AN APPEAL TO SCOTLAND'S 'CORBYNISTAS': join with Scotland's already-existing socialist party

The SSP welcomes the massive boost to public debate around left-wing, anti-austerity, anti-war, socialist ideas that Jeremy Corbyn's leadership challenge and current re-election campaign has triggered. 

We welcome the emergence of those new activists motivated to defend Jeremy from the vitriolic attacks of the capitalists, their media and their treacherous cabal of supporters in Labour's right wing. 

Since our formation in 1998, the SSP has fearlessly defended socialism - whilst Scottish Labour has acted as barely-disguised Tories, abandoning the aims of Keir Hardie and countless other pioneers, slashing council jobs and services, threatening to jail workers who dared to strike against their municipal butchery, and spurning numerous opportunities to extend public ownership or reduce inequality.

Labour v. SSP: the Track Records
The SSP pioneered the battle to abolish NHS prescription charges - only to be voted down by Labour MSPs.

The SSP has campaigned for No Cuts budgets, in defiance of Tory cuts, and frequently led fellow-workers in strike action and communities in protests and sit-ins against Labour councils' closure of schools, community facilities and the slaughter of jobs and services.

The SSP has persistently campaigned for abolition of the Council Tax and for a replacement Scottish Service Tax based on income, which would make over 75% better off, make the rich cough up, and DOUBLE income for local jobs and services.
Scottish  Labour has defended the Council Tax, opposed its replacement - and recently proposed HIGHER taxes on ordinary workers to compensate for Westminster and Holyrood funding cuts.

                                                   Scottish Socialist Voice July 2014

In the Scottish Referendum, Scottish Labour alienated hundreds of thousands of workers and young people by their shameless collaboration with the reviled Tories in Better Together - the Tory-funded, Labour-fronted lie machine that confused enough people to make sure we now suffer years more of ruthless Tory dictatorship from Westminster.
In stark contrast, the SSP championed the aim of an independent socialist Scotland - a different vision entirely from the pro-capitalist aims of the SNP.

Alienated by Labour/Tory Collaboration 
Labour in Scotland will never be forgiven by swathes of working class people for helping the Tories to hold onto Scotland, cursing us with their blitz on benefits, war on workers' rights and slaughter of services and salaries.
That remains the case if Labour continues to deny the Scottish people the right to self-determination - or even a timely second referendum! - which unfortunately not only Kezia Dugdale and the Blairities do, but also Jeremy Corbyn and his most prominent allies in Scotland.
Failure to call for independence for Scotland - but giving it a distinctive socialist content, for an independent SOCIALIST Scotland that stands up for the millions, not the millionaires - is the Achilles heel of Scottish Labour, even if (as we hope) Jeremy is re-elected.

Unite in struggle 
The SSP offers the hand of friendship and solidarity in action to those - in the unions, Momentum, etc - who are fighting in defense of Corbyn.
We appeal to Corbyn supporters to arrange meetings with the SSP to discuss serious battle plans around our common aims and policies - such as the demand for a legally enforced £10 living minimum wage; renationalisation of our railways; a massive plan of public sector house-building; for scrapping Trident.

But we also appeal to the 'Corbynistas' to look beyond Jeremy's re-election, to the harsh choices that loom ahead for Scottish Labour. 

Not the Same Surge in Scotland
The social democratic face presented by the SNP has attracted 80,000 new members. But it's only one face of the pro-capitalist SNP, whose appalling role on CalMac ferries, ScotRail, privatization of Edinburgh hospitals and the business arm of Scottish Water, gives us glimpses of whose side they're really on. 

The SNP is not, and has never claimed to be, a socialist party.
However, for years the SNP has been to the left of Scottish Labour on most issues. That's why there's nothing like the same space, nor the same mass surge of new left activists behind Corbyn in Scotland as has occurred in England. 

For instance, whilst there's been a modest rise in Scottish Labour membership in this second wave - the #KeepCorbyn movement of recent months - the phenomenal surge to half a million members at UK level has left its Scottish branch marooned: Scottish Labour's share of the total British Labour Party membership has plummeted to its lowest ever level in history, below 4%. 

Labour's Capitalist Wing Won't Relent 
Scottish Labour faces an existential crisis that spells prolonged strife, civil war, and subsequent diminished electoral prospects.
The Scottish leadership around Kezia Dugdale and its sole remaining MP have set their face against Corbyn.
Labour's right wing, in Scotland as well as the Parliamentary Labour Party, will not cease to wage civil war against Corbyn and the left ideals he represents. 
They will be backed and boosted in their treacherous sabotage by a capitalist class and media which is terrified at the thought of a left-leaning Prime Minister and the expectations and demands for radical change which that would unleash amongst workers and young people.
These forces of capitalist backwardness have no intention of reversing the transformation of Labour into the reliable agency for the billionaires and bankers - the bastion against socialism - which it was moulded into under Blair and Brown.

Brutal Choices 
So Corbyn supporters face brutal choices, including:
- purge Labour of its capitalist wing (including through deselection of MPs, MSPs and councillors) to begin to construct the embryo of a socialist party, OR
- continue the road of retreat after retreat in a vain attempt to appease the right - as unfortunately Jeremy has tried over the last year.

Welcome Pledges - Unwelcome Retreats

The SSP welcomes the many relatively radical pledges in the #KeepCorbyn campaign, including building 500,000 new council houses over 5 years; rent controls; an end to NHS privatization; universal public childcare; an end to exploitative Zero Hours Contracts; collective bargaining for unions in workplaces over 250, with full rights from day one; "shrinking the gap between incomes"; re-nationalisation of railways. 

Less welcome is the retreat on Jeremy's manifesto of a year ago. For example, dropping immediate free education, abolition of tuition fees, with a living grant in favour of the vague "progressive restoration of free education";  and abandonment of public ownership of the energy giants. That's a worrying retreat in the face of right-wing vitriol.  

Challenging Capitalism 

Historic experiences prove that a strong, determined socialist party, rooted in the working class and undiluted socialist principles, is necessary to challenge and remove the dictatorship of capital - whose fangs have been bared at even the modest policies of Jeremy Corbyn. 

The past year's Niagara of bullying abuse and vilification is nothing compared to what a Corbyn-led Labour government would face - with strikes of investment amongst the capitalists' weapons of choice, as Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s experienced. 

So dilution of policy pledges - in a vain attempt to appease the Blairites and their media chorus-line - is an ominous warning that unless a more resolute, unbending socialist leadership is forged, working people's hopes would be once more dashed on the rocks of retreat under enemy fire. 

For an Independent Socialist Scotland 

The most critical choice of all confronting the 'Corbynistas' is:
- continue to alienate huge swathes of the Scottish people by refusing to support a timely second referendum, let alone call for Scottish self-government (as Jeremy and his leading backers still insist on opposing), OR
- join with the SSP in a massive campaign for an independent socialist Scotland, as part of an alliance of socialist democracies across Europe. Thereby not only uphold democratic and socialist principles, but also win over radicalized workers and youth to the socialist banner, instead of them being fooled by the fake radicalism of the SNP leadership.

Scottish Labour a Million Miles from being Socialist 
At the heart of the problem facing those mobilized by the laudable, left-wing ideas expounded by Jeremy is this: Scottish Labour as it exists is a million miles removed from being a socialist party.
To begin to transform it into one would require naked civil war in the party, thereby reducing its chances of election, prolonging the Tory agony.

Why devote time and talent to what may well be a fruitless attempt to oust Labour's pro-capitalist right wing, or spend years trying to fashion genuine socialist policies in a Labour party which in any case, historically, has never used its positions in government to pursue comprehensive socialist measures?
Labour's history is littered with unfulfilled promises, anti-working class measures - and expulsions of socialists for being socialists, including many of us now in the leadership of the SSP!

Join With the SSP - Join the SSP 
Our appeal to those defending Jeremy's reelection is two-fold:
- combine with Scotland's existing socialist party, the SSP, in joint campaigns on immediate priority issues such as a £10 minimum now; democratic public ownership of rail and transport; opposition to all cuts at council or national level; and for an independent socialist Scotland, AND
- join Scotland's already existing socialist party, the SSP, with already existing socialist policies (which you can also influence and shape at our annual conferences), and an annually elected socialist leadership.

NATIONALISE AND DIVERSIFY TO SAVE OUR SHIPYARDS

Within minutes of BAE Systems announcing the savage loss of nearly 1,800 shipyard jobs on 6 November - 800 in Govan, Scotstoun and Rosyth, plus 940 with the complete end to shipbuilding in Portsmouth in 2014 - I was asked to text a reaction for the SSP website. My extremely condensed message was:
"Tories shut Portsmouth to stop us voting Yes. Labour's Ian Davidson wants work switched south if we vote Yes! Both holding workers hostage. UK capitalist rule equals devastation for 1800 shipyard workers. Need nationalisation and diversification of work b4 it's too late, to save ALL jobs."


Despite all the constraints of a text message, I still stand by that message today.

CATASTROPHE

Since the announcement, some commentators talk as if the loss of 800 jobs in unemployment-scarred Glasgow and Fife is some kind of success story - because the Scottish yards avoided closure, unlike Portsmouth. These columnists and politicians presumably have never lived through the devastating turmoil for families facing redundancy - especially against a background of compulsory unpaid work or insecure low-paid and part-time jobs being all that's on offer to most of the unemployed.
This announcement is catastrophic for working class communities, who for several generations sweated profits for shipbuilding and shipping magnates.

Down in Portsmouth, bitter fury was vented at the closure - although the town will remain the centre of BAE's maritime services, equipment, and combat systems business, with the 11,000 remaining workers servicing the bulk of the Royal Navy fleet. Some of the fury was directed northwards, with the accusation that Portsmouth was 'sold down the river' to sweeten Scotland against voting for independence next year.

CASH & CONSTITUTION

As subsequent comments from BAE bosses, government and the naval high command have revealed, this was a devastating cocktail of naked cash calculation mixed in with a dose of cynical political calculation.
The detailed allocation of the jobs massacre was designed not only to divide and conquer workers, but also help hold what remains of the British state together. It was meant to make Scottish shipbuilders and surrounding communities feel relieved it wasn't their yards that are to close - allegedly the benefit of staying in the UK, when in fact almost equal numbers of jobs are to be slaughtered north and south of the border.
BAE bosses, since privatization of the yards, have grabbed a virtual monopoly over the remnants of an industry that has been starved of investment and modernization for several decades, as successive Tory and Labour capitalist governments bowed to the demands of the banking class of parasites, rather than develop an industrial strategy, making the yards uncompetitive in the global war for markets and profits. 

Both the BAE butchers and military top brass have openly stated their decisions are based on where they stand to get the best profit! As Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Nicholas Houghton put it, "We go and get our ships in the place where it makes most sense for the British taxpayer in terms of getting the right capability for the armed forces."

He added, "The UK government and BAE Systems made clear its decision this week was based on the fact Glasgow is the most effective location for the manufacture of the future [13] Type 26 frigates."

BETTER TOGETHER TAKE HOSTAGES

But in case anyone falls for the brutal line of blackmail - punted both by Labour MP Ian Davidson and new LibDem Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael - that provided Scotland votes NO to self-government and remains hitched to Westminster then jobs on the Clyde will remain safe, ponder the fact Westminster is currently in high level talks with the Indian government about the possibility of them building the same Type 26s. Physically in India, purely because it would provide dirt-cheap labour. 

Gone is all the guff about having to build military vessels within the UK itself (or in the rUK if we vote for Scottish independence) for protection of British military secrets - one of the several lies these same people have peddled as a scare story against independence.

And what an affront to democracy and to the livelihoods of workers: Labour politicians and Labour loyalists in the likes of the GMB union are arguing for a 'break-clause' that means the work on the T-26s would be taken off Govan and Scotstoun and transferred to English yards if we dare to assert our right to rule ourselves by voting YES. 

An unholy alliance of Tory Ministers, the MoD and BAE bosses massacred workers in Portsmouth partly to try and crush the demand for Scottish independence - and now they are aided and abetted by Labour MPs like Davidson and the GMB convener in Scotstoun with their blackmailing threats of 'vote NO or lose your job'. Shipyard workers truly have been taken as hostages, and the ransom demanded is that the rest of Scotland votes NO or thousands of jobs will die.

WESTMINSTER BUTCHERY

It is complete nonsense on several counts. Even the Tories, BAE bosses and military chiefs have to admit they are attracted by the skills levels and costs on offer on the Clyde. But if we all cave in to the blackmail and vote NO, supposedly to save Clydeside jobs, there is nothing to stop the government placing orders in India, or elsewhere. 

As to closing the Clyde yards and moving work south in the event of a Yes vote, which particular English yards will they take out of 'mothballs', and at what exorbitant cost?

On the other hand, what is to stop BAE (or a government of the rUK) placing orders with yards in an independent Scotland, when for instance they're already cooperating with Australia to design these T-26s?!
It's a bit rich, to put it mildly, for Ian Davidson, Better Together and their Mini Me offshoot 'United with Labour' to spout scaremongering doomsday warnings that unless we keep Westminster rule we face the loss of shipbuilding jobs on the Clyde, when the same Westminster Ministry of Defence - BAE's only customer for building warships - is slashing 800 jobs on the Clyde!

UNITY

Workers across all shipyards need to develop a united strategy to save ALL jobs, not falling for blackmail, lies and threats designed to divide them and turn their gaze away from the root causes of this latest in a long line of devastating crises.

The root causes include decades of underinvestment and utter failure to build or retain a manufacturing base. Cheap labour in developing capitalist nations like South Korea or China might attract capitalist shareholders as a source of a fast buck, but countries with far higher wages than the UK have far stronger shipbuilding industries, simply because they've invested in them. Norway, similar in size to Scotland, has 42 shipyards, and built 100 ships last year - with far better wages than here.

DIVERSIFY PRODUCTION

To seriously fight for every job, unions also need to challenge the toxic dependence of the industry on the war machine - the military industrial complex. The drop in orders for warships, in part due to changes in the modes of modern warfare, inevitably threatens jobs and livelihoods if that's all the yards depend on. But there's plenty of scope for other use of the skills of shipyard workers, and indeed expansion of jobs, apprenticeships and skills. 

Thirty years ago, back in 1987, when the Barrow-on-Furness Vickers shipyard faced devastation on not getting the contract to build Trident nuclear submarines, the shop stewards combined with other local trade unionists to form the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee. They produced an expert Report, entitled 'Oceans of Work', showing how the workers' skills and the available existing technology could be diversified away from weapons-construction to exciting new work to harness tidal and offshore wind power energy systems. And that was long before today's widespread acceptance of the need for investment in renewables to combat fuel poverty, pollution and the havoc of climate change.

PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

But just as with the scandalous holding of Scotland to ransom by gangster capitalist Jim Ratcliffe, one-man dictator at Grangemouth, so too the shipyard crisis confirms the old socialist adage that 'you can't control what you don't own'. Rather than squabble and divide over the jobs that remain, courtesy the capitalist shareholders of BAE Systems, the shipyard unions need to mount a serious fight for re-nationalisation of the yards, and the wider shipping industry too. 

But not the old bureaucratic form of nationalisation: one where committees of workers' elected representatives and appropriate specialists are tasked with devising an alternative plan of production, building on existing skills and technology, but shifting production from destroyers to constructive, socially useful and peaceful purposes - including building equipment for a publicly owned renewable energy sector. Building for the merchant navy, and ferries for an integrated free public transport system, would seem other likely means of retaining jobs and producing for social need.

So this is not just a constitutional issue. The future of jobs north and south of the border depends on workers' unions uniting in action, but also rising to the challenge to fight for new forms of democratic public ownership, with massive investment in the likes of renewable energy. We can't rely on capitalist firms nor pro-capitalist governments to meet that challenge. For instance, for every £1 of government funding for research and development on green energy, £34 is squandered on the equivalent R&D for military work.

SOCIALIST CHALLENGE

The abominable role of the Tory/LibDem Coalition is entirely predictable. The role of Labour on this has been even more treacherous, given the £millions poured into their coffers by shipyard workers' unions. They've combined spineless failure to raise any coherent alternative to savage job losses, with shameful blackmail, using shipyard workers and their communities as hostages to save their beloved United Kingdom, ignoring the brutal fact that the same UK and its profit-crazed military-industrial overlords are the ones plunging the knife.

The SNP's attachment to capitalism, to the interests of multinational profiteering over people and planet, hamstrings them from advocating public ownership and diversification of the industry.
That political task is left to the socialists of the SSP; we will not shirk in our duty to argue this case in the trade unions and beyond, as the only realistic foundations for saving jobs, skills, young people's futures, and indeed as a contribution to the health of the planet itself.

WORKERS CAN BE WON TO INDEPENDENCE

The working class make up the vast majority population in Scotland. Over 630,000 of us are in organized trade unions. Tens of thousands more would join to improve their wages, health & safety, job security and rights at work if they didn't feel under threat of reprisals from employers emboldened by the most repressive anti-union laws in Europe. 

That makes the battle to win the hearts and minds of workers for Scottish self-government absolutely central to the tasks facing the Yes campaign.

The anti-independence parties recognize this. That's why their self-named Operation Fear desperately tries to scare the wits out of working people at the alleged consequences of daring to vote for the Scottish people to have the powers to shape Scotland's future - rather than letting anti-working class Westminster regimes impose their ruinous policies on us.

Labour - chief Unionist prop

Very few self-respecting workers in Scotland vote Tory. Those duped into voting LibDem under the illusion they were a fresh challenge in 2010 are deserting these treacherous yellow Tories, as 'Saint' Vince Cable leads the Coalition's assault on workplace rights - in addition to their treachery over student tuition fees, nuclear weapons, the bedroom tax, war on Syria, etc.

So the only real weapon in the hands of the Unionists - especially when it comes to fooling workers into voting No - is the Labour party component of Better Together. Hence Alistair Darling's role as poster boy for the Tory-funded front. Hence Gordon Brown's lumbering attempts to put a hairline distance between the Tory/LibDem/Labour cabal and 'United with Labour' - with it's spurious arguments about retaining workers' solidarity and looking after those most in need by pooling and distributing resources in a 'United' Kingdom.

Vote Labour - get hammered!

Ultimately their argument boils down to this: vote No to Scottish self-government and wait for a Westminster Labour government in 2015, to resolve all your problems of job insecurity, low pay, public service cuts, fuel price rises, bedroom tax. They trade heavily on the longstanding link between Labour and the trade unions to peddle this message, constantly spreading the lie that the referendum is a vote for or against Alex Salmond and 'the nationalists'.

But this argument is absolute bunkum; it takes no account of the real living experience of the recent 13 years of Labour governments at Westminster and how they treated trade unionists and workers generally - far less the stated intentions and policies of Labour for 2015 onwards.

No change – all change

The pro-independence movement needs to waken up to a brutal truth and act accordingly, gloves off: all the talk (from the likes of Alex Salmond) that things will remain the same after independence is a recipe for disaster. Workers are bombarded daily with bloodcurdling scare stories about the dangers of independence (most of them simply absurd) by the Westminster government and Labour, which are printed and broadcast as if they're gospel truth by the mainstream media. So why should workers resist this monstrous lie machine if the Yes camp merely replies "don't panic, nothing will change" - when for workers that means no change to poverty pay, rocketing prices, mass unemployment, vicious anti-union laws?

Union debates 

It is to the credit of unions like the CWU, PCS, GMB, RMT (and the STUC as a whole) that they are holding debates and forums for members to discuss the issues - something which the likes of USDAW, ASLEF and COMMUNITY utterly failed to do before hitching their wagons to the No camp. 

This is an opportunity that must be seized by Yes Scotland, with all its resources - as is being attempted by Trade Unionists for Independence (TUFI), with it's minuscule resources - to hammer the false Labour prospectus in particular, and spell out the positive, radical changes to working people's lives that are available through independence - and only through that route.

Every union or workplace will have particular issues of concern, but several key issues are common to many.

Anti union laws – keep or scrap?

The package of vicious restrictions to the ability to freely join a union, function as a union on behalf of members, and ultimately take united action in defense of wages, jobs, pensions and conditions has been added to by the unelected Coalition. But whilst the recent Labour conference tried to sound a bit more eye-catchingly radical on issues like energy prices and the bedroom tax, they didn't even pretend that on repressive workplace laws.



And why would they? Labour retained Maggie Thatcher's vicious laws throughout 13 years in office. Tony Blair boasted Britain had the most repressive workplace legislation in Europe. Glasgow Labour council threatened striking UNISON members with jail in the '90s, using those very laws. Nowhere has Labour pledged that voting NO in 2014 and voting Labour in 2015 would lead to repeal of any of these repressive measures.

Yes to workers' rights

In contrast a Yes vote would provide workers with the opening to have them scrapped, and the most advanced charter of workers' rights in the whole of Europe fought for.
The riposte of some trade unionists is that Alex Salmond has never openly declared for total repeal. True; and if he did, or if Yes Scotland as a broad umbrella body did, it would be dynamite in demolishing the fake objections of union leaders tied to Labour.
However, this Referendum is not about supporting Alex Salmond. It's about winning the powers to banish the anti-union laws - which neither the Tories, LibDems nor Labour have any intention whatsoever of doing - and then wielding the might of the organized working class to elect a government of the left that is prepared to legislate decent workplace rights. It's a stark choice.

Poverty Pay - or Living Wage?

Precisely the same arguments apply to this, one of the central concerns of most working people. Better Together and United with Labour have a lot of explaining to do! If remaining in Britain is such a rosy prospect for workers, how do they explain away the fact that in the past 40 years of successive Tory and Labour governmnets, workers' wages as a share of national wealth have plummeted? Why UK workers today get £60billion a year less in wages than they did in 1980? Why if someone currently on £12,000 a year had their wages at the same share of GDP as in 1975, they'd be earning not £12,000, but over £23,000? That the last Labour government presided over a massive increase in inequality - the biggest gap since 1864? That their legacy means one in 11 people today are left with a mere £10 a month disposable income, after paying essential bills?

Carve out our future

Voting Yes in 2014 would permanently rid us of Tory rule, with their conscious strategy of driving down wages. And no self-respecting trade unionist has ever sat back and waited to be liberated by one or other brand of pro-big business, capitalist politician. Rather, we seek to carve out the future we want, through collective organisation - for instance by demanding the government of an independent Scotland implements a living national minimum wage for all over 16, with equal pay for women. That would be a genuine measure to assist a race to the top! - and imagine the way such an achievement would embolden workers in England, Wales, Ireland and beyond to follow suit.

Public Services – cut or expand?

As part of their survey of members on the Referendum, the PCS union has found the biggest single concern is the future of public services - exceeding even pay and pensions. Leaving aside the rather important fact that only 20 per cent of the Coalition's cuts have been implemented so far, meaning an eye-watering four times as much is yet to come, what are the prospects for public services and the workers who provide them if Labour manages to win in 2015?
It was United with Labour's Gordon Brown who declared 100,000 job losses in the civil service a clear 3 years before the Coalition took office. And in contrast to the populist speechifying at Labour's recent conference, Ed Balls and others made brutally plain their intention to be ‘ruthless’, with ‘iron discipline’ in making cuts to jobs, pay and services. That's the prospects even if - and it's far from guaranteed - Labour wins Westminster in 2015 and Scotland remains under its control.
By contrast, a Yes vote opens the door to a mighty push by workers and their unions for a massive expansion of public services, with the powers to tax the rich minority to help fund them, expanding jobs in the construction of cradle-to-grave care, expanded education, health and public transport, alongside a massive social sector house-building plan. Without the powers that go with independence, this is impossible under devolution.

Labour's Welfare spokesperson Rachel Reeves says Labour cuts will be deeper than Tories'

Privatization - or public ownership?

Royal Mail workers - and millions more of us reliant on the service - are reeling at the naked profiteering of the sell-off of a service that's been state owned for nearly 500 years. Over £1.1billion was stolen by the speculators and profiteers on the first day after privatization. Already the head of Royal Mail has admitted the prospect of dearer postage stamps. The experience of privatized energy - where the recent price rise by SSE was even higher in Scotland's coldest northern regions than in the rest of Scotland - is a warning of regionally varied prices for mail services, on top of the threat to the universal service, especially in rural areas.
But what do we face under continued Westminster rule, if workers are persuaded by the likes of the CWU union leadership to vote No?

Labour privateers

If some combination of Tories, LibDems and UKIP win in 2015, the answer is too obvious to elaborate. But whilst Labour took £1.8m from CWU members since 2010, and graciously rewarded them with the opportunity to win unanimous support for the CWU's Motion to renationalise the service at Labour's national conference, Ed Miliband and Co immediately spat in their face, trampling on Labour's conference decision, declaring they will absolutely not take Royal Mail - or the railways, or the exploitative Big Six energy companies - into public ownership.
In contrast, not only has the SSP consistently fought for the past 15 years for democratic public ownership of all these services - and banks, big business, transport - but Alex Salmond has now also pledged re-nationalization of Royal Mail in an independent Scotland.
So the choice workers face is stark: vote No for continued privatization, profiteering, service cuts, rip-off prices, or vote Yes to reverse privatization and extend public ownership.
Again, the SNP's failure to call for extensive public ownership, including North Sea oil, misses the point. The 2014 Referendum is not a vote for permanent SNP rule, but for the first ever chance to elect a government of our own choice, where the option of a government of the left that is committed to such massive restructuring of power and wealth is available.

Workers’ solidarity and internationalism

The last resort argument of Labour scoundrels for retention of Westminster rule is that "independence will break the unity and internationalism of the working class".
That's rich coming from people like Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling or Anas Sarwar!
Since when did workers' unity depend on Westminster? In fact, under successive Tory and Labour governments, 'divide and rule' has been a favourite tactic to defeat workers' attempts to defend their jobs, wages, conditions and communities. For example, the toxic combination of privatization and laws against solidarity ("secondary") action has been used to stop railway workers doing the very same jobs from uniting in action, because they're hired by separate profiteers.

Internationalism - not British nationalism

And since when has the solidarity and internationalism of Scottish workers halted at the shores of Britain? What about their solidarity actions with the workers of Chile under Pinochet or apartheid South Africa? What about the solidarity tours I've personally helped organise in Scotland for trade unionists from Denmark, Nigeria, Ireland...or Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol? Did anyone ever decline solidarity with any of these workers in struggle because they're English, or because their country is not part of the UK?! Nobody but a reactionary British nationalist would put such a viewpoint.

And why would this genuine internationalism suddenly cease once Scotland's working class majority had won the powers to elect a left government able and willing to transform workers' lives?
In fact, by voting Yes and simultaneously fighting to carve out a Scotland based on workers' interests, a socialist Scotland, Scottish workers and their trade unions can give a massive push forward to workers' struggles everywhere, starting with our nearest neighbours. And the fact that unions like UNITE and the NUJ straddle the borders of Britain and Ireland - north and south - buries the lie that self-government equals division and isolationism.

Workers need independence and socialism 

The case for independence - and socialism - is there to be won amongst workers, the very people who stand to lose most under continued rule by Westminster's competing capitalist factions, and most to gain from shaping Scotland into an egalitarian socialist democracy.

United with Labour = United with the Tories

How late it was, how late. And not just late, but lame. 

Gordon Brown's attempt to help Scottish Labour distance themselves from their conjoined twins and bedmates in Better Together, the reviled Tories. 

Gordon Brown - intellectual arrogance and political stupidity

The launch of 'United with Labour' was a cynical attempt to appease the growing nausea in the ranks of the trade unions in particular, and the wider working class, at Labour leading the anti-independence 'Better Together' campaign with the Tory/Lib Dem partners in crime at Westminster. 

The recent STUC conference was a warning to Labour's high heidins that they will reinforce the growing openness to independence amongst workers every time Alastair Darling speaks on behalf of this Tory-funded triumvirate.

A tory campaign "led" by Labour left a bitter taste in the mouths of trades unions

As we predicted in a previous blog (23 April) Labour was obliged to try and put 'a distinctive Labour case for devolution' - which is camouflage for Labour trying to con workers into believing that by voting 'No' and staying part of the capitalist British state, their lives and living conditions will improve. 

Nostalgia for post-1945 Labour reforms 

Hence Brown's attempt to resurrect the mass support of older generations for what was achieved 60-70 years ago, when the post-1945 Labour government constructed the welfare state, including the NHS.

But a total con-trick it is. 

Those far-reaching reforms, marked also by the extension of public ownership (albeit monstrously bureaucratic) to a peak 20% of the British economy, were part of an international strategy by capitalism designed to stave off the threat of revolutionary movements across Europe in the wake of World War 2.

It was in part funded by the USA Marshall Aid programme, where the mighty imperialist power poured hundreds of billions of EuroDollars into western Europe to prop up capitalism, in the face of encroachment of their 'territory' by the Soviet Union in eastern Europe. 

The threat of spreading 'communism' - despite it's monstrously bureaucratic and viciously dictatorial form - scared the wits out of western capitalist leaders, and combined with the militant demands of their own working class, pressured the likes of Clement Atlee's Labour government to make serious inroads into the untrammeled rule of the capitalist market.

Put another way, after the Hungry Thirties and the privations and mass slaughter of War, workers in the UK demanded a greater share of the wealth they produced, and the trade unions affiliated to Old Labour helped socialists in the party at the time to win the giant concessions of the NHS; welfare benefits; wholesale construction of council housing for those confined to overcrowded slums and unable to afford mortgages; comprehensive education; and a reduction in the levels of poverty and inequality. 

Reforms, in the proper sense of improvements in the lives of millions of people, were affordable then precisely because of the unprecedented upswing in capitalist wealth production globally for the 30 years up until the first simultaneous capitalist economic crisis in the mid-70s. 

Change, utter change

I only refer to these features of the past to show how things have changed since; utterly changed. From the mid-70s onwards, capitalism as a system of exploitation has gone through its classic pattern of booms and slumps. 

As Labour Chancellor, Gordon Brown had the intellectual arrogance and political stupidity to claim New Labour had banished the cycle of booms and slumps in their period of government from 1997-2010. 

Try telling that to the hundreds of thousands of workers who have been chucked out of work, left to rot in the permanent 'mass army of reserve labour', only then to be demonized by successive Labour and Tory/LibDem governments as 'skivers', 'scroungers' and 'benefit cheats' - background music to justify crucifying cuts to those same benefits. 

How changed, how utterly changed, compared to the 1950s, when even the Tories did not seek to dismantle the safety net of welfare benefits, and subscribed to the aim of full employment! 

Labour counter-reforms

A whole generation experienced the limitations and downright disappointments of Old Labour in government. Governments led by Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan in 1964-70 and 1974-9 came in with raised expectations amongst working class people, with radical promises of 'a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people', and with even Labour arch-right wingers like Denis Healey threatening to "tax the rich 'til the pips squeak"!

But as a party wedded at the top to capitalism, these governments of Old Labour never broke the chains of capitalism, and were held to ransom by big business with threats of 'a strike of investment' - and even plots of military coups on the fringes of the ruling class, especially in 1974. The result: not reforms, but counter-reforms: savage cuts to public expenditure in the 1970s as they obeyed the diktats of the IMF; brutal wage cuts under the wage restraint policy of the so-called Social Contract signed by the Old Labour government and the top union bureaucracy; and eventually a revolt of low-paid workers against this assault on their ability to survive, with a wave of strikes against the Old Labour government in 1978-9 - the oft-mentioned Winter of Discontent. 

Labour paved the way for Thatcher

Mass disgust with Old Labour's actual track record turned Labour voters away in their droves in 1979, with massive abstention allowing the hated Thatcher to take power and proceed to systematically slaughter many of the gains for working people of the post-1945 generation.

Thatcher's was a government of counter-revolution, unbridled capitalism, unashamedly slashing the social wages and democratic rights of the working class majority. 

For 18 dark years they waged war for their own class with a battery of vicious and union laws; extensive privatisation; the virtual elimination of major industries like coal, steel and shipbuilding; the stripping away of workers' hard-won rights in the print industry and elsewhere; conscious preparation for 'the final showdown' with the heroic miners and their communities, in a class-driven civil war that unveiled the naked brutality of state forces in defending capitalist interests...and the ultimate assault that was the poll tax. 

New Labour's record 

That government above all confirmed that the days of advancement for the working class majority within the confines of capitalist rule had crashed to a shuddering halt. 

But the same, critical point was proven even more decisively by the experience of the subsequent 13 years of Labour Westminster rule, from 1997-2010.

Under both Blair and Brown, New Labour demonstrated that the British capitalist state had by then exhausted all its radical potential. 

Gone were the days of even modest taxation of big business and the rich to fund social provision. Rather than extending public ownership and control they privatized vital assets. I recall vividly the way Labour's Helen Liddell joined with National Savings Bank workers and their union in Glasgow in strident condemnation of Tory plans to privatise it just weeks before the 1997 general election - only to then sell it off to German multinational Siemens a few weeks after Labour won a landslide election victory! 

Under the utterly capitalist project that is New Labour, benefit cuts bit deeper, single parents were demonised to justify this assault, and welfare turned into warfare. 

Not a single Tory anti-trade union law was repealed. 

The national minimum wage was conceded under sustained pressure from trade unionists and socialists (the one and only demo calling for a national minimum wage was organised by the SSP 's predecessor, the Scottish Socialist Alliance!). But it was pitched at such a low level that it on several occasions led to employers cutting their existing wage levels to drag them down to the legal Minimum Wage! And it had more exclusion clauses than the worst dodgy insurance policy. 

Poverty - and getting filthy rich

Under the Labour governments of Blair and Brown, inequality and child poverty both escalated massively. Inequality grew faster under Labour than it had under Thatcher and Major's previous Tory governments. Inequality actually reached its highest levels since 1886! 

After peaking in the mid-1970s, wages as a share of national weath plummeted to their lowest since records began in 1956... a trend that continues to this day. 

Peter Mandelson blurted out New Labour's core philosophy with his pithy sneer that he was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich".

And far from sustaining the marvellous gains of the NHS, part-privatisation, pay cuts for staff, and cost-cutting hospital and ward closures that provoked the revolt of thousands in small towns were the hallmarks of Labour in power from 1997-2010. 

New Labour carried on like converts with the Tory PFI schemes, authorizing most of the 700 completed projects; schemes that mortgage future generations with public liability for repaying roughly £6 back to private profiteers for every £1 borrowed off them for public sector projects, with leases mostly lasting 30 years. 

From welfare to warfare

Foreign policy is a natural extension of domestic policy - sometimes implemented by brute military force. So it was no surprise to socialists that the nakedly capitalist New Labour government of Blair and Brown proceeded to send young working class soldiers to the slaughterhouse of Iraq, joined at the hip to George W Bush and his blood-stained imperial ambitions, leading to 200 corpses returning to these shores, dwarfed of course by the slaughter of at least 120,000 Iraqi civilians, with the total death toll estimated at 'somewhere between 500,000 and a million'. 

It was no idle boast when Maggie Thatcher claimed her greatest legacy was New Labour. Millions of people will have felt like puking or smashing the TV when David Cameron used the death of the hate figure of the 1980s to claim "we are all Thatcherites now". But the kernel of truth in his boast is that in terms of the major mainstream parties and their ideology, he is right - at least on fundamentals, if not in every policy detail.

Distinctively Labour cuts






So when Gordon Brown is wheeled out to show how different Labour is from the Tories for the purposes of defending the British capitalist state from the threat of Scottish independence, let us remind the Scottish working class majority of some basic real-life facts and experiences.

Brown trumpeted that the national minimum wage, NHS and benefits are illustrations that we are ''better together'...but in a 'distinctively Labour way'!

United with Labour, Johann Lamont, and other - more leftist - Labour figures try to varnish the case for Westminster rule with talk of 'a redistributive Britain'. 

They should all be challenged to justify the glories of the minimum wage to those hundreds of thousands of Scottish workers who live on or just above £6.19 an hour as prices collide with astronauts in the stratosphere. 

They seem to forget the NHS is devolved, and despite all its many shortcomings, the Scottish government has certainly not conducted a crusade to slaughter service levels, conduct wholesale closures, or privatize and decimate the NHS in the manner currently gathering pace down south at the hands of Westminster. That is the grisly future if Scotland votes 'NO' in 2014.

United with Labour gloss over the fact it is Westminster which ushered in the hated Bedroom Tax, as part a package of £18billion benefit cuts - and no matter how 'distinctly Labour', devolution would leave the power to punish the poorest through such measures in the hands of the Westminster razor gang, regardless of how Scotland voted in the 2015 Westminster elections.

Factions of capitalist rule

In another lame attempt to throw a sop to the anti-Tory clamour and the questioning of the case for the unequal capitalist state amongst workers, Scottish Labour's Johann Lamont floated the idea of devolving income tax to Holyrood in the event of a No vote. 

She was slapped down by the UK Labour leadership. And in any case, even if this was conceded - "to kill nationalism dead" as Labour put it when they reluctantly granted a Scottish parliament in 1999 - it would still not give a Scottish government control over the 'commanding heights' of the economy. Income tax only accounts for about 25% of total government revenue. 

And Labour (unfortunately backed up by the STUC) are explicitly opposed to devolving Corporation Tax - potentially a major source of public funding for the public good - let alone devolving the powers to take energy, construction, the banks or big business into democratic public ownership. 

And which of the four big parties down south do Labour have in mind for taxing the rich; closing loopholes that rob society of £120 billion a year in taxes on big business and the rich; or raising expenditure on the NHS, education or public transport? The Tories? LibDems? UKIP?! New Labour? These are just different factions of the same capitalist party. 

Prospects under Labour

Labour's Ian Smart blurted out in his recent tweet, "Better 100 years of Tory rule in the UK than independence". 

Gordon Brown and United with Labour try not to be so crass, especially given the views on the Tories within the Scottish working class they seek to dupe into voting against determining their own future, their own government, and therefore ultimately their own conditions of life. 

But Labour fail to answer the real amd present danger that it's arguably just as likely Westminster could face a Tory/UKIP Coalition as a majority Labour government - in flagrant defiance of how the Scottish people vote in 2015. 

But even if Labour was to win the keys to 10 Downing Street, what are the realistic prospects of reforms, improvements, for working class Scots? 

Gordon Brown never once chastised nor disagreed with his then chancellor Alastair Darling when in 2010 he warned voters that in the event of Labour winning the Westminster elections, they would carry out public sector cuts "far deeper even than those of Margaret Thatcher's government". 

The poster boy of Better Together was never going to be contradicted by the brooding Heathcliff of United with Labour; after all it was Brown himself who earned the eternal wrath of low-paid civil service workers when he declared plans to slash 100,000 jobs on 12th July 2004! 

Labour in Westminster has absolutely no intention of scrapping the anti-union laws ushered in by Thatcher, retained by Labour for all 13 years when they had the power to repeal them. 

They have a no intention of scrapping Trident and diversifying defense workers' jobs into peaceful, socially useful activity. 

History proves they would rely on some newly-labelled version of PFI and PPP to fund the remnants of the NHS, rather than transforming it (including the pharmaceutical industry) into a fully publicly-owned service with democratic control by staff representatives, patients' groups and the government - funded by taxing the rich.

Millionaires and millions

Regardless of which of the four parties vying for power down south wins in 2015, working class people will certainly not be 'together' with the millionaires and 88 billionaires that bestride the wealth of these islands. 

We certainly won't be 'Better together' with the class of parasitic bankers and tax-dodging businesses that Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of New Labour fete and favour. 

So instead of being conned by catchy phrases like 'United with Labour', the working-class majority population in Scotland need to seize hold of their own future, vote Yes to self- government, with the realistic prospects and full-blown powers to then elect a government of the left, demanding a root and branch transformation of where the power and wealth lies. 

Independent socialist Scotland

United with Labour is above all a cynical ploy to breech the growing obstacles to Better Together's overtures to the organised trade unions, as well as generally seeking to confuse Labour voters into thinking a vote for independence is a vote for the SNP, or more narrowly for Alex Salmond. 

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It is a mythical promise of better living standards within the UK, based on the lie that Labour is fundamentally different from the Tories.

Socialists are best placed to counter this, in a manner pro-big business nationalists like Alex Salmond are unable to do. 

The SSP, and broader campaigns within the trade unions like Trade Unionists for Independence (TUFI), need to confront the myths underpinning 'United with Labour'. 

Facts, stubborn facts, about Labour's real-life track record since the 1970s should be enough to shred Labour's lies about the wonders of Westminster rule, and prevent them dragging the name of the trade unions into the Tory-infested swamps of British unionism.

A socialist vision for an independent Scotland - alongside spelling out the stark, dark prospects under the heel of capitalist Westminster rule - is needed to counter the late, lame attempts by Gordon Brown and New Labour to woo workers into thinking they are best 'united with Labour' - which in fact amounts to being 'united with the Tories'.