The election result in Scotland was quite distinct. Labour's share of the poll was 35 per cent compared to 28 per cent in Britain as a whole. Labour was nearly seven points ahead of the Tories and took 41 of the 72 Scots seats. George Kerevan argues that this Scottish exceptionalism is about to become another cardinal fact of British politics, for the North Britains are preparing to revolt.
The day after the 1983 general election, the leading Scottish quality daily led with the headline: 'Home Rule drums beating after ''no mandate'' for Tories'. The in-built Scots anti-Thatcher majority — which increased from 69 per cent of the vote in 1979 to 72 per cent in 1983 — is now fuelling a renewed demand for a Scottish Assembly as a bulwark against the Tory government at Westminster. Faced with a Thatcher government elected by English votes, and set against granting Scottish devolution, the new Home Rule clamour is taking on a decidedly extra-parliamentary character.
George Foulkes, Labour MP for South Ayrshire, has called for his fellow Scottish Members of Parliament to disrupt the proceedings of the mother of Parliaments to force a Tory government to grant a Scottish Assembly. George Galloway, former Labour Party chairperson in Scotland and a leading leftwinger, demanded in Radical Scotland magazine a campaign that 'could make the fight for a Scottish Assembly a central question in British politics, with a world-wide interest beyond. The Scottish local authorities could withdraw all co-operation with St. Andrew's House, there could be demonstrations, selective industrial action, a 'People's March on London' ...'
Even former leader of the anti-devolution wing of the Scottish Labour Party, journalist Brian Wilson, has been heard to mutter that an Assembly is necessary as a defence against Thatcherism. And such pronouncements at leadership level merely reflect a strong grassroots surge of support for Scottish Home Rule as a barricade against another spell of Tory rule. The independent Scottish Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC) favours a radical measure of devolution, its ranks having been swelled of late by many defectors from the SNP '79 Group. The newly formed Scottish Socialist Society, probably as big in absolute numbers as its English counterpart but more representative of activists, has emerged as a pressure group for the Home Rule left in both the Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP).
What is different about the re-emergence of the national question in Scotland is that it is being led from within the Labour Party and not the SNP. The Scottish National Party itself is in serious decline. At the election, its share of the poll fell to just under 12 per cent (332,000 votes) and it was in fourth place behind the Alliance (693,000 votes). For the past four years the SNP has been engaged in a faction fight between left and right culminating in the expulsion of the leadership of the socialist '79 Group and the resignation from the party in protest by Margo MacDonald. Just prior to the general election the expelled socialists were readmitted but this papering over the cracks has not halted the defection of the left-leaning youth from the nationalists. The SNP has not travelled the same leftward course as Plaid Cymru, but remains firmly on the populist right. This has resulted in the massive loss of SNP votes among the working class in the West of Scotland, where it polled only 8.9 per cent.
The failure of the SNP left ensured that the anti-Thatcher vote in heavily proletarian Scotland would go to Labour, and that the demand for anti-Thatcher Home Rule would be reflected in the ranks of the labour movement. But it would be a big mistake to conclude that all is well with labourism in Scotland. The strength of the Scottish Labour Party is in part only a reflection of the more advanced crisis of labourism south of the border. In fact Labour in Scotland saw its share of the poll drop over six points, while the Alliance came from nowhere to get 24 per cent, just behind the Tories. This raises two important theoretical questions. First, what precisely is [illegible] the direction labourism is taking in Scotland? Secondly, how does the re-emergence of the national question relate to the reconstruction of the leadership of the Scottish workers movement and the mobilisation of working class resistance to Thatcherism?
Labourism's unique strength in Scotland rested on a particular network of alliances which are now decomposing: its use of intellectuals as an organic link with society, unlike England where they were mere 'programme writers'; its use of the Communist Party as its industrial arm; its hegemony over the dense concentration of industrial workers in the West of Scotland.
First, the intelligentsia: politically the English intelligentsia as a whole has been either co-opted into the state machine through the Civil Service, or exiled into academic Olympia at Oxbridge. The Labour Party's relationship with its English intellectuals, from the Webbs to Bernard Crick, has been to keep them in the display cabinet. They were for show, not for bringing out where they might contaminate politics with ideas. The British Labour Party's intellectuals talked to other intellectuals. But not so in Scotland.
Scottish labourism would neither have been created nor have survived as the dominant structure in Scottish politics had it not used the local intelligentsia as its social cement. The ethos of 'service' and 'education' as well as the poor material position of these lower middle-class intellectuals propelled them into the Labour Party. From Maxton to Pollock to Ross, school teachers provided the intellectual fodder of Scottish labourism till the values of the party and the educational system itself became inextricably bound up. Further, Labour's Catholic communalism in the West of Scotland ensured that Catholic intellectuals gravitated towards it, linking church and party. Marxist intellectuals joined the Communist Party, but in Scotland there was a mass CP which by dint of its social weight was accepted as an integral part of the labour movement. A 'modus vivendi' existed between Labour and Communist which brought CP intellectuals into the bosom of labourism: witness Hamish Henderson or Ken Alexander. Finally, the national question itself played a role, for whether politically nationalist or not, Scottish intellectuals felt themselves born of a different culture and this 'otherness' spawned a radicalism which fuelled support for the left among the entire intelligentsia.
Today the Scottish intelligentsia has defected from labourism as a creed. In the seventies and eighties it has become overwhelmingly politically nationalist while retaining its old social radicalism. This resulted from a change in the composition and role of intellectuals in Scotland. The sixties and early seventies saw Scottish universities flooded with the sons and daughters of the working class, all imbued with the labourist welfare state notion that education was a passport to the good life. This swollen mass of the new professional middle class rapidly became disenchanted with the realities of secondary school teaching. One side-effect was the wave of teachers' strikes in the seventies, a telling break with the service ethos. Another significant result was the explosion of cultural activity in Scotland in the seventies and eighties, feeding off the frustrations of this new and enlarged intelligensia: suddenly there has appeared an endless outpouring of local writing. In effect this has been a declaration of cultural independence, and almost to a person the new Scottish intelligensia supports Home Rule and the Scottish workers republic rather than London labourism.
This defection from Unionist labourism has been reinforced by the growth of anti-Stalinist Marxism and by the spread of feminism north of the border. These winds have affected not only Scottish labourism but also its Communist Party ally, removing another prop from the rotting labourist edifice. Till the seventies, roughly a quarter of the entire membership of the British Communist Party was concentrated in the greater Glasgow area. While the CP was almost non-existent in that other bastion of labourism, the English north east, in Scotland the CP was powerful in the unions, shop stewards committees and, latterly, in the Scottish TUC (STUC). The result was not a French or Italian-style running fight with social democracy. Rather, there was an alliance.
British labourism is founded on the principle of the division between politics (ie elections) and trade unionism. The Labour Party fights elections, while the unions deal with wages and working conditions. This split results from the actual creation of the Labour Party by the unions as their 'watchdog' in parliament. Elsewhere in Europe this division of labour does not occur. The European socialist parties established their respective union machines as adjuncts of their political machines to organise support, raise cash and make political propaganda effective through strikes. The British model leaves labourism at a disadvantage. The Labour Party machine as such hardly exists outside of election times, for it has no other rationale for existence. Therefore there is no real transmission belt to mobilise working-class support for Labour policies. In Scotland, however, things were different because the mass CP used its weight in the factories to mobilise politically, and did so in the service of labourism.
The Labour Party in Scotland got people elected to parliament and local government, and in return for tacit electoral support let the CP run the unions. There was a whiff of Cold War politics at the start of the fifties but mostly Scottish labourism was prepared to tolerate the CP. In fact there was a degree of 'mixing' of respective ideologies: Scottish labourism is perhaps the most Stalinist variety of labourism within the British state both in terms of political programme (long indistinguishable from that of the CP) and in terms of internal [illegible].
This labourist CP amalgam has now shattered. Communist Party membership has collapsed as the post-sixties generation turned to Trotskyism, feminism and other anti-bureaucratic creeds. The working class has been repelled by the police states of Eastern Europe associated with the Communist Party. The bastions of CP organisation in the shipyards, mines and engineering factories have been destroyed by de-industrialisation. The Scottish CP's political weight now depends only on its residual control of the apparatus of full-time trade union officials — bureaucrats cut off from the factory floor. These developments have left the labourist machine in Glasgow an ageing head without a body.
This decay of the labourist machine has been accelerated by a major revolution in the structure and demography of Labour's traditional voting base, the West of Scotland industrial working class. This was the proletarian heartland which the SNP tried and only just failed to storm in the mid-seventies. What the SNP failed to do, Thatcher's recession is accomplishing. The core section of the working class, the base on which Scottish labourism rested, lies in manufacturing and mining. Here were the strong unions, the CP-controlled shop stewards movement and the male, craft ethos. It is precisely this core section which has been cut to ribbons by the present slump. In 1974, one Scottish worker in three was employed in mining and manufacturing. By 1982 it was one in four. In the last decade over two hundred thousand jobs have been wiped out in this area, never to return.
It must be deduced from the above that the collapse of the set of alliances which have buttressed labourist ideology in Scotland will sweep away the Labour Party as such. Instead, the erosion of the material basis and rationale for labourism has precipitated a debate about the future role of socialism within the party, and about the new set of popular alliances it will be necessary to construct in order to defeat Thatcherism. One proposal, associated with CP intellectual and English historian Eric Hobsbawm, calls for a People's Alliance. That is for a popular bloc to rally support from any and all sections of the community opposed to Thatcher. Hobsbawm rightly devines the failure of orthodox labourism, but his alternative People's Alliance is nothing more than an accommodation with the English professional classes achieved by abandoning those bits of the labourist programme the middle classes don't like — nationalisation, free collective bargaining and leaving the EEC. Shorn of the jargon, the People's Alliance means a coalition with the SDP on the latter's terms. Supporters of the People's Alliance would argue that since the only way to vote out Thatcher is by such a coalition, and since it is imperative to get rid of Thatcher, then it is necessary to forego their long-term objectives in favour of what can be achieved now.
But that is not the real choice. The English petty bourgeois psychosis known as Thatcherism is merely the reflection of a real material crisis on the economic and social plane. A genuine alliance with the middle classes, which is not to be eschewed in principle, can only work if it is on the basis of a programme which deals with the root causes of this crisis. Otherwise the trajectory of the Hobsbawm approach can only be to create a People's Alliance on the vague basis of 'common sense', English, middle class values, ie 'decency', the Dunkirk spirit, Fabian paternalism, with the unemployed of the eighties serving as a generation of new model evacuees from Thatcher's Blitz being fostered by the English gentry in an idyll of thatched cottages and country hedgerows. To invoke English 'decency' and the commonweal of 'This Island Race' against Thatcher's nasty, lower middle class, grocer's shop concern for 'trade' is to tread a path away from socialism towards English populism. This is indeed Hobsbawm's project: to invoke English nationalism against Thatcher's sectional assaults on the working class and middle class. However, English nationalism is at root the tradition of Empire, of racism, of jingoism and of acceptance of caste. English populism is rotten to the core, and it is a strange direction to take for a Hobsbawm who once savagely attacked Tom Nairn for the supposed crime of capitulating to nationalism.
Yet here lies the clue to the future of Scottish politics. A new popular bloc must be created to replace traditional labourism and oppose Thatcherism. But a Scottish Home Rule Alliance rather than a so-called People's Alliance. A united front that will mobilise all shades of working class and popular support around the democratic demand for the right of the Scottish people to decide their own affairs, and against the imposition of the will of a Tory government which has no mandate north of the border. The Home Rule demand is a bodyblow to the super-centralist English state and its constitutional convention of parliamentary sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. It changes the emphasis of left wing politics from the strategy of the begging bowl of regional economic aid to the need to confront de-industrialisation through local initiative. That raises in turn the question of popular sovereignty over local capital and the multinationals. It transforms the role of the STUC and the Scottish trade union movement from that of supplicant in London to defender of working class interests at home. And above all the fight for Home Rule is based not on a reactionary imperial heritage but on a popular tradition of resistance to oppression and exploitation, the honourable 'national' tradition of the 1820 rising, of Maclean, of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders.
What would be the precise programme of such a Home Rule Alliance? A minimum would be: for the immediate election, by proportional representation, of a Constituent Assembly to draw up plans for a Scottish Assembly; for the creation of such a Scottish Assembly with economic powers to deal with unemployment and the economic crisis.
Some socialists south of the border will see such a Home Rule Alliance as a reactionary diversion which splits the British working class. But this view is itself a reactionary diversion from granting the real balance of forces within the British state. A Home Rule Alliance which mobilises the Scottish working class against Thatcherism can only aid the struggles of the working class throughout Britain. It would give heart to English socialists by turning Scottish Labour's electoral strength into extra-parliamentary fighting strength. It would mean the Irish struggle for freedom was no longer isolated. It would provide a focus to unite the partial struggles of the Scottish trade union movement. The power of the Home Rule Alliance lies not in reformist tinkering with the British constitution, but in the ability to overcome the creeping demoralisation of the labour movement by mobilising shock troops north of the border.
Who will join this Home Rule Alliance? The very way in which Scottish labourism's old alliances have disintegrated indicated how the alliance must coalesce. Already the Scottish intelligensia has opted for Home Rule. With the collapse of the labourist Stalinist machine, the Labour Party faces the necessity of reorganising itself as a European-style campaigning party in order to mobilise a new constituency for itself. It can no longer be just an electoral machine. South of the border, this has given rise to the GLC phenomenon: a local Labour Party turning to campaign politics and using the local government machine not as an end in itself but as a platform. The first signs of this development appearing in Scotland have been in the Lothians in the fight of the Labour Regional Council against Governor General Younger's dictats. Forced at long last to convince and persuade people rather than treat them as voting fodder, the Scottish Labour Party has become fertile ground for debating ideas which would once have been dismissed as heresy. Witness the emergence of George Galloway, not as a Labour Town Council boss — though he is — but as a veritable ideologue actually debating political strategy at the level of theory. Can you imagine a Labour Glasgow Lord Provost doing that in the fifties and sixties? This cultural revolution has attracted a steady flow of recruits from the left of the SNP and it is now perfectly possible to find Labour Party members who are not simply pro-devolution but pro-socialist independence.
What of the mass of the working class as part of a Home Rule Alliance? Scotland never had the Midlands, mass production industries with their conservative, and Conservative-voting, highly skilled, highly paid workers. The latter have become demoralised by incomes policies and unemployment and trooped into the voting lobbies for Thatcher. The Scottish workers reacted to the onset of crisis by supporting the SNP, ie by calling for radical democratic solutions. The right wing, Poujadist leadership of the SNP could not respond to this gut reaction, and so the workers have temporarily returned to labourism (spurning the SDP en route). This experience of the early seventies shows that there is the makings of a Home Rule Alliance based on the workers movement.
[illegible] tend to see the destruction of the traditional industrial working class as signalling the end of political projects based on this stratum. This is a profound error. Every capitalist slump recasts the shape of the working class, but it does not eliminate the worker. For instance, it was the post-war expansion of the proletariat that brought massive numbers of women out of the home and into work, preparing the ground for the rise of the women's movement. The smaller number of industrial workers today is merely the changing division of labour within the overall capitalist order, and those who continue to live by selling their labour power will still have nothing to lose but their redundancy payments. From Lee Jeans to Timex, Scottish workers continue to show a traditional syndicalist reflex for direct action which is absent south of the border. There is every likelihood that a recast workers movement will throw up a new leadership as part of the Home Rule Alliance, though this leadership might be very different from the archetypal male, manual, engineering shop steward.
Male engineering workers were not always the leadership of the workers movement: in the early nineteenth century it was the educated artisans; in France the lack of industrial concentration passed the leadership to socialist town councils rather than shop stewards. In the new microchip age the workers movement will adjust to changing times. Thus some would identify a new workers leadership emerging among the computer workers, the skilled priesthood which capitalism cannot live without as once it could not live without the boilermaker. (And note that Scotland has gained a major share of the British electronics industry.) However the essence of working-class leadership is the ability to mobilise other workers through the very mechanics of the production process which throws workers together. It was the ability of the engineers to lead the tens of thousands of workers under the same factory roof that turned them into the shock troops of the Red Clyde. Today small factory units render this model an unlikely variant, and the computer workers' monopoly of scarce skills will probably produce only a very well-paid conservative labour aristocracy. The reduction of the workforce into small units in fact might explain the re-emergence of municipal socialism. Only the democratic, socialist commune can now act as a centraliser of working-class activity and resistance. This reinforces the need to build an alliance around the fight for an Assembly linked to socialist municipal authorities, and further requires the undermining of the traditional labourist model of the use of local authority machinery as a base for power-broking with London.
How shall the Home Rule Alliance be formed? Since a Thatcher government will never freely grant the Assembly for which a majority voted in 1979, it will be necessary to emulate the tactics of the Irish Home Rule movement. The sovereign will of the Scottish people is already expressed in their democratically elected representatives. These representatives, or as many as respect the mandate of the 1979 referendum, must convoke a convention to demand the Assembly and challenge the right of the Thatcher government to dictate to the Scottish working people. Such a convention should embrace MPs, regional, island and district councillors. Most would be from the Labour Party, but other political parties could be shamed into attending. A mass public campaign would be necessary to get such a convention. Primarily it would be necessary to mobilise and win over the Labour Party and the STUC.
Such a campaign would only succeed over the dead body of Scottish labourism. But for those of us within the Labour Party today the death of labourism is the birth of a new mass socialist Labour Party based on campaign politics. With great respect to the left inside the SNP, the choice is neither a socialist party without Home Rule nor a Home Rule party before socialism, but a party of both. The SNP cannot be a multi-class, 'national' party and embrace socialism. Neither socialism nor Home Rule are achievable without the Scottish working class. The collapse of the SNP vote and the attempted expulsion of the '79 Group point only to the conclusion that it is necessary to build a Home Rule current within the Labour Party. The ideological crisis of labourism means there has never been a better time to do this. The condition of success will be to convert the constitutional relationship of the Scottish Labour Party to the British Labour Party to one of federalism, in which an autonomous Scottish (Independent?) Labour Party forms an equal coalition with a separate English sister party.
Both Home Rule and the suggestion of an autonomous Scottish Labour Party are subversive of the very rationale of British labourism. Unlike European socialism, labourism is not just predicated on winning reforms for the working class section of the nation, it has been the central prop for national integration and social harmony. Labourism is the social cement of British society. Toryism expressed the narrow interests of the City and the landed gentry, bringing in tow the middle class of the English south east. There is no mass Christian Democrat Party uniting industrial capital and skilled worker, no division of the working class between social democracy and Stalinism, no peasant party, no Radical Party of the petty bourgeoisie. There is only Labour to integrate the masses of the most proletarian state in Europe. Break this, through Home Rule or proportional representation, and the conservative prop to British society is smashed away.
The role labourism has played as chief social prop to a state based on eighteenth century class structures has made it super-centralist in programme. The Alternative Economic Strategy, whatever its other faults, it totally at odds with Labour's commitment to devolution. The AES assumes rigorous central planning of the economy while the devolution policy implies an Assembly with complete economic planning powers in Scotland. These two structures are in contradiction, unless, as one suspects, the advocates of the AES have not considered the implications of devolution, because they see it only as a quaint sop to North British opinion separate from the real business of planning the economy. Even Tony Benn, for all his advocacy of radical democratic reform, persistently and ominously fails to include in the major points of his programme any reference to Scottish devolution, the issue that led to the collapse of the last Labour government. And the Socialists for a Labour Victory pointedly 'failed' to include Scottish devolution in their platform while committing themselves to a united Ireland. Scottish socialists might be forgiven for thinking that their comrades South of the Border still have not transcended Great British chauvinism. But more accurately those English comrades have not really come to terms with the insidious nature of labourist ideology. Just as labourism has been confronted by feminism so it will be confronted by the national question in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The break-up of Britain begins with the break-up of labourism.
GEORGE KEREVAN is chairperson of Portobello Labour Party, and a prospective Labour Party candidate in the 1984 Scottish local elections.