In five weeks time, the people of Scotland will decide whether or not to become an independent state.
YouGov polls have consistently shown voters to be split down the middle. That was until the debate between Labour’s Alistair Darling and the Scottish Nationalist Party’s First Minister Alex Salmond at the beginning of the month. Poll results now show “No” votes to be 55%, “Yes” votes at 35%, with the rest undecided.
Both the “Yes” and “No” campaigns are claiming a victory out of the public debate. Salmond has been criticised for talking, for what seemed the entire debate, about what currency Scotland would have post-independence. But he also converted the most undecided voters.
In very general terms, socialists are not in favour of borders between peoples, we are for the breaking down of borders. Our overwhelming concern is what is in the interests of the working-class and a larger political unit makes forging unity between the working classes of England, Scotland and Wales much easier. That in turn makes the labour movement much stronger, and allows for a more powerful force against the bourgeois state.
That is why we advocate “vote no to independence” in this referendum.
Of course it is up to the people of Scotland to decide what kind of political arrangements they want to make and we would defend their right to take and implement that decision against “Unionist” threats.
There is, however, an exception to being automatically in favour of the larger political unit; that is when one nation is more powerful and therefore dominant over a weaker one. In such situations conflicts are more likely to happen and injustices can occur, often leaving the less dominant country in political and economic disarray.
In this situation, the weaker state has the right to self-determination and to become separate from the other. Scotland, however, is not an oppressed nation. It is and has been for a very long time a fully integrated part of the bigger British state. Even Alex Salmond claims an independent Scotland will continue to be British!
The British left appear, sometimes, to make the right arguments for a “No” vote, and then in the final breath of the argument appear to do a 180 degree turn. The SWP for instance: “Their [the SNP] argument is like saying Coca Cola rots your teeth when it’s bottled in London but if you site the bottling plant in Edinburgh then Coca Cola is good for you.” Yes... “...but the breaking up of Britain as an imperialist power is a small victory worth fighting for.” Is it? Is being pro-independence just to appear to be so very, very anti-Tory worth damaging a common labour movement and links between the working classes?
Arguments from left groups for independence are difficult to make sense of, and from a socialist perspective it would be far better to call for a federal republic in Britain within a democratic federal Europe. That is, a united political unit, no monarchy, with strong local autonomy for the Scottish people, and others.
