be nationalised, its factories would not link together the whole of the production chain through to the finished products. Any incoming reforming government would find that all they had taken over through nationalising say, the ‘car industry’, was carburettor and windscreen wiper production! Such a state-owned industry would get short shrift from the global corporations. Chrysler, for example, could easily turn to alternative sources for components.

Scotland is the location of one significant player in present-day global capitalism. Many financial institutions have offices in Edinburgh. Tommy Sheridan has pointed out that the Royal Bank and Bank of Scotland alone make £2 billion profit annually(4). Untold millions pass daily along the electronic circuits monitored by Edinburgh’s banks and finance offices. Yet this ‘money’ would not be available to any socialist or radical reforming government. Finance is the most liquid of all forms of capital. It only passes through particular nodes in the international electronic network when these are subjected to minimum or to no taxation. Trying to collect a tax from such networks would be harder than trying to recover sunken treasure at the bottom of the ocean with a magnet tied to a fishing line!

Quite clearly, the economic constraints imposed by global capitalism mean that any longer term socialist strategy must be international from the start. However, we don’t have to join the Jeremiahs on the Left who say that little or nothing is possible unless the whole international working class strikes simultaneously. Most socialists can recognise the difference between pay awards and conditions found in unorganised and organised workplaces, or those dictated by the employers and those won by workers’ own action. So we should be able to recognise the difference between living in a more or a less democratic state – even under global capitalism. Whether there be trade unions or no trade unions; collective or no collective agreements, capitalist economic power still exists.

Whether we live under parliamentary democratic, one party or military rule, capitalist political power still exists. Yet the differences in each of these cases are still important, particularly in the scope they give us to organise. This means we have to examine the nature of political independence in today’s world.

The nature of political independence

New Labour’s imperial apologists like to pretend that national sovereignty is meaningless in a globalised world of interdependent production, distribution and exchange. Therefore we should all to bow to the dictates of the global corporations. National governments should create the best conditions to attract these firms, hoping for a ‘trickle-down’ of the ‘benefits’ to their citizens.

This is a bit like saying to women that it doesn’t really matter whether you have the freedom to choose your own partner. Arranged or forced marriages are just another form of partnership in a world where economic, social and emotional pressures make marriages for most a necessity. The best way wives can gain the ‘benefits’ in such arrangement is to bow to their husbands’ every demand! No – having the right to self-determination, holding sovereignty, or exercising the freedom to choose, are still very important, even when there are considerable external restraints and relatively few choices!

Thus the type of national state is important when it comes to the pressure socialists and the wider working class can exert in society. If that wasn’t the case, the neo-liberal governments, at the behest of the powerful corporations, wouldn’t be putting so much effort into undermining what democratic rights remain. Scotland forms part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). The UK state is a unionist, imperialist, constitutional monarchy.

The hard-won democratic elements within this state are limited. The formula through which the UK state rulers seek legitimacy for their activities is ‘the sovereignty of the Crown in parliament’. When it comes to the crunch it is the parliamentary element which is subordinate. This poses major limitations on our ability to organise.

The constitutional monarchy gives the ruling class a whole battery of repressive Crown Powers – in effect, their ‘hidden state’. This means they wield their real political power behind our backs, whilst the royal family acts as its highly privileged public cover. All the flummery surrounding the royal family provides a useful fig-leaf for these powers. However, the ruling class would soon sacrifice these royal parasites if they no longer served their interests. But when it comes to the state’s repressive powers that is another matter altogether!

The UK is also a unionist state. The right to genuine Scottish self-determination is not only denied by the Westminster Parliament, but also by the continued Union of the Crowns. Therefore, if ‘independence’ is only defined as breaking from Westminster, this would still leave a whole host of powers affecting Scotland untouched. Secession from the Union Parliament at Westminster still leaves ‘Elizabrit’ as head of state. This continued link will be used by all the conservative forces in an ‘independent’ Scotland to ensure that as much as possible of the unaccountable Crown Powers are left in any new Scottish constitution.

If we don’t break the Crown Powers and the full UK constitutional link, we could see the ‘Hooray Hamishes’ of the Scottish establishment, or the forelock-tuggers of New and Old Labour, putting forward Prince William as senior Commanding Officer of ‘her majesty’s forces’ in Scotland. Alternatively maybe some knighted clan chief could be lined up as Governor General of Scotland. It doesn’t need much imagination to see which side he would come down on if there was a proposal to scrap the Trident nuclear submarine base. Is Faslane to become the UK state’s ‘Guantanamo Bay’ in Scotland?!

The sentimental republicans in the SNP will try to promise us a referendum on the continuation of the monarchy after ‘independence’. By then the significant Crown Powers could have constitutional force – with SNP approval! This is why Alan McCombes leaves us hostage to fortune when he argues that one of the purposes of a Scottish Independence Convention is to draw up a constitutional plan, in which some constitutional issues would have to be left to one side… possibly {my emphasis} the issue of monarchy vs republic…! Instead the Independence Convention would concentrate on questions such as how powers will be transferred…(5). Which powers are we talking about here – the Crown Powers? We don’t want to transfer them, we want to abolish them!

The British ruling class and the link between imperialism and unionism in their UK state

The UK state has been forged to serve British ruling class interests throughout the world. Their unionist state is fundamentally an imperialist state. This British ruling class was formed, over a long period of time, from the landlords, merchants, financiers and industrialists of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. They have developed a common project in promoting the British Empire. There was even an historic possibility of this united ruling class imposing a top-down unitary British state and hence forging a united British nation and national identity. However, the very unionist nature of the state (as well as the role of ultra-unionist reactionaries in Ireland) worked against this.

The 1707 Act of Union retained certain privileges for the old Scottish landlord and merchant class within the reformed UK. The 1801 Act of Union brought the Irish landlords and bigger merchants more fully on board too. Special provision still had to be made to govern Ireland through Dublin Castle, since peasant resentment towards the regime remained. Yet, with the restricted franchise, Tories and Whigs dominated official politics in every constituent nation of the UK during the hey-day of the ‘free-trade empire’ in the early nineteenth century.

In the later nineteenth century, the UK state conceded increased measures of administrative devolution to the newer Irish, Scottish and Welsh middle classes. These measures acted as a further barrier to the formation of a unitary British state. Neither did the concessions, made to the middle classes in the later nineteenth century, weaken the imperialist nature of the UK state – far from it. Most of those pushing for Home Rule in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, wanted a better division of the imperial spoils and were keen to maintain an Imperial Parliament at Westminster.

There was another barrier to forming a unitary British nation – this time from below. The popular classes from the constituent nations increasingly participated in politics as they won an extension to the franchise. This led to the recognition of various hybrid nationalities (e.g. Scottish-British, Welsh-British and Irish-British), with special political, administrative and cultural arrangements for each. As the power of British imperialism has declined, so has the relative strength of the British pole of each of these hybrid nationality identifications.

One exception to this lies in Northern Ireland, where a new Ulster-British identification has gained in strength since 1922. However, the Ulster-Britishers’ ferocious adherence to the Union Jack and their celebration of overseas British military exploits, highlights the imperial connection. This is tied to their defence of real and imagined privileges within the UK state and what remains of the British Empire.

The denial of the right to self-determination for the constituent nations of the UK is disguised by invoking a united British ‘nation-state’. Yet Britishness is an imperially created state identity, which has forged chains for the nations of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and now, even for England (as Scottish Labour unionist votes at Westminster for foundation hospitals and top-up fees have recently highlighted!). Just as Labourism represents a stillborn socialism; so Britishness represents a failed unitary nation or a bureaucratically imposed ‘internationalism’. Indeed the two are intimately connected in the British unionist Labour party.

British unionism and the right to self-determination

The unionist nature of the state means that the constituent nations of England, Scotland, Wales and part of Ireland may be given some constitutional recognition within the UK. However, they have no constitutionally recognised right to self-determination. Sometimes it is argued that, since the UK has no written constitution, this right lies with political parties winning a democratic mandate. The repression meted out by the British state, in the face of the large majority in Ireland who voted for Sinn Fein and independence in 1918, shows the falsity of this view.

Significant measures of constitutional reform, even within the UK state framework, have been met by ruling class resort to extra-parliamentary force. The 1912 Irish Home Rule Bill led to the formation of the reactionary armed Ulster Volunteer Force and the Curragh Mutiny of British army officers, all with active Conservative and Unionist Party support.

In 1969 the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland came up against the armed force of the RUC and B Specials (some actively involved in pogroms). These paramiltary forces were held at the disposal of the Ulster Unionist Party and its Orange statelet (with its large UK state financial subventions). As their control faltered a British Labour government rushed in troops to give them support.

During the late 1960’s and the 1970’s serious divisions once more developed amongst the ruling class over the best strategy to maintain their UK state. This occurred in the context of rising labour unrest and a dramatic upsurge of national democratic movements, including those in Scotland and Wales. The Royal Commission, which eventually reported under Lord Kilbrandon in 1973, came down in favour of adopting a liberal devolutionary approach. However, this was heavily contested by the mainly conservative advocates of Direct Rule.

The liberal forces pushing for Devolution remained impeccably constitutional. This meant that their opponents didn’t have to use many of the extra-parliamentary powers at their disposal. Nevertheless, the Queen used the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 to remind {us} of the benefits which the Union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings – the union and empire obviously going hand-in-hand!

The relative mildness of the actual rebuke couldn’t cover-up the seriousness behind the public jettisoning of the Queen’s supposed political neutrality – A Majestic Mistake as the Daily Record put it at the time(6). Of course, this was no mistake but an opening ‘whiff of grapeshot’ designed to panic all her loyal supporters in the monarchist-supporting SNP.

However, this particular intervention was also combined with a series of British military exercises with Scottish nationalists as their putative target. In one of these exercises, Royal Marines asked participants to shout, English Go Home to make it more realistic!(7) Since the late 1960’s, the state security agencies have been involved in agent provocateur activities. These often emphasise anti-English sentiment. Parcel bombs were posted by duped individuals to selected addresses with messages denouncing the English nature of the target.

The long-standing anti-English, ‘post-box’ in Dublin, which has remained suspiciously unchallenged by successive governments, has all the hallmarks of state-supported entrapment. Last year saw the jailing of a naïve 17 year old Dunbartonshire schoolboy, Paul Smith, after he contacted the internet address of an anti-English ‘organisation’. He was encouraged to post letters containing poison to Prince William, Cherie Blair and Mike Rumbles, MSP(8). Those in the security agencies wanting to defend the existing constitutional set-up, hope to sideline democratic opposition to the British UK state into anti-English chauvinism. The state security agencies’ activities may have been considerably reduced in Scotland since the ’1970’s and early ‘80’s. However, if a campaign for a Scottish Independence Convention takes-off, it will be those nationalist forces which pedal anti-English chauvinism who will become the immediate focus for such state attention. Scottish Socialist Voice needs to be acutely aware of this. It must combat anti-English chauvinism in the same principled manner that it attacks racism. Otherwise those drawn to such sentiments could well become unwitting conduits for clandestine state promoted division-mongering.

The use of the Crown Powers to support ruling class interests in the UK and abroad

We can’t afford to lightly dismiss the ruling class’ ‘hidden state’. The Crown Powers provide the British ruling class with a whole repressive armoury to counter any serious challenge to its rule – be it economic, social or political. They have been widely used.

The murderous suppression of the Civil Rights demonstrators on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1971 and the undemocratic imposition of the poll-tax in Scotland in 1987, both led to a rise in democratic republican feeling. If socialists fail to see this and leave the politics to others, it’s not surprising that non-socialist forces take the political lead. What socialist would leave the current leaders of the trade unions unchallenged? Such leaders would soon be openly acting as a personnel management service for the employers! So socialists should aim to lead economic, social and political challenges to the bosses and their state.

Just as we champion workers’ struggles for better pay, conditions and welfare reforms, so we need to advocate democratic republican reform too. Our ‘school of struggle’ for socialism must prepare us for political as well as for economic power. However, more immediately, you can’t make significant advances on the economic and social front without beginning the process of dismantling the ruling class’s draconian political powers. Poll tax protesters found themselves detained at ‘her majesty’s pleasure’. Civil rights demonstrators were gunned down by ‘her majesty’s paratroopers. So what has our ruling class in reserve if faced with a serious socialist challenge to its power?! In the present corporate business-dominated world, any government considering a significant measure of economic and social reform is subject to serious measures of destabilisation by the major imperial powers, particularly the USA and UK. The elected Chavez government in Venezuela is currently under sustained attack by the US state and oil corporations. The vicious Uribe Velez government in neighbouring Colombia, with its death squads and merciless repression, represents Bush and Blairs’ favoured model when corporate business power is seriously challenged.

And we have ‘pre-emptive’ armed strikes, followed by occupying military and domestic client dictatorships, when ‘rogue regimes’ get in the way of US and British imperial interests. Few are going to shed any tears over the demise of the formerly imperially backed Taliban and Saddam regimes. Yet their replacement, by a motley crew of imperially- approved, mafia-style gangsters and clerical supremacists, offers no democratic future for the long suffering people of Afghanistan or Iraq.

However, the destabilisation treatment isn’t just reserved for ‘non-white’ regimes. Back in 1975, the Crown-appointed Governor General of Australia deposed the mildly reforming Australian Labour Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. He had proposed the closure of Australian ports to US nuclear submarines.

Today British and US imperialism are more closely linked under Blair – with the former now more than willing to act at the bidding of the latter. Therefore any serious movement, even for economic and social reforms within the UK, will soon come up against the force of the ruling class’s ‘hidden state’. The head of every repressive state agency swears an oath of loyalty to the Crown – not to parliament. Every elected politician at Westminster, Edinburgh or Cardiff also has to swear this oath of loyalty. This is done to show their compliance with the ‘hidden state’ which our rulers may have to invoke if normal parliamentary government does not suffice.

The oath of loyalty is the ‘polite’ political equivalent of the Orange arches erected over Northern Irish roads every July, to belittle all forced to walk under them. It shows who’s boss and exactly who has the right to trample on any lowly subject’s assumed rights. Pro-Scottish Independence Convention supporters need to have the measure of the forces we are up against.

The economism and Left unionism underlying the Anti-Convention camp

However, there has been opposition to the proposals for a Scottish Independence Convention from an Anti-Convention camp formed by the CWI, SW and WU Platforms. So far they have made the following major contributions to the debate:-

• 1. Scotland and the National Question, Statement from the International Socialists, CWI Platform.
• 2. The debate that will not go away by Mike Gonzalez of the SW Platform.
• 3. Is Independence a road to Socialism in Scotland? by Neil Davidson of the SW Platform.
• 4. Socialism and Scottish independence by Nick Rogers of the WU Platform.

These Platforms also represent two overlapping perspectives – the economistic and the Left unionist – within the SSP, despite there being considerable differences between them in other respects. Economism puts emphasis on the struggle for pay, conditions and welfare reforms, whilst downplaying the need for political or democratic reforms. Left unionism best describes those who believe a British state still provides the most favourable framework for advance towards socialism (whatever specific arrangements might have to be accommodated to acknowledge Scotland, Wales and Northern Irelands’ political existence, e.g. Devolution). Economism tends to unionism in the UK, because it tacitly accepts the existing state framework as the basis for its economic and social reforms. The CWI is the most consistently economistic tendency. This has led to a distinct tension within the CWI ranks. They have been forced to recognise the impact of the wider national challenges to the UK state upon working class consciousness.

A decade or so ago, the old Militant organisation was recognised as being one of the most unionist organisations on the Left. This has been particularly marked in Northern Ireland. Here their hostility towards Irish republicanism led them to flirtation with the PUP (a loyalist party with close links to the paramilitary UVF) on the grounds it represented an important section of the Protestant working class!

However, the rise of constitutional nationalism in Scotland and Wales forced Militant to another form of political accommodation. In Scotland, where the national challenge has been broadest, the CWI have moved to declaring their support for an independent socialist Scotland. This would appear to have pushed them out of the Left unionist and nearer to the Left nationalist camp – on paper anyhow.

In Wales, where the national challenge has been weaker, the CWI still hold to a Left unionist ‘socialist federation of Britain’ position. Since they hold such contradictory positions in each of the constituent nations of the UK (and partitioned Ireland) they have no consistent overall political strategy for socialists in these islands.

Now that the CWI has criticised the SSP leadership’s support for a Scottish Independence Convention, their own programmatic support for an ‘independent socialist Scotland’ leaves them in a rather uncomfortable position. Alan McCombes, who was once a prominent member of Militant/ CWI, before leaving to help form the ISM, has pointed this out.

Alan takes this shared programmatic point of an ‘independent socialist Scotland’ seriously. He therefore wants the SSP to take, what he sees as, the organisational measures necessary to advance this. Whereas for Philip Stott, an ‘independent socialist Scotland’ represents a paper political position for the CWI. It is only needed to provide a political defence when nationalists are on the ascendant, but otherwise it can be folded and put in the back pocket.

The CWI motion to conference, which calls on the SSP to drop the Scottish Independence Convention strategy, demonstrates their lack of political commitment to their own programmatic position. It isn’t based on any understanding of the antidemocratic unionist and constitutional monarchist nature of the UK state and the need for a consistent democratic challenge. It is only to be dragged out again when the SNP make significant gains.

The SWP certainly shares much of the
CWI’s economism, but has in Scotland anyhow, provided the most consistent Left unionist theoretical defence of British unity(9). The SWP advocated a vote for Devolution in Scotland and Wales in the 1997 referenda, because Labour supported it and the Tories opposed it. Devolution remains consistent with the unity of Britain. The SWP see no real need to go any further than this – well, not until the next time the issue of Scottish self-determination comes ‘like a bolt from the blue’! Ironically in Northern Ireland, the SWP can be characterised as belonging to the camp of sentimental republicanism. But if your republicanism is merely sentimental, it can be put aside for immediate practical purposes. New Labour’s local devolutionary settlement, the Good Friday Agreement, can be accepted as the framework for everyday politics. Like the CWI, the SWP has no overall political strategy to unite socialists in these islands. They see no need for a political challenge to the ruling class’s New Unionist strategy designed to maintain their UK state.

However, with characteristic opportunism, the SW Platform sees no need to directly challenge the SSP leadership’s Scottish Independence Convention strategy either. The SW Platform sponsored motions to Conference on the issue are decidedly vague. Logically, they should support the CWI motion, but sectarian point-scoring, rather than principle, tends to dominate relations between these two organisations! Nick Rodgers of Workers Unity makes some interesting points in his paper, which do merit attention. However, the WU Platform appears to be the most disunited and hasn’t got enough of its supporters together to get the signatures for its proposed motion to Conference!

The weaknesses and contradictions in the Anti- Convention camp

A number of concerns have been raised by the ‘Antis’ over the leadership’s reasons for giving support to a Scottish Independence Convention. Concerns expressed have included, amongst others:-

• 1. It represents a diversion from the class struggle.
• 2. It over-estimates the significance of the national question as a means to challenge capitalism and imperialism.
• 3. It depends on a misreading of the levels of current support for independence.
• 4. It could promote working class disunity.

Both the SW and CWI Platforms have a fallback position though. If a genuine progressive movement for Scottish independence was to appear then it would get their support. What is not made clear is how such a movement would necessarily be progressive if socialists abstain when its initial politics are being determined! Yet there is an explanation for this Left unionist approach with its two possible roads:- optimum British Option A and retreat Scottish Option B. The two main Anti- Platforms believe that the working class is primarily motivated by economic and social concerns. They see little reason for socialists to consistently champion democratic change since, even if successful, we will still be left living in a capitalist state.

They argue it is better to prepare and wait for the ‘big bang’ political challenge – Revolution. To do this, we should concentrate mainly on economic and social movements as our ‘school of struggle’. According to the Left unionist view if socialists organise to promote the dismantling of the UK state, we are creating a diversion from the path of real class struggle, or fostering disunity amongst the ranks of the British working class.

This denial of the anti-capitalist potential of political or democratic struggle sits rather uncomfortably with these Platforms’ usual practice of championing economic and social reforms – higher wages and better welfare measures. Both assume the continuation of the capitalist economy! But these Platforms hold to the view that, when the working class, organised in its trade unions, vigorously pursues struggles for economic and social improvement, then demands for political reform will subside. Therefore any resort to political demands on the state, such as the right to self-determination, reflects socialists’ weakness not our strength.

For example, the CWI statement argues that,

When the working class begins to move and as the class questions become predominant the national question can be pushed back. This can be temporary however as a lull in the class struggle and defeats for the working class can push the national question back onto the agenda.

Clearly, in this view, the national question is not seen to be a class question (10). To be more precise, it is only seen to be such a question for the British ruling class and its Scottish nationalist middle class challengers! Workers are mainly concerned with pay and conditions and shouldn’t bother themselves very much about the nature of the UK state. How comforting such thinking has been to the ruling class, when it has faced real challenges in the past.

The history of economic, social and democratic struggles in the UK

A number of historical examples are often used by Left unionists to illustrate the power of united British trade union organisation. These include the 1926 General Strike, the strike wave of the early 1970’s and the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. Yet this argument is fundamentally flawed. The 1926 General Strike was defeated relatively quickly in 9 days, despite the magnificent working class support shown. Its leaders never contemplated a wider political challenge, viewing it as a purely trade union struggle. This turned out to be its weakness not its strength.

In contrast, the much greater challenge provided by movements for political democracy was highlighted in 1919. That year did indeed see a massive upsurge in economic struggles throughout the UK. Yet these coincided with a national democratic challenge to the UK state itself in Ireland. There was no adequate political organisation at the time to unite these economic and political struggles. Through concession and coercion the economic strike wave was rolled back by the end of 1919. This soon led to major working class set-backs. However, it took another 4 years before the UK state could bloodily contain, but not thoroughly defeat, the Irish democratic movement.

John Maclean drew a significant lesson from the government’s relatively easy defeat of economic struggle. The 40 Hours Strike collapsed after the army’s occupation of Glasgow in 1919. Maclean could see the much greater difficulties the same government faced that year when challenged by a political movement for national democracy in Ireland. The Limerick Strike of 1919 had been part of this wider political movement. Maclean abandoned the economistic British road to socialism (with its tacit acceptance of the UK state) and began to pursue the political break-up of the UK and British Empire strategy first championed by James Connolly. This did not mean abandoning economic and social issues but linking them to political or democratic struggle.

The working class strike wave of the early 1970’s also coincided with a rise in democratic movements, most obviously in Ireland, but also in Scotland and Wales (along with the Black and Asian, women’s and gay movements). State repression was extensively utilised in an attempt to crush the struggle in Ireland. The British Tory government thought it had seen off this challenge when it faced down the Hunger Strikers in 1981. Bobby Sand’s winning of the Fermanagh parliamentary seat at Westminster highlighted the resilience of a movement which was prepared to politically challenge the UK state. The Britain-wide trade union strike wave, which started soon after the initial struggle for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, was contained more easily by the incoming Labour government of 1974. Consequently, strikes in the late 1970’s were much more episodic. Trade union leaders had never aspired to anything higher than a Labour government. Wilson and Callaghan went on, unchallenged by these trade union leaders, to preside over an upgrading of military, police and intelligence capacity!

When Thatcher came to power in 1979 she began to implement the Tories’ secret Ridley Plan. This was designed to wreak vengeance on the miners for the defeat they had inflicted on the Tories in 1974. This resulted in the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. The government resorted to a wide range of repressive powers to break the NUM. Valiantly struggling miners faced the police, army, government agents, anti-union judges and bureaucratically- imposed curtailment of welfare rights.

A militant minority began to see the connection between the deployment of the state’s repressive powers in south Yorkshire and in south Armagh. Yet the Miners’ Strike was led by those who still viewed it primarily as an economic struggle. Once again this was a weakness not a strength. The miners’ power was broken; whilst Tory and Labour governments had to make a series of concessions to the Irish Republican resistance.

The link between British imperialism and the constitutional monarchist nature of the UK state

Now Alan McCombes does argue that Scottish independence

would be a huge advance for democracy and a devastating defeat, not just for the British establishment, but also for American imperialism which sees Britain as its most loyal international ally(11).

Unfortunately, this argument is presented more as a rhetorical flourish, rather than being seriously thought through to its political consequences. The UK state’s very real repressive forces, wielded under the Crown Powers, never get a mention.

This weakness in Alan’s argument has been recognised by both the SW and CWI Platforms. Thus Neil Davidson, for the SW Platform, points out that,

If Britain is vital to the imperialist project… then is it not at all possible – in fact, is it not absolutely certain – that the ruling class will fight to retain Scotland, as they did Ireland, even though Ireland was far less important to Britain than Scotland is? Yet I see no sign that we are preparing the Scottish working class for the ultimate necessity of taking on the state, or of defending ourselves against the counter-evolution that would surely follow any attempt to do so(12).

Alan’s former CWI comrades have also made a similar point. Philip Stott highlights, the ferocious opposition to national independence that will come from the capitalist state at this stage, with the loss of international prestige if British imperialism, weakened although it is, were to lose ‘control’ in its own backyard(13). He points out the completely lightminded way(14) in which Alan appears to deny the serious consequences of his argument.

If Scottish independence represents such a devastating defeat for the British establishment and US imperialism, we certainly need to take into account any likely ruling class response to such a challenge. The greater the challenge from our side, the more the other side will resort to their Crown Powers. No matter how nasty their plans, the ruling class will find some constitutional sanction for them under the existing Crown Powers. We live in a state whose leaders pride themselves on three centuries of constitutional rule. Coups are so un-British and so unnecessary when you have the legal power to dissolve parliament!

Yet Alan’s Left unionist critics share his tendency to misunderstand the real nature of and to underestimate the hidden powers in the UK state. Whilst they recognise the imperialist nature of Blair’s New Labour government (hard to avoid when the UK is currently at war!), they fail to link this with the constitutional monarchist nature of the UK state which buttresses British imperialism. Their demand for ‘regime change’ amounts to a call for a change of government – Gordon Brown (or Charles Kennedy) instead of Tony Blair! There is no call for thoroughgoing democratic change. Yet Blair used a very wide range of the state’s anti-democratic Crown Powers to further the war, including sanction for prior bombing raids and the mobilisation and deployment of troops, long before the parliamentary vote.

Being able to conduct wars or suppress internal challenges without recourse to a democratic vote is very handy for a state which has aspirations to wider power and influence in the world. Its leaders don’t want to feel beholden to any domestic pressure or ‘international law’, as we have seen in the recent war over Iraq. Britannia tries both to ‘rule the waves’ and ‘waive the rules’!

The link between ruling class power and the unionist nature of the UK state

However, since the UK is also a unionist state, this gives the British ruling class additional strength. This doesn’t seem to be acknowledged by the SSP’s Left unionists. The close link between British imperialism and British unionism has been highlighted by the war in Iraq. Examine the line-up of the parliamentary parties (maverick individuals aside) on the vote for war. The more aggressively unionist the parties, the more they were pro-war. It was the Tories and the Ulster Unionists who provided the votes to give Blair and New Labour a ‘democratic’ cover for the war. Neil fails to appreciate the difference between unitary, unionist and independent states and the different forms nationalism takes within them. Neil thinks he is making a particularly anti-Scottish independence point when he highlights the pernicious role played by the ‘Scottish national interest’ during the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5.

In Scotland NUM area officials signed an agreement allowing enough coal to enter the strip mill at Ravenscraig in Motherwell to keep the furnaces going. The reason given by Area President Mick McGahey was the deal was ‘in the interests of Scotland’s industrial future’… And so the ‘Scottish national interest’ helped play a part in the defeat of the NUM, the destruction of the British mining industry and the perpetuation of Tory rule for another 12 years(15).

The problem with Neil’s view is that all the NUM and Iron and Steel Trades Confederation officials he mentions were British Labour (or Labour supporting) unionists (some Left, and some, not so Left!).

Neil thinks he has made another substantial point when he claims that a national element {was} in fact completely absent in the Tories’ imposition of the poll tax in Scotland in 1987.

The whole (as it turned out) disaster was brought about by an attempt to placate the class base of Scottish conservatism, not to continue the work of proud Edward’s army (etc) in oppressing the Scots(16).

However, it was precisely the unionist nature of the UK state which allowed the British ruling class to come to the aid of their local allies. Hence a Tory majority vote at Westminster could be used to impose a poll tax first in Scotland, on behalf of the class base of Scottish conservatism despite the scant electoral support here for the measure.

There was another even clearer case in 1969. The beleaguered Ulster Unionists were able to get assistance from a Labour UK government which sent in British troops to bolster their regime in the face of the challenge from the Civil Rights Movement. Perhaps significantly, the SWP’s forerunners, the IS, chose to see the sending of British troops as the actions of a social democratic government facing down ultraconservatives and giving succour to the local Civil Rights Movement!

IS supported the sending in of British troops. They failed to see the common unionism which united Labour and the Ulster Unionists in defence of the UK state. This was more important than the secondary political divisions between them, particularly when the state’s local machinery was under threat.

It is the very unionist nature of the UK state which allows the ruling class to play off one subordinate nation against another. They can invoke petty nationalisms when necessary. When the British Navy’s Royal Dockyards at Rosyth and Devonport were threatened with closure in 1996, British Labour Party, trade union officials from Scotland and England invoked their respective nationalities to support their own particular case (as well as suggesting a Dutch auction of pay and conditions to win government support!)

Unionist political power can be used in two ways. It can over-ride (including outvote at Westminster) any particular national opposition to specific measures (e.g. the poll tax Scotland). It can also give succour to any local British unionists facing a domestic ‘spot of bother’, (e.g. the use of British troops – including Scottish and Welsh regiments – in Northern Ireland).

Neil appears to be arguing that acceptance of a British unionist state framework at least offers the working class on this island a defence against nationalist division-mongering. Yet the UK state is a union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, not a British unitary state. So there is plenty of scope for unionists to promote nationalist division. Internationalist working class consciousness, even in a multi-nation state, can never be a mechanical reflection of the state’s existence. Indeed, if you take Neil’s argument to the next logical stage, socialists should be demanding the end of any political recognition of Scotland and Wales’ existence. This would better create a unitary British state and hence a united British working class!

However, the SW Platform is not going to argue for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly! Although, this may seem the apparent political logic of Neil’s arguments, it has to be remembered that when it comes down to it, the SW, like the CWI Platform, doesn’t see political issues concerning the democracy of the state as ‘class questions’ but diversions from real economic and social ‘class issues’. Therefore (thankfully) we aren’t likely to see the SWP. turning into British Direct Rulers!

Tailending the liberal unionists and the nationalist populists or taking an independent lead?

The failure of the SWP. and CWI approach is highlighted by the positions they adopted when the nature of the UK state was contested, e.g. in the 1979 and 1997 Devolution referenda. Having refused, before these events, to recognise the democracy issue as a ‘class question’, both organisations still found that they were forced to take sides when a ‘non-class question’ presented itself. With the working class removed from their political calculations, the SWP and CWI were faced with the question of which capitalist side to support in the 1979 and 1997 Devolution referenda. The conservative and liberal unionists were given complete license to set the terms of the debate – ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ to Devolution!

Both the SWP and CWI faced difficulties in 1979 deciding which side to take. By 1997, both organisations had become good liberal unionists – giving support to Blair’s Devolutionary proposals. However, they both made verbal qualifications, declaring either ‘revolution’ or ‘socialism’ to be the real solution.

The underlying method of following the political lead given by others is painfully chronicled by Philip Stott. He outlines Militant/CWI’s changes in position. It began with tacit acceptance of administrative devolution for Scotland before 1979; followed by a switch to support for political devolution in that year; then to support for a socialist Scotland as part of a socialist federation of Britain in the mid-1990’s; and finishing up(?) with support for an independent socialist Scotland in the late 1990’s, when a majority of the youth and a significant section of the working class supported independence(17).

Philip admits that the CWI’s programme has evolved as the moods and consciousness of the working class has developed(18). Who then, by the late 1990’s, was advancing the case for Scottish independence? Quite clearly, not the CWI, since their programme tail-ended what they saw as working class consciousness. It was the SNP – a capitalist nationalist party – {who} were left as the only ones advocating political independence. So there was a real danger that if the mood around the national question hardened even further in the direction of independence whole sections could be lost to nationalism(19).

What was the CWI’s answer to this particular development? The time had come to drop Labour’s liberal unionism and to adopt the SNP’s nationalist populism, otherwise the CWI might have found itself without an audience. They deleted socialist federation of Britain from their programme and substituted socialist independence – well for Scotland anyhow! Yet the CWI accepts that it is unlikely that an ‘independent socialist Scotland’ will be one of the ballot options in a future referendum. Therefore, we would support {capitalist} independence and would campaign for a yes vote in an independence referendum(20).

The CWI’s socialist programmatic prefix is left as abstract propaganda. The chance for socialists to politically challenge the SNP, in the here and now, on democratic grounds is not even considered – an ‘independent’ Scotland under the Crown or a democratic republican independent Scotland.

The political and class nature of support for Scottish independence

Neil and Philip both draw our attention to the fluctuating support given to Scottish independence and, in particular, to its recent decline. Neil states that

Working class support, which reached almost 50% in 1997 fell back to the overall figure of 28% in 1999… In short, support for independence peaked at the time of the 1997 referendum and has, with occasional reversals, declined since then(21).

Philip makes the same point, but qualifies it by noting that other statistics (in the same analysis which Neil uses) confirm our position that support for independence is highest among the working class, people with a left wing outlook, and younger people(22). However, Philip then retreats once more to his economic class questions. This means that the national question did not feature as a major issue at all during the 2003 elections. In order of importance Philip cites, low pay, privatisation, income equality, with the war on Iraq tagged on at the end(23).

Now the war is undoubtedly a political issue. In the CWI (and SWP’s) case though, there is a tendency in public to downplay political support for anti-imperialism and to emphasise the economic aspect, e.g. the money spent on war which could be used for hospitals and schools instead. However, the key thing about recent high-points in support for Scottish independence is that they coincided with times when the political nature of the UK state in Scotland was being politically contested, e.g. during the Devolution debate. The fact that Devolution is now in place means that the nature of the UK state in Scotland is almost continuously politicised.

Philip quotes the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey of 2001, in which 68% thought the parliament should have more powers(24). In other words, the current Devolution deal is not the last word on the issue – far from it. There are unionist forces which have tried to diminish the influence of the Scottish Parliament.

Their first proposal was to reduce the number of MSPs in line with the drop in Scottish MPs at Westminster. This was probably abandoned because of the careerist ambitions of Scottish New Labour members! More recently we have had Labour unionist Westminster MP, George Foulkes, wanting to tamper with the proportional representation system for elections to the Scottish Parliament. Lib-Dem unionist, David Steel, wants an upper chamber in the Scottish Parliament. Unionist desires for more centralised control will continue to clash with popular demands for more democratic control, producing political conflict. We can not pretend that the nature of the UK state is not a class issue. What we need to decide is, which democratic option best suits the interests of our class. This then gives us a policy which can meet each political contingency as it arises. However, if we go further, and begin to politically organise a movement which can be brought to bear in any particular situation which arises, the SSP could take the political lead. Being the foremost champions of democracy, as well as of economic and social reforms, would greatly add to our influence.

Since the SW and CWI Platforms claim to come from the Leninist tradition, it is perhaps worthwhile examining Lenin’s last stated views on Norway’s secession from the Swedish state in 1905. The relationship between Norway and the Swedish state certainly had a lot in common with the current relationship between Scotland and the UK state. Furthermore, Sweden’s neutrality in the First World War showed that it was a much more passive player in the world imperial system than the UK state, either then or today. So basically, for those of a Leninist persuasion, his preferred political solution for Norway should apply to Scotland – but more so!

In December 1916 Lenin wrote that, Until 1905 autonomous Norway, as part of Sweden, enjoyed the widest autonomy, but she was not Sweden’s equal. Only by her free secession was her equality in practice proved… Secession did not ‘mitigate’ this {Swedish state} privilege (the essence of reformism lies in mitigating an evil not in destroying it) but eliminated it altogether(25). Today those reformist measures of mitigation he refers to would include Devolution and Federalism under the Crown. Both leave the essentially imperialist and unionist nature of the UK state untouched.

Changes in ruling class strategy to maintain the UK state.

One common feature underlying Alan, Philip and Neil’s contributions is they only invoke the wider British framework when discussing either trade union struggles or the anti-war movement. They don’t see a common British ruling class political strategy to defend the UK state itself, nor do they see the need to oppose this. The British ruling class has changed its strategy to maintain their unionist state. Old unionism favoured British Direct Rule; New Unionism prefers Devolution-all-round for Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and, more tentatively, for the English regions.

Until the mid-1990’s the ruling class’s chosen strategy was Direct Rule through Westminster. By the end of the 1970’s it was the Tories who had become the principal advocates of such Direct Rule. This followed their abolition of the devolved Northern Ireland Stormont in 1972. Direct Rule was given added impetus by the defeat of Labour’s liberal devolutionary proposals for Scotland and Wales in 1979. When the Tories were returned that year, Thatcher wanted a UK plc to weather the storms in an increasingly unruly world. Direct rule became very much the order of the day throughout the UK.

However, the continuing Republican challenge in Northern Ireland, in the aftermath of the Hunger Strikes, forced a ruling class rethink. The Tories’ first attempt to marginalise the Republicans, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, faltered. Therefore Major moved on to the Downing Street Agreement in 1992 with its proposals for a devolutionary deal there.

New Labour, under Blair, generalised this approach, pushing Devolution for Scotland and Wales too, to counter national democratic movements and sentiment. Indeed, the momentum gained by majority votes for Devolution in Scotland and Wales in 1997, gave further impetus to Devolution in Northern Ireland in the Good Friday Agreement in the next year. In this manner Devolution-all-round has emerged as ruling class’s New Unionist strategy to maintain the UK state(26).

The democratic fragility of Devolution-all-round is very apparent. Opinion polls continue to show that people in Scotland don’t believe the Scottish Parliament has enough powers. This was highlighted when Blair’s tame Scottish Labour unionists, led by Jack McConnell, argued against the right of the Scottish Parliament to take any decision regarding British imperial participation in the war in Iraq. Even in Wales, where the non-legislative Welsh Assembly won only the narrowest referendum majority in 1997, there is growing resentment at the lack of any real powers.

In Northern Ireland Blair resorts to frequent suspension of Stormont Executive when it threatens to vote ‘the wrong way’. British troops, observation posts, RIR and RUC/PSNI fortified bases all remain in place. Their main concentration remains in nationalist areas. Yet their forces don’t seem to be around when loyalists are killing and maiming, whether it be sectarian attacks on nationalists or racist attacks on ethnic minorities! Interestingly, Philip, given his CWI/Militant Left unionist background, does see a connection between politics in Scotland and Ireland. The separation of Scotland could also have a major destabilising effect in Northern Ireland as the Protestant community could see it as the slippery slope to Northern Ireland being cast adrift from Britain.

Clearly Philip only sees here a negative connection between Scotland and Ireland. This is linked to the CWI’s long-standing denial of there being any fundamental democratic issue at stake in Ireland. They view the recent prolonged struggle in ‘the Six Counties’ as merely a battle of ‘warring tribes’. To counter what they see as a clash of feuding nationalisms they try to cling to the municipal socialist, ‘gas and water’, approach of the old Independent Labour Party in Belfast and the Northern Ireland Labour Party with their concentration on narrow economic and social demands.

The CWI-affiliated Socialist Party in Northern Ireland hopes that, by ignoring political demands, it can unite the working class on ‘bread and butter’ issues. The fact that a significant proportion of the working class, and not just the Republican Movement, has borne the brunt of UK state-backed repression in Northern Ireland, has to be seriously downplayed.

The Socialist Party dare not publicly campaign against the battery of repressive institutions, from her majesty’s regiments, the RIR, the PSNI, the state-backed death squads to the Unionist state supporting judiciary (who, in the person of Lord Hutton could be relied on to produce a suitably pro-government whitewash job for Blair!) To take such a stance would lead to the accusation of ‘taking sides’ and of ‘giving succour to the Republicans’. This failure to challenge severe antidemocratic measures is highlighted in the CWI Platform’s motion on Ireland to the SSP Conference.

Therefore the possibility that a growing national democratic movement in Scotland (with its considerably greater immediate potential to unite Protestant and Catholic here) could seriously weaken unionist and loyalist forces throughout the UK is not considered in the CWI’s analysis.They still accept the UK framework as the basis for their normal day-to-day class politics. They see economic and social concerns as being the essence of the class question. Any undue political disruption would upset this. Therefore they view the proposal for a Scottish Independence Convention as a threat, not a possible initial focus for a wider democratic challenge to the UK state and its repressive powers.

Opposing Left unionist attempts to ignore British unionism and to promote bureaucratic sectarianism

Ulster Unionists, New Labour and other unionists can call upon extensive help when they need it. They can use the whole UK-wide state machinery and draw on the political support of the British unionist parties.

Left unionists believe that they have the British TUC, the British Labour Party, or their own Britain-wide ‘revolutionary’ Parties (with semi-autonomous, effectively partitioned, adjuncts in the ‘26’ and the ‘6 Counties’ of Ireland) to counter ruling class power. However, far from forming the basis for an effective challenge, all of these Left unionist (or unionist accepting) organisations practice their own ‘bureaucratic internationalism’. They mimic many of the anti-democratic practices of the UK state and bring them into the socialist and working class movement in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Mike Gonzalez’ (SW Platform) contribution highlights Left unionist lack of respect for democracy. He argues that the controversy over the Scottish Independence Convention is a welcome development from the point of view of those of us who are interested in moving the SSP forward through political debate and discussion rather than bureaucratic and administrative squabbles. Because this is an issue of political principle(27). And, as we have already seen, the SW Platform is so principled, it is not stating its real political objections in its Conference motions on the issue!

What Mike writes off as bureaucratic and administrative squabbles have been genuine debates in the SSP over some of the SWP’s sectarian and bureaucratic practices. The SWP’s promotion of its own front organisations, such as the ANL and Globalise Resistance, without any democratic structures or leadership accountability, has caused considerable concern. The inept intervention of the ANL over the racist attacks in Sighthill in Glasgow is one example. Furthermore, the ANL doesn’t even recognise the nature of British fascism (with its racist and loyalist components), preferring to go along with the British populist equation of fascism with German Nazism. Therefore, despite Mike’s dismissal, the issue of democracy and accountability, is a point of political principle. The SSA and SSP have been more democratic than any version of the Socialist Alliance, or the newly setup Respect, in England (and Wales?). Their initial sponsoring organisations, first the Socialist Party and then the Socialist Workers Party, are well-known for their sectarian and bureaucratic practices. Furthermore, the emergence of political ‘prima donnas’, with little respect for genuine democracy, was a feature of the Britain-wide, Socialist Labour Party under Arthur Scargill; whilst George Galloway, ‘leader’ of Respect, is certainly ‘democracy-and-equality lite’!

Galloway also displays some of the worst British chauvinist traits. At a Respect meeting in Cardiff, Galloway was asked to state why the new organisation had nothing to say about Wales. In replying he made no concession to the right of Welsh self-determination and stated that supporters of independence should be excluded(28). Galloway also wrote a Sunday Mail article, in response to a proposed Scottish Executive Bill on the Gaelic language. In it he decried a language understood by less than two percent of Scots… {which} is ‘rammed down the throats’ of the rest. Our language is English and we should thank our lucky stars for that(29). Not so ‘Gorgeous George’ in the valleys and the glens then!

Most socialists are aware of the fact that it is only the pre-existing political strength of the SSP which prevents Galloway extending the Respect alliance to Scotland. It is quite likely that there are some Left unionists who are disappointed that Galloway is not standing for election here. Yet such moves would only create socialist disunity – a continuing feature of Left unionist bureaucratically imposed ‘internationalism’.

Opposing Left nationalist attempts to promote ‘socialist separatism’ and disunity

However, if the CWI and SWP have a Left unionist blind spot for Labour’s New Unionism, what explains Alan McCombes and the ISM’s failure to see this also? The ISM, who have formed the overwhelming majority of the SSA and SSP leaderships, are in the process of making a painful break from the earlier Militant Left unionist tradition. In doing so they have become aware of the need for more inclusive democracy. This has been sharpened by their growing awareness of the significance of the wider democratic struggle for self-determination in Scotland. The SSP has greatly benefited from this.

Yet there is a danger of the ISM flipping from Left unionism to Left nationalism. One indicator of this, is the constant wariness of the SSP leadership in approaching socialists for joint activity in England, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Wales. Certainly consecutive British political leaderships have failed to build an inclusive democratic socialist organisation. Therefore the much poorer political performance of their front organisations has provided the SSP leadership with an excuse for their detached attitude towards socialists ’south of the border’.

Some want to go even further. The main Left nationalist Platform in the SSP, the SRSM, wants to put the issue of ‘Scottish independence’ beyond debate by proposing an entrenched constitutional amendment at Conference. Such moves could only lead to some socialists being driven out the SSP. Far from opening up the prospect of more united action with socialists in England, Wales and Ireland, it would lead to disunity in Scotland. Therefore, just as we have seen in the case of Left unionist, George Galloway, a Left nationalist approach can also promote disunity.

All SSP Platforms give their support to the right of Scottish self-determination. It is quite legitimate that the form this takes should be debated. Attempts to suppress the debate are sectarian and it is to be hoped that Alan and the rest of the annual conference will oppose them.

However, the SRSM also has ‘Republican’ in its title and constitution. But so far, they have made no statement proposing that this should form the political basis of a Scottish Independence Convention. Is the word ‘Scottish’ the only significant one in the SRSM’s name? Is the SRSM, like the SNP Left, merely sentimentally republican? Does that old Jacobitism provide a present day cover for going along with ‘Independence under the Crown’?! Throughout this article it has been demonstrated that there can be no meaningful political independence for Scotland, unless the UK’s Crown Powers are broken. This means breaking the Union of the Crowns as well as the Union of Parliaments. Detaching Holyrood from Westminster still leaves the British ruling class (including its Scottish component) with plenty of powers to intervene within Scotland. Furthermore, any disgruntled Scottish/British forces will still have powerful external allies. Our strategy has to be international to counter this.

Promoting a strategy of republican internationalism from below

When we examine the socialist forces within these islands we see a very ‘mixed bag’. In Scotland, the majority of socialists are involved in the Scottish Socialist Party. This is the most successful initiative, which is both inclusive and openly socialist. In England and Wales, we find division between the Left populist Respect alliance and the sectarian Socialist and Socialist Labour Parties. We also have the Left nationalist/ populist Wales Forward alliance trying to come to some sort of electoral arrangement with Respect.

In Ireland the divisions are even deeper – partly a reflection of UK promoted (and Irish government accepted) partition. The Socialist and Socialist Worker Parties both practice partitionist politics with attempts to build populist alliances in the North. Socialists within Sinn Fein are being more and more marginalised as the leadership becomes both more constitutional nationalist and more ‘responsible’ (i.e. accepting corporate business pressure).

The Irish Republican Socialist Party is trying to develop a wholly political and anti-sectarian response to the new situation created by the Good Friday Agreement but remains hamstrung by its own past bloody internal conflicts. Socialist Democracy promotes an anti-partitionist politics as well as challenging state/employer/trade union partnerships. However, it remains too small to take the lead in achieving broader socialist unity throughout Ireland.

The British and Irish governments plan more joint initiatives than socialists in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. To counter this the SSP has to unite with socialists and other democratic republicans in England, Wales and Ireland. Our answer to their New Unionist strategy of Devolution-all-round and the institutionalised sectarianism of the Good Friday Agreement should be our own strategy of republican

internationalism from below.

The British and Irish governments have their own Council of the Isles, with representatives from England, Ireland (North and ‘South’), Scotland, and Wales. We need our to unite own forces throughout these islands. A regularly meeting Socialist Council of the Isles would be a good start! Even if we just look at the situation in England, the best that our SSP leadership can come up with, in relation to the new Respect alliance, is a mutual non-aggression pact! In the unlikely event of Respect gaining some quick electoral credibility, there is no chance of such a top-down, populist alliance holding together under pressure. A similar, quickly formed populist Alliance was created in New Zealand. It won over 20% of the vote and several MPs. They promptly gave their support to a Labour government and then lost all their seats in the subsequent General Election! Ken Livingstone has shown that building a credible organisation outside the Labour Party is a good way to persuade Tony to let him back inside again. George Galloway will have noted this.

However, there are many socialists in England and Wales, who are not at all enamoured with the sectarian and bureaucratic antics of the leaders of the Socialist Alliance or Respect. They are impressed by what the SSP has achieved. They should be part of our audience. We shouldn’t be afraid to challenge the Respect leadership’s narrow electoralism within the confines of the UK state (or, at least those parts, which won’t bring them electoral embarrassment!)

We need to form a republican Socialist Alliance covering Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. There should be a Joint Platform which recognises the full autonomy of socialist organisation in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. The political aim should be the abolition of the Crown Powers, the breaking of the Union and the ending of Partition in Ireland.

Of course, political demands must be linked to economic and social struggles. Our push for full democracy and sovereignty in the nation against the sovereignty of the bureaucrats in ‘their Crown in Parliament’ needs to be matched by support for sovereignty of trade union members in their workplaces against the sovereignty of the bureaucrats in the union HQ’s. New Labour’s support for a New Unionist political settlement for the UK has gone hand-in-hand with their new (trade) union policy of promoting economic ‘modernisation’. These linked strategies are designed to benefit the interests of the global corporations. The employer/trade union partnerships, which are undermining so many workers’ pay and conditions, are fully backed by both the British and Irish governments.

Political struggle isn’t a diversion from the central issues of how to fight PFI, support the nursery nurses, abolish the council tax or mobilise against the occupation of Iraq(30). If we pursue any of these issues seriously we need to set our sights higher than a change of government. Political struggle amounts to much more than contesting elections. We need to contest the ruling class’s political power, by exposing their antidemocratic ‘hidden state’ and, through widening genuine democracy, undermine their Crown Powers. If the SSP sees the Scottish Independence Convention proposals as part of this wider strategy, we can gain the real respect of socialists throughout these islands.

Allan Armstrong

References

• (1) Frontline, no. 11.
• (2) Gregor Gall, Socialism, the national question and the Independence Convention in Scotland.
• (3) Alan McCombes, After May 1st: Which way forward towards independence and socialism?
• (4) Tommy Sheridan and Alan McCombes, Imagine – A Socialist Vision for the 21st century, p. 188, Rebel inc., Edinburgh, 2000.
• (5) Alan McCombes, op. cit.
• (6) Andrew Murray Scott and Iain Macleay, Tartan Terrorism and the Anglo-American State, p.22, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 1990.
• (7) Andrew Murray Scott and Iain Macleay, op. cit.p.22.
• (8) The Herald, 1.11.03
• (9) As well as Neil Davidson’s article see Discovering the Scottish Revolution,1692-1746, Pluto Publishers, 2003, See review article,
  Allan Armstrong, Beyond Broadswords and Bayonets, in Emancipation & Liberation, no. 5/6.
• (10) Philip Stott, Scotland and the National Question
• (11) Alan McCombes, op. Cit.
• (12) Neil Davidson, Is Independence a road to Socialism in Scotland?.
• (13) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (14) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (15) Neil Davidson, op. cit.
• (16) Neil Davidson, op. cit.
• (17) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (18) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (19) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (20) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (21) Neil Davidson, op. cit.
• (22) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (23) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (24) Philip Stott, op. cit.
• (25) V. Lenin, The Discussion on Self Determination Summed Up, in Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, p.148, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970.
• (26) Mike Gonzalez, The debate that will not go away.
• (27) The Downing Street Declaration – New Unionism and the Communities of Resistance, a Republican Worker pamphlet, Glasgow, 1994.
• (28) Interview with Leanne Wood, Plaid Cymru AM, in Seren, issue 12, p. 6.
• (29) Wilson McLeod, Securing the Future of Gaelic, in Scottish Left Review, issue 20, p.12.
• (30) Neil Davidson, op. cit.