Sometimes the elders of Scottish academia surprise you. This summer Sir John Curtice spoke to the BBC in front of a poster featuring artwork from Al-Hadaf (The Purpose), a paper founded in 1969 by Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani. When a fraction of the Left gathered recently to discuss ‘Independence and the British State’ ten years since the 2014 referendum, Curtice’s lecture to the Conter conference addressed how deep-rooted the constitutional issue remains, and why it is likely to remain the substance of Scottish politics, even as the SNP’s vote-base begins to subside.
Earlier in the day, Professor David McCrone’s speech seemed to be channelling a revolutionary muse. He remarked on why Scotland needs a new term to capture its current predicament where independence support remains around 50% but the referendum route looks as closed as the Radical Road. Forget impenetrable Caledonian antisyzygies, he said. We need to talk about Caledonian zig-zaggery. ‘By this’, he explained, ‘I mean that progress is not continuous – and I’m not talking about retreat. It’s like, is it not, hill-climbing? Often you have to zig zag to get round difficult obstacles rather than going vertical and risk falling off. It takes longer, sure,’ he explained, ‘but you get there more safely in the end.’ I was surely not the only one in a roomful of socialists to hear echoes of Lenin’s own endorsement of zigzaggery in ‘No Compromises?’:
… to renounce in advance any change of tack, … — is that not ridiculous in the extreme? Is it not like making a difficult ascent of an unexplored and hitherto inaccessible mountain and refusing in advance ever to move in zigzags, ever to retrace one’s steps, or ever to abandon a course once selected, and to try others?
We should start seeing Scotland as a place, McCrone explained, where ‘radical change is followed by pragmatic adjustment, as the state cedes just enough power to keep the Union intact for the time being, in a compromise which sows the seeds of the next phase of radical rebellion.’ If Gordon Brown’s ‘Vow’ and the Smith Commission were the compromises that kept the Union intact, then McCrone’s explanation puts us somewhere in the radical seed-sowing stage. Meanwhile, pragmatists are mapping out their own paths.
A new report by former Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale and Stephen Noon, Yes Scotland chief strategist and now John Swinny’s special advisor, argues that independence should come about only if it ‘commands the clear and consistent support of a majority of people in Scotland’. Such pragmatism would set us on a path where ‘constitutional change only happens when it reflects what the people want’, and to find that out, the report suggests, we must rely above all on polls sampling the intentions of a segment of the public. Perhaps Curtice would adjudicate?
The problem with poll-based politics is that it treats the people as so many opinionated individuals rather than as a collective – active or passive, waking or asleep – that stirs into life in certain times and places. Many people regarded the 2014 referendum as one such moment of popular action, as Sarah Collins and Chris Stevens explain in our recent Redgauntlet podcast, ‘What Is To Be Done?’. The task of radicals is not to reflect the stated desires of individuals back to them, but to grasp things by the roots, raise consciousness, and reveal the material realities that lead people to believe in alternatives and to struggle for them. The referendum campaign, for many on the Scottish Left, brought the Scottish people to life more than anything had during the long years of Thatcher, Major, and Blair, when the civil society consensus emerged around a cautious devolution settlement that the establishment proudly called Scotland’s ‘settled will’.
If the prospect of such popular mobilisation seems unlikely in 2020s Scotland, it is partly owing to the suffocation of the struggle that developed in the wake of the 2008/9 crisis, opposed the austerity that followed, and was expressed across the country during the referendum campaign. In a similar way, the 1997 settlement that Dugdale and Noon explain was so exemplary was the result of a gradual deadening of the class-based demand that expressed itself a generation earlier as the radical hope for a workers’ parliament. The new political life born in 2014 might become the radical meat that the grinders will gradually turn into constitutional square slice. But the work we do now will sow the seeds for McCrone’s ‘next phase of radical rebellion’.
This Scottish Left Review addresses how a quarter-century of devolution has dampened the political and economic power of those who are far removed from Scotland’s governing classes. Robert Rae explains why the stalling of the Human Rights Bill means those who come to live and work here are denied the dignity of cultural rights. With the Commonwealth Games coming back to Glasgow, Dylan Brewerton-Harper shows how the last Games left its scars in places like Dalmarnock. Phil Fairlie looks at the social cost of the dilapidated prison estate, and Dave Watson considers what it would take to rebuild Scotland starting with its poorer communities. With the new Labour government reheating eighties narratives to justify austerity, as Liam Payne discovers, Kate Ramsden and Tom Morrison explain the class-based arguments that cut through to communities the far-right are seeking to infect. In the workplace, Ruby Alden-Gibson reports on public workers’ victories in the battle with the Scottish Government over time itself. Fighting with the language of class, Chik Collins reminds us, is as vital now as ever.
This issue also explores the movements mobilising against the landowner class both here and overseas. Tara Wight reports on a resurgent land movement that is experimenting with new tactics of resistance. Olivia Oldham-Dorrington considers examples from New Zealand that can get the land reform movement back on track. Cailean Gallagher talks with Vijoo Krishnan about the united struggle of land and labour in the long march of the All India Kisan Sabha. Meanwhile, we continue to march for freedom in Palestine and now in solidarity with Lebanon. Derek Newton reviews a book that documents the dedication and resolve that built the global Palestinian resistance, while Phil Chetwynd reminds us that the evil it is resisting emanates not just from Israel or the United States, but from Scotland too. Liam Turbett’s story of a Brigadista nurse is an inspiration to those who dedicate their lives to ‘the noble and justified struggle for freedom’. Perhaps Scotland’s part in the future of that struggle will require a new turn, away from parliamentary possibilities and constitutional pragmatics towards less comfortable terrain. If images from a Marxist-Leninist pan-Arab Palestinian nationalist magazine can loom behind Scotland’s foremost pronouncer of the public will, isn’t it time we started to imagine a more radical backdrop for our politics – one that might unsettle the will of the Scottish people?
