MacCruiskeen wrote:I remember arguing with my father about Scottish nationalism in the late 70s and him saying, "Son, we cannot abandon the English working class to a permanent Tory majority!" He also felt that the upsurge of Scottish nationalism after the sudden discovery of "Scottish" oil was a bit shabby, like a spouse winning the lottery and immediately applying for a divorce.
I'm a relative newcomer to belief in full independence, Mac, and maybe I'm a bit fanatical right now (the zeal of the converted) but it sounds to me like you were right and your Dad was wrong. Scottish independence will
not cause a permanent Tory majority in England. I can prove this, but I will show the evidence in a follow-up post. First I want to deal with the "socialist argument against Scottish independence" - it was recently advanced, in much the same form as your Dad put it, by Stewart Lee in The Guardian (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... dependence) though I can't really tell if he was being serious. Obviously the article is half-joking, and seems to be doing the uncomfortability thing that makes his stand-up so great, but I think the last paragraph in particular is sincere, and sums up the British Socialist case. (The comments are good, btw, with a few terrible ones mixed in).
Anyway, this socialist argument for the Union is the only one that has ever swayed me at all, but to be honest it didn't for long. Like the Union itself, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
MacCruiskeen wrote:That was Old Labour. The need for international socialism was taken for granted.
Here's what I mean... Why would any form of international socialism have to - or
want to - rely on a political/military Union between England and Scotland drawn up by self-interested feudal noblemen under a Crown backed by Divine Right 300-odd years ago? Labour's argument (and the socialist argument generally) against independence has always been fundamentally flawed for this reason. British socialists say we should unite with all the other workers of the world, and support them of course, but they
never say that all the other workers of the world have to come under the British Crown and the British Parliament for this to happen, because that would be considered imperialist.
Only with the Scots/English/Welsh/Northern Irish do they add this weird and eccentric proviso, that socialism here somehow depends on the political union of the UK. Why should it?
I can feel solidarity with the workers of Spain without having to be governed from the Spanish Parliament. I can feel sympathy with the people of Nepal without having to be ruled by the Nepalese monarchy. Are British socialists really suggesting that the solidarity between the English and Scottish working classes is so abysmally
and uniquely weak that it requires an official Treaty and the unrepealed 18th century Act of a unified Parliament
under the Crown to exist
at all? Why?!? And isn't that argument an admission of immediate failure anyway - failure on the part of socialism to unite us as a people, but also on the part of the Union itself, which was supposed to do the same thing? If we're united, why do we need the Act of Union to be in force forever?
Labour should've stuck with Keir Hardie's ideas on Home Rule, since at least his ideas made sense (and they pre-dated the discovery of oil by a long way, too, as did the founding of the SNP - but I know what you mean about the oil causing a shabby upsurge of "nationalism". There was a deeply embarassing survey recently that said the vast majority of Scots would vote Yes to independence
if it could be guaranteed that they would be £500 a year better off. That's only
about £1.80 a day. Those questioned are apparently prepared to decide the future of their country on the price of a Mars Bar and a Daily Record, the dozy, spineless gits. I'll still take those Yes votes though, ignoble as that might be.)
I will admit that if independence is achieved it might become
slightly harder for, say, Scottish mineworkers to go down to London and support the Wapping printer's strike like they did in the 80s, or for Scottish students to cross the border to join tuition fee protests in England like they did much more recently (purely in solidarity, since tuition fees were never introduced up here). But that's the only realistic drawback to ending the Union I can see from a socialist perspective, and it'll be easy enough to get around.
TL;DR: We
won't leave England to face a permanent Tory majority, and for any real believer in international socialism the fact that Scottish and English workers are no longer governed from the same Parliament or under the same Crown should make no difference at all. Worker's Solidarity, like love, or friendship, or sharing an ice cream, should not have to be predicated upon shared governance
or nationality.
MacCruiskeen wrote:In the shabby year of 2012 the question is (one of the questions is) whether the Union has done the English working class any good since then, not to mention the Scottish working class, to say nothing of the South-East Asian working class*.
My question is - has the Union ever done any good for any working class person anywhere in the world at any time? There seems to me no reason why it should have done. It was certainly never intended to.
Looking at the history of the Union, how it was passed and what came after, I can't help feeling that asking if it has "done any good for the working class" is like asking the same thing about the East India Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.
The overarching power structure that the Act of Union enshrined back then hasn't really changed all that much, certainly not as much as some people might like to think, and it was
never supposed to be a boon to the workers, and I would say that it never has been. It was an imperial device then, and it still is now. (An imperial device dreamed up by the shared Anglo-Scots nobility, btw, not by England or English people or anything like that.)
I'm... kind of going on a bit here, eh? I wanted to answer all your points, and you're a lot, lot better at condensing your points than I am. I still haven't managed to answer them all yet. Need me bed.
EDITTED MULTIPLE TIMES IN AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE SENSE.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
)
