Terry Conway

The third elections to the Scottish Parliament, scheduled for May 2007, could not come at a worse time for New Labour in Scotland. As elsewhere in Britain, the disaster of the Iraq war combined with neo-liberal policies at home don’t play at all well with working class voters.

But Blair’s second questioning by the police over the cash for honours scandal has surely given First Minister Jack Mc Connell more sleepless nights than any council leader in England or than Rhodri Morgan in Wales.

That is because this election, like the first election to the parliament in 1999, has the weight of history resting on it, much as New Labour south and north of the border would like to forget the fact. No ceremony took place in the Edinburgh parliament to mark the day that Mc Connell and his friends are a bit embarrassed to mention.

For this is the election that marks 300 years of union, 300 years of that “parcel of rogues in a nation” as Robert Burns so accurately described those Scots who supported the 1707 sell-out after being paid enormous sums of English gold to support the unionist project.

The ordinary people of Scotland had little or no say in what happened to them then and many reacted by taking part in rioting. In May they may well take the opportunity to punish both the Mc Connell and Blair administrations – and it could well be that many perceive the easiest way of doing this by voting for the SNP. They have promised that if they are elected they will call a referendum on Scottish independence, an idea that seems to be gaining support on both sides of the border.

New Labour’s machine has launched a full-scale attack on the idea of Scottish independence, fearing that they could loose the Labour/Lib Dem administration in Edinburgh in May as well as being punished in the Scottish council elections.

With Brown looking likely to take over from Blair in London after these elections, some defeats can, its is assumed, be absorbed into the supposed excitement of the succession ¬– but a real trouncing in Scotland would not play well in England. And a referendum on the future shape of the British state raises bigger political questions that unionist Brown certainly doesn’t want to face any more than his predecessor Blair…

That was the context in which Defence Minister Adam Ingram, who is also the Westminster MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow told a press conference in Edinburgh on January 17, for example, that thousands of military and defence jobs would be under threat, particularly suggesting that the Govan shipyard could close if Scotland went independent.

He stated: "There is no possibility that a UK Navy would commission work from an independent Scotland, without saying what authority he had to make such a statement.

Ingram sounds over the top, until you read the article by SNP MSP Christine Grahame in Scottish Left Review 58 (May/June 2006). Grahame sets out how she and colleague Kenny MacAskill have been digging into the dirty tricks campaign waged by the British state in the 70’s over North Sea oil. Among the documents that MacAskill has uncovered was “the thinly veiled threat that the rump UK would have to use armed force to secure `its’ strategic economic interests if Scotland chose independence”

Grahame is right to conclude as she does in her fascinating piece that “officially sanctioned state violence is still quite likely to be the weapon of final choice for the British establishment if `their’ state and their power base are threatened by a democratic move to independence in Scotland.” She also points out that in the meantime other tactics will continue to used against those fighting for “a better and fairer future for ordinary Scots” – tactics she refers to as “non-violent democratically subversive activities”.

While she is right to point out that such a campaign has been underway on a continuous basis there has certainly been a stepping up on both sides of the border. On February 8 for example The Guardian devoted the whole of its G2 supplement to the question of the relationship between England and Scotland under the rubric “The other special relationship :Can England and Scotland last another 300 years?”

Opening with a question mark would one would think indicate that what follows would be some attempt at balance between those who want to see an end to the union and those who want to defend it, but no such luck. Page after page tells us that independence is bad for Scotland, and apart from one or two nice pieces of humour there is no space for the opposing view.

But Christine Grahame is on the left of the SNP and the response of her party leadership to New Labour and their unionist approach is rather different. They responded to Ingram for example by pointing out that 47,000 defence jobs have gone in Scotland since 1979, and rabbit on about the need to defend Scotland’s regiments. This is hardly going to attract those anti-war activists who also have a vision of an independent Scotland, but shows clearly what direction the SNP leadership is pointing.

The Scottish Socialist Party has a different answer. Alan Mc Coombes, the SSP’s press and policy co-ordinator points out that the SNP supports a “bloated defence budget, complete with an assortment of Scottish regiments – regiments which were created by the Victorian British state to protect its imperial possessions in Africa and Asia”.

Mc Coombes points out that the British defence budget is grotesquely out of proportion and that Scotland’s share of that budget in 2007 will total an obscene £3 million. He continues: “By cutting defence spending to the level of the Republic of Ireland – around £700 million a year – over £2 billion could be diverted into health, housing, pensions and free public transport”.

The SSP’s vote may well be squeezed in these forthcoming elections by voters believing that the best way to punish New Labour is to vote SNP. But the party will be doing its utmost to ensure that Scottish voters are given a real political alternative – and Socialist Resistance will do everything it can to support them in so doing.