NAIL LABOUR'S LIES TO WORKERS

The working class holds the key to the Referendum vote. And the outcome of the Referendum is key to the prospects of better lives for the working class majority population.
So as 18 September looms, all of us who favour the democratic right to self government for the Scottish people, as opposed to Tory dictatorship from Westminster governments effectively elected by the middle class 'swing voters' of so-called Middle England, need to demolish the mountain of lies pouring down from the No camp and mainstream media.
And the most dangerous liars of all are Labour politicians; who in the Scottish working class listens to the Tories and their Mini Me LibDems, after all?

 

LIE: voting No means the security and stability of the status quo
Their central lie is that we have a choice between the stability and security of the status quo by voting No, and the scary insecurities - nay Armageddon - of independence.
Leave the scaremongering to Better Together, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, Johann Lamont and their likes: the harsh truth of life under Westminster rule already for working class people smashes their lies to smithereens. And a glance of what a No vote will lead to should be enough to scare the living daylights out of anyone who is not a banker, billionaire or over-paid Labour MP.
LIE: pensions safe with Westminster
They tell us workers' pensions are threatened by independence. But a string of No politicians - Labour's Ian Davidson, Coalition Pensions Minister Steven Webb included - have previously blurted out in parliamnet that state pensions would be perfectly safe and secure after independence. So too has the DWP, as far back as January 2013. Which hasn't stopped the lies from pairing out since, of course.
Many public sector workers are in pension schemes totally unconnected to the UK anyway. Strathclyde Pensions is a large example. 

And in other countries affected by independence, such as Ireland, private sector company pensions have been protected by agreement between governments.
So a Yes vote is absolutely no threat to workers' pensions. On the contrary, a No vote is a dire threat to us all: Westminster is rapidly raising retirement age to 70 for men and women, imposing increased contributions from workers, and slashing back the value of the state pension for those who manage to live long enough to receive it.
A No vote would leave a devolved government with absolutely no say over the criminal poverty level of the UK state pension. On average across 25 European countries, the state pension is worth 57 per cent of the average wage; the UK is the worst in the EU, with a state pension only worth 17 per cent of the average UK wage!
A Yes vote would give powers to Holyrood to banish that abominable treatment of older people, and the SSP will be at the fore of a battle to base state pensions on the level of a decent living minimum wage (at least £9 an hour in current figures), with voluntary retirement at 60. 

LIE: get more powers for Scotland by voting No to all powers!
The Labour liars tell us they and their Tory allies will concede more powers if we vote No to winning all powers of government to Scotland! You couldn't make it up. Nor can you afford to believe it. These promises are from parties that have a track record of serialized broken promises. On top of which Boris Johnson, arch Tory rightwing reactionary masquerading as a lovable buffoon, has entered the ring as future contender for Tory Prime Minister, telling the press "we don't need to give extra powers to Scotland".
But imagine these untrustworthy bunch DID grant a few extra powers in the wake of a No vote, under threat of a growing clamour for self-rule; what would these powers amount to? In essence, the power to choose which public services in Scotland are slashed, which privatized, which jobs cut, which set of workers to suffer a pay freeze, as Westmister still holds the purse strings and cuts Scotland's pocket money.

 

 

LIE: Scotland's NHS is safe under Westminster
Take the case of the NHS. Devolution up to now has shielded the Scottish health service from the worst excesses of its demolition in England. But the wrecking ball is swinging faster every day down south. 

The last Labour government doubled the amount of NHS privatisation in its last four years in office. 

The Tories' 2012 Health and Social Care Act has literally abolished government responsibity for health provision!  It transferred £80billion of NHS assets from public health bodies to 'Clinical Commissioning Groups' who then advertise services for privateers to take over. Right now £5.8billion of England's NHS is being advertised to the private sector, on top of the £10bn sold off last year.
As night follows day, a No vote would mean the privatisations and cutbacks in England's NHS spreading the same cancer to Scotland's devolved NHS. Why? The Scottish budget from Westminster is calculated as a percentage of government spending in England. Right now England's £100bn NHS budget triggers £10.2bn payment to Scotland through the Barnett Formula. That's £10.2bn compared to a total Scottish NHS budget of £12bn, and a total Scottish government budget of £30bn. 

 

A No vote is bad for your health

These cold figures merely back up the horrendous prospects of cutbacks and NHS privatsiations, here in Scotland, that a No vote would lead to. And that hellish future is made more sure after the deal struck between the US and EU countries, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, whereby US corporations can sue any government or health authority that blocks their takeover of the NHS (and other services) through privatisation!
A Yes vote would give Scotland not only power over NHS decisions, but over the funding and budgets that underpin those decisions. And the SSP will be at the forefront of a battle to build and invest in a modern, publicly owned NHS - including integration of pharmaceutical supplies to a public NHS - funded by taxation of big business and the stinking rich minority who today can afford the private health care unavailable to the rest of us.

 

LIE: independence threatens shipyard and defence workers' jobs

Another Labour lie is that independence equals job insecurity, particularly for shipyard and defence industry workers. Just glance at how secure these workers are under Westminster rule! After 111 years in business, Port Glasgow's Ferguson shipyard has been shut. The last remaining commercial yard on the Clyde has shed it's 77 workers - under the glorious advantages of the UK! 

One of the reasons is the chronic dependency of Britain's remaining shipyards on warships, aircraft carriers (with no aircrafts affordable!) and the entire war machine, rather than a well planned commercial and socially useful plan of production in areas like new ferries to replace Scotland's aging fleet, or the potential Klondike of research, development and construction of marine engineering equipment for the offshore energy industry. 

 

Jobs not bombs 

A Yes vote would give us the powers to implement - and the SSP would have the political will to demand - public ownership of the shipyards, to secure and expand jobs, diversifying these workers' skills into such socially useful, peaceful production. 

Likewise with those dependent on Trident weapons of mass destruction for an income: leaving aside the £100bn cost of Trident replacement, just the upkeep of the current monster will cost Scotland £1bn for the next decade, which independent research (by the Holyrood search unit) has shown could instead pay for 2,700 teachers, or 3,300 nurses, or 125 new primary schools, or 40 secondaries, or 40 community hospitals! And Trident only accounts for 520 jobs anyway, which could easily be protected doing other work.

 

TRUTH: vote Yes or suffer the consequences 

The choices are stark. The horrible insecurities and cataclysmic assaults on the working class that a No vote would usher in. Or the unique opportunity for radical and socialist change that a Yes vote would empower the working class with. 

Life never offers guarantees. But provided working people - including those engaged in political campaigning for the first time in their lives through the Yes campaign - get and stay organised to battle for decent jobs, a living minimum wage, increased pensions and benefits, expansion of the NHS and other public services, and demand the public ownership and taxation of the rich to fund these, then Scotland can become a beacon, a model of equality that workers in other countries will aspire to imitate.

That's the real choices - not the serialized lies of Labour and their Tory allies. 

And the SSP will continue to build for an independent socialist Scotland where these dreams become reality.

 

 

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.

INDEPENDENCE, SOLIDARITY, SOCIALISM #indyref

When it comes to reporting the stance of trade unionists on the Referendum, the picture is consciously distorted in the mainstream media by announcements of national union leaderships declaring their adherence to Better Together, or their sub-contracted messengers, United with Labour.
Under the surface, a groundswell of trade union members are concluding independence is the quickest, and maybe the only, escape route from decades of miserable poverty, job insecurity and capital's dictatorship over their working lives.

It is no accident that the leaderships of giant unions like UNITE and UNISON - plus the STUC as a whole - have remained studiously unaffiliated to either the Yes or No campaigns, whilst in fact regularly lacerating Better Together for its lack of vision and failure to persuade workers of any benefits from continued UK rule. These union leaderships know full well the ranks wouldn't tolerate affiliation to the Tory-funded, Labour-fronted BT. So their Labour affiliation has not led to them toeing the party line. And in the case of UNISON, this is despite pressure from UK general secretary Dave Prentis to accept a huge sum of members' money to affiliate to BT!

Members in revolt

Even in those unions which used UK-wide conferences to impose support for a No vote on the Scottish membership, usually with little or even no prior discussion in Scottish branches, members are refusing to obey the dictats of remote, overpaid national leaderships.
USDAW members on or just above the pathetic minimum wage have a radically different view of the glories of Britain from that of a Labour-loving general secretary on six or seven times the wage of a full-time retail worker.

ASLEF members are angry at the lack of real debate prior to their affiliation to BT, and are now insisting on debates to inform members prior to September.
GMB members are furious at the way their union leadership nailed them to the No camp, which is why Scottish officers have been desperate to disassociate from BT, clinging onto the veneer of being United with Labour instead.


CWU sham consultation 

The CWU leadership are the latest to hoist their flag for the No camp, after an exercise in sham consultation in Scotland. They didn't ignore the Scottish membership as brazenly as the likes of USDAW; they held a series of city-based debates, with members invited to hear a speaker from both sides. But as one of those who spoke in some of the debates for the Yes side, I can testify that the recent UK conference decision to call for a No vote flies in the face of the sentiment of those meetings. 

The leadership circulated scaremongering bulletins to every member, lifted straight from the book of the BT fear factory. At the meetings they consciously never took a vote after the debate. In some of the meetings there was a clear majority for Yes, judging by comments during and after, and in the rest a substantial Yes minority - all despite the leadership documents. 

But fury at the UK union leadership wielding the vote of UK conference - where over 90 per cent of delegates are from outside Scotland - has only added to the determination of CWU activists to campaign for a Yes vote.

The Scottish Prison Officers' Association debated and voted overwhelmingly for Yes. 

The RMT is about to announce the outcome of their consultative members' meetings, where several were enthusiastically for independence. 

And PCS held an extremely democratic consultation of members, where not one single branch in the whole of Scotland supported the No camp.

Escaping the Tories 

Workers face a stark choice. Continued, and indeed escalated, attacks on the working class from a Westminster government regardless of what colour rosette the Prime Minister wears after the May 2015 General election. Or kicking the door open to radical redistribution of wealth and power towards the working class through Scottish self-government, not by relying on the pro-big business SNP, but by fighting and organising to shape Scotland into a socialist society.

The latest polls are reason enough to vote to escape Westminster, with the Tories ahead of Labour and UKIP leapfrogging the LibDems. But even if Labour defied most predictions and won in 2015, what future do they offer workers?


Labour prepared the path for Cameron

We can't afford to forget 13 years of Labour in government preceded the current Etonian butchers, and acted as John the Baptist preparing for the arrival of Christ. Labour initiated the vicious Workfare schemes and benefits sanctions now carried out with the zeal of maniacs by the Coalition, driving 70,000 people a month into destitution. And worse is to come, with threats of daily visits to the JobCentre, compulsory work for no wages - all of which not only condemns the unemployed to pauperism, but helps drive down the wages of those in jobs. And Labour has promised to be tough on benefits too!

Labour retained Thatcher's anti-union laws, now being added to by the Coalition, with plans to effectively outlaw public sector strikes. Westminster are the ones to ban solidarity action between workers - not some bogus splitting of the working class through Scottish independence.

Labour jokers

When Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown promise 'the best of both worlds', with a 'strong Scottish parliament and the benefits of sharing resources across the regions within the UK', with tantalizing promises of only one Xmas until a Labour government that will usher in social justice, I don't know if they're standup comedians or downright stupid, or just lying.

Social justice in the UK after 13 years of Labour in office means the most regionally unequal state in the whole of Europe. As even Coalition LibDem lapdog Vince Cable admits, the City of London "sucks the life out of the rest of the country".
Since the massive recession, London has had twice the growth rates of any other part of the UK, and whilst 284,000 jobs were lost across the UK from 2007-12, 267,000 jobs were created in London.
In Scotland today, the 'best of both worlds' means the richest tenth of the population enjoy 900 times (yes, nine hundred) as much wealth as the poorest tenth of Scots.

Organise to shape Scotland

Independence is a sure way to escape Tory dictatorship, which is a real and present threat up until 2020 or beyond if we remain chained to Westminster.

But that is not to delude workers that a land of milk and honey automatically follows a Yes vote. The wealth is there aplenty in Scotland, but it depends entirely on who owns and controls it.
The SSP wants independence as a means to very desirable ends. 

To banish poverty pay with a decent level of legally enforced national minimum wage - at least £9 an hour in today's figures. 

To end the nightmare of Workfare and benefit sanctions, with massive job creation in housing, green energy, public services - plus a caring welfare system for the young, elderly, sick or disabled, funded by taxation of the rich and big business. 

To scrap the anti union laws and enshrine the right to work, the right to strike, the right to take solidarity action in the constitution. 

To demand widespread democratic public ownership of the banks, energy, transport, construction, and major industries - with elected, accountable workers' representatives making up the majority on boards of management.


Internationalism

These steps towards a socialist Scotland would vastly enhance the lives of the working class majority in Scotland, but also enhance the fighting spirits and chances of similar transformation being fought for by workers in neighbouring countries. 

Workers and their unions should join the fight to shape such a socialist future.
Independence, socialism and international solidarity should be the watchwords of the trade union movement - not surrender to the dictatorship of capital and its various political mouthpieces.

MAY DAY, MAY DAY: INDEPENDENCE, SOLIDARITY, SOCIALISM

- we have nothing to lose but our chains!


Workers celebrating socialism and internationalism on May Day events will doubtless be subjected to the annual ritual of Labour politicians making nauseating declarations of their undying devotion to the working class, international solidarity and socialism.
These chancers don't even blush as they make speeches that totally contradict what they practice all the rest of the year.
They fail to explain how introducing what became the Bedroom Tax under a Labour government - and Labour's refusal to pledge its abolition for a clear 6 months after it was imposed - helped the cause of workers' unity. 

They won't be highlighting Labour's track record of retaining the most vicious anti-union laws in Europe - with Tony Blair boasting about it! - for their entire 13 years in government. They won't want us to recall that it was a Labour government that dragged us into bloody imperialist wars as they prattle platitudes about internationalism.

NEW LABOUR HEIGHTS OF HYPOCRISY 

But this year sees an added layer of hypocrisy from Labour politicians, as they do their damnedest to block democratic self-government for the working class majority population of Scotland.
The Better Together fear factory is funded by Tories and Tory-supporting big business tycoons. £1.3m was donated to them by 19 such multi-millionaires on the eve of Xmas - hoping it was a good time to bury bad news!
The exposure of CBI Scotland as open funders and advocates of continued misrule by Westminster reinforces the message: the chief exploiters and enemies of workers' rights and socialism are at the heart of opposing Scottish self-rule.

LABOUR'S 'SOCIAL JUSTICE'!

But they need to subcontract out their dirty work to Labour to have any chance of fooling enough working people into voting NO. That's why 'United With Labour' was set up, fronted by the likes of Gordon Brown. That figleaf has been blown away, exposing the naked collaboration between Labour leaders and the Tories, with Brown most recently using the toxic, Tory-funded Better Together to tell us we will get 'social justice with Labour by voting against independence'.
Only victims of extreme amnesia could fall for that line. 

Remember the 'social justice' we enjoyed under Brown, Blair and Alastair Darling's Labour governments of 1997-2010?! Rampant privatization, including attempts to sell off Royal Mail; the worst levels of inequality since 1863; announcement of 100,000 civil service job losses; successive assaults on benefits; introduction of student tuition fees that exclude working class people from higher education; wholesale school closures to cut costs at kids' expense; threats to jail Glasgow city council strike leaders by the Labour council; a government - in the exact words of one of its central leaders, Peter Mandelson - that was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich", whilst poverty stalked the land for millions. Not to even mention the wars, or Trident.

SICK JOKE

And Ed Miliband has made it plain a Labour government - even if we assume they're elected in 2015, which is far from certain - will stick to Tory public spending cuts; backed the Tory cap on benefits but refuses to cap private landlords' rents; will not renationalise even the railways or Royal Mail, let alone the rip-off energy companies or the banks; and has absolutely no intention of repealing the vicious anti-union laws. They use weasel words about stopping exploitation under zero hours contracts, but point blank refuse to abolish them.
So voting NO to democratic control over who governs Scotland and then praying for a Labour government at Westminster that offers social justice is black comedy, a sick joke.

WORKERS' UNITY AND INDY

But the most insulting lie peddled by Labour leaders - one which their Tory pals know they couldn't get away with uttering - is that independence threatens the unity and solidarity of the working class and their trade unions. The theme that workers in Scotland have far more in common with a worker in London or Liverpool than with a laird in Scotland.
Those of us campaigning as socialists and trade unionists for independence welcome lectures on workers' unity and solidarity from Labour politicians a lot less than the proverbial Grannies welcome tutorials on the art of sucking eggs!

Workers and socialists in Scotland have nothing in common with the Brian Soutars of this world, any more than with the Richard Bransons. Both make a fortune out of the privatization of transport by successive Tory and Labour governments. And we have everything in common with bus drivers or railway workers, regardless of whether they're from Perth or Poole, Lothians or Liverpool, the south west of Scotland or the south west of England.

WAITING FOR WESTMINSTER'S PERMISSION?!

But since when did the unity and class solidarity of workers ever depend on the permission, let alone the encouragement, of Westminster governments - whether Tory or indeed Labour?
When the Tories imposed the hated Poll Tax 25 years ago - where 'a dustman paid the same as a duke' - they didn't seem to think we were 'Better Together": they imposed it a year earlier in Scotland, in a crude attempt to divide and conquer.
Did working class people wait for permission from Westminster to revolt against the Tory tax? Or for leadership by Westminster Labour MPs, most of whom whinged about its unfairness but told us there was nothing we could do to defeat it?
No, working class people, often led by those of us who ten years later went on to create the SSP, organised a mass rebellion that eventually toppled Thatcher as well as her tax. And those of us living in England at the time didn't sit back and ignore the battles being waged by Scottish working class communities during the year when it only applied to Scotland. We built solidarity with the Scottish working class; for instance I organised a contingent of 1,000 people from Merseyside to the first big Glasgow anti-poll tax demo. 

CROSS-BORDER LESSONS IN ACTION

And we learnt from the experiences of the Scots, inspired by their defiance, spreading the mass non-payment campaign to 18 million people. Workers' unity and solidarity was neither dependent on Westminster nor the Labour leadership, and crossed the borders of Scotland, England and Wales.
Why would it be any different when Scottish working class people won self-rule and insisted on radical social and economic change? Surely English workers would demand 'some of the same', encouraged to defy and defeat the dictatorship of the Tories and the dictatorship of capital?

LABOUR'S PHONEY SOLIDARITY

Where were Labour's bogus evangels of workers' solidarity when those of us who founded the SSP organised workplace solidarity tours across Scotland for the 500 locked-out Liverpool dockers, or striking Tameside care workers, or victimized Bristol civil servants? If they'd taken part they would have found not a single worker in Scotland spurned the appeal for solidarity on the grounds these workers were English.
And why would that powerful instinct for solidarity with fellow workers, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, suddenly vanish once the Scottish working class majority won self-government? Is Johann Lamont about to tell us they will be 'genetically re-programmed' to become petty, narrow nationalists, against workers from other countries?


SCOTTISH INTERNATIONALISM

Too many Labour loyalists at the tops of the trade union movement ape these arguments that independence, an end to rule by the UK Westminster elite, would wreck workers' solidarity.
How then do they explain the rich traditions of Scottish workers trekking across the Pyrenees in the 1930s to fight alongside Spanish workers against Franco's fascist dictatorship? Spain has never been part of the UK!
How explain the more recent internationalism of the cream of the Scottish working class in support of South African workers and youth defying bloodthirsty apartheid? Or with Chilean workers slaughtered by the fascist Pinochet regime in 1973 - a government first recognized by Westminster's Tory regime? Or for Danish bus workers, Belfast car workers or Nigerian journalists - each of whom I and others built solidarity for in Scotland?

DIVIDE AND RULE

Genuine workers' solidarity has never stopped at Dover, let alone Gretna Green. And it has never been dependent on the permission, let alone the support, of ANY Westminster governments, whether Tory or indeed Labour.
On the contrary, successive Westminster regimes - including those never voted for by a Scottish majority - did their damnedest to divide and defeat workers' struggles. To name but one example: they privatized and broke up the railways into dozens of separate companies doing the same work. Combined with anti-union laws banning so-called secondary action - in other words, solidarity action! - this was used to legally ban railway workers doing the same jobs on the same tracks from taking action together against victimization, pay cuts or worsened conditions.


TRADE UNION DEMOCRACY

Too many trade union leaders confuse workers' unity and solidarity with their own centralized power over the union, its decisions and its membership.
Those of us who are trade unionists in the SSP have consistently argued for democratic Scottish conferences of elected union representatives to decide on issues within Scotland. But simultaneously we have advocated democratic meetings of elected shop stewards or union reps across national boundaries within the same services or multinational employers. That would strengthen solidarity, concretely, as well as being a huge boost to members' democratic control of their own unions.

INDEPENDENCE, SOLIDARITY, SOCIALISM

Within an independent Scotland we will fight for socialist change - progressive taxation of big business and the rich; democratic public ownership of all services, banks, energy, construction, transport and big industry.
We will argue for majority control by working class people in the running of these industries and services - a model that workers outside Scotland would be inspired to emulate.
And we will champion genuine workers' solidarity, not just with our nearest neighbours, but also far beyond the boundaries of this island - including through elected international shop stewards' meetings.
Scottish independence would speed up the prospects of radical improvements to the lives of working class people - provided we build a powerful socialist force - and thereby assist workers in other countries.
And a final promise: unlike Labour politicians, we will commit to this all year round, not just once a year in May Day speeches!