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Can there be a Labour Scotland?

23rd February 2015

Can there be a Labour Scotland?

By Ewan Gibbs

Throughout the referendum campaign the dulcet tones of Better Together and Yes Scotland promised some brand of fair-or-fairer Scotland that would better embody ‘Scottish values’. Jim Murphy has taken this to its logical conclusion, stating in his victory speech that he wants us to live in the ‘fairest nation on earth’, and boasting his patriotic credentials by seeking to demagogically enshrine them in the Scottish Labour constitution.

Now that Murphy has taken up the cry of patriotism, there’s no doubt that politics in Scotland is centred on the nation and constitution. At the same time, many on the Yes side are surprised that the current political situation does not lend itself to left politics and the politics of the labour movement. Both the Labour right and the Yes left get it so wrong because they refuse to understand nationalism as anything other than a sudden and momentous change in the politics of Scotland. I want to show that by looking at the relationship between (small-l) labour and nation in the past 50 years in Scotland, we can learn the ways that national consciousness could – even should – be used politically.
This national centring of Scottish politics didn’t happen overnight, it’s been gaining focus over several decades. The national is part of any politics, at least any politics that hopes to gain more than self-satisfaction in a world that continues to be characterised by national consciousness. But claims on Scotland, and specifically labour movement claims on Scotland, have programmatically varied and had differing levels of strength as class power and ideological coherence has risen and declined. The labour movement has on many occasions used national sentiment as a way to frame its demands.

There are two particular periods of transition that demonstrate the relationship between class politics and nationalism in Scotland and the way in which class strength can act to mobilise national feeling. (During the referendum we were often told mobilisation works the other way round.) The working class had varying levels of power during each period, but both involved the Scottish Trades Union Congress.

The first moment to explore is the UCS work-in, which has become a mythologised cause célèbre largely because it coincided with a time when the labour movement was able to profess to represent the interests of Scotland as a whole. The occupation of the 4 shipyards in a titanic (excuse the pun) struggle of 9 months over 1971-2 had support from across the labour movement which was expressed in two regional general strikes on Clydeside. The work-in’s leaders, in particular Jimmy Reid, used a language which connected the fate of the yards with the struggle to maintain industrial employment in Scotland.

This struggle formed a key background to the STUC-called Scottish Assembly, somewhere between a body, meeting and demonstration of Scottish political parties and other organisations. It clearly asserted organised labour as the force leading the demand for a devolved “workers’ parliament” which would assert control over economic direction, wresting power both geographically and in class terms from state and corporate boardrooms in London and the United States. During the work-in and the Scottish Assembly, the labour movement was able to replace fading Scottish capital, whose declining economic power coincided with a growing inability to assert political leadership through the ‘Unionist’ Tory tradition, as the chief representative of the nation and champion of ‘home rule’. The rising strength of the organised working class in Scotland, Britain and internationally in the early ‘70s – especially of a Communist and ‘broad left’ challenge to labourist social democracy – was fundamental in building this position.

The second moment to emphasise took place against a backdrop of sustained trade union defeats, in which industrial mobilisation came to be understood as an impossibility. Some assert that the way that the demand for devolution grew steadily in Scotland demonstrates a fundamental continuity, but from the perspective of the labour movement, this period appears instead as one of a definitive change in strategy. The STUC, which had formerly led demands for a workers parliament, now focussed on building a coalition of all the political forces outwith the Tories, including civil society organisations such as local government institutions and churches. This broad grouping was to become known as ‘Civic Scotland’. This ‘Team Scotland’ advocated a Scottish (no longer “workers’”) parliament as the solution to stave off the worst excesses of neoliberal restructuring.

What had been the mobilisation of a constitutional Scottish solution by labour as an offensive springboard to move towards socialism gave way to a position of a cross-class alliance using the national interest as a defensive shield. This was exposed when Civic Scotland led opposition to poll tax non-payment and found itself on the wrong side of the major class struggle of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Since then the links between labour and the constitution have deteriorated. Of course, even the weak version of the STUC’s institutional claim to represent Scotland was destroyed by the formation of the Scottish parliament. But more damaging has been the growing weakness of organised labour, and an increasingly consensual politics in Scotland which accepts ‘social neoliberalism’; embedding the free movement of capital and the predominance of the interests of business in a limited welfare settlement. Post-indyref, this situation is becoming more entrenched.

It is clear that labour can only have a constructive relationship with the constitution where the labour movement itself is strong. This is partly because it is only on the basis of an active labour movement, that the corresponding ideological confidence to challenge capitalism can be founded. The lesson from examining the history of the STUC is that a strategy based on making coalitions with opposing interests and class forces from a position of weakness will only ensure continuing marginalisation. On the basis of strength, labour has in the past been able to lay claim to Scotland and gain backing for a constitutional vision developed to forward its interests against capital’s. The ideological confidence to once again challenge the present accommodation with neoliberalism can only be attained by building and exercising power through workplace and political mobilisation.

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