[…] Though the SNP is
the palest of pink, it doesn’t take much to be positioned to the left of New Labour.
In contrast to the Blair–Brown governments, the SNP has safeguarded free care for
the elderly, free prescriptions and fee-less university education; it has resisted
water privatization and the fragmentation – read: covert marketization – of the
NHS. While the SNP leadership basically accepts the neoliberal agenda – happy to
cut corporation tax or cosy up to Donald Trump – it has also managed to position
itself as the inheritor of the Scottish social-democratic tradition. […]
The third reason for dissenting
from Nairn’s view, however – and this is the point that needs to be stressed – is
that for the majority of Yes campaigners, the movement was not primarily about supporting
the SNP, nor even about Scottish nationalism in a wider sense. As a political ideology,
nationalism – any nationalism, relatively progressive or absolutely reactionary
– involves two inescapable principles: that the national group should have its own
state, regardless of the social consequences; and that what unites the national
group is more significant than what divides it, above all class. By contrast, the
main impetus for the Yes campaign was not nationalism, but a desire for social change
expressed through the demand for self-determination. It was on this basis that independence
was taken up by a broad range of socialists, environmentalists and feminists. […]
Yes campaigners saw establishing
a Scottish state not as an eternal goal to be pursued in all circumstances, but
as one which might offer better opportunities for equality and social justice in
the current conditions of neoliberal austerity. […]
Even though Devo Max was
absent from the ballot paper, the version of independence promoted by the SNP closely
resembled it: the new Scottish state would retain the monarchy, NATO membership
and sterling, through a currency union with the rump UK. […]
The SNP has submitted
a 42-page document demanding that the Scottish Parliament have the right to set
all Scottish taxes and retain the revenues, to determine all domestic spending,
employment and welfare policy, including the minimum wage, and to define Scotland’s
internal constitutional framework – in short, Devo Max. The Unionist parties’ proposals
are set to fall well short of this. There is an obvious danger here into which Yes
campaigners may be led by an understandable wish to see the Unionist parties keep
their promises: the danger is Devo Max itself. Under neoliberal regimes, the more
politics is emptied of content, the more opportunities for pseudo-democracy are
multiplied: citizen-consumers may take part in elections for local councillors,
mayors, police commissioners, and so on, spreading responsibility to bodies whose
policy options are severely restricted both by statute and by reliance on the central
state for most of their funding. The upshot at local-council level has seen atomized
citizens given a vote on which services they want to close. If this is to be the
basis of ‘further devolution’ in Scotland, it should be rejected. Devo Max will
be of value only insofar as it involves the greater democratization of Scottish
society, rather than tightly circumscribed ‘powers’ for the Scottish sub-state.
[…]
'A Scottish Watershed', Neil Davidson, New Left Review 89, September-October 2014
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