How Labour dropped the ball on Scottish independence

Whoever devised the hardline Labour party stance on Scottish independence was clearly a strategic novice. In this article I'm going to explain why it was such a poor strategic error for Labour to openly side with the extremely unpopular Coalition government and the desperately endangered political species that is the Scottish Conservative Party. Then I will go on to explain what I think the Labour leadership could have done differently.

How Labour dropped the ball

The debate over greater autonomy for Scotland could have been a great opportunity for Labour to showcase their differences from the Tory party. Instead they have chosen to "dance with the devil" by openly siding with the Tory party in order to oppose greater autonomy for the Scottish people.

It's not like this is the first time that Ed Miliband has decided to openly collude with the Tories either. Back in March 2013 Miliband allowed Iain Duncan Smith to table a vile piece of retroactive legislation as "emergency legislation" so that it could be passed through parliament in a single day, and then ordered his MPs to abstain from the vote, in order to allow Iain Duncan Smith to retroactively cover up the fact that through his sheer incompetence he had unlawfully forced thousands of people onto unpaid labour schemes. In July 2014 Miliband and the Labour leadership sided with the Tories once again by ordering Labour MPs to vote in favour of a Tory bill to allow the security services to continue dredging the private communications data of millions of innocent people.

One of the clearest illustrations of the stupidity of choosing to sing from the Tory hymnsheet is the way that Labour have been forced to present two completely different narratives on the NHS either side of the border. Down in England the Labour Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has warned that "NHS privatisation is being forced through at pace and scale" and called for a halt to NHS privatisations until the 2015 General Election. Meanwhile, north of the border Alistair Darling (who like all Scottish Labour MPs is a man who is fighting desperately for his job not to be abolished) has tried to ridicule people's concerns over NHS privatisation as "scaremongering". The hopelessness of Labour's mixed messages on the NHS are a direct consequence of their decision to side so closely with the Tory party.

The Labour decision to unify with the Tories and Lib-Dems in a battle against greater autonomy for Scotland has also strongly reinforced the the impression that there is essentially no difference between the three Westminster establishment parties. Whichever one you vote for, you'll get virtually the same policies. The only difference being the colour of the tie of the politician who is voting to sell off your public services on the cheap to their corporate mates, voting in favour of new draconian legislation to restrict the freedoms of the public in order to protect the interests of the establishment class, and all the while fiddling their expenses to make sure they make as much money as possible out of the Westminster gravy train.

The vision of Labour MPs like Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown sharing a political platform with the Tories is appalling enough for those of us who live in the rest of the UK, but to the people of Scotland it's much, much worse. The Tory party is widely despised in Scotland for many reasons, most notably the pilfering of Scottish oil revenues in order to hand out huge tax breaks to their wealthy backers in the City of London, Maggie Thatcher's Scottish Poll Tax experiment, the deliberate ideological attacks on Scottish workers and Scottish industry, the privatisation of so many Scottish services against the will of the Scottish public, and more recently the hated "Bedroom Tax". For Labour to ally themselves so closely with a toxic brand like the Tories like this is a huge mistake that the Scottish Labour party may never live down.

The fact is that should Scotland achieve independence, the SNP would lose their raison d'etre, but due to Labour's ridiculous hard line stance against greater autonomy for Scotland, surely nobody could consider them suitable rulers of an independent state that they have been so fervently opposed to?

So what should Labour have done differently?

The decision to share a political platform with the politically toxic Tory party was an extremely poor one for the reasons outlined above, but what could the Labour party have done differently?

In my view, the biggest mistake the Labour party made was the decision to continue backing the Tories, even after David Cameron ruled out a Devo Max option on the referendum.

Devo Max would have transferred more political powers to Scotland, but kept the Union in tact when it came to defence policy and foreign affairs. The evidence is absolutely clear that Devo Max would have been the preferred option of the Scottish electorate. When asked to choose between Devo Max and full independence, the Devo Max option won 61% to 39%. When asked to choose between Devo Max and continuation of the status quo, Devo Max won by 62% to 38%.

When David Cameron ruled out Devo Max in order to hold a gun to the heads of the Scottish electorate in a "with us or against us" binary choice, he ruled out the option that the overwhelming majority of Scottish people would have preferred.

The Labour stance should have been to continue arguing in favour of Devo Max, instead of siding so closely with the Tories. This would have allowed Labour to preface every single pronouncement on the independence issue with a strong attack on the Tory party for ruling out the option that the majority of Scottish people actually support.

The Labour message should have been "we want what the clear majority of Scottish people want, but David Cameron is forcing Scotland to choose between the two less popular options".

Adopting this stance would have given the Labour party the platform to talk up the achievements of the Scottish Parliament, and their own role in its creation. They could have spoken of how greater autonomy for Scotland has protected the Scottish NHS and the Scottish education system from the appalling mass privatisations of the English NHS and thousands of English schools. The narrative that devolution of power has been great for Scotland is one that would have resonated strongly with the Scottish electorate, and built the foundation of the argument for further devolution of political power.

If Labour wanted to show their support for the Union they could still have done so, but without sharing a political platform with the Tories. The Labour party could have made a commitment to offering the Scottish people the Devo Max referendum that they actually want the next time they come to power in Westminster, or in the Scottish parliament. This Devo Max stance would have established three important things.

1. It would have demonstrated to the Scottish people that Labour is "in tune" with what the majority of Scottish people actually want. 
2. It would have put clear distance between the Labour party and the Tory party.
3. It would have given the majority of Scottish people a strong reason to vote for the Labour party.

In deciding to side with the Tories, the Labour party has done a very large amount of damage to their reputation. In my view a much more sensible option would have been to steer well clear of the Tories and the "Better Together" fearmongering campaign, and to adopt a political stance that set them clearly apart from the Tories, and actually represented the will of the clear majority of the Scottish electorate.
  
Conclusion

I've tried to keep my strongly pro-independence views out of the above analysis in order to provide some reasonably balanced strategic analysis of Labour's woeful decision to jump into bed with the Tories, instead of carefully spelling out their own vision for the future of Scotland.

Had Devo Max been an option on the Scottish referendum ballot, I would have been forced to make a very difficult decision between supporting greater autonomy for Scotland or supporting full autonomy for Scotland. The fact that David Cameron decided to play a ridiculous "all-or-nothing" gamble with the constitutional future of Scotland by ruling out Devo Max has left me with a very easy decision indeed, to favour full autonomy for Scotland over the continuation of the unacceptable status quo.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

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The bizarre Tory effort to rebrand themselves as "The Workers Party"

If you ever needed another demonstration of how insanely out-of-touch the Tories are with reality, you just need to consider the plan by Tory party chairman Grant Shapps Michael Green to rebrand the Tory party as "The Workers' Party".

There is so much wrong with this proposed rebranding it's incredible. It would be funny if it weren't so Orwellian.

Party funding
[Main article]
         
The Tories, and their braying supporters in the corporate controlled press have constantly attacked the Labour party over the fact that their party is mainly funded by small donations from hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers, via democratically organised institutions (the trade unions). Meanwhile the Tory party is funded by a rogues gallery of extremely dodgy rich people, without the faintest trace of democratic accountability.

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that is majority funded by donations of over £50,000 a shot from the super-rich, to represent the interests of ordinary workers?

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that has a secretive inner cabal of super-rich donors that it refers to as "The Leaders Group", to represent the interests of ordinary workers?

How on earth could anyone be stupid enough to expect a political party that allows their wealthy donors to write up their own wish-list of anti-worker legislation as official Tory party policy, to represent the interests of ordinary workers?
         
Wage Repression
[Main article]

One of the strongest pieces of evidence that the Tories actively work against the interests of ordinary workers is the fact that since they came to power in 2010 the ordinary workers of the UK have suffered the longest sustained fall in real incomes since records began!

The Tories have fueled this decline in real incomes with their derisory increases in the minimum wage, their attacks on public sector pay, their refusal to legislate against companies that employ the majority of their staff on Zero-Hours Contracts, their massive expansion of Stalinist forced labour schemes, their cuts to in-work social security payments and their constant claims that "Britain is Bankrupt".

All of these factors have driven down the incomes of the poor and ordinary. What makes this deliberate Tory campaign of wage repression even worse is that the super wealthy elite have spent the last four years making themselves richer than ever.

Workers rights

The Tories have a long history of attacking workers rights. Just think of their ideological attacks on the trade union movement during the 1980s. These attacks have continued under the current government. There's the financial attack against people that have been unfairly dismissed, the revocation of established workers rights from people forced onto Iain Duncan Smith's Stalinist mandatory labour schemes, the increase in the state pension age, George Osborne's ludicrous "Shares for Rights" scheme, the parts of the "Gagging Law" designed to silence trade unions from speaking out on behalf of their members, and there's also the element of the "Gagging Law" designed to attack the right to privacy of trade union members.

If the Tories were really "The Workers' Party" would they really have spent the last four years deliberately undermining workers rights?
      
International Labour Day
[Main article]

If there is one thing that illustrated the Tory contempt for the value of labour more than any other, it must have been their plan to scrap the May bank holiday, which is celebrated worldwide as International Labour Day.

Grant Shapps Michael Green

I don't normally go in for the personality politics side of things, but it is impossible not to note that the man behind this ludicrous Tory rebranding exercise is the Internet conman turned Tory party chairman, Grant Shapps Michael Green. Grant Shapps' Michael Green's Internet con involved selling a programme that stole the creative content of other websites, changed a few keywords, then packaged the stolen content up into fake websites, in order to cash in on Google Ads. As he was doing this scam, he hid behind the false name Michael Green, and allegedly a number of other fake names too.

When Google figured out his scam, they blacklisted any site using the Grant Shapps Michael Green programme from their Google Rankings. Grant Shapps Michael Green is a man so corrupt that his dodgy Internet scams have even been blocked by Google!

It's no wonder at all then, that this corrupt con man has devised a new fraud, designed to con gullible members of the public into believing that the Tories represent the interests of ordinary workers, when the evidence is so absolutely clear that they don't.

Conclusion

This Tory rebranding exercise is a plan built on the assumption that the public are so extraordinarily gullible and ill-informed that they will simply accept this ludicrous new Tory narrative, in the same way that they have lapped up so many other ludicrously counter-factual Tory narratives (the Great Neoliberal Lie, The "Making Work Pay" fallacy, the "We're All in This Together" fallacy, the "your human rights are a burden that need to be scrapped" narrative ...).

The evidence is absolutely clear; the Tories are the anti-worker party, yet they believe that there are enough hopelessly gullible people in the UK that this blatant propaganda effort to rebrand themselves as the opposite of what they are will win them a significant number of votes, otherwise they wouldn't be trying it.

The Tories are once again assuming that the people of Britain are such a feeble-minded bunch that they'll believe any old rubbish they're told, no matter how blatantly counter-factual it is.


 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.
         

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Reasons Scotland should vote yes: Uncertainty

Introduction to the series

Before I start out on this series, let me first declare my interests. I am a Yorkshireman, so I suppose that technically makes me English. I wish my beautiful region had more autonomy from Westminster, because perhaps if we had, our local representatives would have fought to protect our vital industries (steel, coal, fishing, transport), rather than letting Westminster deliberately ruin them as part of their insane ideological experiment in turning the UK economy into a supposed "post-industrial society" built around the city of London financial sector (and we all know how that turned out).

I know there is no chance of Yorkshire achieving regional autonomy from London in my lifetime, but that doesn't mean I begrudge the people of Scotland their opportunity to end London rule, in fact I'm delighted for them. The only concern I have is the possibility that the people of Scotland will decline this magnificent chance to assert their autonomy. Come September the 18th, I hope we'll be celebrating the rebirth of the Scottish nation.

I hope I'll be drinking a toast to "Scotland the brave", not mournfully lamenting for "Scotland the servile".

Uncertainty

One of the most crucial arguments I can think of in relation to Scottish independence is the uncertainty issue.

The naysayers have repeatedly tried to frame the independence debate around uncertainty. They like to fearmonger that Scotland faces an uncertain future should the Scottish people choose to go it alone. In my view this argument is absolutely ludicrous because Scotland would face an equally uncertain future should they vote to remain part of the United Kingdom.

If Scotland votes to end London rule, then there will be an element of uncertainty over Scotland's membership of the European Union. However if Scotland votes to remain part of the United Kingdom, these uncertainty issues will not be resolved, in fact, they may be made a whole lot worse.
 
Several high profile EU technocrats have tried to intimidate Scotland out of voting for independence. It is absolutely clear why they are opposed, they are under enormous pressure from countries like Spain, Belgium, France, Finland and Italy, who are all desperately trying to prevent their own regions from achieving greater autonomy/independence.

As well as numerous EU technocrats making this point, the odious William Hague chipped in with his opinion that:

"if Scotland left the United Kingdom, it would also be leaving ... the European Union."

The idea that these threats are anything more than hot air is ludicrous. The EU would be much poorer without Scottish oil and Scottish renewables, so to drive Scotland out would be an act of grotesque economic illiteracy. Even if these ludicrous threats to lock Scotland out of the EU are followed through, who would want to be part of a political union that is intent on driving their own country out of it anyway?

Let's say that Scotland votes no because of this uncertainty over Europe. What then? Well, given that the Tories and UKIP are promising an EU referendum in the next parliament, it seems inevitable that one will take place. The problem for the Scottish people being that their votes will be massively outnumbered by English votes in an EU referendum. This means that if the English do as the corporate press has been conditioning them to, and vote to leave the EU, Scotland will be dragged out with them, no matter how the people of Scotland vote. 

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

This article was reproduced (with my permission) on the Wings Over Scotland website. You can see that version (and the huge comments thread) here.

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