THIS weekend the SNP will gather in Dundee to decide its future strategy on the constitution, following the British Supreme Court’s decision of last November blocking its planned referendum in October of this year. 

It does so while Scotland is in a period of political ferment provoked by the failures of the leaderships of both the UK and Scottish governments to address the latest set of inter-related problems contemporary capitalism has visited on us, including war in Europe and a cost-of-living crisis at home. 

Of course, crises are endemic in capitalism and in Britain these have been compounded by the end of empire. 

Historically they are usually, but not always, resolved by attacks on the working class, most notably and most successfully, arguably in recent history, in the 1980s. 

The Thatcherite victory led to intensified class-related regional inequalities, undermining the very notion of a unified British state. 

In Scotland the main beneficiary of that has been the SNP. Building on Labour’s increasing distancing from its traditional industrial and social democratic roots, the SNP posed a left challenge to Neil Kinnock’s and then Tony Blair’s Labour parties based on national identity.

The leadership of the SNP, have not, however, been prepared to challenge capitalism as an international system of exploitation or the institutions that guarantee it, like the EU, any more than their British counterparts in the Labour Party (Corbyn leadership excepted); their strategy has only been to manage it differently. 

In the 2014 referendum the SNP produced a prospectus which offered continued membership of the EU, membership of Nato, support for the monarchy and a truncated form of fiscal autonomy which involved an independent Scotland continuing to use sterling.

The Labour Party did not respond to the rise of nationalism by identifying the root cause as a post-imperial, capitalist crisis which exacerbated regional differences. 

This might have led to constitutional reform that empowered the working class. Instead, it legislated for a devolved Scottish Parliament when it came to power as New Labour in 1997.  

This was carefully designed to give the impression of autonomy while retaining key powers at Westminster, necessary to actually change the balance of forces in favour of the working class in Scotland, especially in relation to democratic control of the economy.

In this way devolution was supposed to manage the fracturing of Britain that increasing deindustrialisation and neoliberalism had brought about. 

And for a while it seemed to work. The comparative buoyancy of the British economy allowed New Labour to introduce the minimum wage and reduce unemployment, using a number of measures including, positively, an expansion of the public sector and, negatively, Gordon Brown’s workfare approach.

But all of this collapsed with the banking crisis of 2007-8 where New Labour’s “light-touch” regulation and tolerance of high indebtedness helped induce a crisis in the banking system. 

Rather than being understood as a crisis of the instability of finance capitalism, the right were able to present it as a crisis of public expenditure, giving the Tory-Lib Dem coalition the control in 2010 that led to years of austerity.

No doubt this fuelled the three “anti-neoliberal rebellions” of the mid-2010s — the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, the election of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

They were lightning rods for pent up frustration and yearning for a better Britain, or in Scotland 2014, where a wide range of youth, community and interest groups engaged in politics for the first time, for a better Scotland. 

And all three suffered from the same critical defect: they were not built on detailed strategies for progressive advance and lacked the socialist or even the radical social democratic base necessary to exploit what advances had been made through their mobilisations. 

Consequently, as we now know, there have been “counter-revolutions”: in the SNP the increasingly dominant neoliberal wing insisted on fiscal rectitude as the basis for a long-term strategy for independence and the right of the Labour Party replaced Corbyn with a ventriloquist’s dummy, with the ventriloquist ensuring that the dummy sounds and behaves increasingly like Tony Blair. 

Brexit, rather than being an opportunity, for example, to deploy state aid as a mechanism for implementing an industrial strategy, has become, in the hands of reactionary Tories, a byword for xenophobia.

It feels like the Scottish left has made little progress. The SNP’s unconvincing offer on nationalism and the crisis in leadership, both personal and political, has led to decline in electoral support for that party and independence, according to recent polls.

This has emboldened the Labour right which now seems to feel that even the limited reforms of the Brown commission can be sidelined in order to ensure the supremacy of their belief in the necessity of a UK-wide market where national or regional or local democracy do not interfere with the smooth running of the international corporations that increasingly dominate our economy. 

In these circumstances the Scottish left has to find a way of maximising unity in order to build a serious opposition to the gathering pace of the corporate takeover.  

This may be possible if the left can agree a strategy that could be supported by those who ultimately want independence but could support what for them would be an interim position. 

That common ground could be found in a progressive, federal solution which would give the Scottish Parliament the tools its needs now, to defend economic democracy, redistribution of wealth and the pursuit of equality in Scotland. 

The Red Paper Collective has been arguing this for some time with little engagement from the progressive wing of nationalism. 

Recently, however, the SNP Minister for Independence, Jamie Hepburn, said the SNP should consider the prospect of a multi-option referendum on Scotland’s constitutional future. 

Perhaps of more interest from a left perspective, Simon Barrow, national secretary of the SNP trade union group, writing in a personal capacity, also accepts the need for dialogue on the political left, despite differences on the constitution.

“…independence groups need to build alliances with labour movement groups in Scotland, irrespective of initial differences on constitutional matters. If the central concern is, as it should be, a better society and improving lives for ordinary people, the first priority is working politically to make it better, and debating the means to do so.”

This could provide fertile ground for dialogue on the left across the constitutional divide. Of course, especially with the likelihood of general election next year, powerful forces in the right of both the labour and the nationalist movements will do their best to undermine such a radical alliance. 

It is the responsibility of those of us who believe there is more to politics, especially socialist politics, than electoralism, to seize this opportunity and begin the hard work of building the unity we need to bring about radical change in Scotland. 

Vince Mills is joint secretary of Radical Options for Scotland and Europe (Rose) and a member of the Red Paper Collective.