In the last few weeks, a rusty old argument, which was always a little broken, has been repackaged and reheeled, peddled by the same old people as something shiny and new. Scottish Labour activist and Scotsman columnist Susan Dalgety’s article in the Herald typifies the talking point: with these levels of child poverty, how can anyone still talk about independence?
Dalgety’s basic assertion, that Scotland pays too little attention to child poverty, is right, up to a point. The latest child poverty figures are a disgrace. I’d go further than that too; even after more than two decades of centre left government in Holyrood this tragedy continues and this should shame us all. Yet to say that independence crowds out the subject of child poverty is wrong. In fact, at its best, the independence movement politicised these issues at a time when nobody in the Westminster establishment was willing to discuss them. At every public meeting I attended in 2014, without exception, people vocalised raw fury at politicians and pundits from across the political divide for their seeming indifference to suffering in Scotland.
Many of those meetings I attended were held in working class communities, the areas where deprivation was highest and where Scots had been betrayed by Dalgety’s party for generations. Independence in 2014 was a class issue; the rich and powerful congregated around Project Fear and collaborated to lead the No camp to victory, and the rest is history.
Sadly for us, the tired arguments of the Scottish Labour Party aren’t history. At the core of the ‘poverty-should-be-the-priority-not-indepedence” position is the failure of Scottish Labour to embrace healthy democratic working class instincts.
There’s the slightest hint of a chastising tone, as if somehow families who rose out of poverty should be eternally grateful to the Labour Party for giving us a hand up whilst keeping our mouths shut at their transgressions.
Independence in 2014 was a revolt against the establishment, centred in working class Labour voting constituencies, based on a desire for control, power and political autonomy. The working class, including those at the very margins of the economy, are political actors, not charity cases.
Ending endemic poverty requires restoring agency, democracy and accountability, all of which were eroded by decades of passive Labourism.
Now, 58 percent of people believe that the current drift of Westminster is beyond their control – and they want control. Again, this is a healthy democratic instinct. But the solution proposed by Labour’s anti-independence wing is for us all to shut up and wait for Keir Starmer’s resounding election victory in 2024. There is no mention of how to reverse the predicted growth of child poverty, at this current moment, under Britain and a Tory government. They makes no case for mechanisms of redistribution beyond the current Barnett settlement.
And as for federalism? It’s a red herring, designed once more to sap democratic impulses. These trends definitely won’t be reversed if working class people are told to remain passive, and asking them to ‘keep calm and vote for Labour’ is just that. In reality, Scottish people are unlikely to return to voting Labour en masse, because Labour offers neither agency, nor control, nor even solutions which outlast the next round of Tory governments.
The predominance of the state in our lives means that it will always be a focus for political conflicts over economic distribution, even if, in the last few years, the independence cause has been hijacked by upper professional liberal elites. Labour needs to aspire to represent the working class, but how can it do so without talking to the 58 percent backing independence for good reasons? It risks becoming a rump of embittered hard-unionists, whose only aspiration is to elect a centrist in 2024. And for the working class in Scotland, neither Johnson nor Starmer represents any kind of future.
