Social democracy and Scottish independence

James Stafford  - Ph.D. student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Commissioning Editor for 'Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy'

Secondly, the campaign failed to address substantial sections of Scottish society which were not receptive to its confused brand of social democratic revivalism.  This was not for want of trying.  The SNP’s conservative prospectus for independence was the outcome of a process of policy revision more total than that which brought New Labour into existence.  Alex Salmond himself, a scion of the radical 1979 Group within the SNP, is an exemplary case of the dilution of youthful socialism under the twin pressures of business and public opinion.  Even this, however, was not sufficient to win the support of the large class of affluent property-owners required to secure an absolute majority in a Scottish referendum of this nature.

In the weeks since the result, the pro-independence parties have enjoyed massive spikes in party membership, but the benefits have disproportionately flowed to the SNP.  By the same token, there is no reason to believe that the governing authority of Alex Salmond would have been reduced by an upsurge in radical politics following a Yes vote.  For advocates of Scotland’s ability to revive social democracy, an uncomfortable truth has been revealed.  Only the weak performance of the Scottish Conservative party conceals the essential identity of Scottish political culture with that of the UK as a whole.

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the Scottish electorate’s scepticism about independence as the product of supine acquiescence in the existing, iniquitous economic order of the United Kingdom.  It might equally be viewed as a reflection of how the Yes campaign’s attitude to economic risk was always inconsistent with its professed social-democratic aims.  One of the key factors that historically distinguished revisionist social democracy from revolutionary socialism was its respect for the economic security of the peoples it sought to enlist and govern. That such security could conceivably exist under an appropriately regulated capitalist system was one of the crucial insights of Eduard Bernstein and the early leaders of the German and Swedish Social Democrats.  While this naturally led to advocacy of more public ownership alongside improved benefits and working conditions, it also produced, in the long run, a kind of conservatism, concerned to avoid needless and damaging fluctuations in employment, investment or prices.

For all the Yes campaign’s accusations of Labour betrayal and decline, Labour’s aversion to economic risk is, therefore, a clear point of continuity between the Wilson-Callaghan and Blair-Brown eras, as well as with the deep history of the European social-democratic tradition that Salmond routinely claimed as his own.  One of Ed Miliband’s few effective interventions in the independence debate was when he observed that ‘nobody claiming to be a social democrat’ could support independence without having a solid answer to the currency question.  Ordinary people, not capitalists or financiers, ultimately bear the costs of periods of economic crisis and instability, such as those engendered by currency crises.  The rich, mobile and powerful will turn such situations to their advantage, as commentators as diverse as Naomi Klein and Colin Hay have highlighted in contexts ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-9.

In short, for social democrats deliberately to attempt to engineer a fiscal, monetary and constitutional crisis within the UK is to flirt with disaster, harking back to the old Leninist call for the sharpening of capitalist contradictions at any cost.

Erstwhile supporters of independence can fairly counter that some kind of radical disruption was necessary to tear the UK away from a seemingly endless trajectory of economic decline and social retrenchment.  But, if the left’s temporary alliance with Scottish nationalism was really tactical, rather than doctrinal, in its origins, then now is surely the time to face up to the evident limitations of Scottish statehood as a means to social justice – at least within the bounds of the moderately reformist politics espoused by nearly everybody in the Yes campaign.

The rejection of Scottish independence preserves the Union as a common political space for economic regulation and redistribution, while creating strong pressure for democratic renewal and institutional reform across the whole UK. Now, as in the past, it is not as a separate ‘progressive beacon’, but as the leading element of a pan-British progressive coalition that Scotland’s constitutional agitators are best placed to achieve the change they desire.