John Wight
My no vote in the referendum on Scottish independence on 18 September will be cast as a
statement of solidarity with working people throughout this island – people in
Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, and London, with whom I share a far deeper
bond on the basis of class than I ever could with Alex Salmond, Jim McColl, Sir Brian Souter, or any other wealthy Scot on
the basis of nationality.
The travesty of this campaign is the way it has obscured class as the divide that unites people across national, gender, religious and racial lines.
Instead, nationality has been the pivot around which every other difference has revolved, in the process turning 300 years of political, social, economic and cultural union into mush.
There is undoubtedly much that is regressive about a state originally born in the interests of a rising mercantile class in 1707.
The privilege and inherited wealth enjoyed by a tiny elite, the House of Lords, the British empire, the antediluvian nonsense that is the monarchy, the recent chaos and carnage sown in the Middle East, the Tories, the brutal inequality: none of these are worth fighting for.
However, the idea that erecting a border offers an escape hatch is the product of delusion. It will instead pitch us all into a race to the bottom.
Nationalism, unless rooted in national oppression, is a perniciously hollow doctrine.
It succeeds, to the extent that both left and right embrace it as a vehicle to advance their own economic and political interests, and works by substituting the past for the present.
But this is a mythological past that invites us to negate a consciousness forged through our engagement with the world in favour of a cause rooted in nothing more than an accident of birth.
How has it come to this?
How, in 2014, are we facing the very real prospect of the political and economic separation of people on a small island in northern Europe, at a time when the economic forces that govern our lives are global in dimension?
For the past three decades, working-class communities throughout the UK have suffered a relentless assault under Conservative and Labour governments.
The Labour party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, became almost unrecognisable from the party that created the welfare state, including the NHS, and which once held full employment as a guiding principle of its economic and social policy.
The embrace of free market nostrums under New Labour meant that the inequality arrived at after 18 years of Tory government not only remained intact, but grew.
The market was the undisputed master of all it surveyed. It remains so today.
Yes, the Tories are despised in Scotland.
With just one Tory MP north of the border the fact that people in Scotland are suffering the depredations of a Tory government in Westminster immediately shines a harsh light on the democratic deficit that is a byproduct of a first-past-the-post electoral system that has long been past its sell-by date.
But if we still had a Labour party worthy of the name, there wouldn’t be a Tory government in Westminster and the political space currently occupied by the SNP in Scotland would never have opened up in the first place.
People in Newcastle, Liverpool, and Manchester are not natural Tory voters either, and I consider myself more in tune with their struggles, needs and history than I do with those of Gaelic-speaking Scots living in the Highlands and islands.
As such, the idea of abandoning people who have stood with us – and us with them – in trade union struggles, political campaigns, progressive movements and so on for generations can be considered progress is anathema to me.
Here the analogy of the Titanic applies wherein, rather than woman and children first, it is Scots to the lifeboats and to hell with everybody else.
As Bertolt Brecht reminds us: “The defeats and victories of the fellows at the top aren’t always defeats and victories for the fellows at the bottom.”
In 2014, people not only in Scotland but throughout Britain need change; –just not this change.
The travesty of this campaign is the way it has obscured class as the divide that unites people across national, gender, religious and racial lines.
Instead, nationality has been the pivot around which every other difference has revolved, in the process turning 300 years of political, social, economic and cultural union into mush.
There is undoubtedly much that is regressive about a state originally born in the interests of a rising mercantile class in 1707.
The privilege and inherited wealth enjoyed by a tiny elite, the House of Lords, the British empire, the antediluvian nonsense that is the monarchy, the recent chaos and carnage sown in the Middle East, the Tories, the brutal inequality: none of these are worth fighting for.
However, the idea that erecting a border offers an escape hatch is the product of delusion. It will instead pitch us all into a race to the bottom.
Nationalism, unless rooted in national oppression, is a perniciously hollow doctrine.
It succeeds, to the extent that both left and right embrace it as a vehicle to advance their own economic and political interests, and works by substituting the past for the present.
But this is a mythological past that invites us to negate a consciousness forged through our engagement with the world in favour of a cause rooted in nothing more than an accident of birth.
How has it come to this?
How, in 2014, are we facing the very real prospect of the political and economic separation of people on a small island in northern Europe, at a time when the economic forces that govern our lives are global in dimension?
For the past three decades, working-class communities throughout the UK have suffered a relentless assault under Conservative and Labour governments.
The Labour party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, became almost unrecognisable from the party that created the welfare state, including the NHS, and which once held full employment as a guiding principle of its economic and social policy.
The embrace of free market nostrums under New Labour meant that the inequality arrived at after 18 years of Tory government not only remained intact, but grew.
The market was the undisputed master of all it surveyed. It remains so today.
Yes, the Tories are despised in Scotland.
With just one Tory MP north of the border the fact that people in Scotland are suffering the depredations of a Tory government in Westminster immediately shines a harsh light on the democratic deficit that is a byproduct of a first-past-the-post electoral system that has long been past its sell-by date.
But if we still had a Labour party worthy of the name, there wouldn’t be a Tory government in Westminster and the political space currently occupied by the SNP in Scotland would never have opened up in the first place.
People in Newcastle, Liverpool, and Manchester are not natural Tory voters either, and I consider myself more in tune with their struggles, needs and history than I do with those of Gaelic-speaking Scots living in the Highlands and islands.
As such, the idea of abandoning people who have stood with us – and us with them – in trade union struggles, political campaigns, progressive movements and so on for generations can be considered progress is anathema to me.
Here the analogy of the Titanic applies wherein, rather than woman and children first, it is Scots to the lifeboats and to hell with everybody else.
As Bertolt Brecht reminds us: “The defeats and victories of the fellows at the top aren’t always defeats and victories for the fellows at the bottom.”
In 2014, people not only in Scotland but throughout Britain need change; –just not this change.
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