IT'S OFFICIAL: LABOUR ARE THE REAL CONSERVATIVES!

“Labour are the real conservatives.” 

So says Sir Keir Starmer, making official what most of us already knew. 

The knight of the realm went on to elaborate: “Somebody has got to stand up for what makes this country great”, declaring his intention of making Labour “change its DNA”, in a project he described as “Clause 4 on steroids”. 

The latter refers to the infamous Tony Blair’s purge of socialist members and socialist aims from the Labour Party thirty years ago – scrapping the socialist Clause 4 Part 4, which pledged Labour “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” 

So Starmer’s ‘Clause 4 on steroids’ mission to make Labour ‘the real conservatives’ leaves little to the imagination. 

Beware of False Friends 

As growing hatred for Tory atrocities against working-class people obliterates over 1,000 of their council positions in England, and opinion polls speak of Scottish Labour winning seats off the SNP, working-class people desperate for change should beware of false Labour friends. 

There are some good and decent people in the ranks of Scottish Labour, trade unionists included. And the Scottish Socialist Party has a proven record of organising with them in common cause on picket lines, in building solidarity with strikers, in taking action against the profiteers, racists, fascists, and other human dross. But we have no illusions in Scottish Labour as a party of the working class. 

When Anas Sarwar made bogus claims about supporting workers’ rights, when he addressed the recent STUC Congress, he should have been called out for rank hypocrisy, given that for years he refused to even let USDAW recruit workers in his warehouse, let alone recognise the union for negotiations. Then he tried to disguise his track record by handing over his shares to his young children in a trust. It's no coincidence he did so after I and others in USDAW had called him out for his anti-trade union antics, when he was seeking the support of our union as deputy leader of Scottish Labour, with the unqualified support of USDAW’s dominant right-wing leadership. 

The truth is Scottish Labour have long since abandoned the working class and only make noises about supporting trade unionists in a cynical play to exploit workers’ votes, as the increasingly discredited SNP/Scottish Green government comes into collision with trade unionists. 

The hunger to dump the Tories is in danger of getting a New Tory PM

Starmer Abandons All Promises 

Under the centralised dictatorship of Keir Starmer, Labour has abandoned even the timid reforms they previously promised. As the giant energy companies rip billions of profits out of people in desperate fuel poverty, Starmer has abandoned Labour's previous policy of a public energy company - which in any case merely amounted to a state company competing with the existing profiteers, rather than the necessary full-blown public ownership of all forms of energy which the SSP advocates. 

Starmer’s Labour have likewise dropped the demand for nationalisation of Royal Mail and done a complete U-turn on abolition of student tuition fees down South, which had been a policy that mobilised tens of thousands of young people behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. 

Blair's landslide election in 1997 left Tory laws and inequality intact

Labour Denies Democratic Rights 

The ‘Starmtroopers’ - as Sir Keir’s disciples rather stupidly and distastefully decided to label themselves - are not even democrats, let alone socialists. 

They point blank refuse even the right to a referendum vote on Scottish independence, with the same devotion to (literally and politically) wrapping themselves in the blood-stained flag of British imperialism - the Union Jack - as the Tories. 

When the vicious anti-protest Public Order Bill of Rishi Sunak was rammed through parliament on the eve of the coronation and used to arrest peaceful protesters calling for a republic on the day of parading a parasite king around in a gold, bejewelled carriage costing millions to public funds, Labour's leadership refused to pledge that they would repeal this anti-democratic legislation. 

The pathetic excuse given by Labour's Foreign Affairs spokesperson, David Lammy was “It would take up too much parliamentary time. Labour can’t come into office picking through all the Conservative legislation and repealing it.” 

What contemptible scorn that shows towards people's civil rights. And what an alarming signpost towards what a Labour government will do with the most repressive anti-union laws in the western world. 

History of Betraying Workers 

When it comes to anti-trade union legislation, Labour seems to have cooled off even on its very specific, limited earlier pledge to scrap the Tories’ brutal Minimum Services Level Bill. This threatens workers with the sack if they refuse to go to work on strike days, despite their union having cleared all the high hurdles required to carry out a legal ballot for industrial action. 

However, these unforgivable stances by ‘modern’ Labour are no accident or aberration. They are merely the modern manifestation of a long, inglorious history of pro-capitalist Labour leaders siding with the employers’ class against workers - deploying the full force of the law, and more, going back decades. 

During recent ambulance workers’ strikes, Labour MP Stephen Kinnock publicly supported the Tories’ use of the army to break these frontline workers’ action in pursuit of decent pay. He's the son of the ermined Lord Neil Kinnock, who refused to support the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5, despite representing a South Wales mining community, and then joined the chorus of denunciation of those heroic workers in the latter stages of their desperate fight for survival. 

Labour Kept Tory Anti-Union Laws 

Throughout the 13 years of Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (1997-2010) they steadfastly refused to repeal the vicious battery of anti-worker, anti-union laws imposed by Thatcher’s Tories in the aftermath of the miners being defeated. The only real exception to that was that they lifted the ban on trade union membership at the GCHQ spy centre… but that was only conceded on condition of a strict no-strike clause. 

During the mid-1990s, when council workers in the Labour-led Glasgow City Council were driven to take strike action, Labour council leader Frank McAveetey threatened to jail the rank-and-file union leadership, courtesy of the Tory anti-union laws. 

Blair converted Labour into a nakedly, proudly capitalist party by scrapping the socialist aims encapsulated in Clause 4 part 4 - “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” - by neutering the influence of trade unions over party decision-making, and by shutting down Labour Party democracy to prevent socialists within its ranks winning any influence, nationally or locally. 

He achieved his openly stated mission by converting Labour into the equivalent of the American Democrat Party; another capitalist institution, which certainly exploits and abuses workers’ votes, but doesn't even pretend to be a workers’ party, let alone a socialist one. 

1945 Labour government used troops against dockers 5 days after being elected  

Serialised Use of Strike-breaking Troops 

However, even so-called Old Labour, which preceded Blair’s New Tories, has a history stained by the use of anti-union laws and even the deployment of troops, to break the will of workers in struggle. 

A few random examples suffice to show that whilst up until about 30 years ago Labour could be defined as a mass workers’ party with a primarily pro-capitalist leadership, that meant they refused to challenge the capitalist class and frequently sided with the exploiters against the workers whose votes they relied upon. 

It was a Labour government which is 1977-8 deployed troops against striking firefighters, earning the derision of working-class people when the army's Green Goddesses often had to be push-started, such was their state of dereliction, as they feebly tried to respond to fires.

The 1964-70 Labour government of Harold Wilson drafted “In Place of Strife”, a package of anti-union laws lifted straight from the Tories’ playbook, which was only halted by the ferocious opposition of the organised trade union movement, driven from the bottom upwards. 

Labour government used troops against firefighters' strikes

Concession and Repression 

Even the frequently lauded post-war Attlee Labour government of 1945-51 has a chequered record. It's true that under the mass pressure of demands for radical change and the fear of revolution that swept Europe, they carried out the most radical reforms in the history of Labour in power - creating the NHS, welfare state, and building tens of thousands of council houses. 

Alongside that they nationalised a series of collapsing industries, such as coal mining, railways, gas, and electricity. 

But the same Labour government sent troops in against striking dockers five days after being elected – and again used 21,000 troops to break dockers’ strikes in the autumn of 1945. On 14 different occasions, between July 1945 and October 1951, the Labour government sent troops in against strikers, including dockers, gas workers, and lorry drivers at Smithfield meat market. 

Those examples could be greatly added to but suffice to show that any party which accepts the continued rule of the capitalist class, and refuses to mobilise workers for socialist change, will frequently side with the sworn enemy of working people and utilise the same anti-democratic, anti-worker, anti-trade union laws that the open enemies of the working class in the form of the Tories readily use. 

Indeed, that also applies to the SNP, who recently declared their intention to use the army to break a firefighters’ strike, after the sweeping majority vote for industrial action was announced by the FBU.

Whilst SNP threaten use of army to break firefighters' strike, SSP stand with workers

Build a Working-Class Socialist Party 

Workers need a genuine workers’ party. Socialists need to be organised in a socialist party. 

The Labour Party does not qualify for either definition. Their historic track record, their readiness to do deals with Tories, and their abandonment of even the mildest reform policies make them unfit for the loyalty and votes of the working class. 

Individual socialists in Scottish Labour are nothing short of political prisoners. They should be released and offered a home in the SSP, which genuinely stands up for the historic socialist aims of full trade union and civil rights; democratic public ownership with workers’ control; and a socialist democracy where the fabulous wealth of the nation is used in a Socialist Green New Deal that could reverse the capitalist onslaught on jobs, incomes, public services, and the health of the planet we live on. 

No trust in Starmer’s and Sarwar’s New Tories! 

Join the SSP and help build a genuine working-class socialist party!

https://membership.scottishsocialistparty.org/join_us/

SCOTTISH SOCIALISTS CHALLENGE THE COUNCIL MACHINE: for defiance, not destruction

SSP proud history of fighting for Council jobs & services

Despite threadbare resources, the SSP is challenging the mainstream parties in the May council elections across Scotland. 

From Nairn to Arran, Dundee to Drumchapel, and a dozen seats in between, we are putting up a socialist case that differs drastically from what's on offer from Labour and SNP contenders for council control. Socialist measures that would transform the lives of working class communities and 250,000 council workers alike, provided a mass movement is built to achieve the changes proposed.

Councils at Sharp End of Austerity 

Local government is at the sharp end of austerity, raining down from the Westminster Tories, left unsheltered by the SNP Holyrood government, who since 2010 have devolved £3billion in Tory cuts to councils, NHS boards and college authorities. 

The recent SNP/Scottish Green budget added £170m in council funding cuts to the catastrophe already visited upon local authorities in recent years - including the 40,000 job losses, the £1.4billion slashed off the wage bill, and the 9.2% cut (from £10.5bn to £9.5bn) in Scottish government funding of councils since 2010/11 (Accounts Commission Report, March 2017). 

The Fraser Allander Institute predicts a further £1billion will be hacked off council revenue funding from Holyrood by 2020. 

As we've often argued, the stark choice is between defiance and destruction; either devolved devastation, or defiance and defeat of the Tory butchers.

That choice applies equally to the Scottish government, whose mandate was won on claims to be anti-austerity, and to local councils of whatever political stripe. 

No Cuts Budgets: Win back our Stolen £Millions!

The SSP is contesting the council elections to broadcast our 100% anti-cuts, anti-austerity, anti-capitalist message... with a raft of positive, socialist alternatives that would easily shelter workers and communities from the storm of savage cuts originating in Westminster, passing through Holyrood unimpeded, blasting out from supine local councils, run by both Labour and the SNP. 

We are arguing for No Cuts Budgets, and for reversal of the cuts already agreed last month by councillors who've failed to stand up for the people they now beg votes off. But we don't see setting No Cuts budgets as an idle gesture, nor a folded arms exercise, but as the launchpad for a mighty battle by mobilized council workers and communities to "win back our stolen £millions", off Westminster and Holyrood. 

For Defiance, not Devolved Destruction

Axe The Council Tax - Make the Rich Pay

The SSP is championing a package of measures that would not only fund No Cuts budgets, standstill budgets, but would generate the resources to vastly expand jobs, local services and wage levels for council workers – including the band of super-exploited council apprentices. 

We have consistently fought for our fully-costed alternative to the regressive Council Tax; the progressive, income-based Scottish Service Tax, which would simultaneously mean about 80% of Scottish people paying less in bills, and literally double the money raised locally for jobs and services; from £2billion in Council Tax last year, to £4billion under our new tax proposal. 

Instead of adding 3% to the already-exorbitant Council Tax bills - in a taxation system that hammers low- and middle-income families far harder than the super-rich in their £million-plus mansions - we are demanding the Scottish government axe the Council Tax, and usher in a Scottish Service Tax based on ability to pay, exempting the first £11,000 income, but making the rich minority pay far greater sums, thereby doubling funds. 

Drop the Debt! Fund People's Services, not PFI Profits 

Socialist councillors would provide the backbone lacking in other parties to challenge another form of daylight robbery of local people by the profiteers. As the Accounts Commission has confirmed, Scottish local authorities have combined debts of £15.2billion, costing a colossal £1.5billion in debt repayments every single year. 

That's cash that could be invested in improved social care for children, disabled people and the elderly; housebuilding and renovation; schools; libraries; community facilities; local bus services; free school meals; sports and recreation; parks; environmental improvements; bin services; local fresh food markets in every housing district; job creation; wage rises instead of 8 years of wage cuts for council workers... 

But instead, that fortune is forked out to moneylenders, bankers and spivs who've plundered public resources for profits made out of long-ago council house building and, especially, the monumental ripoff of PFI/PPP schemes. 

PFI/PPP: The School of Daylight Robbery

Schools and hospitals built or renovated under PFI and PPP - initiated by John Major's Tories, but vastly expanded under Blair and Brown's Labour governments from 1997 - will cost Scottish taxpayers £30.2billion by the time 30-35 years of repayments ("unitary charges") have been completed. That's equivalent to the entire annual budget of the Scottish government. On average, that means for every £1 invested in schools or hospitals through PFI/PPP schemes in Scotland, we are paying back £6! 

In just 8 of Scotland's 32 councils alone, £1.8billion has already been handed over to the PFI spivs for construction or maintenance of schools, but a further £4.5billion is still owed to these big business loan sharks. For example, Edinburgh city council face charges of £64m for each of the 25 PFI schools; Glasgow £1.5billion for 30 PFI schools that initially cost £225m to construct in 2001. 

That's theft on a gargantuan scale. It's robbing not only this generation, but the next, and the one after, of resources desperately needed for useful jobs and services in the community.

44p in the £1 to Moneylenders!

The SSP is demanding that the debt is dropped; that councils discover the backbone to renegotiate and cancel historic debts, and the Scottish government aid them in this. There’s a clear precedent for dropping council debts; when the government imposed mass council housing stock transfers to the likes of Glasgow Housing Association in 2001, they wiped out debt to give that oversized quango a fresh start, lifting the burden of debts that had hung round the council’s neck, hampering their ability to build or renovate homes for rent.

Put simply, we demand an end to the crime where on average across Scotland, for every £1 paid by residents in Council Tax, 44p is handed over to the profiteering moneylenders. Imagine what could be done with all that dosh, swilling around in the bank accounts of, well, bankers, amongst others! 

Minimum £10Now! for Every Council Worker

High up amongst the unique policies being pushed by the SSP in the council elections is one that would transform the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of council staff, increase their spending power in the community, and generally boost local economies; our demand for a £10-an-hour minimum living wage for every council worker - with guaranteed equal pay for women. 

It would be easily affordable - provided a fight is put up for extra funding, for a return of the stolen £millions, to win back the £1billion stolen off councils by Holyrood on behalf of Westminster since 2010/11 alone. Or by cancelling the debts. Or through the Scottish Service Tax doubling the money locally raised. 

The Power to Guarantee £10Now!

But have councils the powers to introduce a £10 minimum? Yes! They don't have the power to legally insist on £10Now! across society; that's reserved to Westminster. But already 13 of the 32 councils bask in the kudos of being Accredited Living Wage Employers, paying the voluntary £8.45 minimum advocated by the Living Wage Foundation. 

In fact, in trying to impose a miserly 1% pay cap on council staff this year, they boast of offering an £8.51 minimum. So the SSP is demanding that councils introduce a £10 minimum - as a step towards ALL workers winning that, across all sectors - and enlist the support of the same staff in an almighty fight to fund the £10 minimum by cancelling ancient council debts, and winning back the funding stolen by governments who've chosen the path of austerity, planned poverty, to bail out the ailing, exploitative capitalist system.

Merseyside mass movements led by socialists beat Thatcher in 1980s

Socialist Councillors' Proud Tradition

The SSP stands in a long, proud socialist tradition of courageous men and women who've used their positions as councillors not to manage the machine, but to challenge the deprivation and class divisions imposed by the bigger, broader capitalist system. 

The socialist councillors of 1920s Poplar, London, who went to jail rather than attack the working class, coining the slogan "Better to Break the Law than Break the Poor" - and whose mobilization of local people won vast improvements in housing, wages and services. 

The 1970s Clay Cross, Derbyshire, socialist councillors who refused to implement Tory rent rises, built council houses, vastly increased council workers' wages, and faced down the threat of jail to stand up for working class people. 

And especially the 1980s Liverpool socialist council, which led a mass movement of the Merseyside working class, beat back the notoriously hard-faced Maggie Thatcher government, and won £60million in government grants off Westminster to sustain an inspiring programme of radical reforms. Life-changing reforms, including 5,000 new council houses; an 8-year rent freeze; 12,000 new construction workers' jobs; new nurseries, leisure centres and parks; vastly improved schools and FE colleges; expanded services; and a £100-a-week minimum wage for a 35 hour week for its 31,000 staff. 

It can be done; it needs to be done; the alternative is devastation. 

Choose SSP #1 on May 4th

The choice on May 4th is fundamentally between a variety of mainstream parties, indulging in tribal warfare and largely manufactured differences on policy, but all wedded to obedience of the cuts handed down by the Westminster Tories - or socialist candidates prepared to help lead a movement to defy and defeat the Tory vandals. 

Every first (or even second) preference vote for the SSP is a statement of intent. A declaration of defiance of the endless round of cuts to jobs, facilities and services. An endorsement of policies that put the interests and livelihoods of working class communities and council workers before the profiteering and privileges of the PFI moneylenders, the bankers, and the 1% who wallow in obscene wealth through tax cuts at the expense of our daily living conditions. 

Choose a better life; choose socialism; vote SSP. Elect fighting, principled socialists.

The SSP Podcast

I recorded a piece for this weeks SSP podcast on Council budgets. Councillors who cannot protect their electorate from Tory/ LibDem imposed cuts should stand down and allow socialists to take their place.

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!

Ructions after the Referendum

- workers, Labour and Scottish Independence

The Scottish Referendum has added substantially to the stresses and strains between Labour and the trade unions.

On one side of the potential for clashes we have the blind, unthinking loyalty to Labour of the tops of many of the trade unions; either blatantly through affiliation to the Tory-funded, Labour-fronted Better Together, or increasingly in recent months via the United with Labour front for unionism.

Lined up against such trade union 'leaders' is a growing battallion of union activists and members who see Scottish Independence as a rapid escape route from the dictatorship of the Tories. 

At a UK-wide level within the trade unions this might not be an issue of prime importance; but within the Scottish union memberships it is a decisive turning point, another factor in the abandonment of Labour by big chunks of the working class.

Mass political education 

Scottish workers and working class communities have been engaged in the politics of the Referendum debate like no other issue in living memory. Questions of profound significance about what kind of society we live in and what kind of society we want to construct under Scottish self-government have been debated in community halls and school assembly rooms every night of the week, in every corner of the nation, with tens of thousands participating. It is a mass political education system that means nothing will remain as it was after September 2014.
And the exposé of Labour as open collaborators with the avowed Tory enemy of workers has added immensely to the process of workers unshackling themselves from their old Labour loyalties.

Labour the chief obstacle

The British and Scottish Labour leaderships are increasingly the chief barriers to Scottish independence. As the battle for the hearts and minds of the working class majority population heats up, the Tories, LibDems and mainstream media are more hindrance than help to the unionist cause; they are widely recognized as workers' enemies.
Hence the rolling out of Gordon Brown as newly-discovered evangel of workers' solidarity, promising "justice with Labour", etc.!

Of course many workers are liable to fall for Labour's lies, given the residual roots of what used to be Labour in the mass of the population, going back several generations. That danger is heightened by the same Labour leaders' cynical portrayal of the Referendum battle being between them and the SNP - another lie! 

A substantial minority of workers, traditionally Labour voters, have had these myths burnt out of their consciousness at public meetings of the SSP, or other Yes meetings with SSP speakers. Socialists are in the best position to crush the lies of Labour mis-leaders in working class audiences. 

We have exposed the fact that when Labour claims independence would break the unity of the working class, it was 13 successive years of Labour governments that banned workers' solidarity, legally outlawing the right to take action in support of fellow workers, under threat of seizure of trade union funds. 

We've exploded Labour leaders' lie that voting Yes is condemning workers in England and Wales to permanent Tory rule: only twice has the Scottish vote been essential to a Labour government being elected, one of which was the brief 8 months of Harold Wilson government from February to October 1974. 

We've explained that far from abandoning the working class down south, independence would usher in the opportunity to lead by example, by shaping a society in favour of the working class that would act as a beacon to fellow workers in our neighbouring states.
And SSP speakers have been instrumental in reminding thousands of the realities voting No and then seeking "justice with Labour" at Westminster in 2015 would mean: it was Labour in office under Brown, Blair and Alastair Darling that announced 100,000 civil service job losses; abolished the lower 10p tax rate for the lowest paid; implemented rampant privatization; destroyed Final Salary Pension Schemes; and presided over the most unequal division of wealth since 1886, according to Oxfam.

Labour: another capitalist party

Labour's attachment to the UK state is an expression of its deeper ideological devotion to capitalism and it's state institutions. Since at least the 1990s, Labour has transformed into an openly capitalist party. But precisely because of its working class origins of a century ago, and the remaining institutional Iinks between Labour and the majority of the trade unions, that makes Labour the chief political obstacle to the advancement of the working class, let alone full blown socialism. 

By clinging onto traditional working class voters, whilst preaching and practicing neo-liberal capitalism, Labour is involved in a monumental deceit that upholds the power and profiteering of the capitalist elite - the billionaires who rule Breadline Britain.
The same applies to foreign policy, which is only an extension of domestic policies: it was Labour that dragged Britain into the killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq, clinging onto the coat-tails of USA imperialism.

The debates at trade union branches and public meetings on the Referendum have raised issues that can't simply be bottled up and put in cold storage again after September. These include the call for control over trade union decisions by the Scottish membership; the formation of industry-wide shop stewards committees across national boundaries (and not just restricted to the borders of the current UK, in this age of multinational capitalism); and the treacherous role of Labour in their undisguised collaboration with the sworn Tory enemies of the working class.

Ructions after the Referendum

After September 18, we are likely to see eruptions, schisms and a haemorraging of members from Labour in Scotland.

If, as we hope and expect, a Yes vote is won, the tops of Labour at UK and Scottish level will never be forgiven for their anti-working class collaboration with the Tory enemies of democratic self-rule.

If their efforts were to succeed in getting a No vote, hundreds of thousands will neither forget nor forgive their role in blocking workers' escape route from brutal Tory dictatorship. And after a while, those in uproar at the Scottish and British Labour leaders would include tens of thousands conned into voting No who then realized their betrayal, as the assault on jobs, pay, benefits and services began to bite deep.

If, with the assistance of the growing Labour for Independence trend, we win a Yes vote, all hell will break loose in and around Labour in Scotland.
MPs will vie with MSPs for parliamentary seats in an independent Holyrood - mostly unprincipled jockeying for parliamentary ambitions; rarely if ever as a principled left/right split.
Those Labour members who've had the courage to campaign for independence will face stark choices in an independent Scotland: join with other genuine socialists in the SSP to fight for a socialist majority in the 2016 elections, or stay in the Labour party in the hope of transforming Scottish Labour into a socialist force.

Socialist programme

Of course a political programme for radical socialist transformation is at the heart of this question, rather than names and party labels. Policies that could mobilize working class people in a movement built on the shoulders of the Referendum campaign and that challenges capitalism would include a decent living minimum wage; reversal of Westminster's cuts; massive increases to pensions and benefits; defense and extension of a modern public welfare state; abolition of all anti-union laws and introduction of workplace democracy; reversal of past Tory and Labour privatisations; democratic public ownership of Royal Mail, energy, transport, construction, banks; progressive taxation of the rich and big business; full employment through creation of decent, well-paid jobs and apprenticeships in housing and the green energy sector; removal of Trident and opposition to involvement in imperialist wars.

Unprincipled readjustments 

But where would such a programme leave 'Scottish' Labour? The Labour Party in Scotland under Westminster rule is a mere appendage of a British party that is firmly hitched to capitalism and besotted with winning middle-class swing voters in so-called Middle England. In other words, fundamentally and utterly opposed to any suggestion of socialism.
In the event of independence, Labour in Scotland would be obliged to reposition itself. Not a principled autonomy or independence from the capitalist British Labour party - based on the principles of the right to national self-determination and therefore pursuit of an independent Socialist Scotland - more an unprincipled readjustment driven by self-preservation and parliamentary ambitions in an independent Scottish parliament.

Johann Lamont: a very strange 'socialist'!

The central question would still remain: what ideology and political programme would drive such a Scottish Labour party in an independent state?
The performance of the parliamentary wing of Labour in Scotland bodes ill for those dreaming of a socialist revival in Scottish Labour's ranks. For instance, only two Scottish Labour MPs voted against the recent Tory cap on welfare benefits. 

I've witnessed some in Labour for Independence claim - in their argument that independence would revive Labour as a socialist force - that Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont is actually a socialist, but hampered by the London-based domination of Ed Miliband et al. 

It's a strange version of socialism that denounces Scotland as a "something for nothing society", threatening to remove free prescriptions, over-60s' bus passes or free school meals; or that besmirched the Scottish working class as "not genetically programmed to make political decisions" - both declarations being made in the past year by the same 'socialist' Johann Lamont.

Workers won't flood into Labour

A Yes vote may embolden some in LFI and the Labour Campaign for Socialism in challenging the Scottish Labour leadership. But the fundamental problem they would still face is the lack of any groundswell in the working class towards joining the Labour party en masse to reclaim and convert it into a socialist party.

In fact, the opposite is the trend. At least a whole generation of trade unionists and working class communities have experienced nothing but disappointment, disgust and despair at their experience of Labour in government at council, Holyrood or Westminster levels. 

And their most recent experience is of the same Labour being on the wrong side - united with the Tory class enemy - during the Referendum battle. 

Far from any movement of workers being attracted to join the Labour party, unions like USDAW have had members resigning and threatening to resign due to the union's ultra-Labour loyalist affiliation to Better Together; a mistaken, but entirely understandable conclusion by workers who are furious, and a graphic indication of the deepening chasm between the trade union ranks and Labour. 

A clear and growing majority of activists and union reps in the likes of UNISON and UNITE are for Yes, which brings them into conflict with the party their unions are still affiliated to.

Trade unions: Make the Break!

Regardless of whether it's a Yes or No majority in September, the case for breaking from Labour has grown in the trade unions; exponentially so compared to when the SSP launched our 'Make the Break' campaign in January 1999. 

Trade union branches and especially union activists are key to the renewal of socialism in Scotland, alongside young people and those currently not in a unionised workplace. 

But that won't be achieved by trying to breathe life into the Labour party. The severe limitations of that strategy - even when applied by the biggest trade union in the country - were highlighted in Falkirk, with all the consequences for Unite the union and it's activists at Grangemouth refinery. The limitations - indeed the futility of that strategy - were further underlined by last year's Labour conference voting - unanimously! - for public ownership of Royal Mail and the railways, only to have the Labour leaders spit in the face of their own party conference, declaring within minutes that they will do no such thing on winning power at Westminster.

Build a mass socialist party

Workers convinced of the need for radical change, including through the mass learning process of the Referendum, would do much better to devote their talent and energy alongside those of us already organised in the SSP, in constructing a mass, working class socialist party. Realignments on the Scottish left in the event of independence will strengthen that strategy immensely. 

Socialists in SNP: Make the Break!

That is especially so given the thousands of socialists who have up until now chosen the SNP as the biggest vehicle to travel to independence in. On reaching that destination - the raison d'être for the SNP over 80 years - they will then confront the choice of what kind of Scotland to build with the powers of independence. Whether to surrender to a tartan capitalism, 'more of the same' but under the Saltire - or do battle for a full-blown socialist programme for Scotland, as part of the international struggle for socialism?

Thousands of SNP members on demos, rallies and public meetings have said to the SSP: "When we get independence, we'll be with you."

These pro-Independence socialists need to 'make the break' from an SNP party whose dominant leadership have shown their dedication to capitalist economy and capitalist institutions through policies such as lower Corporation Tax; membership of the nuclear, warmongering NATO; support for a medieval monarchy; and their implementation of Westminster austerity through cuts imposed by SNP-led councils.

Make nothing remain the same!

Together with the SSP - which for all 16 years of our existence has persistently fought for socialism and Scottish Independence - socialists in the Labour party and trade unions, plus newly awakened socialists in RIC and Yes groups across Scotland, socialists currently in the SNP can help forge a mighty force for fundamental socialist change in Scotland and beyond.

Nothing will remain the same after 18 September - provided we fight to shape Scotland into the socialist society workers need it to become.

BREAK FROM BILLIONAIRES' BREADLINE BRITAIN!

Since our formation in 1998, the SSP has consistently fought for an independent socialist Scotland. We are the one and only party to have done so for the past 16 years - tirelessly.

Throughout the two years of the Referendum campaign, we have championed the central argument that the Scottish working class majority are key to the outcome, having least to lose and most to gain - with the potential power to then go on to transform an independent Scotland into a socialist democracy.

It seems the enemies of democratic self-determination - the Unionist parties of Better Together - have woken up to this, in a perverse fashion.

That Tory-funded Fear Factory has been fronted by Labour for the past two years. They've built a cottage industry in the manufacture of lies, scare stories and attempts to intimidate working class Scots with the core message that we are too poor, too small and too thick to handle independence. The crowning glory of this insult has to be Johann Lamont's utterance that "the Scottish people are not genetically programmed to make political decisions".

Change of tack

Now the Unionist cabal are trying to switch tack, in panic at the backlash their insults, negativity, and orchestrated threats (for instance, about currency) has created amongst working class people.

Whilst Alistair Darling (of the rich) still peddles BT's doomsday scenarios about independence, other sections of the Labour hierarchy fear they've been rumbled as Tory collaborators, and have wheeled out Gordon Brown to tempt traditional Labour voters with a different shade of Unionist lies.

Brown is trying to distance Labour from their Tory paymasters in the No camp, by trying to breathe life into United with Labour - the Mini Me Labour offshoot of Better Together.

Like any one of successive Tory and Labour governments, these characters rely on sub-contractors; United with Labour, and figures like Brown, have been hired as sub-contractors to do the Tories' dirty work amidst the working class.

The workers are revolting!!

This move is rooted in the growing revolt within the trade unions at Labour being part of the toxic Better Together. Even the Scottish organiser of ASLEF, the first trade union to rush through affiliation to BT well over a year ago, with no genuine prior debate amongst members, admitted last week "on reflection it might have been better not to have joined Better Together".

He said so at the end of a Yes/No debate called by rank and file members through the Bathgate ASLEF branch, where I spoke for Yes (against a member of Labour's Campaign for Socialism and Red Paper Collective), at the end of which 85-90 per cent of the train drivers present favoured a Yes vote!

Hammer Labour's lies

In the final months of the campaign, Yes Scotland needs to roll up its sleeves, shelve caution and hesitancy, and get struck into Labour's cruel deceit of the Scottish working class. Along with hammering the false Labour promises, Yes Scotland needs to make its positive vision more concrete, on key issues like wages, jobs, services and workers' rights.
The pro-independence movement has worked wonders in canvassing and street activity, and the SSP, RIC and Yes groups have also revived the age of the public meeting, with hundreds cramming into dozens of community halls every night of the week. Another arena we need to systematically target are the workplaces, directly - as well as via where workers live, and through trade union meetings.

But then the crunch question is the message conveyed; the keynote arguments to convince working people they will be better off under independence.

Would you JOIN the UK?

Imagine there'd been no 1707 Act of Union, that Scotland was not part of the so-called 'United' Kingdom. Imagine we were having a referendum in September to JOIN the UK.
Would any self-respecting worker vote to join a United Kingdom with a record number of billionaires -104 - and where the richest 1,000 enjoyed a massive 15 per cent to their incomes last year, to a mind boggling £518billion - whilst many workers haven't had a pay rise in four or five years, and millions more have had 'rises' that are drastic cuts compared to inflation?

Would workers be wise to vote to be part of a state where the richest ten people in Scotland - yes, 10 - have nearly half the wealth of the annual Scottish government's budget for the other 5.3 million of us?

Or where the richest one per cent have as much wealth as the poorest 54 per cent of the population?

Or where billionaires glut on their wealth, with tax cuts for them by Westminster, whilst two million children in the UK are in poverty - an absolute majority of them in families with one or more parent working?

If most workers wouldn't vote to JOIN such a dysfunctional state, why should they vote to REMAIN part of it - which is what a No vote means?

Breadline Britain

Billionaires' Britain is Breadline Britain. The Channel 4 last week took a rest from preaching the virtues of British rule to expose heartbreaking poverty for families, through a chain of unemployment, benefit sanctions, zero hours contracts and foodbanks. Breadline Kids told the story of a man who had to stop working when his teenage daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia, and then had to scrimp and search for food for his two kids, especially when his benefits were delayed. And like him, the story of the mother on zero hours contracts, a proud woman who nevertheless was forced to turn to foodbanks to avert starvation for her child.

Scotland is a net exporter of food, yet we rely on over 1,000 foodbank to avoid starvation in the 21st century.

Why would we want to give a vote of confidence to that obscene track record, by voting to stay in the UK?

Labour's 'justice'

Gordon Brown and others in the Labour hierarchy have awoken to the fact growing numbers of their own traditional working class voters see a Yes vote as a 'get out of Tory jail card', or even a rapid escape route from a real and possible Tory/UKIP jail.

So Labour peddles the line 'vote No in 2014, vote Labour in 2015'. They try to seduce workers with the words of Ed Miliband that "we're only one Christmas away from a Labour government", with promises of "justice under Labour, a sharing of the greater resources of the UK across the regions".

In a recent interview Alistair Darling showed no sign of being ironic when he offered workers "the security of being part of something bigger, with a share of the larger resources".
But what has been the real life experiences of 'justice with Labour', as measured by 13 successive years of British Labour governments?

The most regionally unequal state in the whole of Europe. A state where 87 per cent of all the working cranes right now are in London and the South East. Where London's growth rates in the recent 'recovery' are over twice (nearly five times in some cases) that of other areas of the 'United' Kingdom.

Grand Canyon wealth gap

But this is not just geographical inequality. It's a class divide that dwarfs the Grand Canyon. London sucks in labour and capital, with massive property booms and obscene profiteering in the City of London casino economy. Meantime in the real city of London, a property company called Property Partners has installed metal spikes to stop the homeless from sleeping outside the doorways of their building!

When Gordon Brown tries to scare workers about the security of their jobs and pensions should they vote Yes, we need to remind the same workers it was Labour in government, with Brown at the financial helm, that demolished Final Salary Pension schemes; provoked public sector strikes in defence of pensions; abolished the 10p tax rate for the lowest paid; and announced the slaughter of 100,000 civil service jobs back in July 2004.

That's justice, Labour style!

Things can only get worse.

And worse is yet to come if a majority of workers are conned into staying chained to Westminster rule, the dictatorship of capital. Only an estimated half of the Tory-LibDem's public sector cuts have been implemented. And that's before adding on the additional £25bn of butchery announced by Gideon Osborne before Xmas.

Even if Labour achieves the unlikely by winning office in 2015, they have declared they will sustain the Tories' cuts.

No more money from Labour!

And even the limited concessions on extra devolution verbally promised in recent weeks by Labour, Tories and LibDems are neither guaranteed, nor a route out of the fundamental problems of poverty and inequality we face in Billionaires' Breadline Britain.

If these opportunists were serious about added powers being devolved to a Scottish parliament - as opposed to trying to con us into a No vote with empty verbal gestures as they see workers attracted to the chance of real powers to change things through independence - why wasn't a package of legislation on this included in the recent Queen's Speech at Westminster?

Johann Lamont has at least let the cat out of the bag, in an article in the Northern Echo, where she clarified Labour's promises on pathetically minor extra powers for Holyrood over income tax:

"Scotland will not be getting more money. It will simply be accountable for raising more of its money. I hope that dispels some myths."

Living wage

And none of their verbal promises offer any power to increase the level of the national minimum wage in a devolved Holyrood. Nor the levels of pensions, nor benefits.

Yet we live in a slave labour economy, one of the root causes of people relying on foodbanks to fend off starvation.

The current 'adult' minimum wage is worth only 35 per cent of average wages in the UK. Even a modest catching up with the 46 per cent of average wages enjoyed in France - hardly a socialist Nirvana! - would mean £8.14 an hour minimum.

And if this country matched New Zealand's national minimum wage as a proportion of average earnings, it would rise to £9.55 an hour. Hardly a king's ransom, but a real transformation of millions of workers' lives.

Job creation

The Yes campaign has a chance and a duty to focus on issues like a decent living minimum wage for all over 16, with pensions to match: the SSP has campaigned for at least £9 an hour, based on two-thirds of male median earnings.

The Yes campaign likewise needs to make more of a vision of massive re-industrialization of Scotland, centred around house building to tackle the 157,000-strong waiting list, and green jobs in the potential Saudi Arabia of clean, renewable energy that Scotland's offshore conditions alone could create. Well-paid, dignified jobs and apprenticeships.

Diversify to defend and create jobs

And defense industry workers could be guaranteed decent, secure jobs as part of such a plan, by designing and constructing the engineering equipment for the green energy sector.

Instead of relying on war and slaughter for work, the shipbuilders on the Clyde could use their skills to build such equipment, on top of the need to build a fleet of ferries.

Industry experts calculate that the insane £3bn spent to build each aircraft carrier could instead be used to build 200 new ferries, and that that would generate ten times as many jobs in the yards!

And Scotland needs 100 new ferries to replace the aging domestic fleet and meet new EU regulations on clean fuel. As a modest minimum, all that could create five times as many shipyard jobs as now exist, a sharp rebuttal to the vicious scaremongering and blackmail of the Unionists.

But such a plan can only fully succeed if energy in all it's forms, and the shipyards, are taken into democratic public ownership - something the three factions of Thatcherism who dominate Westminster would never countenance.

Transform Scotland

As we enter the last phase of campaigning, targeting workers with concrete alternatives, explaining how their lives and standards of living could be transformed - provided
independence is used to reshape Scotland from top to bottom - is critical to winning a Yes majority.

And the talent, knowledge of life and work, and the vast levels of thinking and engagement this campaign has stoked up all bode well for the future.

We need to hammer the lies of Labour, remind workers of their real track record, and paint a picture of how Scotland could be if the working class majority seize the chance and then construct a socialist government in an independent state.

Workers have least to lose, most to gain, by breaking from the Billionaires' Breadline Britain.

UKIP: NO FRIEND OF WORKERS!

The election of 24 UKIP MEPs; the fact they topped the poll in England; their massively increased share of the vote (up 11 points since 2009 to 27.5%); and the open calls of some Tories for a pact or coalition with them for Westminster governments, should be a loud, frightening wake-up call to workers in Scotland who are pondering what to do on 18 September.

UKIP's racism and xenophobic anti-Europeanism is reasonably well known by many people in Scotland. 
Hardly known at all - largely buried from view by the sycophantic media that has consciously built them up as a means to siphon off the growing disgust with the mainstream parties that might otherwise be attracted to voices on the left - is their rank hypocrisy and their viciously anti-working class agenda.

Ruin and right-wing populism

UKIP appeals to people ruined by the crisis in capitalism. The likes of small business people and the self-employed who are crushed between the bankers and multinational corporate giants, and sections of workers facing destitution and desperation due to the chronic shortage of decent jobs and housing.
Untrammeled capitalism, deregulated under successive Tory and Labour governments, has meant a cataclysmic shock to people's systems, their sense of stability, so some grab at UKIP's easy-sounding explanations: their scapegoating of immigrants, their denunciation of EU bureaucracy, their demonization of the allegedly 'work-shy', and their railing against the corruption of the three big pro-capitalist parties in Britain.
The hypocrisy and inconsistency of UKIP on these issues is nauseating - but rarely if ever exposed by a media which has hoisted them to prominence as a means to drag disgruntled voters to 'the BNP in blazers' rather than risk the anger of ruined workers finding a voice on the socialist left.

UKIP corruption
Whilst thundering against corruption and 'foreigners', UKIP's election strategist was Neil Hamilton, former Tory MP, expelled from Westminster for taking cash in brown envelopes off Mohamed al Fayed.
In the same vein, Farage claimed £2million in expenses as an MEP up to the year 2009 - and chose his German wife from amongst 400 (British) applicants for the job of his parliamentary secretary.
Two of the twelve UKIP MEPs elected in 2004 were expelled for money laundering and false accounts.
Farage was recently rumbled for his secret tax account - a tax dodge - in the Isle of Man, but the mainstream media let it drop as an issue after a few days, in stark contrast to their hounding of so-called benefit cheats, day and daily, for years.
So much for UKIP's anti-corruption ticket - a potent weapon of appeal amongst a population heartily sick of the corruption of British politics, which has accelerated exponentially since the ideological convergence of Labour and Tory.

Racist lies
UKIP's brutal anti-immigrant propaganda has not and can not be countered by any of the big parties in Westminster, for the simple reason they first created the platform for UKIP to pour out their bile, and because the Tory and Labour leadership to some extent or another share their scapegoating of 'foreigners' for the plague of unemployment and poor housing blighting capitalist Britain.
Not a whisper from Tory or Labour politicians about the lies and nonsense about a flood of Romanians and Bulgarians into Britain since new EU regulations took effect in January; in fact the numbers of people from these countries entering the UK this year has taken a nose-dive!
Not a word from the British establishment that contrary to the xenophobic rants of UKIP, the NHS depends on 40% of its nursing staff and 30% of its doctors coming from abroad, and that it would collapse without immigration.
Not a single headline to highlight the Manchester University report that last year alone, immigrants to the UK contributed (in taxes) over £8.8billion more than they took back in any form of benefit.
One incident sums up the fact that UKIP is dragging the other major parties to the right, rather than Labour countering their rightwing British nationalist claptrap: UKIP pounded the Tories into declaring a ban on all access to benefits and the NHS to immigrants for their first two years of residence. Labour rightly denounced this as terrible...and then said they would only do it for the first ONE year!!

Jobs, housing  - and socialism
It's impossible to counter UKIP on jobs, wages, housing and immigration without advocating a socialist solution to the problems causing havoc to millions facing the consequences of capitalism and the bankers' profiteering.
We need masses of work done, for instance, to tackle homelessness, slum housing, overcrowding and fuel poverty. If the government funded councils and local housing associations to build, renovate and insulate hundreds of thousands of houses in Scotland in the lifespan of the first independent parliament, that would create jobs and apprenticeships, as well as cutting poverty. And the jobs could be well paid, with a decent living minimum wage, which would counter the 'race to the bottom' favoured by capitalist employers and successive Westminster governments, who currently dip into a large pool of skilled and desperate 'reserve army of labour' to drive down wages.
And if some of those doing the work came from abroad, most people wouldn't care, so long as there were plenty of jobs for all.
Add to that the potential Klondike available from green energy in Scotland, where hundreds of thousands could be employed to develop, build and operate clean energy supplies, not for private profit but for public need.
In turn these and other job-creating measures would require funding from progressive taxation of the obscenely rich - including the ten richest Scots who between them own wealth of £12billion  - plus democratic public ownership of energy, construction, banking and transport.
And that's a million miles from what UKIP offers working class people.

The flame of Thatcherism
"I'm the only politician keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive".
It wasn't Cameron or Clegg who said that, though it could be! Nor Ed Miliband, though in practice it would be true of New Labour's  devotion to the so-called 'free market' and capitalist inequality. It was the 'man of the people', the cheeky chap down the pub, UKIP's Nigel Farage.
UKIP has a totally contradictory clutch of policies, designed to fool different layers of small business people and ruined workers into voting for their right-wing populism.

Vicious UKIP assaults on workers
They openly support privatization of the NHS, to permit people to jump the queue by being able to pay for it.
They want to privatize big chunks of the education system, with vouchers for parents to buy places in private schools.
They generally want more 'free trade', 'deregulation' of business and rampant privatization - former City of London trader Farage is truly keeping the flame of Thatcherism alive.
UKIP want to abolish the statutory 5.6 weeks of paid annual holidays workers have won in this country through generations of trade union struggle.
They even want to end statutory redundancy pay - 'free trade' capitalism means total freedom to exploit workers.
As well as opposing women being on company boards on the grounds that UKIP think women are inferior players of poker, chess and bridge (!!), they want to slash maternity pay by 50 per cent to a miserly £64 a week!

UKIP favour even deeper cuts to jobs and public services than the ConDem coalition. Days after the TUC held its demo in London of over 250,000 in March 2011 against the Westminster Coalition's public sector cuts, UKIP held one - pathetically small - demanding MORE cuts!
In the face of obscene new levels of inequality - which fuels the anger and disillusionment of millions with the traditional political parties who help create these conditions, which in turn UKIP taps into with populist demagogy - they advocate a flat rate income tax. So under a UKIP (or Tory/UKIP) Westminster government, low paid workers and the middle class would pay proportionately far more of their incomes in tax than the bankers, mineral-exploiting capitalists, billionaires and landowners who dominate ownership of wealth.

Race to the top!
UKIP plays on real fears and insecurities in the face of a storm of capitalist assaults on working class conditions. But their policies would lay waste to all the concessions won by past generations of workers; divide the working class and therefore undermine our ability to fight back; and would mean an accelerated race to the bottom for working class people in the jungle of primitive capitalism UKIP favours.
Workers need Scottish independence to escape the prison of a Tory/UKIP government; unity in struggle against capitalist exploitation; and socialist change to ensure a 'race to the top' on jobs, wages, housing and democratic rights.