Seumas Milne
It’s not hard to work out why next week’s referendum on
Scottish independence is on a knife edge, and the markets in meltdown.
If the Westminster elite had been secretly working for a yes vote, they could hardly have done a better job of it. Issuing threats of dire ruin, the no camp yoked together Labour, Liberal Democrats and Tories in a made-to-measure demonstration of exactly the London establishment stitch-up the nationalist-led campaign has thrived on.
Trading on fear and relentless negativity, the Better Together campaign has left the field open to independence campaigners to offer hope of real change and empowerment.
By refusing to include a halfway house “devo max” question on the ballot paper, they denied Scots the option most wanted in favour of a gamble that has already backfired.
Now in a state of advanced panic, they’ve cobbled together more devolved powers and sent David Cameron to Edinburgh to plead for the union: the embodiment of Tory rule without a mandate that is the main reason many yes voters will opt for independence.
The prospect of the Protestant Orange Order marching for the union and the chance of a supportive visit from Ukip’s Nigel Farage might just about clinch it for Alex Salmond.
On the other side, the yes campaign is a ferment of energy and grassroots campaigning.
With the Scottish National party having long since moved on from its Tartan Tory days to a stance that better fits Scotland’s left-leaning centre of gravity, independence has also attracted a significant section of the Scottish left – on a scale not seen since John Maclean, Lenin’s consul in Glasgow, campaigned for a Scottish socialist republic after the first world war.
After 35 years in which Thatcherite destruction of Scotland’s industrial and social fabric by governments Scots never voted for was followed by New Labour’s “light-touch regulation” and illegal wars, getting on for half the country has had enough and sees the exit as the best way of getting something better.
Add in a dose of Caledonian-style anti-politics, and working class voters have been jumping ship in droves.
If Scotland votes yes next week, the sky won’t fall in of course, whatever the costs.
Scotland may not have been an oppressed nation in the Irish mould, but it has the right to self-determination and every capacity to make it as an independent state.
Coming from a culturally nationalist Scottish background with a Gaelic speaking father, I don’t have any difficulty understanding the appeal of independence, let alone the demands for social justice and democratic accountability that are swelling support for it.
The message that if you vote yes you’ll never get another Tory government could hardly be a more powerful one in a country that polled 42% for Labour and less than 17% Conservative in 2010 and ended up with Cameron as prime minister all the same.
But the idea that a yes vote would be a short cut to a progressive future in a Scandinavian-style social democracy is another matter.
It’s not just that Scottish voters aren’t being offered genuine independence at all. Instead, the state cooked up by the SNP is one signed up in advance to the monarchy, Nato, the EU and a currency controlled from London.
Sure, Whitehall and Brussels will negotiate terms if it comes to it.
But that will certainly be on the basis of harsh debt and deficit limits – turning an already tight fiscal inheritance into a turbo-charged austerity that would make the kind of welfare system Salmond is promising impossible to deliver.
On top of that the SNP, which would doubtless rule the roost in the aftermath of a vote for independence it would rightly be seen to have brought about, is still no party of the centre-left. Backed by tax avoiders, hedge funders, privateers and Rupert Murdoch, its central economic policy is to cut corporation tax 3% below the British rate to attract capital to Scotland.
It’s a classic recipe for a race to the bottom, as each government seeks to undercut the other’s corporate taxes to woo foreign investors – slashing the revenues for public services and pensions in the process.
But then the SNP also opposed a 50% top rate of tax, bankers’ bonus tax or mansion tax, while pledging deregulation and cuts in red tape.
And a Scottish exit from Britain will make Tory governments more likely, by stripping out 59 Scottish MPs from Westminster, only one of whom is currently a Conservative. On current polling, Labour would lose its majority at next May’s election without them [not true].
The impact of that wouldn’t only be felt across the rest of Britain, most painfully in its most deprived communities.
It would also feed back directly into Scotland, as a more rightwing administration in London propelled a weak government in Edinburgh into a wider Dutch auction on taxes, rights at work and regulation – delivering the very opposite of what most yes voters actually want to see.
Progressive yes campaigners counter that the independence campaign is far more than the SNP, encompassing left, green and women’s groups who hope to influence a new Scottish constitution and politics that could offer a beacon to the rest of Britain.
The reality is that the left and Labour movement in Scotland, decimated by decades of deindustrialisation and defeats, are currently too weak to shape a new Scottish state.
Instead, a victorious SNP and its business friends would be likely to do that – in a neoliberal world where small states are at the mercy of corporate power without an exceptionally determined political leadership.
That weakness is mirrored south of the border, of course.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said at the weekend that workers on both sides of the border had “more in common with each other than Edinburgh bankers or English aristocrats”.
It’s the decline of such class politics that has fuelled the rise of nationalism in Scotland as a kind of anti-establishment proxy.
By failing to make a clearer break with New Labour and embracing austerity lite, Ed Miliband has left many Scottish voters without the sense of a real alternative.
But however inspiring the yes campaign and whatever other reasons there might be to back independence, Salmond’s Scotland clearly doesn’t offer an escape hatch from neoliberal Britain.
In fact it looks like more of the same – but under the saltire.
If the Westminster elite had been secretly working for a yes vote, they could hardly have done a better job of it. Issuing threats of dire ruin, the no camp yoked together Labour, Liberal Democrats and Tories in a made-to-measure demonstration of exactly the London establishment stitch-up the nationalist-led campaign has thrived on.
Trading on fear and relentless negativity, the Better Together campaign has left the field open to independence campaigners to offer hope of real change and empowerment.
By refusing to include a halfway house “devo max” question on the ballot paper, they denied Scots the option most wanted in favour of a gamble that has already backfired.
Now in a state of advanced panic, they’ve cobbled together more devolved powers and sent David Cameron to Edinburgh to plead for the union: the embodiment of Tory rule without a mandate that is the main reason many yes voters will opt for independence.
The prospect of the Protestant Orange Order marching for the union and the chance of a supportive visit from Ukip’s Nigel Farage might just about clinch it for Alex Salmond.
On the other side, the yes campaign is a ferment of energy and grassroots campaigning.
With the Scottish National party having long since moved on from its Tartan Tory days to a stance that better fits Scotland’s left-leaning centre of gravity, independence has also attracted a significant section of the Scottish left – on a scale not seen since John Maclean, Lenin’s consul in Glasgow, campaigned for a Scottish socialist republic after the first world war.
After 35 years in which Thatcherite destruction of Scotland’s industrial and social fabric by governments Scots never voted for was followed by New Labour’s “light-touch regulation” and illegal wars, getting on for half the country has had enough and sees the exit as the best way of getting something better.
Add in a dose of Caledonian-style anti-politics, and working class voters have been jumping ship in droves.
If Scotland votes yes next week, the sky won’t fall in of course, whatever the costs.
Scotland may not have been an oppressed nation in the Irish mould, but it has the right to self-determination and every capacity to make it as an independent state.
Coming from a culturally nationalist Scottish background with a Gaelic speaking father, I don’t have any difficulty understanding the appeal of independence, let alone the demands for social justice and democratic accountability that are swelling support for it.
The message that if you vote yes you’ll never get another Tory government could hardly be a more powerful one in a country that polled 42% for Labour and less than 17% Conservative in 2010 and ended up with Cameron as prime minister all the same.
But the idea that a yes vote would be a short cut to a progressive future in a Scandinavian-style social democracy is another matter.
It’s not just that Scottish voters aren’t being offered genuine independence at all. Instead, the state cooked up by the SNP is one signed up in advance to the monarchy, Nato, the EU and a currency controlled from London.
Sure, Whitehall and Brussels will negotiate terms if it comes to it.
But that will certainly be on the basis of harsh debt and deficit limits – turning an already tight fiscal inheritance into a turbo-charged austerity that would make the kind of welfare system Salmond is promising impossible to deliver.
On top of that the SNP, which would doubtless rule the roost in the aftermath of a vote for independence it would rightly be seen to have brought about, is still no party of the centre-left. Backed by tax avoiders, hedge funders, privateers and Rupert Murdoch, its central economic policy is to cut corporation tax 3% below the British rate to attract capital to Scotland.
It’s a classic recipe for a race to the bottom, as each government seeks to undercut the other’s corporate taxes to woo foreign investors – slashing the revenues for public services and pensions in the process.
But then the SNP also opposed a 50% top rate of tax, bankers’ bonus tax or mansion tax, while pledging deregulation and cuts in red tape.
And a Scottish exit from Britain will make Tory governments more likely, by stripping out 59 Scottish MPs from Westminster, only one of whom is currently a Conservative. On current polling, Labour would lose its majority at next May’s election without them [not true].
The impact of that wouldn’t only be felt across the rest of Britain, most painfully in its most deprived communities.
It would also feed back directly into Scotland, as a more rightwing administration in London propelled a weak government in Edinburgh into a wider Dutch auction on taxes, rights at work and regulation – delivering the very opposite of what most yes voters actually want to see.
Progressive yes campaigners counter that the independence campaign is far more than the SNP, encompassing left, green and women’s groups who hope to influence a new Scottish constitution and politics that could offer a beacon to the rest of Britain.
The reality is that the left and Labour movement in Scotland, decimated by decades of deindustrialisation and defeats, are currently too weak to shape a new Scottish state.
Instead, a victorious SNP and its business friends would be likely to do that – in a neoliberal world where small states are at the mercy of corporate power without an exceptionally determined political leadership.
That weakness is mirrored south of the border, of course.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said at the weekend that workers on both sides of the border had “more in common with each other than Edinburgh bankers or English aristocrats”.
It’s the decline of such class politics that has fuelled the rise of nationalism in Scotland as a kind of anti-establishment proxy.
By failing to make a clearer break with New Labour and embracing austerity lite, Ed Miliband has left many Scottish voters without the sense of a real alternative.
But however inspiring the yes campaign and whatever other reasons there might be to back independence, Salmond’s Scotland clearly doesn’t offer an escape hatch from neoliberal Britain.
In fact it looks like more of the same – but under the saltire.
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