I promised to return to the debate last Saturday at the Convention of the Left about the break up of the UK, which was sponsored by Scottish Left Review..
Although the attendance of between 60 and 70 people was reasonable, it is a shame that more socialists from England didn’t see this as an important debate that is relevant to them.
Gregor Gall made the point that the discussion needed to be informed by actual knowledge of the developments, politics and situation in Wales and Scotland; and as Frances Curran of the SSP pointed out, the political context in Scotland is considerably to the left of that in England, and that is connected with the way the national question has impacted on every aspect of Scottish society.
Leanne Wood AM, a Welsh Assembly member for Plaid Cymru explained this clearly. Plaid is an explicitly a left wing party, with an aim of improving the lives of the ordinary people in Wales. Given the disillusion in Wales with the Labour Party, Labour were unable to form a government in Cardiff, and therefore have a coalition with Plaid – the One Wales agreement – that has already made some gains in clawing back space from Westminster’s presumptions towards private finance
But the powers of the Welsh Assembly are too limited to take the sort of action required to safeguard the welfare and livelihoods of the people of Wales. Hence the demand from Plaid for a referendum for greater powers.
Chris Harvie MSP, from the Scottish National Party explained how the process had gone further in Scotland; there is a very real prospect of the Scots voting for independence, and the type of impact this would make can be measured by the facts that an SNP government would require Britain to remove its nuclear weapons from the Clyde.
One of the contributions from the floor argued that the British state would never allow an Edinburgh parliament to do that, and other speakers from the floor argued that the power of the British capitalist state required that there should be a symmetrical challenge from the labour movement organised on a British wide basis.
Of course, there is no reason why Scottish independence should cause the trade unions to fracture. However, the interest of the English based Brit-left in real unity with the Scottish working class can be gauged by the near silence from London based political groups on the united strike by 200000 workers in UNISON, the GMB and UNITE in 32 local authorities across Scotland on 24th September.
One very (unintentionally) amusing speaker from the floor asked why the Scots and Welsh should be allowed to leave Britain, if a majority of British people didn’t want the UK to break up. He argued rather strangely that Fianna Fail had originally been a socialist party (news to the Irish comrades present), and their subsequent descent into being a conservative party was the consequence of nationalism, and the SNP and Plaid would inevitably follow the same path. (Note, that the implied logic of this position was to oppose the independence of the 26 counties). When challenged by other speakers from the floor, he defended himself by saying he had studied history at Oxford.
The question of overlapping British and English identities is an important one. I made the point that while Scottish and Welsh people are much more likely to articulate their sense of identity in national terms, the fact that English people don’t is not because they are less affected by national identity, but because they assume Britishness is the natural state of affairs that foreigners deviate from! British national identity shouldn’t be confused with internationalism.
I would argue that where British is used as a synonym for English, then this is actually disrespectful of the Welsh and Scots, as we are implicitly saying that the different aspects of their culture and history don’t matter as much as English history and culture. The specific application of Britishness should be for those parts of our culture and history that we share, and which are usually irretrievably bound up with the legacy of Empire. (It is a supreme irony that it is the unionist Tory party that abolished so many of the British institutions that reinforced the union: the National Coal Board, British Rail, British Steel, etc)
Chris Harvie observed that the Scots have always themselves had an ambivalent attitude to Britishness, because they were happy enough to be confused with the English as long as there was a commercial profit in it. He also pointed out that the tradition of Little Englandism in the nineteenth century was actually not a xenophobic one, but a type of liberal isolationsism that opposed foreign military adventures.
Rupa Huq played a very important role in the meeting as the party pooper! She said that she was uncomfortable with separatism and felt that the demands for an English parliament are reminiscent of Powellism – specifically a racialising of politics.
Leanne Wood responded that in fact the only Asian members of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are members of the SNP and Plaid Cymru. But nevertheless, Rupa’s point is a substantial one, that for many people in BME communities, they consider themselves Black British, and redefining the nation as English can appear to exclude them. While it is important not to get the tiny English Democrat Party out of proportion, they constantly make immigration a key issue they campaign upon. Of course, the external projection of imperial power was British, and those people from the former colonies coming to the metropolitan centre of the Empire’s “Motherland” will have seen themselves primarily as coming to Britain, while the distinctions between the nations of this island will have been entirely secondary.
A Welsh woman, living in Manchester asked how the identification of English nationalism with far right politics could be avoided. A good question, and I replied that I thought this issue wouldn’t go away by ignoring it, and contesting the content of national identity and patriotism was better than giving the far right a free run on the issue. The work of Billy Bragg in popularising a certain type of progressive English identity is important. And we should not overlook the advances that have been made in shifting the nature of support of the England football team, where the “No Surrender” brigade have been marginalised, and for example Mark Perryman’s work with England fans is a very important example of what can be done.
Sadly, I had to leave straight after the meeting, due to other commitments, and I didn’t get to chat with people, which was a great shame. Thank you to all the speakers, all of whom had traveleld a long way to be there. Hopefully there will be other, future events where we can jointly promote the cause of breaking up the old Empire state of Britain.