Poor old Alex Salmond. Things haven’t been going too well
for him lately. Maybe it was one too many whiskeys with their Burns Suppers,
but the Scottish National Party Government seems to be stumbling from one
embarrassment to another. First they couldn’t get their “recession beating”
budget passed on the first go. Then they were forced to back down on their
flagship policy to scrap council tax, apparently due to a lack of
“parliamentary consensus”. And then, just to add insult to injury Iain Gray,
the Scottish Labour Party leader, slammed the SNPs plans for an independence
referendum. This makes it increasingly look like Labour will vote against the
proposed referendum to come before the parliament at some point over the next
year. What was the SNP’s response to this? A cabinet reshuffle! The last resort
of any desperate government.
However the fact is no matter how much the SNP insists on
calling itself the Scottish Government (they changed the name from the Scottish
Executive in 2007), it is still only a devolved administration that gets all
its financial backing and political power at the discretion of the Westminster
Parliament. For the SNP this task is made doubly difficult by being a minority
government without a majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament. So in order
to get their budget passed on the second attempt they had to do deals to get
Labour and the Lib Dems (the Tories had been in support from the offset) on
side. These two parties demanded the most tokenistic gestures in return for
their support. Labour got a pathetic 11,000 new
apprenticeships which will be of little relief to the mounting scores of
unemployed youth, particularly when these un-unionised apprenticeships pay
peanuts and don’t even guarantee a job at the end. The Lib Dems won one
inquiry into financial sector jobs and another into Scottish public spending. What
a gain for liberal democracy! Arguable the opposition party that got most out
of it were the Tories who, in return for backing from stage one, got tax cuts
for small businesses and a £60m town centre regeneration scheme (read: knocking
down social housing and replacing with posh flats no one can afford). It shows
the true colours of the SNP that they find natural allies in the Tory party and
readily give them the most typical of Tory policies: tax cuts for business. On
the sidelines of this earth shaking game of real politik sat the Green Party.
Once wooed by the SNP as possibly coalition partners, and the only other party
in the parliament to support the SNPs central aim of independence, they were
quickly and unceremoniously shoved to the sidelines of the budget negotiations
when the SNP realised that they could get Labour and the Lib Dems to back the
budget. The Greens were asking for a £100m home insulation project for their
support. Needless to say they didn’t get it, and when the budget was finally
rushed through parliament on the second attempt it was approved by a majority
of 123 with two voting against. No prizes for guessing who those two votes were.
Yes, that mighty force in Scottish politics – the Green Party!
The Scottish Parliament was sold
as following the model of constructive, nice, ‘consensus’ politics that would
see an end to political bickering and allow for the input of small parties. The
budget debacle has shown once and for all what nonsense this is in reality.
Unprincipled political bargaining ruled the roost as the big parties’ horse
traded their way to the final agreement. Whilst the 2003-7 Parliament saw the
involvement of the Scottish Socialist Party, Solidarity, the Greens and the
highly important contribution of the Senior Citizens’ Unity Party, their MSPs
were on the fringes of the parliament and made no real impact to its political
decisions. The shunting aside of the Greens is merely the latest display of the
political impotency of support for such small parties as advocated by some on
the Scottish left, particularly some in the SSP. The SSP thought that through
playing a kind of leftwing lower common denominator politics they could
maintain a presence in Parliament and use it to win concessions for the working
class. The SSP went about playing the ‘parliamentary game’, engaging in a rash
of limited reformist campaigns and attempting to cosy up to the SNP with the
ultimate aim of forming a coalition government. The inevitable result of this
was political annihilation, with them going from 6 seats in 2003 to zero in the
current parliament. In the same way the Greens couldn’t even get their home
insulation proposal a serious reading, the SSP could never enact serious change
in parliament. They were always pushed to the side with the smaller parties
whilst the big boys got on with thrashing out a parliamentary majority. Lenin famously said that parliament
is a pig sty. After this farce of one-upmanship and political horse trading the
Scottish Parliament look less like a pig sty and more like a flea circus. This
latest round of bickering has further increased many Scottish working people’s
disillusion with the political system and this joke of a Scottish Parliament.
It raises the question: if anyone bothers going to vote in the next Scottish
Parliamentary elections then who will they vote for. It’s hard to say whether
it is the SNP or Labour that have come out of this looking worst.
The economic crisis looks likely
to hit Scotland as badly, if not worse, than the rest of the UK, and is already
causing the SNP some major political headaches. It was less than two years ago
when the SNP came to power in Scotland talking about how much better the
Scottish economy would be if Scotland was an independent country able its run
its own economic affairs to attract foreign business and particularly
investment in the finance sector (Edinburgh is one of the biggest financial
hubs in Europe). The SNP said we could join the “arc of prosperity”. Scotland
was to be a prosperous land of deregulated investment as the wizard men of the
finance industry were given a free reign to play with pieces of paper and
generally create social wellbeing. They held up the Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ and
Iceland as examples of small countries with high economic growth and great
standards of living, saying that Scotland could be just like these if only it
were independent. How ridiculous that argument looks now with the Icelandic
economy in a literal state of ruin and Ireland having to launch major cuts just
to stave off a similar fate. The reason that the SNP were so keen to press the
idea that the Scottish economy could do so well if only it ran itself was
because they got their most important political and financial support from a
section a Scottish finance capital that wanted to win fiscal autonomy in order
to use Scotland as a cheap and easy base for its own dealings. This base
amongst finance capitalists seems to have all but disappeared as the
Westminster government was forced to nationalise RBS and HBOS to stop them
going completely bankrupt. The SNP’s supporters amongst big business in
Scotland did make a last ditch attempt to keep HBOS as a separate entity from
Lloyds, with British Government financial backing, using the SNP as a political
mouthpiece to lobby against the merger. This failed, and the finance executives
of these Scottish banks that supported the SNP have lost their financial power
and with it their political clout. Not only do the SNP look publicly like they
have no idea what they are doing when it comes to economic policy but they have
lost the biggest part of their backing amongst the Scottish business
establishment.
After
nearly two years in office the SNP are definitely over their ‘honeymoon period’
and are losing political credibility like so much water out a sinking ship. It
begs the question how are they going to manage to approach the next election
and gain any support, let alone win a second term? It is possible that as the
recession worsens they will try to divert any rise in class conciousness
(already demonstrated by the public sector strikes, the Grangemouth strike and
widespread action during the recent dispute over bringing un-unionised labour
in from abroad) into a nationalist feeling against the government in London. If
the next Westminster election bring in a Tory government that launches a full
scale attack on welfare and public services then this is more likely to be
successful. If they can characterise the problem of the recession and massive
cut backs in health, education etc. as the fault of the government in London
they may just be able to win the next election, and even have a chance at
winning a yes vote for independence. The SNP has always blamed London for any
promise they can’t meet or pledge they can’t fulfil. Recently, they have been
very quick to point out that the block grant given to the Scottish Government
will (by the SNP’s reckoning) be £500m less this year than it should be, and
that Westminster is refusing to loan them money to build a new Forth Road
bridge. The SNP have teamed up with the Lib Dems (yet more political
manoeuvring) to demand borrowing powers for the Scottish Parliament to finance
major capital projects like the new Forth crossing. The Lib Dems see this as a
solution to the current constitutional mess, but the SNP see it as a stepping
stone to independence.
What these
high powered games of political chequers between the parties in the Parliament
and crucially between the SNP in Edinburgh and the government in Westminster
really mean is a huge hole in funding for desperately needed investment in
schools, the health system and particularly the Scottish transport network. At
the end of last year the SNP presented their long term transport plan to Parliament.
It contained proposals to upgrade the rail and road network, with particular
emphasis on building better links between the north of Scotland and the central
belt. At its centre was a plan to build a new road bridge over the River Forth,
but to do this it needed a loan from Westminster. Westminster wasn’t willing to
oblige, and now they are talking about putting all transport projects on hold
to be able to pay for the new bridge. For the SNP picking fights with London
may be a lot of fun, but for working people in Scotland it will damage public
services. Whether or not the SNP can win the next election depends a lot on if
they can direct the blame for the the effects of the recession and public
spending cuts away from itself and towards Westminster. But it depends in equal
measure whether Labour can mount an effective opposition.
The New
Labour leadership has found no way of winning political points off the SNP
since they came into government, despite the fact that they have been practically
giving points away over the last few months. First they tried a little left
wing rhetoric with the former leader Wendy Alexander declaring that it was a
battle “between socialism and nationalism” at the 2008 Scottish Labour Party
conference. But working people looked back over the cutbacks and broken
promises that marked the eight years of a Labour administration in Scotland and
over ten of Labour Government in London and saw straight through this facade of
“getting back to Labour’s socialist values”. So next Alexander tried calling
the SNPs bluff and challenging them to an immediate referendum on independence,
knowing that the idea of a separate Scotland would get voted down with a fairly
sizable majority against. The SNP knew this too and also realised that they had
to put off a referendum until there was the likely possibility of a Tory
government down south. The nationalist tacticians see that if there is a
Conservative government in London launching an all out attack on the working
class then people might see independence as a way out, when they wouldn’t have
given it a moment’s thought two years earlier. Anyway, the Labour leadership in
London were getting a bit jittery about a slide to the left and supporting a
referendum on Scottish independence, so they got rid of her over an illegal
leadership campaign donation of £900 and brought in the current leader Mr. Gray,
who is easier to keep in line. Just to make sure that the SNP didn’t get any
false hopes about Labour supporting a referendum Gray lambasted the idea in Parliament
last week, as well as pointing out that the SNP are making a habit of
defaulting on their manifesto pledges: first replacing student loans with
grants and now on scrapping the council tax. But Labour seems incapable of proposing
any alternative. Everyone knows that they were the ones that brought in tuition
fees in England and would have done the same here if their then coalition
partners the Lib Dems hadn’t put their foot down. They haven’t put forward any
alternative to the SNP’s promised local income tax after their restructuring of
the current system outlined in their election manifesto just didn’t add up.
The short
of it is that the New Labour clique has reached an impasse. They have lost all
their best activists, systematically isolated their working class electoral
base and when they try to distance themselves from the government in London are
quickly whipped back into line. If the Scottish Parliamentary Labour party
really cared about saving Scotland from the recession and re-energising its
base it would propose a radical, socialist program in opposition to the SNP’s
bosses’ budget. Apprenticeships yes, but not on low pay and with no job
security. Why not call for apprentices to be unionised, paid a living wage and guaranteed
a job? Even better how about an apprenticeship for everyone young worker out of
a job? Why don’t the Labour leadership call for full fiscal autonomy for the
Scottish Parliament so it can nationalise all of the Scottish banks (and not
just the failed ones!) for the benefits of workers all over Britain? Why don’t
they demand a fair sliding scale of tax to make the rich pay their share
instead of the SNP’s proposed flat rate local income tax that will in reality
hit the poorest hardest? The New Labour clique won’t call for these things, in
fact it can’t do. London won’t let it, and more importantly its big business
backers won’t let it.
The
failures of the Labour leadership are threatening the future of a united labour
movement in Britain. If they were willing to raise a genuine socialist
programme then nationalism would not be an issue. The SNP have emerged as a
political force and sustain themselves only because of the inability of the
Labour leadership to answer the problems of working class people in Scotland.
The capitalist crisis is seeing these mounting everyday as unemployment and
repossessions rise. There is not much time left! If the Labour Party and the
trade unions fail to offer a fighting alternative then a solution will be
sought elsewhere and a strengthened nationalism could emerge. It would be a
tragedy for the opportunity presented by the current developments to be wasted
and turned into its opposite. Action to prevent further degradation and to
reclaim our movement must start now.
The fight
for a socialist Scotland and a socialist Britain are inseparable and is not one
that will be confined to parliament. It has to be fought on the streets and on
the picket lines, and by linking the recent wave of industrial action in
Scotland with working class people’s desire for a Scottish politics that really
works. Not this caricature of democracy that is the Scottish Parliament, which
is nothing more than a debating club for trumped up councillors, but a Scottish
budget in the interests of working people implemented and administered by
working people. And that’s what the SNP or the New Labour clique can’t give us
and fear most.
