After the referendum

Submitted by AWL on 22 September, 2014 - 1:56 Author: Dale Street

The Scottish referendum debate drew in thousands of people who had not been previously involved in political argument and activity. Public meetings attracted capacity crowds. Political discussion became a mass activity.

When passions run high, as they did in the referendum debate, there will inevitably be excesses. Activists on both sides were equally guilty of such excesses. And, in the end, they were peripheral to the big political debate.

But some toxic divisiveness in the Yes campaign was inherent in its political project. Whereas the workers’ movement seeks to bring together people of different national and ethnic identities as equals in a common movement, the nationalism of the Yes campaign stood for the polar opposite: dividing peoples along national lines.

The history of Britain was reduced to the existence of the British Empire. The centrality of Scotland’s role in that Empire was conveniently ignored: Britain plundered the world, whereas Scotland was apparently just an innocent bystander.

Also written out of British history was everything which represented historical progress, from the revolutionising of the means of production so admired by Marx to the world’s first powerful working class movement (Chartism).

In the final week before the referendum the Yes campaign produced posters (in Labour Party colours) declaring “End Tory Rule For Ever — Vote Yes”, while the “Radical” Independence Campaign produced leaflets calling for a Yes vote in order to “say goodbye to the Tories and because we’ll always get the government we vote for.”

The unspoken political sub-text was that national identity defines voting patterns (English: Tory; Scottish: not Tory). But it doesn’t.

The appeal of the Yes campaign to gut working-class anti-Toryism was not an attempt to mobilise workers as a distinct social force in society. It was an attempt to mobilize them on the basis of national identity and rope them into a nationalist project at odds with the basic working-class value of solidarity.

In the immediate run-up to the referendum the Yes campaign ran the argument that a failure to vote Yes would result in the privatisation of the NHS in Scotland. This was despite the fact that health is a devolved power. Only the Scottish parliament can privatise the NHS in Scotland.

And three days before the referendum an NHS whistleblower leaked documents showing that the SNP government was considering plans to cut £400 millions from the Scottish NHS budget (following on from the £300 millions it cut in the last parliament).

There was certainly an element of scaremongering in the professed concerns of certain elements in the No camp about the social results of a Yes vote.

But the response of the Yes campaign was to sidestep. And only that sidestepping allowed the Yes campaign to hold together.

LGBT activists and homophobic big businessmen; green activists and politicians who promised an oil-driven economic boom; feminists and Tommy Sheridan; socialists and the custodians of capital; migrants’ rights campaigners and the architects of yet another border; CNDers and the champions of NATO...

But an independent Scotland could not deliver such contradictory aspirations. Now we need to sidestep the sidestepping, and focus on united working-class action to deal with the real problems.

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