INTERNATIONAL and THE WEEK can justly claim to have taken the initiative in discussing the issues raised for the left and the labour movement by Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Gradually, other journals are taking up the discussion - a hopeful sign. Recently, both the NEW STATESMAN and New LEFT REVIEW have carried articles. To develop the discussion let us examine their ideas.
Paul Johnson, in the NEW STATESMAN of July 26th, waxes impatient with "Nationalist Cloud-Cuckoo Land", and Tom Nairn, in the May/June NEW LEFT REVIEW, offers us "Scotland - the Three Dreams". At the outset let us assure the reader of the material existence of the subjects under discussion: the nations of Scotland and Wales.
It is because Mr. Johnson refuses to start from reality that he has so much difficulty in grasping the issues he is discussing: he keeps catching strains of the tune like the music of the elfin piper, through the mist of his ideas, and as he clambers through the hill and glen of his argument he becomes more angry and perplexed. But he never gets any nearer to the source of the melody.
"Where does one begin", he asks, "to refute a proposition so preposterously compounded of adolescent emotionalism, political naiveity, phoney economics and sheer barefaced opportunism?" Where indeed when one has the barefaced opportunism, not to mention political naiveity, to tell the Welsh miner and the unemployed Clydeside plater that "Britain is going through an unpleasant period of adjustment.......which is all the more harsh because it has been so often and so cravenly postponed", but that Mr. Johnson finds it "....an exciting time in which to live, because our arrogance and complacency has received a brutal shaking, and we are now forcing ourselves to consider entirely new ideas, and discard baseless assumptions...."
Had he been fortunate enough to pick an unusually sweet-tempered ex-miner or ex-plater to voice his opinions to, Mr. Johnson might have been told that his listener was in the process of discarding such baseless assumptions as the right to a steady job, was being forced to consider such entirely new ideas as working in another industry for half the wages he had previously earned, or leaving his familiar area and friends, moving to England or overseas.
This is not to say that his characterisation of the philosophy of the SNP and Plaid Cymru does not have some justice. "....the firm is doing badly, so let's break it up and go our separate ways." But to understand the most important element in the nationalist upsurge: the flood of working class support; it is totally inadequate.
The gains of the nationalists have been in direct proportion to the attacks on the working class by the Labour Government and its failure to convince the working class that they will receive anything else. In face of the lack of any alternative, particularly a socialist alternative, the workers have turned to the lively, youthful, forces of the nationalists. Unlike Mr. Johnson, they cannot justify the betrayals of this Government by indulging in moral abstractions - such an attitude is far more easily sustained on a comfortable income.
However, more is involved than simple disorientation by Wilsonism, the nationalists strike deep chords in the minds of millions of Scottish and Welsh people, we can find a clue to the reasons for this if we examine some of Mr. Johnson's dishonest, as distinct from ignorant, arguments.
"Ulster has had its own Parliament since the twenties....Their unemployment rate is consistently higher than that of any other part of the United Kingdom....Yet even their meagre prosperity seems attractive to independent Ireland.... If the Scots and Welsh have reason to envy the wealth of the South East - and they have - this is a consequence not of political structure but of economic geography. It can only be mitigated by purposeful policies determined and operated by the Union Government. Once this union is dissolved blind economic forces would take over,..Under a United Kingdom, English men are content, or at any rate prepared, to accept and largely finance the policy of regional development. They would have no such moral spur, still less political compulsion, once the Celts opted out.
Quite apart from the nauseating insinuation, that the Scots and Welsh ought to be bloody grateful for what they have been given, this is a complete inversion of the economic effects of capitalism on a historical scale on the "Celtic Fringe"; the wealth of the South East is not the result of a fortuitous accident of "economic geography", but of the centralising force of capitalism which is more and more concentrating wealth in particular areas of this planet and in the hands of particular sections of the population.
In the colonial world the effects of this are famine and starvation. Now this tendency manifests itself in the imperialist countries themselves. But not only that: from the [illegible] capitalism imposed an atrophying and piratical regime on these nations. Starting by imposing feudal property relations on the land as opposed to the old communal tenure of the clan system, It drove the people from the land and decanted them into its factories and sweatshops or sent them overseas to die like animals in the floating coffins of its emigration ships. This process has been examined with precision and passion in such books as Thomas Johnston's "A History of the Working Classes in Scotland" and James Connolly's "Labour in Irish History".
If these nations are economic backwaters, with large underpopulated areas - and are becoming more and more so - this is because of the development of British capitalism. And this is one of the powerful factors which helps the nationalists - the smoke from the burning clachans has not yet dispersed!
Tom Nairn's efforts are much more rewarding, if only because he is a Scot and therefore understands the problem a little better than Mr. Johnson.
His article is basically a merciless dissection [illegible] right-wing of the SNP, placing these ideas firmly in the context of Scottish petit-bourgeois thinking, it is literate and well-written and to an (ex) Presbyterian from Edinburgh like the writer of this article, devastatingly accurate in its characterisation of Scottish Bible-and-Tawse ideology. One passage is worth quoting: "The Irish rose up and wrenched their independence from imperialism when the latter was at the apex of its power. With sleekit Presbyterian moderation, the Scots have restrained themselves until it is abundantly plain that the English would be incapable of stopping an insurrection on the Isle of Wight.")
However, as an analysis of Scottish nationalism it is too one-sided to grapple with the problems which the phenomenon presents for Scottish socialists. This comes out when he attempts to find a historical place for this nationalism.
"Nations and nationalism are aspects of the bourgeois epoch of world history....it has two sorts of justification as a historical force. Firstly, as a necessary means of escape from feudal or other primitive systems that are an impossible barrier to economic and social progress. Secondly,....as an analogous instrument for the non-European societies to escape from.....Western imperialism.
"Where is Scottish nationalism located in this perspective? In its present form, nowhere. That is, as a tragic dream comparable to the other dreams of Scotland's history precisely in its remoteness from those real conditions which could give it the historical significance it implicitly claims."
This discussion purely in terms of ideo[illegible] and not also in terms of the forces it mo[illegible] the political/economic situation in which it is developing, and the various currents which are active within it, is the source of the inability to fit Scottish nationalism into its historical [illegible]ries, for example: Belgium and Canada. Capitalism strains the seams of the old nation-states - this separatism is part of the reaction to the centralist tendencies of latter day monopoly capitalism. These movements, though petit-bourgeois in ideology and leadership, can often mobilise working class support on quite a large scale and can often be quite radical in their demands, due to their opposition to the main current of capitalist development.
His one-sidedness in Tom Nairn's outlook prevents him from giving a clear answer to the problem he poses at the end of his article: "The only possible sane reaction to the dilemma is a socialist nationalism, whose dream has dimensions which really correspond to those of the stubborn visionary drive towards identity we have been considering." But he can pose no perspective because he searches for this socialist nationalism solely on the plane of ideology.
There is, of course, no easy solution to this problem, but what Tom Nairn does not seem to see is that the workers turn to the SNP not because they are taken up with the Knox-and-Sabbath ideas of the Scottish middle class, but because they have real economic problems which only the natio-[illegible] they vaguely want a Scotland which they can control more closely.
This then is the problem in real terms: how convince the workers that they can achieve th[illegible] things and solve their problems only by [illegible]throwing capitalism? If anyone says that he has the solution at this moment he will be worthy of suspicion, the discussion has barely begun, but that solution will only come out of a discussion which grapples with the reality in all its com[illegible].