Last weekend I was in Glasgow East to help with Labour’s byelection campaign. This is the area that my mother’s family had come from, a combination of Scots Presbyterians and Irish Catholics for whom the shipyards provided reliable work and a half-decent living.
Just as it is part of my own personal heritage, the East End of Glasgow has a special place in the formation of the Labour movement, with several Independent Labour Party MPs such as James Maxton and John Wheatley at the forefront of improving the conditions of the working classes.
So I was keen to see how today’s residents felt about the Labour party and its ability to respond to their concerns. I was sent out from the campaign HQ at John Wheatley House in Shettleston (the site of my mother’s school) into streets and blocks across the constituency. Regardless of people’s political affiliation, a common complaint I heard was the running down of the area by opposition politicians and the media as the most deprived constituency in the UK. Despite several social problems arising from the demise of traditional industrial jobs in recent decades, it was obvious that the area has seen a lot of investment over the last decade.
Yet Labour was about to lose in the area for the first time in living memory. It was a brutal reminder that no party can take its votes for granted. Until fairly recently, whatever grumbles people in areas like Glasgow East may have had about Labour, the alternative just wasn’t really considered. The Tories were like a foreign species; the Liberals a sideshow and the Nationalists a strange bunch of conservative eccentrics obsessed with a single issue irrelevant to daily concerns.
But in my (albeit very limited) experience, I noticed that people were much more willing to try the Nationalists for the first time ever. This wasn’t so much among older people, who rightly identified key social improvements such as the NHS and better provisions for working families and pensioners as Labour achievements. However, younger people were more likely to see the SNP as representing a strong and confident Scotland.
As might be expected, during the campaign nationalist activists had covered themselves and everything around them with saltires, while many walls and lamp-posts were plastered with stickers proclaiming ‘Scottish NOT British’. Yet flag waving alone did not make the nationalists attractive; they had always done that. Devolution and the formation of a minority administration had allowed the crafty operator of Alex Salmond to display his undoubted talent as a supreme populist, proposing expensive measures, and blaming in turn the rest of the Scottish parliament for not being Scottish enough or the Labour government for not providing the necessary cash.
The SNP must feel that time is on their side. First, the trend (in Europe at least) since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been for modern states to fragment along older ethnic borders. Second, they relish the possibility of a Tory government as, for all of David Cameron’s lip service to the Union, he and other English Tories look increasingly comfortable with there being less Scottish influence at Westminster to the point of none at all.
And a Tory government can be helped on its way by the SNP taking Labour seats in the heartland of the Central Belt. That means talking Labour’s traditional language of helping the vulnerable and outflanking Labour in providing public services.
The breakup of the UK has never been so clear in prospect as it is now. And it would be a major step backwards in the development of society in across the whole island of Britain. There is no doubt that Scotland could be a viable state either within or outside the EU, but would divorce be worth it?
At the moment, Scotland has the best of both worlds in government. With devolution, Scotland’s distinct approach to law, education and the provision of public services has been guaranteed not to be infringed upon by a government not of its choosing. Moreover, it has taken bold steps soon followed by the rest of the UK in ending both smoking in public places and fox hunting.
Also, as part of the United Kingdom, Scotland is part of an outward looking society that continues to defend Scottish and British interests of the rule of law, democracy and the improvement of condition of the world’s poorer and oppressed peoples. With much fewer resources for diplomacy, defence and international development, complete separation would encourage Scotland to turn in on itself. Like for many a Little Englander Tory, the world would become less of Scotland’s concern.
With the SNP’s raison d’etre of separation achieved, what would become of them? Without any ‘outsiders’ to blame, the SNP is likely to fall in on itself with the risk that an even more nationalistic and isolationist party would come to the fore, just like the original version. In any event, there is a real risk that the centre of political gravity would shift to the right.
So, for the moment the SNP is getting away with being all things to all people, with every populist claim calculated to one end alone. It is an end that the (English) Tories are ever more willing to live with.
Only the Labour Party has the motive to unmask the SNP in its true colours. As internationalists, we should remember that all nationalism (unlike patriotism) is ultimately grounded upon what makes people different from others; it is about us and not them. That in the long run is never beneficial to human society.
Our cause is equality, and that means bringing people together. Our message should be: be proud to be Scottish and British, and European … as well as coming from Glasgow’s East End.
Kevin Bonavia is Labour parliamentary candidate for Rochford and Southend East