Reading the SNP’s long awaited Sustainable Growth Commission Report reminded me why I left the Labour Party. It reads like an extract from Tony Blairs playbook. Readers of a certain age will recall how the ‘Old Fettesian’ warmonger demanded Labour abandon its core values and become ‘New Labour’ to win over ‘Middle England’.
In attempting to placate ‘Middle Scotland’ former SNP MSP Andrew Wilson has adopted a similar approach. His report is full of Blairite calls for ‘more flexible labour markets’, ‘greater tax incentives for business’ and ‘further inward investment opportunities’ for capital. Such neo-liberal orthodoxy may be expected from a former RBS economist, but it offers merely another vision of low taxes for employers and low wages for employees.
There was a widespread acceptance on the YES side that the economic case for Independence presented in 2014 was our Achilles Heel leaving too many legitimate questions unanswered; How would we deal with the inevitable flight of capital? How would an Independent Scotland cope with a collapse in world oil prices? What impact would Scotland’s falling population have on our long-term ability to pay pensions? How could we turbo charge Scotland’s chronically poor productivity levels?
Dismay
Andrew Wilson was charged with bringing forward answers to all these questions. His Report however has not only failed to deliver the illusive ‘silver bullet’ SNP leaders promised us, it has been met with dismay across the broad Independence movement.
On the central question of what currency we would use, Wilson opts for the most conservative option of all, the status quo. His ‘Sterlingisation’ plan insists we keep the Pound in an informal or ‘transitional’ arrangement that would leave our new nation at the mercy of financial foes we could not protect ourselves from.
The Scottish Socialist Party has long argued we should have our own currency so that our Government will be able to implement its programme in full using all the economic tools available to it. Such an approach gives us the power to vary exchange rates, interest rates or implement spending promises.
Ten years of austerity
Wilson’s ‘steady as she goes’ strategy also recommends ten years of fiscal austerity after Independence to pay down the national debt. Thus, the same approach the SNP slammed Labour and the Tories for introducing in the aftermath of the 2008 banking collapse, would be his post-independence economic centerpiece. Politically this plan not only capitulates to ‘the moneymen’ in The City of London, it completely undermines the message that Independence is about real change.
Responding to Wilson’s conclusions SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon warned her party conference in Aberdeen last month it must stop obsessing about the date of the next referendum and start making a far more persuasive case for independence capable of winning over the persistent majority who oppose it. Such advice is well placed but ironic given her own obsession with Brexit these past two years and her party’s repeated failure to mention independence in three consecutive General elections!
Clear opening between Right and Left
Andrew Wilson’s Sustainable Growth Commission report does nothing to make our case more persuasive. And yet having said that, he does the Independence movement one important service, he highlights the profound difference between the Right and the Left in our approach to the National Question itself. For the Left Independence is, and has always been, about change, about securing significant material improvement in the living standards of ordinary working-class people, about breaking free from the British state stranglehold. For the Right however, it is about ‘an orderly transition’ from the existing economic power relations to something similar governed from Edinburgh.
For Nicola Sturgeon the Growth Commission’s conclusions leave her ‘Left flank’ exposed. They are much too Right wing for a nationalist party desperate to pose as Left of Centre.
Material gains in a socialist Scotland
In the meantime, a sizeable opening has appeared to the SNP’s Left. As recent polls confirm however, Scottish Labour’s failure to advocate an independent socialist Scotland, means they are unlikely to benefit from this new landscape. The Scottish Socialist Party’s programme for independence is much more likely to appeal as it includes material advantages for working class people such as:
- A £10/hour Living wage for all with 16 hours guaranteed as a minimum,
- Returning our railways, oil and gas and energy industries to public ownership,
- Ending the industrial scale tax evasion of rich Scots,
- Rescinding all the scandalous PFI contracts signed, much to their detriment, by Scotland’s public sector
- Developing Scotland’s vast green energy industry with the profits going into public housing provision
- For a modern, democratic republic
These demands and others supporting the case for an independent socialist Scotland received great support on the recent Independence rallies. Delivering such demands is the key to persuading Scotland’s working-class majority Independence means real change for them not more of the same.