TIDE IS TURNING: workers most to gain from independence

Huge swathes of working class people in Scotland, including many who cling onto their Labour voting habits despite years of bitter disappointment, are shifting over in favour of independence. And by Christ the working class needs self-government if we are to avoid some of the worst assaults and setbacks in modern history!

For two years, the working class has been fed a daily diet of fear, lies and blood curdling tales of the Apocalypse in the event of Scotland doing what umpteen nations at the Commonwealth Games did long ago - elect its own government to decide its own future.
The mass media bombardment and incitement of uncertainty has been relentless.

Fear incited  

No wonder some people fear public services would lack the funding in a smaller country - despite the fact the UK has some of the worst services, fourth lowest pensions and worst child poverty in Europe. And despite the fact Scotland is a net exporter of taxes to Westminster, to the tune of £4.4billon in 2011/12 alone.

No wonder many older workers fear for their pensions - despite the fact they are being dismantled and devalued by successive Westminster governments, and despite Coalition Minister of State for Pensions, Steve Webb, admitting in May that pensions would be safe and secure under independence.
No wonder the wee old woman in Greenock today told our SSP stall "We'll have no yards if we vote Yes" - despite the fact the former shipbuilding centre of the world has been reduced to a fragile shell, slashed from 35,000 jobs in Scotland in 1979 to 5,000 today, with constant job insecurity for those shipyard workers who have survived wave after wave of redundancies under Westminster rule.

So with the thickening fog of lies and scaremongering, it is all the more remarkable and significant that big chunks of workers have seen the truth and swung over to voting Yes - including stalwarts of the labour and trade union movement.

UCS veterans for Yes

No set of workers in Scotland know more about the value of workers' unity, solidarity and internationalism than those who lived and fought through the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders battle of 1971-2. In the face of wholesale shipyard closures, the work-in staged by these men and women electrified the whole working class, built a monumental movement, which straddled national borders and continents, and forced the Tory government of the day to retreat and save the majority of jobs.
So when seven prominent veterans of the UCS struggle - shop stewards and union conveners during that historic class confrontation - publish an open letter in favour of a Yes vote, appealing to today's shipyard workers to do likewise, it is a moment of profound significance.
It blows to smithereens the Labour leadership's arguments that voting Yes would endanger workers' unity, or that it's a vote for 'separation' or 'narrow nationalism'.

Labour monolith in meltdown

The British and Scottish Labour party leaderships thought they could impose a No vote on Labour voters and the trade unions, with the help of the dirty lie that voting Yes makes you a Salmondista, a fan of permanent SNP rule, and an enemy of workers in England, Wales and Ireland. 

But their monolith is cracked, falling apart, with a big swing to Yes within the Labour party itself, which is in turn a sure sign of the even bigger pro-independence trend growing inside the trade unions, which Labour heavily relies on for cash and votes at elections.

As Ed Miliband visited Scotland recently to tell us all again the "value of pooling resources in something bigger, the UK", two contrasting Labour figures on Merseyside came out in favour of Scottish independence. Principled left-winger, former Labour MP Les Huckfield, was one who spoiled Miliband's unionist party. The other was right-wing reptile and anti-socialist witch-hunter-in-chief Peter Kilfoyle, former Labour  government Minister. Each in his own very different way is a clear reflection of the growing mood for self-determination for Scotland amongst Labour voters.

UNISON leaders for Yes 

Far more significant entirely was the recent declaration for Yes by a large group of senior workplace and branch leaders in UNISON Scotland. Despite being pounded by fake radical general secretary Dave Prentis with offers of UK union funds to back Better Together, UNISON in Scotland has remained formally neutral, campaigning for 'A Fairer Scotland'. The Scottish UNISON leadership are astute enough to know siding with the Tory-funded unionist camp would wreak havoc in their ranks and provoke mass resignations.
And now many prominent UNISON activists, including Scottish Deputy Convener Stephen Smellie, have openly called for a Yes vote as the best route to 'a fairer Scotland'.

As Stephen, a Labour party member, explained,
"In an independent Scotland the trade unions will be far more influential than is possible at a UK level. Having spent years campaigning for a better, more just and fairer Scotland, I don't believe all those people and organisations who have worked for fairness will let the politicians get on with it. In alliance with communities and progressive forces, trade unionists will be able to ensure that decisions taken by government will be more often in favour of working people, of sustainability, of peace, of justice."

A recent TNS Poll found 28 per cent of Labour voters are intending to vote Yes, up from an average of 21 per cent over the previous three months.

Least to lose, most to gain 

As we have persistently argued for years, it is precisely the working class who have least to lose by ending Westminster dictatorship for and by the rich, and most to gain from self-rule, where the working class majority can organize and insist upon a radical redistribution of wealth to banish poverty pay, breadline benefits, and reliance on foodbanks in this food-exporting country.

The central lie peddled to cow working class people into voting No is that we face a choice between the status quo or endless uncertainties under independence. The Status Quo is not on offer. Only One Direction is - backwards, at a frightening speed!

The Tories have still to implement at least 70 per cent of their planned cuts to public sector jobs, services, wages and benefits.

They boast that the economy is 'back on course' by GDP growing by 0.2 per cent above the pre-2008 banking crisis level. What they prefer to hide is that while profits and the wealth of the billionaires and millionaires is booming, pay increases only average 0.3 per cent compared to 1.9 per cent official inflation (itself an absurd under-estimate of daily price rises for life's essentials). And GDP per head of population is still 5 per cent below its 2008 level and will take at least another 3 years to catch up. The alleged recovery has been built on the backs of millions suffering low pay and Zero Hours Contracts. Workers are far worse off now than we were six long years ago.

Strike ban - Labour silent 

When a million public sector workers across the UK took strike action on July 10th to demand a share of the alleged recovery in the form of pay rises, the Westminster Coalition responded with repeat threats of even more vicious anti-union laws, designed to effectively ban strike action - the first step towards dictatorship by any other name.

And where were the denunciations of this by the (union-funded) Labour party? Their deafening silence spoke volumes about their intentions if (a very big if!) they get elected in Westminster in 2015.
The same week, Miliband spewed out economically illiterate garbage about Labour "transforming the economy without any increase in public spending", in a tortured attempt to win back some working class voters whilst keeping sweet the middle class swing-voters of so-called Middle England. 

And the following week, closer to home, the Labour city council in Glasgow went to court to get a ban on peaceful protests called by council workers' unions outside the City Chambers during workers' lunch breaks or outwith their shifts - after the same 'people's party' had refused bonus payments for anti-social hours worked by staff to make a success of the Commonwealth Games. That's a taste of the 'justice with Labour' we keep being promised as a reward for voting No in September!

No means hell for workers 

Workers face a hellhouse if a No vote is cast. The slaughter of incomes through Universal Credit. Attacks on young people's housing benefits. Enforced daily visits to JobCentres on pain of escalating sanctions that drive people into destitution. Attacks on pensioners' rights. Savage cuts to jobs and wages in the public sector, including revenge attacks on Scotland's block grant from Westminster. A drive to spread student tuition fees north of the border. Dismantling of the NHS through the knock-on effect of Westminster NHS cuts on a devolved Scottish NHS via the Barnett Formula. Increased use of Zero Hours Contracts to brutally maximize profits. The destruction of a vast expanse of Scotland by fracking, which the Tories have now authorised for about a third of our land mass. And the squandering of at least £1billion a year of Scottish taxpayers' money on Trident weapons of mass destruction, instead of potentially transforming childcare, education and elderly care.

Yes opens door to socialism  

A No vote is what should induce massive fear and insecurity, not self-government. To spell out this is not negative campaigning, it's telling the truth - before it's too late.
In contrast, a Yes vote would guarantee several things to the working class majority. Escape from dictatorship by the Tories. The chance to escape the looming assaults on our incomes, rights and conditions. The chance to shape Scotland's future, by sustaining the energy, creativity and determination displayed by tens of thousands of people who've participated in Yes campaign events, and by fighting in turn for a socialist majority in the 2016 elections.

Those older generations who were reared on the socialist aspirations of Labour and trade union pioneers have the chance to see those ideals pursued in an independent Scotland, where their voice can count. Young people raised to their feet by the Referendum campaign have the chance to help build a genuinely democratic, inclusive, socialist Scotland that acts as an international beacon.
And the SSP will remain as steadfast in fighting for not just independence but also socialism after the Referendum as we have for the past 16 years. Join the growing forces that reject the dictatorship of capital, the dictatorship of the Tories, the dictatorship of Westminster. Our day will come!

SSP Yes meeting packs them in in Ayr...

This is a text I sent to comrades last night after a superb public meeting in Ayr...

"Incredible SSP public meeting in Ayr. Big town hall packed tight. I made it 215-220 after 3 headcounts. All ages. Solidly working class.

Tremendous level of discussion from audience: currency, oil, banks, Trident, childcare, benefits system, war, ...and above all socialism hotly debated after tremendous speeches by Liz Swan, Colin Fox, Jim Sillars.

What would Johann Lamont make of it since Scottish working class are not genetically programmed for political decisions?!?

As one woman said "we've heard great arguments for Indy tonight that we never hear in the media." Which is why large numbers responded to my appeal to join the SSP and shape our futures.

The SSP is on the march!"

Richie Venton

SHAPE SCOTLAND'S FUTURE FOR WORKERS' RIGHTS

The SNP government's White Paper on 'Scotland's Future' contains many welcome reforms, and certainly represents a massive step forward from the jail-house conditions working class people currently endure. But a Freedom Charter for workers it is not.

Many of the measures pledged by an aspiring SNP government in an independent Scotland would substantially boost the living standards of Scottish workers and their families. Abolition of the bedroom tax, calling a halt to the dreaded Universal Credit scheme, scrapping of Trident - such plans would halt attacks on the poorest, and potentially release a fortune for spending on jobs, public services and people's incomes that is currently squandered on devilish weapons of mass destruction.

The headline-grabbing promise of free childcare of 30 hours a week during term time for all 3- and 4-year-olds and vulnerable 2-year-olds is a powerfully welcome key to many, many women (and some men) being able to realistically choose to work - provided of course the jobs were created.

Promises of a Youth Guarantee of either education, training or employment as a constitutional right for all aged under 24 is in stark, glittering contrast to the wasted generation under Westminster rule, and is indeed something socialists have demanded for years - again, provided we fight to ensure it is based on provision of a living income or student grant and is not a device exploited by employers to displace unionized, older workers with cheap youth labour.

Renationalisation of Royal Mail has been welcomed not just by Communication Workers' Union members but workers in general, as a means to reverse profiteering and service cuts at the hands of the privateers.

WIN OVER WORKERS

With 630,000 workers organised in trade unions - and probably at least as many again willing to join but terrified of victimization, job losses and blacklisting if they openly joined a union - the White Paper was a golden opportunity to enlist the support of the working class majority population of Scotland. But for those hesitating, or even being dragooned into the No camp by the scurrilous Fear Factory that is Better Together and their offshoot United with Labour, a bold, striking vision of a markedly different future under independence is the necessary method of persuasion. 

Again, measured against what we suffer now under Westminster's rule by and for the millionaires, the SNP's prospectus is progress. But nothing like the advances the likes of the SSP or the broad-based Trade Unionists for Independence are striving for.

Labour's Social Contract provoked strikes‏

NO VOTE MEANS NO RIGHTS AT WORK

What do we face as a future if a No vote is cast next September? 

The UK already boasts the infamy of some of the lowest pay, longest working hours, shortest holiday entitlement and most savage anti-trade union laws in the western capitalist world. And things can only get worse! 

The Tory-LibDem boot-boys have slapped prohibitive fees on Employment Tribunal cases, pricing workers out of any measure of justice. They are hammering the right of union reps to function and represent members in the civil service. London's Tory Mayor Boris Johnston, an obnoxious reactionary disguised as a boisterous buffoon, has pioneered a drive towards banning the right to strike in the public sector, and for a 'review' of union balloting laws on industrial action whereby those members who abstain would be counted as voting against any proposed collective action. And as well as ushering in further cuts to the block grant to Scotland from Westminster, a No vote would embolden the Old Etonians to lay waste to what little workplace rights remain. 

So trade unionists don't even face a choice between the status quo and independence, but between a further clawing back of gains won by past generations of trade unionists and socialists in struggle - or a chance to improve our lot as workers by voting for the right to get whatever government the Scottish people elect!

Irish Social Partnership increased inequality

TIMID STEPS FORWARD

The White Paper rightly states that under Devolution, "the Scottish government is responsible for training the present and future workforce, equipping them with the skills and knowledge they need, but has no say in how they are treated once they are in a job." 

It makes the welcome pledge that an SNP government with the full powers that independence provides would "reverse recent changes introduced at Westminster which reduce key aspects of workers rights. For example, on independence we will restore a 90-day consultation period on redundancies affecting 100 or more employees." 

Likewise they will abolish the 'shares for rights' scheme recently initiated by the Coalition, bribing workers into surrendering fundamental redundancy and unfair dismissal rights, etc, for a few non-voting company shares.

Welcome promises, but very timid. Not a word about scrapping the bulging package of anti-union laws ushered in by Thatchers Tories in the 1980s, retained by Blair and Browns Labour regimes, brutally added to by the current Thatcherites - both Tory and LibDem!

No mention of the guaranteed right to be in a union, the right to strike without fear of victimization,  the right to take solidarity action with fellow workers.

No sign of Worker Director at First Scotrail RMT strike in 2010!

WORKING WITH THE UNIONS

In sharp contrast to the vilification of trade unions offered by the Better Together parties, 'Scotland's Future' sets as its priority "working directly with the trade unions, employers' associations, employers and voluntary sector to build a partnership approach to addressing labour market challenges". 

The Paper goes on to promise "particular focus on encouraging wider trade union participation and recognition of the positive role that can be played by collective bargaining in improving labour market conditions."

The central proposals on offer from the SNP are the formation of a National Convention on Employment and Labour Relations, involving employers and trade unions, and a subsidiary Fair Work Commission.
The latter "will deliver the mechanisms for uprating the national minimum wage", with the "guarantee that it will rise, at the very least, in line with inflation, to ensure work is a route out of poverty".

LIVING MINIMUM WAGE

Considering the UK minimum wage has lagged inflation for years, leaving workers at least £675 worse off than if it had tracked price rises for the past 5 years, this is better than the No campaign can offer hundreds of thousands of workers. 

But it is miserably timid, with no pledge nor proposal for a guaranteed living level of minimum wage, legally enforced.  

Matching inflation but starting with the current £6.19 an hour for those over 21 - and the White Paper is silent on the lower youth rate - would certainly not be 'a route out of poverty'. 

The SNP swear their allegiance to the Living Wage Campaign, and are right now funding a Poverty Alliance Accreditation Scheme - seeking to persuade employers to pay at least £7.45 an hour. 400,000 Scottish workers earn less than this. But again this is not a legally enforced government figure, merely an aim that they seek to cajole employers into paying, based on the core faith the SNP has in businesses big, medium and small.

SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP

These proposed structures are founded on a central philosophy of 'social partnership' between employers, trade unions and government. 

The SNP even raises the idea of worker directors - imitating the actions of 14 out of the 28 EU states where workers have some form or other of representation on company boards. They advocate "employee representation to bolster longterm decision-making and improve industrial relations". 

Given the way workers' trade unions have been cast out into an industrial Siberia the last 30 years, frozen out of important discussions, with dictatorial management all too common, this is a very seductive prospectus. But it is strewn with pitfalls and lethal traps. 

CLASH OF INTERESTS

Of course, elected union representatives having direct access to discussions on their employers' plans would be a massive advantage compared to, for instance, the capitalist dictatorship on display by INEOS boss Jim Ratcliffe at Grangemouth. Access to secret company accounts would help unions restrict the shenanigans of employers.

But the problems arise because the interests of workers and those of their capitalist private employers clash; in essence there's a conflict over who gets the bigger share of the wealth produced, whether in wages and conditions for the workforce, or profits and dividends for the big shareholders. 

WORKER DIRECTORS?

Social partnership amounts to the partnership of the rider and the horse - not two people with common interests, equals.

In many cases worker directors are gagged from speaking out on company secrets, or at the very least bound by the decisions the majority on the board. That seems to be the situation already in the NHS.
The SNP White Paper lauds First Group as a local example of their model for the future, mentioning the transport giant has had a worker director since it was set up in 1989. That begs the question: where was this 'workers' voice' when First Scotrail launched its savage assault on rail workers a few years ago - when in fact it was uncovered that the SNP government had secretly agreed to subsidise the company for any losses they incurred through strike action by the RMT union? Is that what social partnership entails?

TOKEN PARTICIPATION

In some retail companies, committees exist with handpicked workers on them, partly in an attempt to bypass the collective union and it's elected stewards, partly to pass down the message of top management to the shop floor, disguised as the 'decisions' of these workers on the carefully moulded committee. Despite all the window dressing, this is an attempt to undermine, not enhance, the collective bargaining of organised workers.

INDEPENDENT TRADE UNIONS

The proposed Convention is of course a welcome arena for the unions to independently advocate  measures that meet the needs of their members - ranging from advocating a formula for a living level of legally enforced national minimum wage for all over 16, to a charter of workplace rights. 

Scotland's trade unions should welcome the Convention, and use it to put forward the views of independent trade unions. But they need to thoroughly discuss the lessons of experience here and abroad when it comes to so-called social partnership and 'worker directors'.

SOCIAL CON-TRICK
Back in the 1974-79 Labour government, something very similar was implemented, named the Social Contract, initially popular with some of the lower paid who won wage rises in the first phase, but bitterly nicknamed the Social Con-trick in the following years - until it was smashed on the rocks of workers' strike action in 1978-9. 

The core problem was that the government could control (i.e. hold down!) wages, but they couldn't control prices in a capitalist economy, leading to rip-roaring inflation and a collapse in workers' real wages. 

Union leaders who were the architects of this earlier edition of 'social partnership' were discredited, workers confused, Labour defeated, and Thatcher elected by default!

IRISH SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP

More recently, workers in the South of Ireland have been hamstrung and made to pay the price of horrendous capitalist crisis because their national union leaders sold them a pup - successive National Agreements that allegedly ensured bosses and workers were 'all in it together', which drastically hampered their ability to fight back collectively and defend living standards.

WORKERS' CONTROL

Of course, in all probability an independent SOCIALIST Scotland would include properly elected workers' representatives on workplace committees, to control day-to-day operations, and a working class majority elected onto boards of publicly owned industries, services and cooperatives. But that is a far cry from what is on offer from this White Paper, which is rooted in the open continuation of privately owned capitalist enterprises, which in fact are promised cuts of up to 3 per cent in Corporation Tax.

THE ONLY WAY IS YES!

Trade unions and their members cannot afford to be neutral on the Referendum. We have far too much to lose if we don't help win a majority for independence. More wage cuts. Even worse assaults on services. Catastrophic removal of the remaining rights we have at work. And all of these regardless of what colour of rosette the capitalist Prime Minister in Westminster wears.

SEIZE THE MOMENT - SHAPE THE FUTURE

The SNP government's White Paper is one version of independence, but only one. It says itself, "Each of Scotland's political parties will bring forward policy proposals at the future election to an Independent Scottish parliament." 

Absolutely. And the duty of trade unions, as the biggest single collective body in Scotland, is to seize the unique opportunity offered by national self-government, and combine with socialists to carve out a future that goes far beyond the vision painted in this White Paper. 

Fight for public ownership of key sectors like energy, North Sea oil and gas, the banks and industrial giants - with new forms of democratic control and management by working class people that go way beyond a few token 'worker directors'. 

With socialist change we could build a genuine social partnership. 

This White Paper is a very substantial improvement on what we have in the capitalist UK; it is pale and timid compared to what socialists and the trade union movement need to campaign for on the road to a Scottish workers' republic.

Just back from chairing superb, lively, passionate Trade Unionists For Independence public meeting in Glasgow

Text message I sent to TUFI and SSP volunteers...

Members of huge breadth of unions - GMB, USDAW, UNITE, PCS, CWU, UNISON, RMT, ASLEF, FBU, NUJ, EIS - and several branches of many. Ranged from young shop stewards in charge of their union website and conveners & reps for workers in front line of assaults by todays government of and for the millionaires - to an ex-miner and a veteran of victorious 1971 UCS shipyards occupation. Passionate speeches.

Clear, hardhitting arguments on the workers' case for independence, and determined plans to go back to workplaces to shape our future.

People left more equipped to convince fellow workers, more confident to challenge those union leaders who've imposed a NO position on their unions, more united across party boundaries in favour of a Scotland for the millions, not the millionaires.

Richie Venton, TUFI & SSP

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.

Spend 30 seconds: demand MPs abolish the Bedroom Tax NOW!

The reviled Bedroom Tax is in a shambles, which is why everyone who devotes 30 seconds of their time to sign my online Petition could realistically add to the prospects of it being scrapped - now!

The ePetition is simple and pointed: it demands that Labour leader Ed Miliband moves an immediate Emergency Motion in the House of Commons for Abolition of the Bedroom Tax NOW - instead of waiting until some time after 2015, for the eventuality of Labour winning the Westminster elections a long, agonizing two years from now.

You can add your voice to this demand on Miliband to put his money where his mouth is by clicking here.


[and if you have problems with the link, simply go to www.change.org and in the 'Search' box type 'Bedroom Tax Miliband'].

Coming Apart at the Seams

Those of us who for the past year have fought consistently and persistently to resist and abolish this obnoxious theft of benefits - tenants, trade unionists, socialists - welcome several recent decisions that undermine it.


We welcome various recent legal judgements that have found in favor of tenants - on grounds of room size and previous usage; disabled people's right to additional space for their needs; the human rights of the disabled, parents, children.

We welcome the decision of the Northern Ireland Assembly to exempt all current tenants for the next 4 years. Whilst the political forces in power in the Assembly are dangerously liable to pass on the £17m cost of underwriting the bedroom tax in the form of cuts to other services, this decision adds weight to the longstanding demand by the SSP, Shelter Scotland and anti-bedroom campaigns for the Scottish government to fund the guesstimated £53m loss of rent this year to social landlords, from tenants simply unable to afford the bedroom tax.

And given that right now - until such time as we win Scottish self-government - it is only Westminster which has the powers to abolish the tax they imposed on us, we welcome the recent political U-turns by two of the major Westminster political parties: the LibDems and Labour.

LibDems under Siege

The LibDems have played a disgusting role, abandoning their party policy of a mansion tax on the rich and privileged, whilst acting as the yellow Tory props to the blue Tories in an unelected Coalition - which has hammered nearly 100,000 families in Scotland with their vile, punitive Bedroom Tax. All the more reason to cheer the decision at the recent LibDem UK conference in Glasgow to slam the bedroom tax and open the door to Clegg being pounded into presenting a Motion for its abolition at Westminster. That decision was, let's not forget, in large measure due to the pressure brought to bear by the protest demo of tenants, trade unionists and socialists outside the LibDem conference.

Labour forced into U-turn

More significant still, that meant Labour was the only remaining mainstream party left standing alongside the Tories, refusing to call for abolition of the bedroom tax.


For the past year, Labour has done nothing to lead the battle for its abolition; refused point blank to promise abolition under a future Labour government, in fact saying they would keep it; refused for months on end to even pledge 'no evictions' in Labour-run councils; and stooped down even lower when they issued real eviction notices to a severely disabled mother of three in Labour-run North Lanarkshire council.


Now, a year after the Bedroom Tax was passed by Westminster, six months after it was implemented on April Fools Day, Ed Miliband has promised its abolition if Labour wins office in the 2015 Westminster elections.

Why wait 'til 2015?

A welcome step, but one which strips away all Labour's feeble excuses about 'needing to examine the cost of abolition', and poses the question starkly: why wait another two or three years? Why not fight for its abolition here and now?

The LibDem conference is supposed to be binding on their MPs. So if - as my ePetition demands - Ed Miliband and Labour were to put forward an Emergency Motion for its outright, immediate abolition, there should be an inbuilt majority of MPs that should vote for it, overruling Cameron's vicious millionaire razor gang.

Not another 2 years of Devastation!

If there's an ounce of sincerity in Miliband's promises - if it's not just a cynical electioneering ploy designed to win votes, and damage the case for Scottish self-government into the bargain - then why would Miliband and Labour make us wait another two years or more?


Why would they punish the poorest sections of the working class with another two years of cuts to their benefits, loss of family homes, upheaval, stress, even suicides? And why would they condemn even more staff in social housing to job losses and pay cuts of £5,000 a year, as has already been imposed by £100,000-a-year chief executives in some housing associations?

We need to demand that Miliband turns his grand speeches into decisive action - action that should be easily successful - action that would rescue 660,000 households from the pit of poverty and despair they've been tossed into by the Bedroom Tax.

NOW is the time for Abolition!

Sign the ePetition today. Encourage others to do likewise.

Sign the petitions at SSP street stalls demanding abolition NOW.

And raise Motions in your trade unions, community organizations, anti-poverty groups and anti-bedroom tax groups demanding that Ed Miliband and your own local MPs push for immediate abolition. That includes those trade unions whose leaderships insist on pouring £millions of members' money into Labour's coffers: demand some return on your money from Labour for once!

It's hardly asking the earth of them! But it could be a life-changer for hundreds of thousands of tenants and workers at the sharp end of this indefensible daylight robbery.

Spend 30 seconds of your day: potentially, if thousands of us do it, and pound Miliband into belatedly pushing for abolition, this could help change the lives of hundreds of thousands.

A SOCIALIST CASE FOR INDEPENDENCE

I wrote this article on 22 June 2013 for the Yes Scotland website, at their behest.

Scotland’s egalitarian traditions are captured in the phrase "We're a' Jock Tamson's bairns". But under Westminster capitalist rule, old Jock must have disowned and disinherited the majority of us! 

We live in the 4th most unequal developed country in the world. 

The richest 100 Scots last year increased their wealth by £21billion, to a total of £39 billion. 

So 100 people have substantially more than the annual budget of the Scottish government, covering essential jobs and public services for the other 5.3 million Scots! 

The richest tenth of households are 273 times better off than the poorest tenth. 

And it's not just those on skinflint benefits or pauperised pensions that suffer; the biggest single group in poverty - and growing in number - is the working poor; currently 280,000 of us.

Just a few statistical reminders of the system we need to change; why Scottish workers need socialism.

But likewise, Scotland’s working class majority need to vote for independence to help tackle these obscene inequalities in our rich nation, in part because independence would hasten the prospects of a socialist future where we truly are “a’ Jock Tamson's bairns”, genuinely 'better together', sharing the fruits of our collective efforts in a fashion that would banish poverty, poor housing, mass unemployment and underemployment

As a socialist and internationalist I advocate independence for three main reasons. 

Firstly, as a democratic advance, so the Scottish people actually get the governments they vote for. There's never been a Scottish Tory majority since 1955, yet we've been saddled with Westminster Tory dictatorships for at least 34 of the subsequent years.

Secondly, as a devastating body blow to the power, prestige and imperial arrogance of the British ruling class, who lord it over Scotland like colonial masters (witness the poll tax), use Scotland as the dumping ground for their US masters' nuclear arsenal, and habitually mobilize disproportionate numbers of working class Scots to slaughter and be slaughtered in wars for oil and empire.

Independent self government of Scotland’s land mass, offshore waters, oil and gas, and the removal of Trident, would all undermine the arrogant rule of the rich, and indeed thereby vastly boost the prospects of the people of England and Wales confronting and defeating the same dictatorship of the rich.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, independence would hasten the prospects of radical socialist change, of a fundamental and irreversible transfer of wealth and power to the millions, away from the millionaires.

Contrary to the Tories’ Labour puppets in Better Together, voting YES in 2014 is not the same as voting for indefinite, unchallenged rule by the SNP.

A YES in 2014 would give the working class majority population their first-ever real choice of Scottish government, with the opportunity to elect a government of the left with the powers and political will to transform the lives of millions. 

Such a government could radically redistribute the fabulous wealth of the nation through measures that are way beyond the powers conceded by Westminster under devolution, or even various shades of Devo Max - including progressive taxation of the rich elite and big business; a Living Wage for all at 16, with equal pay for women; a fair benefits system for those unable to work; a state pension and education grant linked to a Living Wage; reversal of privatisation and extension of democratic public ownership into all services, transport, energy (including green energy), big industrial enterprises, construction and banks; reversal of cuts and expansion of public services; scrapping of Trident and an end to bloody imperialist wars. 

It could democratize society, scrapping all anti-union laws and blacklisting; constructing democracy in the workplace and communities; devolving key decisions to local councils, tenants and communities. 

Some in the trade union movement cling to the myths peddled by those on the 'left' of the Labour party - that independence would 'wreck the unity of the working class', and we're 'better together' in a 'redistributive Britain'.

Which particular planet have they inhabited for the past 30-40 years, during which all the post-1945 gains of the NHS and Welfare State have been systematically dismantled, not only by Westminster Tories but also Labour governments?

And if they succeeded in confusing workers into voting No, Westminster would undoubtedly unleash even more savage cuts to jobs and services, emboldened by our failure to seize the chance of democratic self-government. 

That is the grisly spectre under continued Westminster rule, based on the economic and social crisis created by the banks and big business. It would especially confront us if the real and present danger of a Tory or Tory/UKIP government ruled from Westminster, but also even if Labour won in 2015.

Labour have refused to even pledge abolition of the iniquitous Bedroom Tax, let alone the Thatcherite anti-union laws they retained; have abandoned the principle of universal social provision; and have warned that a Labour government will be 'ruthless', with 'iron rule' [their phrases] in carrying on with public sector cuts.

The unity and solidarity of working people has been cynically undermined by successive Westminster governments, and has never depended on one form or other of capitalist government.

Trade unionists share membership - and take joint action - across national government boundaries: in Britain and Ireland, north and south, across Scandinavia, and in North America. It is an insult to the proud internationalist traditions of the Scottish working class to claim they would cease all acts of solidarity with fellow-workers in England, Wales, Ireland, Europe or indeed further afield once we had gained the powers to radically improve the lives and conditions of the Scottish people through self-government.

Every day that we suffer growing poverty, inequality and stunted ambitions for the young generation is an argument for fundamental, socialist change – which is a far more realistic prospect in an independent Scotland than with the ‘choice’ of different factions of the same capitalist, pro-war Westminster machine.

A socialist Scotland will not emerge on 19 September 2014, but if we vote Yes, its time will come far sooner than if we surrender to Westminster rule by the rich. Workers need socialism and independence.

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. 

Download a free copy of the SSV HERE

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'.