DEMOCRACY IN AN INDEPENDENT SCOTLAND

Ben Wray (Common Weal), 2.9.13

Intro: Ironic Syria

Ironic that I have meeting about what's wrong with British democracy and what could be right about Scottish democracy when, for maybe the first time in my lifetime, British democracy has actually achieved something. The vote against war in Syria was a victory for democracy against the hacks, party whips and careerism that almost always wins out. Although its worth putting the vote in its proper historical context. It’s the first-time since 1782 that the House of Commons has voted against war. Its also worth saying that the vote against war in Syria was comparable with previous Tory rebellions over the EU, in the sense that the Tories were divided by different elite strategies for the British state at a time when Britain's role in the world is in transition. Tories never rebel unless they think the interests of the elite are potentially in danger.

Plan for meeting

Anyway, I want to argue that British democracy can no longer be recognised in any sense as a 'representative democracy', since its neither represenative nor democratic. However, if we simply replace Westminster for Holyrood, we'll make some progress, but it will be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, the PR system in Scotland is progress on first past the post, but it has failed to transform democratic participation in Scotland, with voter turnouts as low if not lower in Scottish elections as they are in Westminster elections. Secondly, local government is not really local at all, Scotland has the largest local councils in Europe, with the lowest participation in terms of candidates standing and voter turnout.

Therefore, for Scotland to have a qualitative shift in democratic form, it needs more radical ideas about what democracy means and what form it should take.

I'll argue that a radical approach to democracy in Scotland has to encompass change at three levels: the local, the national, and, most radically of all, at the workplace. In doing so, Scotland needs to be willing to adopt mixed democratic methods, with elements of participative and properly representative democracy.

Westminster democracy

voter turnout: 25% of votes can get Tories into power, and since nearly half the population don't vote, Westminster government can come from less than 15% of the population voting for them. Add into that the Scottish dimension, with only one MP here, and it becomes fairly straightforward to say that the population really doesn't elect those in power here.

'Apathy' and neoliberalism: It is complacent and elitist to understand this disengagement as purely about apathy. In another report titled 'The crisis of the British Regime', Adrian Cousins takes statistics from various opinion polls to analyse the trust and belief that the public have in political institutions. The results are stunning, and I would urge you to read the full report.

Two examples will suffice here: The “percentage who 'almost never' trust the British governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party” has risen from 10% in 1974 to 40% in 2009; whilst the “percentage of respondents who believe there's a 'good deal of difference' between political parties” has declined from 82% to 12%.

Its clear that as neoliberalism has become increasingly hegemonic, democracy has waned. Its not difficult to see why this would be the case: since profit is king, the need for the mass of society to engage critically with the general organisation of things is unnecessary.  The role of the citizen is to be as functional as possible within this framework. So University courses are increasingly departmentalised, so that we bring our children up to be, say, fantastic chemical engineers, but to not know or care about why they are doing the chemical engineering and for whom they are doing it.

Neoliberal politics is, therefore, a tool of governance, not representation. We elect parties who we think will be most effective at managing the capitalist economy, and the problems that come with it. When Blairites endlessly bang on about Labour being 'a party of government, not protest' this is what they mean: that the task of politics is to most effectively run a system in which corporations rule the economy, poverty and growing inequality are facts of life, and so on. The ruling ideology is the only possible ideology that can rule.

We should stop calling our Westminster system a 'representative' democracy because the government elected does not intend to meet the will of the people and does not receive votes of the overwhelming majority of the people. We should instead call it neoliberal democracy: yes there is a vote once every five years, but the vote is strictly for the party who the electorate believe is best at governing a neoliberal economy. No wonder voting turnout is in steady decline.

Nexus of power from corporate elites at Westminster (eg City of London remembrancer sits behind the chair in House of Commons to ensure its interests are protected) – how can they say trade-unions play to

Is Britain a democracy? Stuart Wilks-Heeg, the author of a recent report by Democratic Audit on democracy in Britain, has gone as far as to question “whether it's really representative democracy any more?”

Wilks-Heeg's report compared British democracy to other OECD countries on various scales and found it well behind. On all indicators of a democratic systems' representativeness Britain was in 'catastrophic decline'.

Wilks-Heeg puts the increase in political disengagement into its proper context:

"Over time, disengagement skews the political process yet further towards those who are already more advantaged by virtue of their wealth, education or professional connections. And without mass political participation, the sense of disconnection between citizens and their representatives will inevitably grow."

Scottish democracy

SNP argument: 'Scotland's future in Scotland's hands' no Tories and we get who we vote for – simple argument, but not transformational – doesn't challenge the more fundamental weaknesses of the democratic system.

There was a similar flurry of excitement around devolution, that it would be a much more open space where diverse views can have an input into, only for it to make way for corporate dominance

Voter turnout  in  Scottish elections is lower than for Westminster,  our system means more votes count, but not enough people vote

National level – corporate capture, lobbying, lack of engagement: “Over 70 per cent of the Scottish population lives on an income lower than the average salary of £24,000 • Of the 'influencers' group (excluding elected politicians) only about three per cent have an income lower than the national average.”

Lobbying – Scottish Parliament-Business Exchange, Futures Forum.

What we want

Constitution – Should be written with proper democratic input, like in British Columbia or Iceland, or even better an actual constituent assembly

National – we don't want a new state to be carved out by big accounting firms and corporate vultures with the aid of unaccountable civil servants.

Radical decentralisation – Sao Paolo, participatory budgeting, local public services – not big society

Workers – trade-union rights, worker-management boards, and – eventually – participatory economics

Media – Scottish journalism collapsing – publically funded press association

Discussion

Bob, Chris, Allan, Luke, Stuart, Pat and Alister contributed to the discussion raising the issues of what was meant by self-determination, monopoly ownership of land, water and the media; possible dangers of increased local democracy being used to promote cuts under Cameron’s ‘Great Society’ proposals; the limited nature of democracy in the UK with the ruling class ability to resort to the Crown Powers, which the SNP would also maintain; the need for a written constitution and possible state financing of political parties: the need for a new Left/Socialist party.

Ben replied by saying that he agreed with most of the points being made. However, although he appreciated that the Right were promoting ‘local democracy’ for their own political reasons, it was important that socialists were able to mount a defence of 

WHAT WOULD A RENEWABLE SCOTLAND LOOK LIKE?

Peter McColl, Green Party, 19.8.13

Three topics to be discussed:-

•     Independence and North Sea Oil
•     Renewables in Scotland
•     The experience of community ownership in the Highlands and Islands

1. The current UK government is tied to a policy of developing unorthodox fossil fuels, e.g. shale gas and fracking. This is part of a wider trend found in the USA and Ireland (where there is also a prospect of lignite reserves being used). This benefits the energy corporations. Osborne wants to divert government subsidies from renewables to the energy corporations involved in fracking. This is tied to a strategy of increasing people’s dependence on these corporations, since the alternative course of developing renewables opens up the prospect of local or community ownership.

Scotland still has considerable reserves of North Sea Oil, as well as undeveloped oil reserves west of Shetland. However, given the impact of burning fossil fuels on climate change, we need to consider methods of moving away from these. Money raised from existing reserves could be used to finance the transition to renewables, whilst the new reserves are left undeveloped. Climate change hits the poorest the hardest.

This would also mean opposing shale gas and fracking, which have other environmentally damaging costs – including polluted ground water and possible earthquakes. There is currently a planning application to frack under Mossmorran gas fractionation plant in Fife, with possible devastating consequences.

2. Scotland has the potential to take the lead in renewables – particularly wind, tidal and wave power. The unit costs of wind power have been falling dramatically. Even the cost of solar power is falling to such an extent that it could be used economically in more limited cases in Scotland, despite poorer weather and longer winters.

Money from oil and gas currently goes to the National Exchequer and the energy corporations (although ironically Norway’s state owned Statoil is one of the beneficiaries of oil and gas currently in the UK sector).

Now the development of wind power is in the hands of 3 major private corporations.

The alternatives to these forms of ownership include state control and/or locally owned companies or cooperatives. These can be more empowering.

3. The potential of social ownership can be best seen in the Highlands and Islands. The success of recent community land buyouts has been linked to the development of local renewable energy. This can be seen on Gigha, Eigg and in South Harris. These places have moved away from dependence on imported diesel fuel and are now energy self-sufficient, sometimes with surplus available for other uses.

Peter has been involved in an attempt to establish a community owned wind turbine in Portobello. However, they had faced major obstacles from the local council, including spurious opposition to a site next to a water and sewage treatment plant on the grounds of possible danger to the plant.

Discussion

Allan, Gordon, Iain, Liam, Sarah, Vincent contributed to the discussion, raising the issue of the potential of carbon storage schemes, enhanced local democracy, how independence could actually improve the energy/environment situation, where the money for investment in renewables would come from, the balance between electricity distributed on the National Grid and more locally, the lack of constancy of wind power, the balance between old and new sources of energy, and the issue of fuel poverty

Two facts were revealed in this discussion. Ian Taylor, oil businessman and major financer behind ‘Better Together’ has s strong interest in fracking development. Food parcels, which require no heating, are having to be developed for the poorest, because people can not afford the cost of fuel.

Peter summed up by supporting further research into carbon storage schemes, but not placing any great credence on false promises. These have been made in the past, but have just been used to continue with old energy production methods in the meantime. The cost of renewables is falling rapidly making them increasingly cost efficient. Fossil fuels may initially have low costs when reserves are still large, but these deplete leading to a longer term rise in costs. There were also other potential energy sources such as biomass, but these are likely only to have more limited local potential. It would be possible to overcome some of the problems of the lack of constancy of wind power by having an underwater power connector with Norway, which has surplus energy produced by hydro-power. Electricity from wind power could then be fed back to Norway, when such power was being generated (a similar concept to power transfers in pumped storage schemes in the Highlands). There would be a need to keep some high voltage power stations for industry, e.g. aluminium plants, but these could use hydro-power. A major cause of fuel poverty lay in the control of energy by profiteering corporations. The creation of more local community power schemes was one way of addressing this problem.

WELFARE AND INDEPENDENCE

Bill Scott, 5.8.13

Cuts – who they are falling on?

•         £22 billion of cuts to welfare benefits

•         More than half of all cuts falling on households containing disabled people.

•         The other major losers, apart from disabled people, are women in their 40’s & 50s with caring responsibilities.

•         Impact in Scotland = £4.5 billion being taken out of local economies

•         90,000 Scottish DLA claimants lose an average of £3,000 a year with the change to PIP.

•         100,000 ESA claimants also losing an average of £3,000 a year

•         Half of all ESA claimants also claim DLA and so total losses from just those two benefits could average £6,000 a year for tens of thousands of disabled people.

•         And of course Bedroom Tax is also falling disproportionately on disabled people. Across UK two thirds of households affected contain a disabled person.  In Scotland however it’s 80% of the 95,000 households likely to be affected.

But poor and disabled people aren’t just facing massive cuts in benefits and their families’ incomes. They are also facing massive cuts in essential services that they, more than any other group in society rely on, because they cannot pay for any alternatives.

The Campaign for Fair Society estimates that in England the combination of cuts in benefits & services means that: 

•         People in poverty will lose an average of £2,195 p.a. - 5 times more than the burden placed on “the average” citizen.

•         Disabled people will lose an average of £4,410 per person - 9 times more than the burden placed on the “average” citizen.

•         People with the most severe disabilities will lose an average of £8,832 per person - 19 times more than the burden placed on the “average” citizen.

So disabled people and others are losing social care & social work services, library services, education services, refuse collection, public transport, sport and leisure facilities etc. etc. etc.

That in turn leads to a loss of personal independence.  Without care services older and disabled people cannot even get out of their own homes and go to shops or visit friends and relatives or take an active part in community life – e.g. as volunteers – they are even perversely forced to give up work.

How are local authorities making these cuts –

·         Care charges – being levied on people already relying on benefits. Marginal tax rate for a disabled person is sometimes 95 – 100% of their disposable income!

·         Higher entitlement criteria for care services – leading people to lose care packages that they have had for years and in some cases decades. Pam’s example.

·         Day Centres being closed.

·         Supported employment services such as Remploy being closed – thousands of workers emptied onto dole.

·         Disabled people and their carers being sent ultimatums that they can either accept cuts in care packages or go into residential care.

·         Loss of Mobility – 48,000 people to lose Higher Rate Mobility. 16,000 of them will also lose Motability vehicles.

·         Loss of Homes  - Scottish Government estimate that 11,000 people will be evicted due to Bedroom Tax – we think that’s an under-estimate.

·         Service providers moving disabled people out of individual flats and into “communal living” with 8 or more sharing – and that may just be the start of a move back to disabled people being forced into a new form of residential care.

But some would argue “We’ve seen cuts before. What’s new about these ones?” 

The answer is that apart from being more vicious and deeper cuts happening over a very short timescale these are not just benefit cuts but an attack on the very concept of the Welfare State.

Reign of Terror:  The Government are using their allies in the Tory press to attack and scapegoat benefit claimants and immigrants for not just the Financial crisis but all the ills of our society  - the lack of jobs, something for nothing benefits, lack of affordable housing.

But the real truth is that the Tories and the Lib Dems and Labour believe that the crisis in Capitalism can be solved through supply side economics – if workers can be forced through fear to accept cuts in their wages and terms and conditions of employment – as they have largely over the last five years - then the rate of profit can be restored. By the way company profits have never been higher than they are at present – it’s just that they are not being shared with their workforces.

To achieve this fear amongst workers claiming benefits has to be made as shameful and degrading and difficult as possible.

Disabled people are literally being assessed to death – 30 a week who are found fit for work die within six weeks of their Assessment.

But they now face not one assessment but  potentially dozens in the course of their lives - WCA, PIP assessments, Blue Badge assessments – awards for life thing of past regardless of whether you have a lifelong or progressive condition their aim is to bring you back time after time after time.

Result continuous stress of fearing that the next time you could lose your ESA, your PIP and or your Blue Badge.  Add to the stress of losing your benefits the stress of trying to get them back again through appealing.

·         Appeals –  Over 800,000 appeals now in the system. ESA appeals in 2012/13 heading for a quarter of a million in a single year. 

But even for those who manage to get put on benefits what then?

Work Related Activity Group of ESA & JSA claimants and Single parents whose children are aged over 5 – all face sanctions unless they participate in mandatory job search activities.

There are now also proposals that sick people will be compelled to undertake “treatment” for their condition on pain of losing their benefits if they do not attend medical interviews.

Sanctions-

Since May 2010 two and a quarter million claimants on Jobseeker’s Allowance have had their benefits referred for a decision on whether to cut their benefits for a fixed length period.

A study conducted by the DWP in 2006 showed that around 130,000 claimants were subject to sanction referral that year.  These latest figures are seeing figures of over 110,000 in a single month.

Since 2010 1.5 million people have been sanctioned for failure to attend an Advisory interview and half a million for failure to participate in the mandatory Work Programme.

When people are sanctioned they are treated as no longer in receipt of benefits and thus do not turn up in the official statistics – a clever way of reducing the claimant count by tens of thousands each month without putting a single person into work.

But it’s not just the numbers. Those who fail to meet their Work Related Benefit Commitments can now lose -

·         30% of their benefits for 13 weeks for the first failure;

·         30% of their benefits for 26 weeks for a second failure within a year of the previous one;

·         and 156 weeks—3 years—for a third, or further, failure within a year of a previous failure that led to either 26-week or 156-week sanction.

It’s likely that 80,000 people who are currently claiming have already been sanctioned twice  - if sanctioned again in the coming year they could lose 30% of their benefits for 36 months.

And the alternative to being sanctioned?  - Workfare being sent to work in Tescos or Asda or some other extremely profitable business, for just your benefits.

Workfare is unwaged slavery and designed to get people to take any job rather than have to work for nothing. And any job now would include the 1 million (or many more?) on Zero Hours contracts, less than the minimum wage etc.

The latest DWP report is seriously advocating residential workfare for disabled people and the long term unemployed,  carrying out menial, repetitive work for nothing more than your benefits, living in communal dorms, potentially a hundred miles from your friends and families until you have been trained for work

We are seeing a return to the Victorian concept of the workhouse where people will be prevented from falling into the sin of worklessness.

And for those lucky enough to escape that fate – why instead of benefits food vouchers that you can exchange at your local Foodbank stocked by the generosity of those lucky enough to be in work.

In other words the wholesale importation of the American welfare system of shaming and humiliating the unemployed and poor and making them reliant on charity rather than benefit “entitlements”.

This is what we can look forward to if we continue in the Union.

Can an Independent Scotland do Better? –

Cuts totally unnecessary. We are spending less, in terms of a proportion of national income, on benefits now than we were during the last major recession in the early 1990s (GDP). Spending on working age benefits accounts for about 5% of GDP today compared to around 8% in 1992/93.

Moreover even if you accepted the need to “pay our way”  – and I don’t  -none of the benefit cuts would be needed at all if we just collected a small percentage of the estimated £25 billion pounds lost each year in tax avoidance and the £70 billion lost in tax evasion by the likes of Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Philip Green of Topshop shifting their liabilities to lower tax regimes. 

Moreover benefits are not only affordable but necessary.  They stabilise capitalist economies by maintaining demand when times get hard – it was Keynes and Beveridge, both Liberals who understood this, but it’s a concept that Labour has abandoned.

Finally Scotland is better placed than the UK as a whole to pay out more in benefits -  Scotland is the eighth wealthiest country in the world. The three wealthiest countries by the same measurement are Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland (just ahead of the USA). The UK ranks in 17th place.

However we shouldn’t be content in simply avoiding the worst of what the UK intends to do and accepting that people on benefits will be poorer than those lucky enough to be in work.

We need to campaign for a system that genuinely supports Independent Living and decency –

High levels of inequality in a society are associated with higher levels of ill-health and reduced well-being.

Getting welfare on the cheap has costs in terms of the health and well-being of citizens which in turn are passed on to the tax payer. Investment in effective welfare provision which helps to reduce inequality will lead to better outcomes, not just for individuals but society as a whole.

The over-riding principle of any new Benefits system in an Independent Scotland should be that it supports all of Scotland’s people, including disabled people, to reach their full potential and play a full, active and equal role in Scottish community and economic life. 

We need to invest in childcare and Access to Work – Norway is wealthy because it supports far more women to be active in the workforce. Access to Work which provides for adaptations to workplaces, office furniture and even pays for PA support at work results in a return to the Exchequer of £1.20 for every £1 spent.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of jobs that need done – in terms of personal assistants, childcare and health service workers, renewable energy etc. So we should create jobs for those that want to work rather than penalising folk who can’t find one.

We also need to invest in public transport to make it free and more accessible to reduce people’s dependency on cars and to allow disabled people to access work and the community.

We should also, it goes without saying, abolish the Bedroom Tax as it flies in the face of providing Homes for Life – homes that can be adapted to meet our needs – to have the extra rooms needed when we become parents and to also have them when we acquire care needs as we get older.

Even with vote for Independence will this happen without a struggle? No. Just today Alex Salmond is quoted as saying that the benefit cap would be retained in an Independent Scotland. The benefit cap would be completely unnecessary if we were building social housing for the tens of thousands of families that need them and still had a Fair Rent Act that restricted profiteering by private landlords.

So vote Yes to Independence. But be ready to campaign for a fairer more redistributive benefits system because it will not be given to us without a fight.

ASYLUM SEEKERS, MIGRANT WORKERS AND INDEPENDENCE

 Richard Haley, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities, 28.7.13

On 9 July, an inquest in London ruled that Jimmy Mubenga was unlawfully when he died on a plane at Heathrow while being restrained by G4S guards who were trying to deport him to Angola.

Jimmy Mubenga came to Britain in 1994, a student activist who had to get out of Angola because the regime was after him. He came here shortly after his wife (Makenda Kambana), whose father had already been killed by the regime and his child. He found work, they had more children. Then he got into a fight in a nightclub and in 2006 he was convicted of actual bodily harm jailed. After he'd served his sentence he  was in line for deportation – a far more severe punishment than his jail term.

Jimmy Mubenga was killed in October 2010, in the words of the inquest jury "pushed or held down by one or more of the guards, causing his breathing to be impeded".

Like all migrants and asylum-seekers living in Britain, he was living in a different country from British citizens, with a different legal system and different rights, subject to the old sentence of transportation for even a minor offence.

Jimmy Mubenga's death was exceptional. But violence and abuse during deportation is routine. In 2008 campaigners and lawyers published a dossier of nearly 300 cases of alleged assaults on deportees by private security guards. People were beaten, punched, kicked, knelt on, sat on, handcuffed in ways that caused injury, racially abused.

Those aren't the only ways that asylum-seekers are abused.

At the end of March, 180 people were being held at Dungavel, not for any crime, but because the government doesn't want them here. In the course of the previous year, over 28,000 people were taken into immigration detention across the UK, with about 2800 in detention at any one time. Some have been detained for years. [Of the people coming out of detention in the year to the end of March, 76 had been held for more a year.]

If you're suspected of a crime, you can be held without charge for at most a few days.

Some asylum-seekers have their liberty, and absolutely nothing else.

They aren't destitute by accident or oversight, but because the law has systematically destituted them. They aren't allowed to work. If they are refused asylum and don't have a new claim or an appeal in progress, they are shortly afterwards denied access to any publicly-funded support, unless (Section 4 support) they choose to co-operate in their own deportation back to countries where they believe themselves to be at risk of torture.

Why is the system so vicious? British immigration policy is openly based on a strategy of deterring people from seeking asylum here.

Asylum-seekers in Scotland

Only a handful arrive at Scottish ports and airports looking for asylum. Anyone who does that has to go down to Croydon to file their asylum claim. The overwhelming majority of Scotland's asylum-seekers enter Britain south of the border.

However they arrive, they then have very limited choices. If they have family or friends they can stay with, they can opt to do that and receive subsistence-only support from NASS. Most don't have that option. Under the dispersal scheme created by the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act they'll be sent to one of the various locations around the UK where NASS has arranged accommodation. The only place in Scotland where they'll be sent is Glasgow.

So almost all Scotland's asylum-seekers live in Glasgow, with a small number receiving subsistence-only support in Edinburgh and one or two other places.

There's no accurate figure for the total number of refugees and asylum-seekers in Scotland, but based on UK trends the Scottish Refugee Council estimates that there are about 20,000 refugees, asylum seekers and others who come under the UNHCR term "persons of concern."

This isn't a very big figure, but it's quite a significant addition to Scotland's small BME population (100,000 people in the 2001 census). Economic migration to Scotland is much bigger – in each of the last few years 36-37,000 migrant workers entering Scotland were given national insurance numbers.

The number of asylum-seekers receiving support in Scotland reached a peak of around 6000 people in 2004 and fell steadily to about 2000 in March 2011. This March the number was just under 2300.

[This is partly a UK-wide trend. The number of people applying for asylum in the UK peaked at 84,000 in 2002 and settled down to somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 from 2005 onwards. Worldwide the number of refugees has marginally risen over that period.]

Dispersal is driven by cost. Glasgow City Council was one of the most expensive accommodation providers in the UK, which is why in 2011 UKBA ended its contract with the Council, giving the contract first to Ypeople then to SERCO, whose normal business is running prisons and detention centres (including Dungavel). The housing crisis for asylum-seekers is still unfolding, with evictions going through the courts.

Besides the asylum-seekers who are receiving support, there are others who have ceased to get any support. It's impossible to make a respectable guess about the number of people in that situation.

Last year the charity Positive Action in Housing helped about 313 people out of its destitution fund. 111 of  those people had been destitute for over a year, and out of those 111, 24 had been destitute for 3-5 years.

Independence

"On independence, Scotland could take into account economic and demographic needs, as well as human rights and justice, when considering asylum applications. Responsibility for the immigration and asylum system would allow Scotland to provide greater security to asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their application and ensure a fairer and more humane asylum system" – SNP 'Your Scotland Your Voice', 2009

 

It's often said that Scotland's needs are different from England's because of aging population.

North or south of the border, we need open borders so that we can stand in solidarity with working people all over the world. We need to protect all our rights in the workplace by making sure that no-one is a second-class citizen or an un-citizen, and no one is stuck in a black economy.

An independent Scotland ought to work towards dismantling the oppressive immigration system that we're going to inherit. But there will be some very immediate problems.

We'll probably inherit 180-200 detainees held in Dungavel. We'll inherit an uncertain number – maybe 2000 – asylum-seekers living in poor housing and poverty. And we'll inherit an unpredictable but smaller number of asylum seekers who are facing absolute destitution.

The things that need to be done are things that various organisations have been campaigning about for years.

The first thing we need to do is to end detention and destitution.

That's to say, as soon as the Scottish Parliament gains authority over immigration matters, we need an act of parliament that abolishes the power to detain asylum-seekers and that gives all asylum-seekers – even those whose claim has been refused – an entitlement to support and a right to work.

We also need to limit the powers of immigration officials so that there are no more dawn raids like the one in February this year that split up a young Nigerian family in Glasgow.

It would also be a good idea to grant an amnesty – a right to Scottish residence - in all the legacy cases from before independence. On current trends, that would probably only be around 2000 people.

These are just minimal humanitarian demands – band-aid not reform.

It would be a bad mistake to think that they will be easy to achieve.

They fly in the face of the culture of deterrence that's shaped British immigration policy and policies right across Europe. But the groundwork for the struggle has already been done.

There's been cross-party sympathy in the Scottish Parliament, and there's been a fair amount of sympathy in the media. The issue needs to be pulled into the politics of independence.

Some Further reading

"Improving the Lives of Refugees in Scotland after the Referendum: An Appraisal of the Options" – Scottish Refugee Council - http://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk/assets/5495/4087_SRC_Referendum_Report_V3.pdf

http://www.migrationscotland.org.uk/ - COSLA strategic migration partnership – some useful and up-to-date stuff

Abuse during deportation - http://www.statewatch.org/news/2008/jul/uk-outsourcing-abuse.pdf

- report by NCADC, Medical Justice, Birnberg Peirce (2008)

Europe: http://www.statewatch.org/asylum/obserasylum.htm is a useful resource on European policy developments

International solidarity – the No Border Network - http://www.noborder.org/

Institute for Race Relations - http://www.irr.org.uk/ - British based group with an international outlook (especially Europe)

THE CASE FOR A BREAK-UP OF THE UK AND ‘INTERNATIONALISM FROM BELOW’ RESPONSE TO THE UNIONIST STATE

Talk given by Allan Armstrong (RCN) to the Republican Socialist Alliance meeting on July 6th in London

The development of the Republican Socialist Alliance is to be welcomed. Unlike so many on the Left, the RSA appreciates the importance of the constitutional monarchist nature of the UK state, and the formidable anti-democratic nature of the Crown Powers. These powers cloak the operations of the British ruling class’s ‘hidden state’ and the activities of the City of London. For republicans, opposition to these Crown Powers is of greater significance than opposition to the monarchy, which merely fronts them.

There are two other significant features of the UK state. It retains an established church, the Church of England, with its 26 bishops in the House of Lords. Although this is a specifically English ‘privilege’, along with the constitutional necessity for a Protestant monarch, it is still significant in maintaining British rule over Northern Ireland. A socialist response to this must be based on upholding a consistent secularism, which breaks the link between the state and religion.

However, republicans must also recognise the third feature of the UK, and that is its unionist nature. The UK consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (and the whole of Ireland before 1922). The UK came about as a result of the English conquest of Wales, the joint English and Scottish conquest of Ireland, and an English and Scottish ruling class deal to create a British state in which they could benefit from imperial exploitation.

Thus, if republicanism and secularism are the socialist responses to the UK’s Crown Powers and state-backed Protestantism, then upholding the right of self-determination for Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and yes, for England too, is the socialist response to the unionism of the UK state.

Ironically, the Union actually recognises national self-determination, but on a limited class basis. For example, under the 1707 Act of Union, the Scottish section of the new British ruling class retained control of those aspects of the state that enabled it to maintain its rule in Scotland – the Church of Scotland (including then, its control over education) and the Scottish legal system.

In the nineteenth century, with the rise of industrial capitalism, a new rising wannabe ruling class force emerged in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Many of them demanded an extension of national self-determination to protect and advance their own interests on a national basis. Thus Home Rule (or Devolution as it is now called) would provide protected careers within the nation, whilst also maintaining openings at an all-UK and British Empire levels.

Today, the SNP’s ‘Independence-Lite’ proposals (or ‘Independence within the Union of the Crowns’), which accept the Union and the Crown Powers, the Bank of England and participation in the British High Command and NATO, represents the self-determination of a wannabe Scottish ruling class. ‘Independence-Lite’ is a continuation of the old Home Rule tradition, but for a world dominated by the global corporations and US imperialism.

For socialists, self-determination in Scotland must reflect working class interests. This means a complete break with the Crown Powers, with the Bank of England and with NATO. During the nineteenth century Marx and Engels saw Tsarist Russia and its Hapsburg Austrian ally, as the two principal upholders of reaction against democracy in Europe. Today the UK plays the role of ‘Hapsburg Austria’ to the US’s ‘Tsarist Russia’ in upholding the current global corporate order. The struggle for genuine self-determination is thus directed at the US/UK imperial alliance.

However, this also raises the issue of what sort of republicanism we need to take-on this unionist and imperialist alliance. One tradition, which has some purchase on the British Left, needs to be questioned. This is the ‘Cromwellian republic’. It developed out of the ‘counter-revolution within the revolution’, after the Levellers were suppressed in 1649. Cromwell was no universalist and supported a Greater English republic and empire.

Although, the Cromwellian regime was ousted in 1660, this particularist form of republicanism was realised in the new American US republican constitution in 1787. In the White American Republic, the Crown Powers were, in effect, transferred to the imperial presidency. Cromwell may have failed in his attempt to drive all the native Irish beyond the Shannon, but President Jackson was able to remove the Five Civilised Tribes to ‘Indian territory’ beyond the Mississippi on his ‘Trail of Tears’.

In the UK, imperial republicanism fed into British Radicalism, and then the British Left. It could be seen in William Linton, the Radical Chartist, who first designed an English republican flag. He  believed that this was synonymous with an all-islands (Great Britain and Ireland) flag.  The Radical and republican MP, Joseph Cowen supported British imperial wars. The Radical Liberal and republican MP, Charles Dilke, was a rampant racist and promoter of British imperialism. What united these people was a strong belief in a ‘British road to progress’. They bought into the Whig version of history. Furthermore, from the days of Hyndman’s SDF to the ‘Brit Left’ of today, this Whig tradition has morphed into support for various ‘British roads to socialism’.

There is alternative socialist republican tradition to this. It is based on the recognition of national self-determination and ‘internationalism from below’. Its very first shoots can be seen in the refusal of those English republican Levellers to be sent by Cromwell to Ireland. They thought they shared more in common with the native Irish fighting to hold on to their lands. In the 1790s, an alliance of United Irishmen, United Scotsmen and the London Corresponding Society built up an ‘internationalism from below’ alliance to challenge the UK state, the principal backer of the counter-revolution in Europe and beyond.

The Radical wing of the Chartists supported Young Ireland in its desire to break the Union. From 1879-95, Michael Davitt and others attempted to build a land and labour alliance on ‘internationalism from below' lines in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. Indeed many of its proponents played a leading part in the ‘New (trade)  Unionism, which emerged after 1889.

Both James Connolly in Ireland and later John Maclean in Scotland developed ‘a breakup of the UK state and British Empire’ strategy. This emerged as the most revolutionary challenge in these islands in the context of the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave. This is the socialist republican tradition that the Republican Communist Network is raising in today’s struggle for Scottish self-determination.