What Kind of Independence?

Salmond’s new party will pitch itself as a useful tactical addition to the parliamentary bloc for independence. The SNP membership and the wider Yes movement, having made vast commitments of time and money to the cause, are anxious that their historic moment may slip through their fingers. There is a vague but genuine feeling that progress toward the SNP’s historic goal has stalled.

The appearance of rising support for independence under Sturgeon, crucially, grew from an unprecedented peacetime crisis of the British state, caused by protracted Brexit negotiations and the initial mishandling of the pandemic. This has receded somewhat with Britain’s success (relative to the EU) in administering vaccinations; in parallel, support for independence has dropped from highs of 58 percent, with some polls now showing a pro-union majority.

Meanwhile, inside the SNP — once the archetypal centrally managed party — public infighting has become the new norm: with opposition parties a sideshow, the ruling party has been embroiled in toxic internal struggles for power.

Parliamentary opposition to the SNP may be pitiful, but the vast, left-leaning social movement for independence has become increasingly critical of Sturgeon’s managerial style. Many now openly question whether the SNP has any intention of fulfilling its founding purpose of delivering independence.

Particular doubts surround the SNP’s neoliberal economic plan for independence, which most now consider a relic of the pre-pandemic, pre-climate era. Sturgeon’s failure to update a strategy based on replicating Ireland’s low-tax, high-foreign-investment “Celtic Tiger” model from the 1990s has been cited as proof that she has no intention of pursuing a second referendum.

Sturgeon’s team has formally committed to a referendum soon, perhaps this year, perhaps in the early part of the next parliamentary term, meaning 2022 or 2023 at the latest. Yet the barriers are substantial. Legally, and certainly in the eyes of the international community, Scottish independence would appear to depend on consent from the UK’s sovereign parliament, where the arithmetic is unforgiving. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party has no intention of permitting a referendum, regardless of events in Scotland.

Nor, for now, does the Labour opposition. After a brief opening under Jeremy Corbyn — who thought Labour might need to rely on support from Scottish Nationalists to form a government — the door has slammed shut under Labour’s “new management.” His successor Sir Keir Starmer has compensated for his disastrous role in the People’s Vote campaign (a bid to repeat the 2016 Brexit referendum) by using every opportunity to wave the Union Jack.

Sturgeon has never convincingly explained how she will compel Westminster to abide by Scotland’s electoral will. And the issues do not end there. Economically, longstanding problems have been exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis. For generations, Scotland’s potential prosperity rested on North Sea oil monies, which, under Margaret Thatcher, were once a significant part of the United Kingdom’s revenues.

While Norway used its oil to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most secure economies, Scotland faced mass unemployment and its aftermath of drug addiction, alienation, and entrenched inequality, as Thatcher used the revenues to help push through a neoliberal restructuring of the British economy.

But oil is declining, both in volume and in economic relevance. Those problems redouble when factoring in rising climate consciousness. Either way, upon independence, Scotland’s fiscal deficits would be considerable. Too large, certainly, for the European Union’s neoliberal rulebook — demanding that member states run budget deficits under 3 percent. Given that Sturgeon has built her own case for independence entirely on EU membership, this presents a considerable barrier.

Which is not the same as an insurmountable barrier, given a willingness to depart from decades of economic orthodoxy. And, with capitalism unlikely to produce rising incomes in coming decades, socialists have a strong case that now is the time for a democratic “break” with the straitjacket of neoliberal globalization.

There is every reason to suspect that Scotland’s left-leaning independence movement would be sympathetic to an agenda framed around popular sovereignty over key economic resources. More to the point, the world’s ruling class seem willing to break many of the old rules after the pandemic. But the SNP leadership seems almost uniquely determined to be the diligent pupil of the old neoliberal pedagogy.

Back to Normal?

The problem is thus less about the abstract impossibility of independence, and more the paucity of vision. Although the current SNP leadership owes its power to their success in mobilizing an anti-austerity, pro-NHS, left-populist movement in 2014, their program for independence remains strangely oblivious to a decade of global capitalist breakdown.

They are wedded to a notion that Britain’s crisis is unique, and that joining the European project will be sufficient to restore “normality.” Given overall Scottish opposition to Brexit, this narrative has chimed with public feeling. But it rests on misconceptions about this historic phase of capitalism, and nobody has devised an updated case for independence.

In the heat of a referendum, the SNP’s case for independence would be exposed as a relic, a product of fantasy neoliberalism that might have appeared in a 1990s think tank paper. Proposals for “sterlingization,” the unilateral use of a (foreign) UK currency, involves ceding all monetary sovereignty to the Bank of England.

For this reason alone, the proposals are unpopular with party members; and even before the pandemic, they would have forced Scotland to wear a hair shirt of austerity for decades. More fundamentally, this currency policy is effectively untested in advanced capitalism, barring exceptional cases like Panama.

Equally, the notion of Scotland rejoining the EU while using the currency of a third country which is not a member state strikes many experts as a rather dubious proposition. All this merely illustrates the contradiction of trying to sustain an old fashioned “centrist” program under contemporary capitalism.

Sturgeon’s vision has found itself tangled up in all the contradictions of the retreating technocratic consensus. However, as the independence movement and much of civil society was swallowed into government, there are few rival sources of agency or authority to reassert a more consistent view of popular sovereignty.

Nonetheless, there remain three crucial reasons why Scottish independence should interest socialists worldwide. Firstly, it puts into question a state that forms a key link in the imperial chain. Despite Brexit, the UK remains a key ally of American foreign policy, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a former empire that once commanded a quarter of the globe. Diminishing its size and role therefore makes a modest but not insubstantial contribution to weakening American military hegemony.

During Scotland’s last referendum, Argentina raised the prospect of removing Britain’s permanent membership of the UN Security Council in favor of a non-colonial power if Scotland succeeded from the union. The particularities of SNP foreign policy, a contradictory mishmash, both antinuclear and pro-NATO, are less important than the fundamental impact of the breakup of Britain on the state system.

Secondly, it opens the black box of state formation. Scottish independence challenges the norm that European constitutions are finished articles. The chief barrier to Scottish self-determination is the almost total absence of historical precedents among advanced capitalist states in the Global North. However, that also hints at how Scotland’s success could shift dynamics in favor of centrifugal movements. Movements toward Irish reunification and Catalan independence, for example, could accelerate markedly.

Thirdly, there are questions of class and democracy. The previous Scottish independence referendum of 2014 is a fascinating study in political sociology. Opposition to independence was led by the political establishment, major corporate interests, and the most conservative sections of the trade union movement. Added to that was the European Union, Barack Obama, and most of the global ruling elite. By contrast, the Yes movement became perhaps the biggest grassroots social movement in Scottish history, and it has set down roots in working-class communities and “flyover Scotland” that persist to this day.

This was reflected in the demographics of the 2014 vote. Among Scotland’s most deprived voters, 65 percent favored independence. Likewise, there was a majority among the demographically defined working class (C2DE — 53.4 percent).

Independence also secured strong support from younger voters, and, with pensioners excluded, there was an overall majority for Yes. Crucially, some of the greatest enthusiasm emerged from depressed “Labour heartlands” — working-class communities which had been taken for granted by mainstream social democracy, and now abandoned the party in droves.

Beyond “Inclusion”

The importance of this is worth spelling out. In 2014, huge swathes of Scotland’s poorest and most disenfranchised people revolted against the political instructions and the dire economic forecasts presented by their establishment. The same is arguably true of Brexit, but the Yes movement was overwhelmingly progressive: it was explicitly anti-austerity and pro-immigration when these were taboo stances inside the Westminster mainstream.

This type of mass political behavior, where working-class voters defy instructions en masse and assert their own agency, always deserves our attention — even when its characteristics are ambiguous. Given that in Scotland’s case this was a largely left-populist movement, it should command a serious response from socialists looking for positive moments of political revival.

Equally, the tragedy of Scotland is how badly this spirit has been let down. 2014 made the SNP into one of Europe’s strongest mass parties and provided the ultimate populist foundation for Sturgeon’s hegemony. However, there has been precious little reward for these working-class voters.

Under the SNP, Scotland has made little progress on poverty, inequality, and key policy areas like schooling, beyond progressive-sounding buzzwords about inclusion. Real policy achievements are conspicuously absent. And the professional-managerial class has strengthened its grip on the Scottish state, forming a praetorian guard against any challengers to Sturgeon’s power.

Nonetheless, independence itself remains a national-popular, democratic project. The movement exhibits extraordinary capacity for self-organization. Against Sturgeon’s wishes, mass demonstrations supporting the breakup of Britain persisted until the lockdown; many were among the largest in Scottish history. Their composition was overwhelmingly drawn from outside the political and professional establishment.

Underlying this movement is a desire for popular sovereignty: self-rule, autonomy, and public control over the state. There is little prospect of achieving these aims under Scotland’s botched devolved constitution. The task for socialists is to separate these healthy instincts, both from conservative nationalism, and from Sturgeon’s reversion to a 1990s vision of neoliberal globalization.