An Old Dream, Still Worth Fighting For

Owen Jones writes: 

Here’s a column I said I’d never write.

The debate about Scotland’s future is one, of course, that the Scottish people alone have to determine, and there are enough London-based English journalists sticking their oar in as it is.

But, as the September referendum on independence approaches, it is becoming impossible to ignore, and the implications involve all of us.

I have my own personal reasons for an interest: most of my family live and work north of the Border, and I spent two years of my childhood in Falkirk.

In March 1990, my family went to the great Glasgow anti-poll tax march, just one visible expression of seething anger at a Westminster government that Scots did not vote for.

Scotland has changed dramatically. It was once a True Blue stronghold: more than half of Scots voted for the Tory sister party, the Unionists, in the 1950s. But as the grip of religious sectarianism weakened, and de-industrialisation hammered entire communities, Toryism imploded.

By the early 1990s, the number of manufacturing jobs left in Glasgow was just a third of the number two decades earlier. A labour movement that once promoted at least some sense of solidarity across Britain’s internal boundaries began to disintegrate.

The disappointments of the New Labour era only compounded a sense of alienation. The Scottish Nationalist Party, under Alex Salmond, has – at least in rhetoric – skilfully captured a social-democratic space that was all but abandoned.

No wonder nationalism has filled the void. If northern England had a national identity, it too would undoubtedly have a thriving movement in support of independence.

Although the No crowd still have the edge, recent polling suggests the Yes vote is chomping away at its lead. It is poorer Scots – those who have the least stake in modern Britain – who are more likely to advocate independence.

Whether separation would improve their living standards is a debate to be had, but a cross next to Yes seems like the ultimate rejection of the status quo.

With independence at least a distinct possibility, corporate interests are warning Scots not to vote the wrong way. Bob Dudley, BP’s chief executive, said this week that his company would face higher costs and that “all businesses have a concern”.

The much-loved financial lobby is warning it will have to pay more, too. It it looks like it should be filed under “Likely To Backfire”: an anti-Establishment mood, that is certainly not unique to Scotland, will not be cured by the Establishment appearing to close ranks.

The question is, what would a new Scotland look like? Despite its progressive rhetoric, the SNP would hand big business a mighty cheque in the form of cuts to corporation tax that would out-Osborne the current Tory Chancellor.

That could well provoke a Dutch auction on corporation tax with the rump of Britain.

But others in the Yes camp are keen to emphasise that the SNP does not have a monopoly over the independence cause.

The Radical Independence Campaign promotes a Scotland that would break away from the free-market status quo. More than 1,000 delegates attended its conference last year, with speakers ranging from representatives from trade unions to Oxfam.

They are keen to emphasise their internationalist credentials. “A Yes vote opens up an opportunity for wider and deeper social change, and we are supporting a Yes vote for those reasons,” the RIC’s Jonathon Shafi tells me.

The non-Scottish left panic that secession would saddle them with an eternity of Conservative governments. It comes across as electoral colonialism, that Scottish territory must be preserved because of its left-leaning voting fodder.

But the relative weight of the Tory core vote would undoubtedly grow, and Scotland itself may find itself economically dependent on an England whose political centre of gravity has shifted rightwards.

For some – not all – of the Yes camp, support for independence seems to be born out of a sense that the Union is the source of social ills.

But it is neo-liberal dogma – which, to varying degrees, has swept practically all industrialised countries – that has given us a low-wage, low-rights, insecure workforce, privatised utilities and services, and a housing crisis.

It would be striking, but rather unlikely, if, in the era of globalisation, a small, independent nation managed to break from this without building an outward-looking movement first.

There is something inescapably sad about this situation.

Scottish nationalism is one symptom of the tragic decline of a type of politics: of movements based on shared economic interests – of people who really “are all in it together” – rather than national identity, striving to win concessions from those above.

The NHS, the welfare state, workers’ rights: all of these gains – now under attack – were won through the joint effort of ordinary Scots, Welsh and English people. But it is just a symptom, and the reality is, for now, as uncomfortable as it is inescapable.

An alternative, of course, would be a loose federation, with the English regions granted substantial autonomy, too, breaking the hegemony of Westminster across the islands.

Movements for a living wage, decent housing, publicly run and accountable services and workers’ rights would unite shopworkers in Glasgow with call centre workers in Manchester and Cardiff.

An old dream, yes. But still one worth fighting for.

In the 1970s, Labour MPs successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its ruinous effects on the North of England. Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution.

Eric Heffer in England, Tam Dalyell and the Buchans (Norman and Janey) in Scotland, and Leo Abse and Neil Kinnock in Wales, were prescient as to the Balkanisation of Britain by means of devolution and the separatism that it was designed to appease, and as to devolution’s weakening of trade union negotiating power.

Abse, in particular, was prescient as to the rise of a Welsh-speaking oligarchy based in English-speaking areas, which would use devolution to dominate Welsh affairs against the interests of Welsh workers South and North, industrial and agricultural, English-speaking and Welsh-speaking. Heffer’s political base was in Liverpool, at once very much like the West of Scotland and with close ties to Welsh-speaking North Wales.

There is a strong feeling among English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic minorities and Catholics that we no more want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” English, Scottish or Welsh than Ulster Protestants want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” Irish.

The Scotland Office Select Committee is chaired by Ian Davidson, a Co-operative Party stalwart and Janey Buchan protégé who is therefore a hammer both of Scottish separatism and of European federalism.

The simplest examination of General Election results at least since 1945 gives the lie to the lazy fantasy that an independent England would have had, and therefore might have in the future, a permanent or semi-permanent Conservative Government rather than, as was and would be the case, a Labour Government almost exactly as often as happened within the United Kingdom, including with comfortable or landslide majorities on every occasion when that was the case under the current arrangements.

Those who would counter that that was and would be seats, not votes, are almost always strong supporters of First Past The Post, and must face the fact that England would never return a single-party government under any other electoral system. Great swathes of England scarcely elect Conservative MPs at all.

The notion that the Conservative Party has a unique right to speak for England is as fallacious and offensive as the notion that the Conservative Party has a unique right to speak for the countryside. But of that, another time.

Whereas of course the SNP is full of Tories.

Parties that were to the left of New Labour, but which are to the right of what is now Labour again, hold seats in Scotland, Wales, the North of England, and the South of England.

In Scotland, the Labour vote is as large as ever, while the SNP has taken over most of what was historically the unassailable Tory majority there, with the SNP heartland exactly where the Unionist, as a party name, heartland used to be; it has never been Labour.

In Wales, Plaid Cymru’s strength is in rural areas that not very long ago were either Labour-Conservative marginals or safely Conservative.

No one could accuse its voters of being immigrants. Speaking the oldest cultural language in Europe also to be in more pedestrian day-to-day use, they are the oldest population group on this Island and its islands. Compared to them, everyone else here is an immigrant; even the speakers of Gaelic are Irish.

Labour is in second place in two of Plaid Cymru’s three seats. It is not the Labour vote that has transferred to Plaid Cymru. That vote has not transferred to anywhere.

Bradford West was a Conservative target seat in 2010, and it is the kind of place without which that party cannot win an overall majority. Nor has it ever done so without Brighton Pavilion, which, say it until it sinks in, is in Sussex.

In both, the Labour votes remain solid enough to provide realistic bases for recapture in 2015. The main party that has lost ground is demonstrably the other one.

The Greens’ target seats in several parts of the South are in a similar position, with neither the aim nor even the aspiration being the replacement of Labour, but rather the uniting of the anti-Labour vote. It is obvious who that means, at least primarily.

How can this possibly be? It ought not to come as any surprise. 70 per cent of people favour the public ownership of the utilities, the railways and the Royal Mail.

The second and third of those were the policy of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher. John Major abandoned both in principle, and the railways in practice. He never won another General Election.

Support for a 50 per cent top rate of income tax is support for a rate 10 per cent lower than that which was administered by Nigel Lawson when he served under Thatcher, and the threshold at which today’s respondents would wish to set this lower rate is well above that at which he administered that higher rate with her authority.

One could go on.

The Conservative Party has always been economically to the right of the Labour Party at the given time. But the Conservative Party of the 1980s was economically far to the left of the Labour Party of the Blair years.

Enough previous Conservative voters duly leapfrogged Labour to put parties to its left into Parliament from, it is worth repeating, all four of Scotland, Wales, the North of England, and the South of England.

They put those parties into government in Scotland, and periodically in Wales. They also nearly managed to do so in England in 2010.

But we are not now living in 2010. We are certainly not now living in the Blair years. Next to a Labour Party which is the Labour Party again (not a Trotskyist groupuscule; the Labour Party), the SNP is just the Tartan Tories again. Plain and simple.

Therefore, after Scotland’s impending rejection of secession, a new Act of Union.

Establishing the Crown as the guarantor of the Welfare State, workers’ rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries.

Those last, often with the word “British” in their names, were historically successful in creating communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, thus safeguarding and strengthening the Union.

The public stakes in the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland are such permanent, non-negotiable safeguards of the Union. Any profits from those stakes ought therefore to be divided equally among all households in the United Kingdom.

There is no West Lothian Question, since the Parliament of the United Kingdom reserves the right to legislate supremely in any policy area for any part of the country, and the devolution legislation presupposes that it will do so as a matter of course.

It never, ever need do so and the point would still stand, since what matters is purely that it has that power in principle, which no one disputes that it has, or else there would be no perceived need, either of the SNP, or of a referendum on independence. Anyone who does not like that ought to have voted No to devolution. I bet that they did not.

But the grievance of England, and especially of Northern and Western England, concerns, not some “West Lothian Question”, but cold, hard cash.

Each of the present or, where they have been abolished in the rush to unitary local government, the previous city, borough and district council areas in each of the nine regions must be twinned with a demographically comparable one (though not defined in terms of comparable affluence) in Scotland, in Wales, in Northern Ireland, and in each of the other English regions.

We probably have to talk about the English regions, even if we would prefer to talk about the historic counties from before an unprotesting Thatcher was in the Cabinet.

Across each of the key indicators – health, education, housing, transport, and so on – both expenditure and outcomes in each English area, responsibility for such matters being devolved elsewhere, would have to equal or exceed those in each of its twins. Or else the relevant Ministers’ salaries would be docked by the percentage in question. By definition that would always include the Prime Minister.

In any policy area devolved to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, no legislation must apply in any of the English regions unless supported at Third Reading by the majority of MPs from that region.

Since such legislative chaos would rightly be unconscionable, any Bill would in practice require such a consensus before being permitted to proceed at a much earlier stage of its parliamentary progress.

No one would lose under any of this: there would be no more politicians than at present, and both expenditure and outcomes would have to be maintained in, most obviously, Scotland and the South East for the twinning system to work.

Is it conceivable that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish voters would not also insist on full incorporation into it, with their own areas thus also guaranteed expenditure and outcomes equal to or exceeding those in each of those areas’ respective twins?

Or else the relevant Holyrood, Cardiff Bay or Stormont Ministers’ salaries would be docked by the percentage in question. By definition that would always include the First Minister, and in Northern Ireland also the Deputy First Minister.

By all means, let these be the terms of a new Act of Union.