 Welcome to Marxist Voice, podcast of the Communists in Britain. In today's episode we'll be listening to another talk from 2023's revolution festival, this time on the crisis of Scottish nationalism. Almost 10 years ago, the Scottish national movement terrified the ruling class, threatened to rip apart the union and unleashed the rebel spirit of the workers against Tory Britain. But today the movement is at a crossroads. The SMP, which was raised to unprecedented levels of support by the movement, has proven politically bankrupt and their rosy reformist image has given way to fierce attacks on the working class. As a result, those who have sobered up to the bankruptcy of petty bourgeois nationalism are looking for a way forward. In this talk, Sean Morris will explain the crisis faced by Scottish nationalism and that the way forward for the fight for national independence lies in the class struggle. Without further ado, this episode of Marxist Voice, brought to you by the Communists in Britain. It's been kind of a slightly dramatic year really for Scottish politics. Normally things in Scotland are a little bit more slow-paced, a little bit more, you know, blurred around the edges and compromise compared to the crisis that's been going on in Westminster certainly and in UK politics as a whole. For the whole past decade, but especially you know the past five years or so. But it's still been all going on. So hopefully this will be exciting and energizing for people. I'm going to start really by kind of talking a little bit about the political thriller I think that's been kind of unfolding in Scotland over this past year. But I think that one of the greatest illustrations of the crisis that Scottish nationalism finds itself in is the fact that the SMP they promised in June of last year, Nicola Surgeon promised this or she said it was her aim. They said there would be a referendum. It should have happened about a month ago on the 19th of October 2023. That's when they said we're going to get this, we're going to have a referendum then on independence. And of course, it didn't happen. In fact, nothing even happened. There wasn't even much of a word or a celebration from the SMP about oh, this is what we wanted to have. It was kind of just buried, covered up, forgotten about. This plan was of course famously quashed by the UK Supreme Court basically ahead of that kind of legal challenge to the UK's ability to stop a referendum. That's when they announced they wanted to have this one in October of this year. And then fast forward a few months from that court case, Nicola Surgeon in February this year, she resigns as First Minister and as leader of the Scottish National Party seemingly like a bolt from the blue. I have nowhere. Her excuses, the reason she gives is like, oh, I'm just kind of tired of politics. It's a brutal kind of life or whatever. I think she used that word. She said that she was brutally treated or something like that. Drew a lot of comparisons to like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. She resigned around the same time. Also, female leader was often compared to Nicola Surgeon and so on. And yeah, had the exact same reasons. She's like, oh, politics is just, it's just too mean, you know, it's too hard. And obviously, this is just entirely superficial, the real reasons go much kind of deeper than that. But as soon as she was, as soon as she resigned, the party, the SMP was thrown into extremely contentious leadership debate, which everyone maybe will have seen a little bit of or seen some of the main figures from on the news and so on, which exposed many of the fault lines that ran through the party basically that were just below the surface that were kind of ignored or really kind of covered up by Nicola Sturgeon, her own kind of personal popularity and authority. The leadership election really exposed to what degree her and the kind of clique around her actually held the party together. And in fact, there was a lot of acrimony and disagreement and political disunity around the party. After her resignation, there were kind of a couple of candidates and so on. This was supposed to be a new generation of SMP politicians taking over the party from Sturgeon and the kind of clique of people who'd ruled the party for more than 20 years. And yeah, they were immediately divided over many extremely caustic issues. You know, the question of the candidates' religion played a big part in the campaign. The controversy over transgender rights and the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland also played a huge part in it. And they also ended up kind of attacking each other over the party's raison d'etre over the independence question and the fact that there was an impasse. And it was I think it was extremely embarrassing for them all to basically have their own candidates for leadership come out and basically say, we've done practically nothing. We're basically where we were in 2014. We're not really any kind of closer to independence. So this was all the high kind of political drama that emerged during the leadership election. But then also in the same time, the party was then besieged by this police investigation, which everyone will probably have seen in the headlines and so on into the party's finances. And it's raked up a lot of dodgy stuff really in the party, which is obviously what the intention of this investigation actually was is to rake up all the dark stuff that builds up in a party and in a government after it's been in government for 10 years or more than 10 years, 15 years. Exposed the very close, incestuous really relationship between the S&P as a party and the Scottish government, the party machine basically, and the state bureaucracy based around Hollywood symbolized most perfectly by the actual, by the marriage between Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister and S&P leader, and Peter Murrell, who was the S&P's kind of chief executive, the kind of top boss. And all of the kind of basically this power couple or whatever, Scottish politics, you know, the influence that they jointly had over the machinery of party and government, how they kind of merged and blurred the kind of lines and so on. As everyone knows, you in a bourgeois state, you know, there's supposed to be this formal separation of powers and so on. And that was all kind of, you know, very blurry and I threw a lot kind of a big kind of shadow over Hollywood and so on. The lack of, the complete lack of transparency in the Scottish National Party's own finances was the main feature of this investigation and the main thing that's kind of come out. Like I said, all the kind of strange dodgy stuff like this motorhome, this is a luxury motorhome that cost £100,000 or something like that, that was purchased by the party before 2020. It was meant to be some sort of S&P battle bus or something like this, but it never got any use as an official S&P campaigning vehicle that was owned by the party. And in fact, it sat for more than 12 months in the driveway of Peter Murrell's 92-year-old mother. And it was reported that the question basically is did Peter Murrell and Nicholas Sturgeon, did they make personal use of this vehicle, which was paid for by the party for their own kind of holidays and so on? The question of expenses, the main thing was about independent donations to the party for campaigning for independence. And then also things like Peter Murrell, the loans that he personally had made to the party to cover its financial difficulties, basically, and how much money the party owed to him personally and all this sort of stuff. And then the party's finances were in such a bad state that it was revealed. The company was supposed to be auditing the party, they quit and they said they wouldn't do it, basically. And there was a scramble earlier this year for the S&P to desperately find some accountancy firm, a legitimate one, that would audit the party's accounts in time for this deadline for the Electoral Commission or else they would face an even bigger investigation potentially or deregistration. And it revealed in particular, right around the time of the leadership election as well, which is extremely embarrassing for the party, the financial crisis that the S&P was in, having lost around 40% of its membership since 2019, a huge number of people drifting out of the party, basically, and the consequently loss of membership dues and also less donations and all that kind of stuff, basically. As part of this investigation, senior figures, including Sturgeon, she was arrested and questioned, though nobody was actually charged with any kind of crime. And there was a huge publicity around the case and a lot of kind of odd behavior around it, I think, and it's kind of taken a piss out of by a lot of people. The police investigation, their raid on the S&P headquarters and on Nicola Sturgeon's home, they seized things like Nicola Sturgeon's personal shaving razor and other personal items that were taken as evidence somehow of financial crime, white collar crime. And the scenes themselves were ridiculous. You know, her house had all these forensic tents, dozens of police officers. It was like a serial killer had lived there or something like that, not someone who's accused of, like I said, a kind of white collar crime of financial impropriety or whatever. And it seems pretty likely, really, that the whole investigation, like I said, no one has actually been charged. The whole investigation is what they call, I think, legally vexatious. There's no real basis to it. It's politically motivated, in other words. And it really isn't even really clear what crimes have been committed. Like I said, no one's been charged. Yes, there's a lot of dodgy stuff with the S&P party finances, but what bourgeois party does not have a dodgy financial record that they cover up, you know? And it's purely because the S&P are the S&P that they're facing an investigation like this. You know, people will probably remember it was the leave campaign in the 2016 referendum. They broke all the rules about spending and, you know, finances and whatever else, but they faced, you know, basically no kind of consequences. Not like the S&P are being investigated anyway. And it seems like this, you know, what's the reason for all this? Like, I think the Tories were emboldened by the S&P's loss at the Supreme Court last year. You know, and but they could still see, you know, Nicol Sturgeon, you know, in response to this, talked about, you know, this plan for a de facto referendum at the next general election. So they probably felt that they needed to do something and try and keep the S&P on a short leash, basically. And as a lot of other things that they did, you know, they, around the same time, this dictate from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office went out to all Scottish politicians and ministers, basically saying that, you know, you're no longer allowed to take, like, foreign trips to different countries and present yourselves as they're representing the Scottish government and to talk to foreign leaders about, you know, the potential of Scotland becoming an independent country, which since Alex Salmond's day, you know, there's been a network of Scottish, I don't know what they're called, like development officers or something that set up in various countries to try and attract investment directly via the devolved government into Scotland. But they said you can't do that anymore. This is a violation of, this is overstepping the bounds, basically. And they also announced that they might investigate the Scottish government for the amount of money that it spends on independence campaigning. Again, they would make the argument that this is illegal, basically. The Scottish government can't spend money on breaking up the UK state because it's just, it's a devolved part of the UK state. And it's not, you know, saying, oh, it shouldn't have, there shouldn't be, like, a Scottish government minister for independence as there is, there shouldn't be a Scottish government minister for, like, foreign affairs, that kind of thing. And, you know, this probe into the S&P finances has been open since 2021. And it's initially based on, it seems, the complaints lodged by one pro-independence crank, basically. This guy, Sean Merkin, who's just a bit of a lunatic, basically, hates the S&P. He's just a total payboarder nationalist, wherever. He lodged this complaint with the police like two years ago into this £600,000 that just had sort of disappeared from the S&P accounts that was meant to be ring-fenced for independence campaigning. And like nothing happened in this investigation for two years until, like I said, that loss at the Supreme Court. And Nicola Sturgeon talking about a de facto referendum, I think it's when this was all kind of put, moved into order. And it's completely within the powers of the Home Secretary to have ordered this. You know, they, you know, protest and say this is like a Scottish police investigation. But the National Crime Agency, which is a bit like the UK's version of the FBI, are the ones that have actually been doing much of the investigating on this. And of course, sharing resources with, with, you know, the National Crime Agency, works on organized crime and that kind of thing, and works closely with Police Scotland, which is the UK's second largest police force. So a bit of a conspiracy, I guess, is what I'm sort of saying. But whether it is a conspiracy or not, the damage is done, basically, to the S&P by this whole scandal. They've dropped around like 10%, you know, in the opinion polls. And there's a widespread perception amongst the party membership supporters and voters more generally that the party is in, is in a deep crisis. It's losing its direction. And in fact, that it may have entered like a phase of decline. It's kind of years of absolute dominance in the ballot box are kind of over. And now it's being kind of cut down to size. And it looks like that the Labor Party, the Scottish Labor, kind of stands up and ready to give the S&P a body blow really at the next election. It's the kind that won't knock the S&P out. You know, I think they'll still be the largest party in Scotland for years to come. But they'll certainly be down on one knee if they lose a significant number of seats, either at Westminster or even opinion polls are now showing that the S&P would maybe lose a significant number of their seats at the Holyrood election as well for the Scottish government. And, you know, people may have seen, you know, two months ago, wherever it was, they've already faced a big defeat in the Rutherglen, this by election that happened just in the kind of south east of Glasgow. And the party is now, you know, very, very vulnerable, I think, to scandals. There's a real lack of enthusiasm amongst the party's, you know, support base. And I think that was the what caused the result that happened in Rutherglen, which was a, you know, in pure numerical terms, it was a big landslide for the Labour Party, but it's basically because thousands of pro S&P voters seemingly just didn't even show up to vote for the party. And, you know, why would they? There are kind of reasons why. But, you know, the S&P, they looked unbeatable, I'd say, you know, just over a year ago still. But how, you know, and why is this happening now? Why such a sudden kind of decline and crisis? You know, this isn't just a bolt from the blue, I would say, but it's a result of the kind of contradictions they've been building up in Scottish politics and in the S&P over the whole kind of past period, basically, since the last referendum and even going back a little bit further, basically. I think the first thing really to understand about the crisis of Scottish nationalism is that it's a crisis of reformism, basically. So we'll get onto that. You know, the S&P, they've been in power for 16 years now, a long, long time. They maintain high levels of support, you know, at the ballot box, especially since the 2014 independence referendum. You know, they got there after a kind of steady rise, you know, over about 20 years, with like I said, many of the same people at the kind of top of the party for that whole time since the 1990s. People like Alex Salmond, John Swinney, Peter Murrell, Nicholas Sturgeon, and Angus Robertson. And I think it's just Robertson who remains basically in the kind of upper stratum of the party now. And he's likely to probably leave soon enough. And of course, everyone knows, and it was after 2014 in the independence referendum when there was a huge sea change in Scottish politics and the S&P became a genuinely kind of mass political party. You know, thousands of people applied to join for a few years. I think it was, you know, per capita, the second largest political party in the world, something like one in 10 people in Scotland were a member of the Scottish National Party. The only party that beat them in the world was the Chinese Communist Party on that statistic. But this generation of like Sturgeon and so on, you know, like they were the ones that succeeded in winning that mass support from the S&P, but largely by posing just to the left of the Labour Party, basically. Labour's difficulty was the S&P's opportunity. You know, in the early 2000s, they were very opposed to Tony Blair and to the Iraq war and so on. And they have put forward a kind of programme, you know, of kind of reformism, social democratic reformism, wherever, through at Holyrood through the devolved Scottish parliament. You know, they pose things like abolishing council tax and replacing it with a more fair like local income tax or property tax of this kind of stuff. You know, very pro-NHS, all this kind of stuff, basically, you know, kind of posing very much to the left of the Labour Party. I mean, the S&P itself goes all the way back to the 1930s as a political party. I mean, Scottish nationalism, I mean, wherever you could, you could you could did it even further back, but that's when it became a kind of organised force. And the S&P, I mean, it always did have a left wing, I guess, within it, but historically was very much dominated by its right wing, by the kind of the sort of the traditionalists, the tartantories, as they were kind of known, especially in the 1980s, who were just kind of like the sort of straight nationalists, you know. They even, many of them opposed devolution, they just want, they didn't want that as a halfway house, they wanted independence or nothing. And on the basis of, you know, oil, wealth and this kind of stuff. And like I said, they're quite right wing and pro-capitalist. And that was what kind of kept the party quite marginal for much of its history, I think, because the Scottish working class was, you know, I think, pretty much kind of tied to, you know, to unionism, I mean, not unionism necessarily, but against independence, through the Labour Party, essentially. And it was the breakage of this link, you know, between Scottish working class and Labour that, you know, opened up the possibility of this growth of Scottish nationalism really, is what gave rise to the SNP. Like I said, it adopted this kind of Labour-like social democratic reformist kind of platform in the sort of 1990s. And it was, you know, as a result of generations of betrayal of the Labour right wing, you know, from Kinnock to Blair and so on, to Bryan even, you know, the last Scottish Labour leader of the Labour Party. So a vast swath of working class voters and people, you know, turned their back on Labour, basically kind of once and for all, in, you know, 2014-2015. It was the 2015 general election when you had that massive landslide, basically, towards the SNP. One and a half million people voting SNP in Scotland, which was a historically, you know, high massive mandate, basically. And, you know, this sudden shock, you know, was not, again, not something just kind of randomly happened, but it was a result of that year's culmination of years of decline for Labour in Scotland, you know, losing to the SNP, basically losing support to the SNP. A few years ago, Boris Johnson, he was in a way correct. He was caught in one of his famous hot mic moments, you know, speaking his true thoughts, you know, when he didn't realise people were recording him. He was correct in a way when he said that devolution was Tony Blair's biggest mistake. You know, that's what he said, basically, you know, basically railed against Holyrood and against devolution. So it was all a big mistake. It was true because, you know, the creation of Holyrood and of the Scottish Parliament only really allowed, you know, the SNP and Scottish Nationalism to gain a little bit of a foothold and to compete against Labour in this kind of space and eventually replace, you know, the Labour Party, essentially. Because the Labour Party, the Labour left and right, you know, they supported devolution for most of the 20th century or home rule, I guess it was called, to try and cut across Scottish nationalist sentiment and, you know, provide like a middle tier of the British Government, the British state that was not based all the way down in here, I guess, in Westminster or in London. But the result instead was not to cut across nationalism, but, you know, just provided a space for it to grow and an increase in it and all the resulting kind of constitutional crises that have been over the past couple of years, conflicts between Holyrood and Westminster, over who has powers over what and so on. The very ill-defined nature of the British constitution, you know, also plays a part in this. But the SNP, like I said, they were brought to power off the bankruptcy of the Labour right wing. It is a very similar process that brought Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party, of course, with the kind of identical sort of political change in consciousness and so on. But in Scotland, this was expressed a bit earlier, you know, like I said, in 2014, as a rise in support for independence and for the Scottish National Party. Before, most people I think even knew who Jeremy Corbyn was, is when this happened. But the SNP, unlike Jeremy Corbyn, they've actually been in government for a whole kind of period, whole kind of time. They've had the responsibility, the reins, basically. And they're now, I'd say, very tinted by this 16 years plus in power. Because they, you know, they are now the establishment, basically. In 2014, part of their huge appeal, or in the 2015 election, the part of their huge appeal was the SNP. They seem to be like a radical anti-establishment party, but now I don't think anyone really thinks and looks at them in that kind of way. There most certainly are the establishment in Scotland, politically speaking. And, you know, over the years in government, they've built, you know, a very close relationship to big businesses in Scotland. You know, big business or the big bourgeois, you know, companies or whatever in Scotland. They're kind of sketchy on independence. You know, they don't actually support it, they're not really certain about it. But they certainly favour the SNP as it's kind of a very pro-EU position, for example. You know, they were against Brexit in Scotland. It's overall voted against Brexit. And they're very much in favour of the kind of Holyrood gravy train that exists as well, all the kind of lobbying and secret meetings and all that kind of stuff. It's another source for them. So around the party, you see at their conferences, you know, there's lots of lobbyists from finance, from the little bit of manufacturing that still exists in Scotland. And then from energy production in particular, you know, oil and gas, but also renewables are a real big growing kind of industry and in food and drink and so on. And the party itself, you know, it's economic, I guess, strategy for all these years has been, you know, trying to seek foreign direct investment, you know, into Scotland. So through all kinds of schemes, you know, these free ports, for example, or green free ports as they're branded to make them sound a bit nicer, which we know what these are. These are just kind of concessions to big international corporations where they do not have to pay like VAT or any kind of other kind of things like this. Workers' rights will probably be much lower and stuff like that. It basically allows them to have a higher rate of kind of exploitation in this little kind of port. And Scotland gets a little bit of benefit, a little bit of kind of maybe tax revenue that they otherwise wouldn't get. That's kind of what the S&P is kind of based around now. You know, all their policies are basically created by, you know, financial consultants that are based around, you know, Edinburgh, Edinburgh's kind of big banks and so on. These like Charlotte Street partners, for example, is a big accountancy firm that's very, very close to the party in every way, personally, politically, with the top people and everything like that. They draft much of the S&P's, you know, prospectuses that they make about independence, the growth commission report that they released a few years ago, for example, was written by Charlotte Street partners, this kind of stuff. I know this makes it very, very clear, you know, we should be, we have to be clear, as Marxists of course, about the class nature of the S&P as a party. It is a petty bourgeois liberal nationalist party. Within it, you know, there's a kind of balance basically between the petty bourgeois or I guess, you know, kind of bourgeois, maybe in a Scottish context, sort of middle class, balance between them and in this big working class support base, you know, that exists, that is very much more to the left and so on. And all throughout the years at various conferences and stuff like that, there's been tension essentially between this, represented by, you know, a bit of a break between the leadership and the kind of mass membership. Over a couple of questions here or there, you know, like land reform and the growth commission report, for example, about independence, these kind of things. But the balance within the party is very much definitely tipped in favour of the petty bourgeois leaders. They have, you know, they basically have free kind of free hand, there's not much left opposition really within the party. And of course, they're explicitly pro-capitalist and whatever else, you know, they work within the limits of capitalism. Thankfully, though they are reformist liberals and so on, there's not very many S&P politicians who abuse the term socialism and try and pretend that they're socialists. That's relief. But really what's happening now is they're facing a crisis of their own reformist limitations, namely that the basis for the kind of reformist programme that they carried out with the past couple of years, very, very limited reformism, I'd say. The basis for that has been completely eroded, you know, by the long term, you know, crisis of capitalism that has existed, but also the more recently, obviously the more acute kind of crisis since kind of, you know, 2019 basically. So Hamza Youssef, who's the new Scottish First Minister, well, I guess he's been in power for like six months or something, but he came to power implementing austerity cuts worth, you know, billions of pounds to the Scottish budget to health and to education. These areas that the S&P say they champion and want to protect, in particular facing kind of huge cuts. And really, this is, it's not a change. It's the same that was proposed under Sturgeon in the budget last year. But what's different now is that they can no longer really hide this austerity, which they have been carrying out for, you know, the whole period that we've had austerity in Britain since the last kind of big financial crisis in 2008. But they, you know, they can no longer hide this kind of ugly truth, really, behind all the kind of piecemeal reformist policies that the S&P would present as their, you know, as their main kind of platform. You know, these bits and pieces they've done here and there, people maybe know about like the baby box program, which is about intended to help new mothers, you know, extra benefit payments, you know, the S&P was against the bedroom tax, for example, people remember that one. And they're against universal credit and so on. There's extra, you know, you can get more free childcare hours in Scotland, prescriptions are free, another kind of thing that they, they opposed is prescription charges. And there's more, you know, there's a greater range of, there's more expanded provision of like school meals and things like this. All these little kind of, you know, welfare-ist elements of the British state that exists, you know, they boost kind of very slightly. And that's, they've been able to hide behind that, basically. But essentially, what I mean by the whole basis for this is eroded is that all these things that I just mentioned, you know, are some, like the prescription charges, whatever, more than 10 years old now, they've run out of things that are cheap or free, basically, to do. And they have much less money to work with when it comes to like funding the NHS, funding expanded childcare or, you know, improving the education system, whatever else. Due to the global economic crisis, like I said, especially after it, if it takes a kind of, it took a deeper turn in the kind of 2016 to 2019, you know, that's when all this really began to dry up. And you had all kinds of reformist policies being promised by the S&P that they never even followed up with. You know, they talked about we should have a public energy company, never did anything about that, all this sort of stuff. So it's reformism without reforms, you know, is what we could say. And the same kind of reformism, without reforms that led to the failure, I'd say, of Syriza and like Podemos and these other, you know, kind of populist, you know, groups that sprung up to the left and outside of the traditional, you know, socio-democratic parties in Europe. Now, of course, the S&P for all this and for the austerity and all the cuts that they implement, they put all the blame on Westminster, as you would expect, they say it's not us, you know, we're just the middleman, which, you know, really reduces, I think, you know, has reduced, especially after the contentious leadership debate and the other thing of that has reduced like people's perceptions of like Holyrood, you know, from the National Parliament of the Scottish people to, you know, essentially just to like a middleman, it's like a kind of council of councils, you know, if you imagine like a local council debate where they argue about, you know, cutting the budget and they just say, oh, it's not us, it's the government and so on. They do the same thing and all the kind of same, you know, arguments and stuff pop up. But they put all the blame on Westminster, they say Scotland needs independence to not have this austerity policy. But obviously, that just begs the question then, does it not? What are you actually doing about that? What are you actually doing to fight Westminster and to help Scotland become an independent country? And they have no answer is their problem. They have no real answer. They have nothing concrete, nothing practical, or even inspiring just to say about this, you know, the Westminster control, you know, they say they're subjected to, you know, just excuses their kind of austerity and the attacks that they make on like workers living standards at this time. Now the S&P's campaigning for independence is really like completely bankrupt, especially at this stage. It's been a long time coming. It's been, you know, slowly unfolding basically. They were handed a really predictable defeat, I think last November in the Supreme Court. I think the S&P, the Scottish government, they fought to stop their legal advice being released to the press. I think very likely because their lawyers probably all told them you have no chance, you're going to lose this case, i.e. you're just wasting taxpayer money to make a, you know, a political point that didn't even really help the party that much. And the idea that Nicola Sturgeon then came up with after that of like a de facto referendum, not very bold policy, I think, but slightly bolder than what they were talking about before, but it was very clearly not supported by the party of hierarchy, you know. People around Nicola Sturgeon didn't really come out and support it. It was very clear that they didn't view it as like a legitimate, and so the plan has kind of died to death, and you know, Homs the Usif is trying to hold on to it in a slightly distorted way, but there's not a real commitment or idea that at the next election, UK general election, it's going to be a de facto referendum. They've essentially abandoned that idea before they ever really, you know, planted their flag in it. They're really back to square one when it comes to their independent strategy of asking the Tories for permission, you know, please give us this referendum. And of course all they need to do is say no, you know, and then that's it. That's the be all and end all really. They have no cards left in their hand really to play, any kind of legal manoeuvre. They don't even really have any plan to try and pressure the UK government in any kind of way. You know, they don't arrange big protests and demos and whatever else. I'll try and skip through the rest of this quickly. We'll not skip through, but well always repetitive false starts to the campaign and so on over the very many years. I've lost kind of a many times, you know, the S&P usually in the build-up to an election would come out and say like this is it. This is the, you know, the campaign starts now, everyone get together, give us all your emails and phone numbers and personal data into this website and we're going to start the campaign. And then of course nothing happens, but then an election day you get a message from the S&P, not from, you know, yes, Scotland or wherever the campaigning on saying, oh yeah, but you signed up, come and vote for us and wherever. Many times they did this, these kind of false starts, these re-launches, big graphics and whatever. It was all extremely shallow. It was all forgotten about in a matter of months basically, when it was just to try and, you know, rally the troops basically, not a real serious or sincere attempt to start a campaign or anything like that. And now they're on the same path really they were before on Disturgeon, you know, of they're just content to continue to like issue these very uninspiring reports and programs about, you know, independent Scotland about how much fairer and better everything would kind of be. And it's all just kind of pie in the sky stuff, you know, it's just all the most kind of random and, you know, popular, trendy rather, you know, left reformist policies you can think of, universal basic income, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff is just included in these reports and none of it makes for inspiring reading. And yeah, we're really no closer than we were in 2014. The movement itself now is largely very demobilized, I would say. There are not really huge independence rallies that exist anymore that have a broad attendance. And I'd say the SMP leaders now it becomes clear to not just ourselves as Marxists, but I think many people in the movement that the SMP leaders they see their role not so much as to actually get things going like to try and rouse the Scottish people to fight for independence, but in fact to restrain them to restrain the movement and to keep it into channels of supporting the SMP elections and blah, blah, blah. I think a lot of people will now see that see it that way. I think a sign of a sign of the state really of the movement was just a month ago the SMP they did have they did call their first independence rally that they have done for years and years. But it was basically just a year a pro-E rally was just a big Ramona jamboree. You know, it was just an appeal they've lost any kind of appeal to actually kind of or they've drained any appeal to a sort of radical change out of their their their program for independence and instead they're just appealing to like an alternative status quo you know wouldn't it be better if we were back in the EU which is totally it's just a utopian fantasy. Scotland will never join the EU again. And the only people who come out to these like big rallies are you know like I said middle-class Ramoners with these horrid flags of the the Scottish Salta with the EU stars around it and whatever else they're just and they all of them they just are like they're just flag waivers and and importantly a lot of them are people who have been nationalists for their whole lives they're not people who had a big change in consciousness after the last referendum they are just people who are nationalists by and large a lot of them are older there's not many young people at these rallies anymore. So that's the second thing to understand about the crisis of Scottish nationalism is is the bankruptcy and the cowardice and what Trotsky I think would have called the parliamentary cant of the bourgeois nationalists basically there are no-hopers really when it comes to fighting for their the independence of their country they're totally averse to any kind of serious political struggle that goes outside the narrow limits set by the British constitution you know they wouldn't do anything to jeopardize their their cozy relationship that they have with with business international business and domestic business and their entire strategy revolves around trying to seek legitimacy not in the eyes of poor and downtrodden people but in the eyes of the the international bourgeoisie basically they just want the EU to somehow lean on Britain I don't know how and say oh yeah by the way you know you should let Scotland have a referendum or something and of course they seek in other ways you know the in the past they were they had a anti-natal position that would change under Alex Salmond and then more recently with the invasion of Ukraine the party is like 100% you know pro and fearless backing NATO in Ukraine and so on and you know they're wedded to this idea you know the the S&P the Scottish Nationalists really of the idea like they'll just be a gradual you know progress towards independence and so on this kind of gradualism but I think if they were honest they would admit that independence is a long way off but they but they have to pretend you know they have to pretend that it's something that could happen oh yeah next year and so on in order to keep their you know to keep this this mass base of of working class people that support them kind of energised and pulled around the party and you can only do that for so long before people see through it and that's that's what's happening really yeah few trust us and you see that in the opinion polling there's this decoupling as they call it I don't know why but between the S&P support and support for independence you know the the yes and the S&P opinion polling it shows really I think that in particular that this S&P crisis is not severed the the connection between the working class and and independence you know there's still they kind of take it for granted to support independence really it still has a lot of support independence amongst you know class conscious advanced workers amongst young people like I said they kind of take it for granted really if you meet a young person like if we came out and sort of launched in some big argument like against independence something like the communist party for example do it just is a big turnoff because it's just seen as like a you know a stereotypically unradical position is to support the UK state to be against independence for example but and yeah I think it's clearly that it is a question however that is it is kind of receding in a lot of workers minds the advanced working class the economic and industrial struggles that when folded the past couple years all the strikes the cost of living crisis and so on is much more kind of pressing and has moved to the forefront of people's minds and independence is being is viewed as something that's a bit more but more long-term now really it seems to be totally stuck at this impasse basically and and they can they can see that the S&P the bourgeois nationalists have no way to get beyond this impasse of the Tories say no referendum no independence it's not going to happen and they have literally no way to to get around that or no way to to change that kind of that veto and it seems that it's increasingly kind of divorced from from the lives of of working people and many people in the yes movement the independence movement have kind of said as much you know back in 2014 what gave the the independence movement and campaigns such a broad base was there were little local groups of people founded everywhere every little town and village had a yes hub or something like this and a lot of those groups don't exist now and it was last year that one of the I mean it wasn't I don't think it was one of the biggest ones but it was yes airshare which is a traditionally much more kind of pro-union area so I think they gained a lot of prestige in the independence movement but they basically or airdream rather not airshare but they they basically said we're wrapping it up like you know we're gonna suspend our campaigning we're gonna suspend this group because speaking to people on the street about independence you know people just don't see the connection anymore between campaigning for independence and improving their their their kind of immediate I guess situation so they said people are much more worried about that kind of stuff and then and there needs to be a a re a convalescence or whatever of those kind of questions of the the aspirations and the needs of working-class people and and the possibility of independence um and I own that question you know the crisis of Scottish nationalism is also a crisis of of its left as well as as its right as well as the kind of bourgeois nationalists and so on the big the kind of big ones you know they're unable to find this there is like I said a left wing within the s&p but they're unable they've been proven unable to find any kind of organized outlet or to crystallize or in anything in particular over the years in fact many of them any of the groups that did exist in the s&p to its kind of left like there was a there was a kind of anti-nato campaign there was this group called common wheel and things like this and there were a few kind of people near big names like George caravan and um and a few others they all uh they all jumped ship a few years ago out of the s&p to join alex salmon's alibi party which is just uh you know alex salmon does he again paints himself as to the left of the s&p and as alibi does but he's just a complete bourgeois opportunist you know um but they very foolishly decided to go and lump themselves in with him and his his little party alibi um and then some others many others are trying to seek shelter basically in in the green party which is at scotland's other you know pro independence party that has some has uh some purchase um but we all know i think he in this room how useless like the green parties are um and especially the the scottish green party they just are they're just clones basically of the s&p and they just follow their line completely and in the scottish socialist party which uh was historically you know had representation in scottish parliament and so on you know it still exists but it is uh it is a reformist sect now that is spinning its tires you know uh they're they're not really going anywhere um so the working class is unable basically to to assert itself assert its interests in this movement that's been kind of blocked and prevented um so the pay bourgeois elements you know are like completely dominating i would say at this at this stage um and the s&p you can see that is chock full of the most repellent careerists you could ever imagine um people much worse than even like the Blair years i would say um especially the party youth it seems like the young scott's for independence they are all extremely pro nato right now they're all extremely pro israel all this kind of stuff and they're they're all quite horrible you know briefcase bearing you know so on so's um and uh i'd say a lot of clansh class conscious voters are thus as we saw in rutherglen just historically a working class much you know deprived kind of poor area historically labor supporting switched to the s&p um you can see them deserting the party i think you know not to go back to labor necessarily but just to say you know what is the point and with this rutherglen election you know the bbc i remember watching a little bit of their their their coverage of it before the election you normally when you see these bbc or channel four whatever stuff and they go to some constituency that's having a by-election or whatever else they all they they somehow find every like the most petty bourgeois like reactionary people or whatever you know shopkeepers market sunday traders and whatever and ask them and portray them as like the common man or whatever when really they're just like the one you know mental guy who rants about immigrants or whatever in the pub um but they actually seem to in this little piece get working class people because it was kind of strange like one was a woman who was just like hanging out of her window like cleaning her windows and things like this and uh and people like that and they all seem to just express that they were just like well i don't need to see what's the point in me going voting for the s and p or labor they're basically kind of the same now and and and very i think it's very consciously very conscious or saying you know doesn't really matter who you vote for like you know all these kind of parties they promise this and that and whatever but like at the end of the day you know you don't get to vote on what actually happens like the actual policies that are decided or implemented you know and that feeling of you of democratic kind of disenfranchisement i think is very very powerful it was a part of the part of the the factor that led to the rise i would say of scottish nationalism is this idea that you know scottland we always vote for the labor party but then england is much bigger and votes for the conservative party so we get conservative governments so this is democratic deficit and so on i think that kind of feeling is it's still kind of existing there but it's now just directed against all all the political parties and against this the system generally i'd say um so at the minute i would say um around but to conclude from the ruling class point of view i think they've got the s and p under control basically for the for the meantime um it's not really a serious threat in the short term it's going to upset anything i think the big the serious bourgeois and even the slightly less serious ones in donning street um i think they can see that the s and p leaders themselves are not actually that serious about breaking up britain about actually fighting in any kind of way for uh independence which is not to say that they're not still a thorn in their side i think they they definitely are and still will be um because independence is still represents a kind of long-term strategic instability for the british state um so they still have the so there's still a necessity of kind of combating it um in various ways which which the current government the Tory government does um but uh you know they saw through the whole um drama of brexit there's there's multiple years of just chaos and whatever um and also during the the pandemic as well that it is a complicating factor for them you know it represents a kind of um another axis of contradiction within the general kind of crisis of british capitalism that that can exacerbate make things worse and make and make any kind of solution difficult or make any kind of solution just something that produces is further problems um so i think really the um the question for like in scottland right now anyway it seems like i think the next uh the next phase of the next big kind of movement perhaps of the kind of class struggle it may not break about break out as a result of the national question directly you know i think um the way all impact whatever way um whatever exact form you know the the class struggle takes in scotland but it uh you know scotland and scottish working class there's still very much part of the of the class struggle in in britain as a whole it's not it's not totally separate and distinct so um what goes on throughout the rest of britain like this huge palestine movement for example it's happening at the minute the result of you know what kind of uh what kind of thing is thrown up in opposition to like kier starmer and so on we'll have an echo in um in uh in scotland but um what is the uh to conclude i guess my final sort of point now what is the what's the task of communists then for for us in this uh the situation is particularly the juncture right now well i think it's worth because of uh the timing of this event going back and and uh and using as our touchstone the figure of uh john mclean so it's uh the end of this month in the 30th november is the centenary of john mclean's death died in 1923 now john mclean is one of the greatest revolutionaries when the greatest Marxists and communists of britain has ever produced um his uh honorific title is the Scottish Lenin um for for for many reasons you know he was a representative of the early soviet republic in britain um i think he was like an honorary president or something like that of the of the common turn um he was a very brave internationalist you know he faced uh charges of sedition and imprisonment whereas mental and physical health was destroyed by conditions there um and uh you like i say he was a brave internationalist he opposed this the the first world war um and very clear internationalist terms while many of course in the british labor movement um obviously sided with imperialism and he saw the need as well after this kind of period for the working class to very decisively break with you know it's kind of liberal and labor reformism of the past and instead to fight for communism in britain he was one of the earliest and first representatives really of of of of communism or of bolshevism in britain now mclean john mclean out of uh impatience with um english workers i guess and with uh kind of left wing sects that were forming the early communist party um he advocated a separate path for scotland you know a separate scottish party and a separate scottish revolution i guess i don't really know but um and we you know if say this on this mclean was wrong um clearly like i said the destiny of the scottish working class is still very much tied to um to the class struggle across the whole of britain um you know workers north and south of the border you know they uh they they have a common enemy in the british capitalist class um and that's a kind of common struggle so so the task of of communists today um was to build an all britain you know communist party and that is still our same task today i think is to build an all british communist party well to build an international communist party of course um but unlike then unlike in mclean's day however um scottish self-determination the question of independence is which is what this is already about um it is a key question in scotland and in scottish politics and therefore in british politics more broadly uh it's a democratic question of course it's not a socialist one in that sense um but it's one through which the working class in scotland expresses a lot of its opposition basically to the british state the british ruling class and the stats quote and for that it maintains huge uh importance in terms of the the developing consciousness of of the revolutionary working class like mclean you know we are communist internationalist above all else um you know we're not left nationalists or like pb nationalist payboards or democrats um and you know the the two great things that lenin taught us all about the national question is that every national question is concrete of course we analyze it concretely um but also that with every national question what is common about them is as marxists and as communists we approach it from the uh the point of view of the interests of the proletarian uh international revolution so for that reason i guess to echo john mclean we can say all hail the scottish workers republic and all hail the revolutionary communist party that brings us to the end of another episode of marxist voice so thanks for listening but before you go a few announcements first if this talk has made you want a revolutionary antidote to the reformless reformism of the s n p then look no further than in defense of lenin a new biography of the great revolutionary which delves into his life and development including his position on the national question which was ultimately vital for the success of the russian revolution go to well-read books to get your copy link in the show notes below secondly if you agree with shorn then you should get involved in the practical struggle to build a revolutionary organization which can fight for communism and a scottish workers republic and that means joining the revolutionary communist party which will have its founding congress in just one month go to communist dot red to join and to donate to our party launch fund of 20 000 pounds you should also go to shop dot communist dot red to get your hands on the papers posters and stickers which will help you establish a communist cell in your area linked to both of these in the show notes that's all for this week but we'll be back soon with another episode of marxist voice podcast by the communists in britain