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The end of the beginning? Thoughts on a referendum

21st September 2014

The end of the beginning? Thoughts on a referendum

By Ewan Gibbs

Hangovers are healing and the dust is slowly beginning to clear. The initial fallout is almost over.  Alex Salmond has announced his imminent departure from the post of First Minister. Meanwhile schemes for devolution and constitutional changes across Britain are being formulated and are already under fire for not meeting ‘Better Together’s’ late campaign promises and mixing delivering them with long-term UK constitutional fixes. At this point these are very much my own tentative and personal thoughts. This is a contribution to consider where things go from here and how socialists should think about how we move on; it’s much more the beginning than the end of that. My advice would be to suspect anyone that claims to have a fully formulated ready-made answer.

A central conclusion has to be that the constitutional debate will not go away and will in fact most likely intensify. The UK unitary state has lost any sort of popular mandate it had in Scotland. This isn’t simply in reference to 45% of the electorate who voted ‘Yes’ but also to the fact that without doubt a large bulk of those that voted ‘No’ did so on the back of promises for much expanded devolution and constitutional change. It’s also made clear by the huge participation and excitement surrounding the referendum which was unprecedented in my memory of electoral politics. Turnout was massive, around 85%, but it wasn’t limited to that.

For the first time in my lifetime politics was being widely talked about everywhere, to the extent that one pub in Glasgow city centre felt the need to put up a “nae indy ref debates at the bar” sign. Young folk in particular were engaged and opinionated. Independence has become a solution to the lack of a progressive option on offer at a UK level for many who became politically active through the campaign. With the significant exception of 18-24 year olds who marginally voted No all age groups under 55 voted Yes. The 4 local authority areas that voted Yes, 3 on Clydeside, Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire and North Lanarkshire, and Dundee on the east coast are disproportionately poorer and have suffered the worst effects of deindustrialisation in Scotland. This all seems compounded by the fact 37% of Labour supporters voted Yes when the party threw the kitchen sink in to get a No vote.
For Guardian poll, click here 

The ‘Better Together’ campaign and consequently Labour’s strategy was complacent and limited. This only confirmed for many that Labour was part of “the establishment” and “Westminster”. ‘Yes’ had an activist movement that genuinely energised people, the other side was always far more limited in what it could mobilise and therefore reliant on full-timers. I don’t think there’s much point in rehashing the case made by socialists of Yes and No here but I think it’s important when we’re taking stock to remember that the argument was constrained for the most part. It was a debate at leadership level between two sides arguing alternative strategies which were framed within not against neoliberalism. That was clear on the proposals for a currency union in particular. Dissenting voices from the left on this major issue in particular were isolated in both the Yes and No camps.

From a socialist point of view among the most worrying aspects of the independence referendum is the extent to which the left put forward arguments in which class conflict and mobilisation on these lines was at best a secondary factor. That went without saying in ‘Better Together’ and anyone that was affiliated with it. But it was also clear when the Common Weal’s arguments for “social partnership” and a Nordic model of tripartism between the state, employers and trade unions got wide purchase and chimed more broadly with much of ‘Yes Scotland’s’ ideological outlook. These look like forces that might well be here to say,. SNP membership is currently skyrocketing and the Greens have also had a large number of people join them post-indy ref. It is likely these new members are mostly Yes activists who argued for these policies over the last 2 years. In taking things forward reformulating a politics with work and a conflict-based analysis at its centre is going to be fundamental and the only way a labour movement based politics can defeat the very successful SNP approach to the debate in terms of ‘fighting for Scotland,’ as some all-encompassing, progressive panacea to all the nation’s woes. 

This also serves to underline that the constitutional crisis has not ended, if anything it’s only set to intensify. There’s huge pressure for further devolution in Scotland which has grown further following the promises by all the major parties in their panic following Yes coming out ahead in a poll a few weeks ago. At the moment the whole thing is a dog’s dinner of various proposals and Tory one-upmanship by linking any further devolution for Scotland with “English votes for English laws.” In itself this raises the spectre of a whole new democratic deficit given that, through the Barnett Formula, Scottish funding is linked to English budgets which Scottish MPs would then be removed from setting. Any serious riposte to this would require a lot of thought about the constitution.

It’s my tentative view that if Labour can’t take up the demand for some sort of federalism to English regions with a separate all-UK government then, not only will the Tories gain an electoral advantage, but support for independence in Scotland will also rise and new demands for it will be put forward in light of an utter stitch-up and betrayal. Ed Miliband’s latest statement is characterised by a false binary differentiation between constitutional and social change:

“Right across Britain, people are yearning for change. Constitutional change matters. But we all know something else matters even more. Our country doesn’t work for everyday working people and only works for a privileged few at the top. And we’ve got to change it.”
For quote, click here

What Labour currently can’t understand is that, rather than juxtaposed, the two have become intrinsically linked in Scotland. The dominant view in the party and the one its British (and most of its Scottish) leaders have had since the 1930s, which predicates achieving social justice on the policies of a centralised state, has been a huge constraint for decades - but it’s now threatening to become fatal. When this is combined with mealy-mouthed promises for an £8 an hour minimum wage in 6 years time the chances of a Labour victory in 2015 slip further away, and those of ongoing SNP hegemony and another referendum in years to come only rise. If there isn’t a labour movement challenge which links a clearly set constitutional position with economic and social policies rooted in an analysis of society which posits working people’s interests against capital’s (the 99% and the 1%) a future of being squeezed between Tory demands for English home rule and a resurgent SNP and broader Yes movement posing as the defenders of Scotland against Westminster is probable.