The change that Scotland needs…

North of the border the media pundits are focusing on the forthcoming by-election in south Lanarkshire and Labour’s efforts to take the seat from the Scottish nationalists. Sir Keir Starmer tells the voters that he’s going to “smash the class ceiling” and deliver a new deal for workers’ rights. The Scottish nationalists, battling to keep the seat for the SNP, tell the people of Rutherglen & Hamilton West that “every vote for the SNP will send a message that only the powers of independence will deliver the change Scotland needs”.
The SNP is dipping in the opinion polls following Ms Sturgeon’s resignation and amid the ongoing police investigation into the party’s finances and the bookies make Labour the odds-on favourite to win the seat.
Starmer says "What we're being absolutely clear about is an anti-poverty strategy driven by an incoming Labour government will focus on growing the economy and making sure we get that growth in every part of the country. The single worst thing you could do for child poverty is to re-elect a Tory government or re-elect another SNP government here in Scotland”.
Katy Loudon, the SNP candidate will try to outflank Scottish Labour on the social agenda while reminding voters of her party’s Remainer credentials. Labour’s man, Michael Shanks, tells the media he believes “in the European project” and says he would back reversing Brexit if there was a public appetite for a rethink – which is not official Labour policy though it does reflect the stand of the bureaucracy in most of the major unions.
The SNP upholds a veneer of internal democracy but like all bourgeois parties the real decisions are made by a handful of power-brokers at the top. Nicola Sturgeon was brought down through the exploitation by these factions of financial scandals surrounding the party and this has naturally created a credibility gap amongst the electorate.
Though the SNP like to pose as social-democrats they are, in fact, bourgeois liberals. Their modest social reform programme that included free prescription charges and the abolition of student tuition fees was, in the past, enough to win tens of thousands of traditional Labour supporters over to the nationalist camp. Whether can retain that support is another matter.
Labour’s problem is that nobody can believe a word Starmer says these days. He’s broken virtually every pledge he made to the unions and the membership when he first became leader. He lost the confidence of the Remainers who thought he would take up their call for a second referendum. His only loyalty is to the Blairite faction that believes in serving US imperialism and what they perceive to be the dominant trend in the British ruling class. 
As always the SNP are hoping for a hung parliament after the next election. Their now leader Hamza Yousaf says the SNP could make life "very difficult" for Labour in a hung parliament if it refused to give Scotland the power to call a new independence referendum. Labour has, naturally ruled a new indy referendum or any sort of coalition with the SNP. But Yousaf says nothing about a possible deal with the Tories and the Liberal Democrats or the ‘other’ referendum that the Remainers across the bourgeois spectrum and determined to get. 
Creating the conditions for a hung parliament is a difficult task for any block to accomplish in British politics. But it can be sone. We saw at the 2017 election. We also saw how close the Remainers were to reversing the Brexit vote during the days that followed.
A hung parliament may well give Yousaf a second referendum but it may not be quite what the SNP faithful have in mind...
 

The Neverendum

The Supreme Court's verdict that the Scottish Parliament does not have the competency to legislate for a second independence referendum without the consent of the Westminster parliament was hardly surprising – least of all to the Scottish nationalists who tabled it in the first place.
    Three Tory Prime Ministers have turned down previous SNP calls for another referendum. Labour is equally opposed. Only last week, Labour’s Henry McLeish, who served as First Minister from 2000 to 2001, rejected calls for a referendum, telling Sky News: “This is not the time to be taking these big political and constitutional decisions, it is a time for making devolution work and for the independence campaign to be sidelined”.
    Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish government, says she’s now going use the next general election as a de facto referendum on independence and continue to push for Scottish independence. But this has been rejected by the Scottish Labour, Conservative and the Liberal Democrat parties who all say they will not take part in any SNP plan to treat the election as a single-issue vote.
    The SNP won the lion’s share of Scotland’s seats in the House of Commons – 44 out of 59 – at the last general election in 2019. But their overall share of the vote was still only 45 per cent which clearly doesn’t give them a mandate for any unilateral declaration of independence. It was more or less the same for the Scottish devolved government elections last year. Though the Scottish parliament is elected by a mixed system of voting that includes a form of proportional representation the SNP and their Green allies still only took 49 per cent of the vote – though that did give them 70 seats out of a total of 129 in the Scottish parliament.
    The Scottish Parliament was set up by the Labour Government in 1999. It has played an increasing role in the developing Scotland and, under Labour leadership, it used some of its powers to pass modest reforms beneficial to the working class.
    Following the collapse of the Scottish Labour Party in the 2015 general election at the hands of the SNP the nationalists have been successful in deluding many people that they are a left‑wing party.
    The SNP claims to be a social-democratic party but it is essentially a bourgeois liberal platform that in recent years has embraced the NATO alliance. Its neo‑liberal economic policies and their failure to use tax raising powers already devolved to the Scottish parliament reflect the true nature of the SNP.
    Behind the traditional nationalist demand for independence is the call for an independent Scotland within the European Union that simply reflects the demands of a section of the Scottish bourgeoisie who believe their interests are better served through greater integration with Franco-German imperialism
    The degree of local autonomy won by the Scots is, in itself, no guarantee that the national traditions and culture of the Scottish people will be developed, nor will it automatically lead to the strengthening of working class power. But the creation of national institutions in Scotland has been a positive step.
    The New Communist Party has long recognised the rights of the Scottish nation to full national self‑determination. We support Scottish demands for the right to preserve and develop their culture and national identity. We support their right to possess and control all the physical and other resources present on their land and territorial waters. If there is another indy referendum we will, of course, say YES.

A Man of the Clyde

by New Worker correspondent

Len McCluskey speaking

Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man by WWJ Knox and Alan McKinlay. Published by Liverpool University Press (2019).

Last Friday saw the launch of a new biography, authorised by his family, of Jimmy Reid: A Clyde-Built Man by WWJ Knox and Alan McKinlay, and published by Liverpool University Press for £24.95 for the paperback edition. Held at the Glasgow HQ of Unite the Union, it began with a ‘light lunch’ of steak pie with roast potatoes followed by chocolate pudding. The vegetarian option was macaroni and cheese, a very 1970s meal to commemorate the life of the leader of the 1971–72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in.

 Present-day leader of engineering union Unite Len McCluskey described Reid as a “working class hero” who inspired him in his youth and compared his speech on his becoming rector of Glasgow University as being like the Gettysburg Address. One of the two authors described Reid as being one of many “Philosophers in Overalls” on the Clyde. Knox said that Reid’s political life was a “life in three acts”. That indeed was true. Soon after the work-in that was successful in saving some shipyards, albeit at the expense of others, Reid rapidly went downhill.

Jimmy Reid’s leading role in the workers’ occupation of the Clyde shipyards threatened with closure made him a national figure during the UCS “work-in”. Backed by other unions at home and abroad, the UCS workers were publicly backed by famed Scottish comic Billy Connolly and the former Beatle, John Lennon. Reid was a leading member of the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and he soon achieved iconic status in the party led by a fellow Scot, John Gollan.

But Reid’s fame was illusory. His hopes of entering parliament on the CPGB ticket were dashed at the general election of February 1974. Although he did get 14.6 per cent of the vote, the best communist vote for years, he predictably lost to the sitting Labour candidate. His support plummeted at the second snap poll in the autumn of the same year.

In 1975 he left the CPGB to seek his fortune in the Labour Party, which only the previous year he described as “Falangists”. A career in print and broadcast journalism followed. He wrote for the {Glasgow Herald, The Scotsman}, the {Daily Mirror} and tellingly, the {Sun} when it was a rabidly Thatcherite Tory rag.

During the 1984–85 miners’ strike he launched a vicious attack on Arthur Scargill in the Tory {Spectator} magazine at the behest of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who wanted his own hands kept clean. A former comrade, Scottish miners’ leader Mick McGahey, somewhat aptly called him “the broken Reid”.

Some charitable souls suggested that Reid was simply desperate for cash to acquire the vast quantities of a noted Scottish beverage that had long been a feature of his life. Soon after Tony Blair came to power he urged support for the Scottish Socialist Party in the first Scottish Parliament elections, but he soon found a home in the Scottish National Party (SNP). He died in 2010 and he is remembered in the Jimmy Reid Foundation, the publisher of the {Scottish Left Review}, a journal of the left in Scotland.

Communists meet in Edinburgh

By New Worker correspondent

The first Saturday in July saw the British ‘Pietro Secchia’ section of the Communist Party (Italy) hosting a meeting in Edinburgh with the New Communist Party (NCP) and the Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain (PCPE), with the three parties making presentations and a useful exchange of views. Both overseas parties and comrades from the Greek Communist Party are developing work with Edinburgh-based migrants from their countries.

Italy has an unemployment rate of 10.9 per cent and Spain’s rate is worse at 16.1 per cent. Many have therefore come to Scotland in search of work. This work is often in the catering and hospitality industries, where long hours and precarious employment are the order of the day. Many fleeing unemployment at home and who have secured jobs are often simply relieved to have them.

Both parties find that many progressives who sympathetic to their parties are reluctant to become active, but both parties are undaunted in their efforts to alter that and expand their important work.

Alain Fissore of the Italian party stressed that the European Union (EU) had nothing to offer the working classes of Italy and said that the break–up of the EU was needed. 

Afterwards comrades headed to the nearby Princes Gardens for a wreath-laying ceremony at the monument to commemorate those volunteers from Edinburgh and the surrounding Lothians who fought against Franco’s fascist army in the Spanish Civil War. A number of passers-by joined in.

Alain also observed that Friedrich Engels, in his early book The Condition of the Working Class in England, noted that Edinburgh had some of the worst houses in Europe. The high-rise houses on the Royal Mile he referred to were formerly inhabited – by the poorest on the ground floor (who often literally shared their rooms with pigs) whilst the rich lived above the smells. When the rich moved to the grander New Town the poor remained before subsequently being shunted off to the council estates around the city.

Today the area is filled with tourist shops selling imported tartan toys and bottles of whisky can be purchased from Sainsbury’s at half-price, but finding a place to buy a pint of milk is difficult.

History – it’s how you look at it

by Ray Jones

Review: Sweet William or the Butcher?: The Duke of Cumberland and the '45

Author: Jonathan Oates (2008), 224pp. Publisher: Pen Sword & Military. ISBN: 9781844157549

As Karl Marx said, it’s the material world that forms consciousness not the other way around. Ideas and concepts arise from our interaction with the world and most fundamentally from how humans make their living – how they survive.

And as they only survive by working together, collectively in societies, the ideas that predominate among people will be the ideas that are the main ones created by the economic/political type of society in which they live. For example, slave society, feudal, capitalist or socialist.

            It is rarely simple because in all societies there are divisions, tendencies, classes that interact with each other, they clash and cooperate in many ways. And within these they may have their own divisions.

The ideas of the fractions, while having many similarities with those of the dominant forces, will not be the same and will often contradict them. If not for these differences (contradictions) nothing would ever change.

This can make the study of history complex. But when evaluating historical events and processes (evaluating, not merely recording) Marxists must keep the main division in society, the division that defines them, in the front of their thoughts.

That is the class division, the different relationships to the means of production. Those who own the land, factories, machinery and so on, and those who don’t. We must always see things from the view of the working classes and oppose their oppressors.

Just as with ‘democracy’ when we always ask “democracy for whom?”, when evaluating history we must always ask “which class does it serve?”

To try and stand aside and be ‘objective’ is not only impossible but almost always leads to a reactionary position in the end.

The idea for this opening came to me as I was reading a book by Jonathan Oates called Sweet William or ‘the Butcher’?

This is an attempt to rescue William, Duke of Cumberland (second son of George II), from the nickname ‘the butcher’, which became attached to him after his part in putting down the Jacobite rising in the battle of Culloden in 1746 and its aftermath.

In spite of proclaiming his aim from the start, Oates still attempts to appear objective.

Oates summarises the cases historians have made for and against Cumberland and I will summarise his summary.

For Cumberland:

·        Many of the stories of terror are lies told by Jacobites.

·        The social context: it must be taken into consideration, eg the amount of violence in society, wide spread hatred of Jacobites amongst English and Lowland Scots..

·        ‘Necessity’: the ruling group needed finally to end the long-standing threat of Jacobinism. William as a member of the Hanoverian dynasty had a personal investment in this.

Against Cumberland:

·        Prior to Culloden, the decisive battle, he urged civilians to kill Jacobite stragglers.

·        After Culloden he allowed his troops to kill wounded Jacobite troops on the battle field and his cavalry showed no mercy to those fleeing.

·        After Culloden his campaigns in the Highlands killed Jacobite sympathisers and destroyed property, stole and killed cattle; the results of which have been called ‘genocide’. Even non-Jacobites were sometimes affected.

In spite of the book’s title, Oates never seriously thought that ‘Sweet William’ was an accurate term for Cumberland and concludes that Cumberland may have been harsh but, all things considered, he does not deserve the name ‘butcher’ either. What should Marxists make of all this?

            Well, they would be interested in any new facts but Oates does not really produce any.

But his type of arguments are interesting. They could be called ‘relativism’.

Cumberland should not now be called a butcher, he argues, because by the standards of his time he should not have been. If he behaved that way today it would, presumably, be all right to call him one.

The gaping hole in that argument in the case of Cumberland is that he was called a butcher at the time and not just by Jacobites. His own elder brother was part of the campaign against him.

But, more importantly, if we accept relativism it leaves historians as mere collectors of facts, unable to make judgements.

Relativist arguments are often used by liberals not liking some events but unwilling to condemn them. Ritualised cannibalism in tribal societies is perhaps a common example. But they can be used for reactionary purposes as Oates shows.

The opposite position to that of relativism however, is ‘absolutism’. This is when the historian starts from a preconceived set of principles and judges historical events by them – ignoring the social context. So when in some societies some babies were killed at birth this was evil, no matter what the circumstances. Some things just are wrong and that’s all there is to it.

But of course that’s not all there is to it. Many absolutists are coming from a religious position that itself has historical and social roots. Often their positions are reactionary but sometimes positive, depending on the circumstances.

Both relativism and absolutism are approaches that are often used, consciously or unconsciously, for a political purpose.

It must be recognised that individuals cannot step aside from their society and upbringing and be totally unbiased, we see things through our experiences, culture and education – we can do no other.

Marxists, through their experiences, choose to see things from the view of the working class. They see that the working class is the progressive class and what is best for it is the best, in the long run, for humanity.

Early on in his book Oates mentions other writers. One of these is John Prebble and his book Culloden, which he dismisses in a couple of paragraphs although he admits it is a powerful work and probably the most influential on the subject.

Prebble was a member of the old Communist Party (CPGB) until after the Second World War, and the contrast between his approach to history and Oates’ is stark. Prebble sees things in terms of class conflict and openly chooses a side – the side of the working people, of the oppressed.

He doesn’t support  ‘bonnie Prince Charlie’ or the ‘butcher Cumberland’. but paints them from the view ordinary people.

I think his book is an example of how you can write good history, full of emotion and colour, and not pretend to be writing looking down from some god-like position.

Of course this Marxist approach, which is neither relativist nor absolutist, should not just be applied to history. It is the core of Marxist ideology. Whatever we do, whatever we study, we should approach it from a class view.

All this is not to say that individuals play no active part in the making of history. It’s not all about the working of universal laws.

Masses of individuals make up the forces of history – there are no forces outside or beyond them.

And within these masses there are individuals who played more of a role than others. We can all think of examples – Cromwell, Marx and Engels. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and many others.

But even the most gifted individuals cannot work successfully against the historical laws explained by Marx.

As G Plekanov says, they cannot “foist on society relations which no longer conform to the state of the productive forces … or do not yet conform to them.”

In other words, you cannot retreat to a rural tribal idyll from advanced capitalism, or spring to socialism from tribalism.

The very gifted person understands the direction society is moving, is embedded in their class, they “possesses qualities which make them most capable of serving the great social needs of their time, needs that arise from general and particular causes.” And they can have great influence.

But I would like to emphasise the words ‘most capable’ because, with the aid of Marxism-Leninism and as a part of the revolutionary party and the labour movement, we can all play a part. We are not just cogs in a machine.

There is a world to win and we can help to win it!