“in the detailed analysis of failure there are radical proposals for change, proposals that Anas Sarwar would be well advised to study if Scottish Labour is to have a chance to escape the dead hand of Starmerism.”
By Pauline Bryan and Vince Mills
Keep Left: Red Paper on Scotland 2025, which marks the 50th anniversary of the original Red Paper on Scotland edited by Gordon Brown in 1975, continues to focus on one of the most important historical changes that have developed at pace since the accession of Margate Thatcher in 1979 – a possibility that Gordon Brown’s publication did not appear to consider possible. That focus is the continuing decline of Scotland’s economy and the consequences of that for Scotland’s working class and its first line of defence – its trade unions.
Gordon Brown noted in his publication that:
“…the Scottish economy is perhaps more subject to the influence of multinationals than any other similar industrial country. Consequently the economy is not only …an unstable one, one of the first to suffer and the last to recover in times of depression but also dependently subordinate to the international market, with an increasingly distorted and artificial division of labour, compounded by the massive export of capital…”
External ownership of Scotland’s economy has intensified since then. Richard Leonard MSP points out that the creation of the Scottish Parliament has made no difference in stopping it, no matter who is or was in power. Under the SNP, attracting foreign direct investment has remained a priority including newer sectors like renewable energy. Like the economy of the 1970s these too are dominated by multinationals headquartered overseas. In fact, it is getting worse, the Scottish government is accelerating the sell off of Scottish energy assets to private corporations and overseas state-owned utilities.
This failure to enact a just transition away from fossil fuels is of particular concern to Rosie Hampton. These moves, such as they are, have been dominated by private capital in pursuit of profit rather than redistribution of wealth and control over our energy. In this the Scottish Government has been complicit damaging not only the interests of Scottish and British workers but those in the Global South who are also exploited by those private companies extracting wealth from their countries to supply energy companies in Scotland.
As Diarmaid Kelliher points out in his contribution, the trade union movement, as the 1970s and 1980s progressed, was less and less able to resist this process. Although globalisation, financialisation, deindustrialization and neoliberalism were all transnational processes, nevertheless, government policy in Britain and Scotland facilitated and continues to facilitate these trends, undercutting sectors which were once strongholds of organised labour.
The social consequence of this has been immense. Economic decline and the disintegration of industrial communities and their organisations over the last fifty years have seen significant changes in what it means to be working class. There has been a loss of shared identity in politics, work and communities, with working class youth (particularly boys) both demonised and criminalised.
The book however is not pessimistic. In the areas mentioned above and in the many more that the book covered – for example the constitution, local government culture – as well as detailed analysis of failure there are radical proposals for change, proposals that Anas Sarwar would be well advised to study if Scottish Labour is to have a chance to escape the dead hand of Starmerism.
- By Pauline Bryan and Vince Mills, of the Scottish Campaign for Socialism.
- Keep Left: Red Paper on Scotland 2025 is published by Luath Press.
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