John Foster sees hope for the left if it adopts the correct strategy to connect with citizens
The referendum result poses big challenges for socialists and all on the left. The SNP’s formula for independence was, indeed, rejected and the scale of that rejection was bigger than many, including myself, expected. Yet Labour’s working class heartlands did vote ‘yes’ and the challenge resides in the character of that vote. It came primarily from the poorest, those who have suffered worst from neoliberal policies. It was a vote that was antiTory but at the same time saw opposition in terms of independence. Exploitation was identified with external rule.
The SNP ran a very sophisticated campaign. Its White Paper terms for independence were essentially neo-liberal: EU, sterling, cuts in business taxes, NATO membership and no guarantees on the removal of anti-trade union laws. Not just that. Its timetable for independence provided full reassurance for big (and small) business on delivery. All the key institutions required for neo-liberal continuity would be in place before formal independence. Yet, at the same time, the SNP succeeded in penetrating working class areas in a way they had never done before. 2012 had seen an electoral shift to the SNP but it was quite shallow and was reversed in subsequent local elections.
The referendum was different. It generated a movement. The tactic of flooding working class areas with activists using radical slogans did not necessarily achieve this result. But it did enable pre-existing nationalist sentiment to gain a life of its own and transform a prevailing fatalism into a belief that immediate social and economic change was possible. The cries at one polling station in Govan were ‘end Tory rule for ever’, ‘put Cameron on the dole’, ‘stop the cuts now’ (even though many shouting them came from elsewhere, two from as far away as Wales).
Older voters remained unconvinced and voted predominantly ‘no’ – a generation politically formed in the 1970s and 1980s who remembered the mass campaigns mobilised by the union movement and even the Labour Party.
But the majority in working class Govan and Glasgow voted ‘yes’. This is the challenge. Mass politics were previously anchored, however tenuously, in some form of class perspective. Poverty was seen to be caused by the rich and their grip on government. Now oppression and exploitation are increasingly identified with external rule. And there is a converse reaction in England where the Tories and UKIP seek to exploit discontents raised by what is seen as special treatment for the Scots.
The class content of politics, already weak before the referendum, is directly threatened. This should be as much a matter of concern for left nationalists as for those who argued for the more traditional left position of home rule.
How to respond? There are two positive features. One is the degree to which opposition to ‘Westminster rule’ in working class areas is to some extent still phrased in terms of class It associates exploitation with external government but it’s still about class justice. The other is the politicisation of ‘no’ voters. Two thirds of Labour voters did not vote ‘yes’. Some of this was inertia, some distrust of the SNP. But there was also a newly reinforced yearning for class politics – something which found expression at the local mass meetings, attended by hundreds, organised by Working Together and the labour movement campaign. It was this feeling to which Gordon Brown sought to respond in his eve of poll speech.
Miliband’s response has been interesting. He picked up the anger at poverty and deprivation and argued that issues of economic and social justice must not be side-lined in the bid to resolve the constitutional issues. This is correct. At the same time, there is a danger in this position. It separates two things that, in terms of class politics, need to be taken together.
Today’s political cliché is that there is a fatal detachment between government and the governed. The clichéd (non-class) solution is to devolve powers ‘closer’ to the people. Yet lessons from existing devolved governments are not learned. The Scottish Parliament already possesses powers to raise taxes and to take into public ownership and to intervene industrially. But they have never been used. Why? One is the lack of a mass class movement to demand their use. The other, no less important, is the scale of institutional prohibition on anything that infringes neo-liberal, free market process enforced at British and EU level.
Devolving still more formal but unused and unusable powers will lead to even greater disenchantment. The issues of social justice correctly raised by Miliband have to be addressed through regional devolution, national parliaments and federal institutions. This has two clear requirements: a mass movement for class justice, one which the labour movement must lead, and a mass class understanding of how existing state structures, in Britain and the EU, sustain the neo-liberal framework that maximises big business profits at the expense of working people.
This was the original perspective of the STUC for a home rule parliament. It has been reiterated recently in the 2014 Red Paper – a parliament with both the means and the political will to enhance the power of the great majority against that of capital – within a federal structure that has the potential power to facilitate this redistribution and thereby becomes the focus for class mobilisation. And, not just from Scotland.
John Foster is a member of the Red Paper Collective and a labour historian