Scottish Workers Republic: Scottish Republican Socialist Movement P.O.
Box 16887 Glasgow G11 9EP
£3.00
by Wee Jimmie frae Auchenshuggle.
A CURIOUS periodical recently
arrived at the New Worker office.
Undated and unnumbered it describes itself as the “bumper issue” of the journal
of the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM).
According to their website the SRSM was
founded in 1973. Since then it has gone through a number of name changes and
has suffered confusing splits, which are naturally caused by agents of British
intelligence who seem to devote all their resources to these most dangerous
enemies of British imperialism. Its relationship to other bodies – chronicled
on their website such as the “Army of the Provisional Government” active in the
1970s – is unclear.
Clearly more
nationalist than socialist they welcome the recent triumph of the Scottish
National Party (SNP) in the Scottish Parliament elections. Their main target
seems to be the “traditional British Unionist Left”, who are abused rather than
have their policies subject to withering criticism.
There is an
interesting piece on imperialist reporting on Libya. A touch of the Messianic is evident in a
piece about Trident, which seems to suggest that it is essential to vote SNP to
create a nuclear free Europe. A short but nevertheless
rambling article on James Connolly by James D Young concludes the issue.
Anyone looking
for a left-wing critique of the SNP policies or bourgeois Scottish nationalism
in general is going to be disappointed. A party that hopes to maintain the
British monarchy and seeks to lower corporation tax to please its
multi-millionaire bankers and led by a former economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland
is a tempting target for “Socialist Republicans”. But they can’t find their
tongues.
Poetry, of a
sort, features strongly. The miscellany of poetry includes offerings that make
William McGonagall appear positively Shakespearean.
There are some
more inspiring efforts, including a satire on Edinburgh
merchants by the 15th century poet William Dunbar, but this is
marred by blatantly obvious typos and poor layout.
Strangely enough for
Scottish nationalists, they have an abysmal knowledge of Scottish history, one
that seems to be derived from entirely from pictures on those shortbread tins
sold in tourist shops.
At one point we are informed that the 1745
Jacobite Rebellion was a “Scottish revolt against British rule”. The Jacobite
rebellions were nothing of the kind; 1745-46 saw the final attempt by the
absolutist French monarchy to put their man, “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, on the British
throne. Some Highland feudal chiefs conscripted their
followers into an army that treated Glasgow and Edinburgh as occupied cities
before heading south to Derby,
where they gave up the march on London.
More Tory Jacobites were to be found in Lancashire
than Lanarkshire. Their final defeat at the Battle of Culloden was at the hands
of a British Army that included 12,000 Lowlanders and Highlanders and all
Protestants, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, eager to rout their Catholic
enemies.
They also
distort the events of 1820, when the British working class was engaged in a
desperate struggle for Parliamentary reform against a background of economic
depression following the ending of the Napoleonic wars, which is romantically
turned into a nationalist revolt.
Any
left-inclined Scottish nationalist or a left-winger of a nationalist persuasion
could take justifiable pride in the valuable role that Scottish enlightenment
figures played in the role of developing the study of society, past and
present, on which Marx later drew to good effect: Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson,
John Millar and William Robertson to name but few. The lessons of the
Enlightenment are clearly lost on what are at best charitably described as the
romantics of the SRSM.
This
publication will be of great interest to collectors of political sectariana and
anyone wanting a temporary change from the Fortean
Times.
