An article written by Andy Anderson. The Labour Movement and Scottish Independence Last year at a Yes Campaign event in a traditional Labour area of Scotland I was engaged with SNP members and a member of the Greens in a leafleting exercise and I was handing out Scottish Labour for Independence leaflets. I was confronted by a very irate young woman who demanded to know what authority I had to describe myself as Labour. She told me she was sure that the Labour Party had not approved of my actions and that I was just a stooge of the SNP and should be ashamed of myself. I attempted to have a discussion with this young woman in the hope that I could educate her a little, but, unable to control her anger and frustration, she ran off. Now that gave me food for thought: I come from a family which has been committed to the labour movement since that movement’s very beginning. We have mainly been active on the trade-union side of the movement, which is of course the genesis of the movement. My grandfather’s family, in a Fife mining community used to provide accommodation for visiting trade-union speakers when they came to talk to the miners in that area. One of the young miner’s union representatives who came up from Ayrshire to talk to the Fife miners and stayed with them was James Keir Hardie who later branched off into the political arm of the movement. So the trade-union and Labour movement is in my DNA, it is certainly in the silicon particles embedded in my lungs which I got at the coal-face. I have worked paid and unpaid for the trade-union movement since I was 15 and at 75 I am still doing so; if I am not entitled to be a member of the Labour movement in Scotland today who is? The tiny cabal of New Labour ‘parasites’ who now control the Labour Political ‘vote gathering’ machine would no doubt agree with that young woman, they would contend that I “had no authority” to speak for Labour. I rejected ‘New Labour’ and all it stands for in 1997. I felt that If I had wanted to support Neo-Liberal capitalism and its attack on workers I would have joined the Tories so I stopped paying dues to the Labour Party. However in terms of real Labour values I am more Labour than any of this load of parasites. I am proud of Labour’s history and achievements, this cabal are ashamed of it. I believe that Keir Hardie was right to link the trade-unions with a political arm, the Labour party; they, on the other hand, want to break that link. I believe that the post war ‘Attlee’ Labour Government was the best UK Government ever, they do not want to discuss it and are keen to disassociate with its policies. Yet most Labour voters in Scotland are like me, we respect these traditional Labour values and see them as defining Labour and the Labour movement. We reject this scramble to get together with the Tories and this slave like backing for a right-wing Tory chancellor lecturing to the Scottish people. Who gave this parasitic cabal the authority to do this in Labour’s name? Indeed who is Labour now? We hear a lot from the Labour Lords and MP’s who have a clear vested interest in Scotland staying with Westminster, is that to be taken as Labour’s voice? These people are all paid high salaries and get a great expenses deal with the Westminster Parliament, they are parasites on the Labour movement. They have powerful friends in the media, (didn’t we see Tony Blair rushing to help Rebekah Brooks and Rupert Murdoch), they also have friends in the UK establishment; but do they represent Labour values? The trade-union movement, with one or two notable exceptions, are not rushing to join the Tories in the neo-liberal UK union which is designed to put the requirements of the small capitalist elite in a more secure privileged position while offering the working people ‘austerity’ in order to pay for these privileges. The Labour Party in Scotland, which is very shy about publishing its membership numbers, probably has actually shrank to around 6,000 to 5,000 members in Scotland now while its leader, who is unable to answer questions about trident or unemployment or welfare provision publicly demands austerity against our “something for nothing” society. She hasn’t notices that the UK is among the most ‘unfair’ or unequal societies in the world. She obviously thinks it should be more unfair. However the trade-unions, in spite of high unemployment, still have 500,000 members in Scotland so where is the ‘real’ common voice in the labour movement today? The fact is that more and more people in our country are now relying on food banks to get by, last year 582,935 workers in the UK joined the ‘zero-hours contracts’ army.* This means that they are worse off than the unemployed, and the ‘good’ thing for the politicians is that they are not counted in the unemployment figures. There are now over a million of these people in the UK who have ‘disappeared’. The Con-Dem Westminster Government tell us, that the economic recession is over, that the economy is growing again. Well that might be true if you just use the GDP to measure this. What is beyond dispute is that the Osborne plan has redistributed income further away from the working people both in terms of salaries and conditions and their entitlement to the social wage. What is also beyond dispute is that this worsening of living standards for most workers will continue for the next two years at least even if this so called ‘recovery’ continues. So what sort of recovery is it if a few patients are getting better but most are getting worse? It seems that the capitalist elite are managing to get a larger slice of the cake even without Johann Lamont’s assistance, although I’m sure they are grateful to her for it. The picture is clear. The UK economy is run in the interests of a small wealthy elite, they own the banks, they own the businesses, they own the media and they appear to ‘own’ most of the politicians. When the economy is doing badly, their media, and their establishment, and their politicians tell us that we need to have austerity measures and the poor get poorer; when there is a recovery the rich get richer and the poor get poorer again. Got it? You know it’s the old game heads I win and tails you lose. If you want to ensure that this scheme will continue for your children and grandchildren just vote No at the referendum. *Westminster response to question from Chuka Umanna Shadow Business Secretary
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:42:47 +0000
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