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Scottish Labour has a real opportunity – it mustn’t waste it
It is no good telling the people of Scotland that they are against independence if they do not have a real alternative to put to the people, says TAM KIRBY
Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard
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WITH the SNP wasting time in Holyrood debating what flags should fly in Edinburgh, we are faced with a Tory majority that can now implement any policy it wants when we need to develop a real strategy for democracy not just in Scotland but across Britain.
Debating flags is a distraction of epic proportions, when we need to be talking about real class issues.
Since the ’80s the country has become deindustrialised. Labour had 13 years in power and did nothing to rebuild or even protect the industrial areas destroyed by Thatcher. At its peril it ignored these industrial areas and did nothing to redress the balance of power or wealth.
That is the main reason we saw the SNP hoovering up working-class votes in Scotland.
Labour supporters who rightly felt abandoned and saw no real change for their communities found a home with the SNP — especially after the lunacy of Labour joining the Tories in the Better Together campaign, then electing Jim Murphy as leader for the 2015 election.
In England the working class had no centrist party like the SNP to switch allegiance to. They were driven to the hard right-wing populist Farage parties, which convinced them that they were anti-Establishment.
Labour, the party which should represent them, was perceived as ignoring the very people it is there to represent.
They then went on and voted to leave the EU in huge numbers and saw their vote being ignored by the liberal intelligentsia who told them that they didn’t understand the implications of leaving. Even worse, this same liberal intelligentsia called them racist and stupid. In this, I am in no way equating the SNP to Ukip or the Brexit Party.
Scottish Labour is now reviewing its stance on independence. Seven years too late, of course. Richard Leonard and the likes of Neil Findlay and Alex Rowley are promoting “home rule.” Rowley has written a discussion paper on the very subject.
But the sad fact is that there is a split, with the likes of Ian Murray and the other right-wing elements in Scottish Labour ploughing the same furrow of Better Together.
The fact that Labour never pursued an alternative to the state and sided with the ruling class during both referendums has brought it to the realities of one election defeat after the other.
Even when it was in power for 13 years it did nothing to change the state in favour of the working class. Not even abolishing the House of Lords, one of the easiest reforms it could have made.
In Scotland it had two years in the run-up to the independence referendum to put forward an alternative, but it sided with the ruling class and joined Better Together.
This lunacy and the decades of taking the Scottish working class for granted led to the wipeout in 2015 and then the wipeout in 2019.
Scottish Labour has an opportunity. It should be constructing an alternative to the current state. It is no good telling the people of Scotland that they are against independence if they do not have a real alternative to put to the people.
Leaving the EU will repatriate a whole host of new powers that should come to Holyrood. Scottish Labour needs to develop Rowley’s “home rule” proposals and offer the people of Scotland an alternative to the neoliberal EU-driven SNP Growth Commission vision for an independent Scotland.
If it fails to offer such a radical alternative, I fear for its future as a mass party in Scotland.
Tam Kirby is chair of Fife Trades Union Council.
More from this author
Trades councils are key to linking up the class struggle at a local level — all unions and union branches must affiliate, writes TAM KIRBY
We must memorialise more of the important events of the workers' movement with real-world events, writes TAM KIRBY, as a new miners’ gala in Fife takes shape
TAM KIRBY argues we can freeze energy bills and the price of essential goods, restore the universal credit uplift and abandon the National Insurance hike — so long as we can build a coalition to tax the rich
TAM KIRBY laments how the auld are held in contempt because we apparently ‘had it so much better’ – when in fact class struggle has been a battle for every generation
