- Finding new avenues: Scotland’s independence movement and the SNP’s crisis Archived Message
Posted by Keith-264
on June 18, 2023, 7:35 pm
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http://isj.org.uk/independence-and-the-snp-crisis/ Issue: 179 Posted on 13th June 2023 Maryam Hally and Héctor Sierra The 2014 Scottish independence referendum was the first of a series of political earthquakes that shook British politics in the past decade.1 This journal has contributed to an argument that the Scottish independence movement was not some retreat from class politics caused by nationalist fever. Instead, it was an expression of revolt against the politics of austerity following the 2008 economic crash as well as against decades of neoliberal reforms.2 The independence movement is best understood as another manifestation of the same global trends that gave rise to the Arab Spring revolutions and other movements of resistance against neoliberalism and the hollowing out of democratic institutions. Left-wing historian Tariq Ali went as far as identifying the independence movement as one of the three most important examples of this trend in Europe, along with the rise of the left-reformist parties of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in the Spanish state.3 Of course, the transformative projects embodied by Syriza and Podemos, as well as by Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States, have one by one failed to live up to the expectations they raised.4 Common to all these was a failure to face up to the reality of mighty, unaccountable capitalist states and the class interests they exist to defend. In what follows, we argue the Scottish independence movement may have faced the same destiny. The radical energies unleashed by that movement were largely deflected into electoral support for the Scottish National Party (SNP). Although the SNP shared the movement’s ambition for Scottish independence, the party stood for a vision far removed from the aspirations motivating working-class people to back rupture with the British state. Scotland became a source of instability for British politics, but Scottish politics itself remained remarkably stable in the period following 2014. For many years, particularly after the 2016 Brexit vote and the confused attempts of Tory administrations to disentangle Britain from the project of European integration, it was possible for defenders of the neoliberal centre to look to Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP government as an exception to the norm of political chaos elsewhere. This illusion has now spectacularly ended, with the party plunged into what party president Michael Russell has called “its biggest crisis in 50 years”.5 The claim that a second referendum (“Indyref2”) would take place in October 2023, insisted upon only a few months ago, has now given way to widespread acceptance that independence is off the agenda for the foreseeable future. Here we briefly look at the immediate and long-term reasons underlying Sturgeon’s sudden resignation as first minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP in February 2023, after almost a decade as one of the most successful bourgeois politicians of our times. We chart the contradictory relationship between the mass independence movement and the party that sought to lead it, and we explore what all this means for the future of both in this new phase of Scottish politics. Lastly, we will assess the role played by the left in this process and begin to map out how socialists should intervene in fighting for change in the new political situation. Ctd... |
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