The SNP and the Scottish Question

Critically assessing the extent to which left-wing political economy is integral or instrumental to contemporary Scottish nationalism

Upon his reelection as Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 2004, Alex Salmond promised “to offer the people of [Scotland] the opportunity to move forward to independence, democracy, and equality” (Guardian, 2004). This promise was in-keeping with his longstanding, at the minimum rhetorical, conviction to move his party to the left, by which I mean advocating greater social and economic equality by “shifting the balance of wealth and power within capitalist society towards the working class” (Davidson, 2010, p. 338). Scottish nationalism, which for the purposes of this essay will be defined as any ideology that promotes an independent Scottish legislative body and latterly independence, has been broadly associated with such rhetoric since devolution. The extent to which this is the inheritance of the long standing tradition defending the interests of Scotland or is a creation of the modern proponents of Scottish independence to bolster their electoral chances is disputed. In this essay, I will argue that left-wing political economy (meaning the increase in state welfare, workers rights, equality, etc) is now an instrumental part of Scottish Nationalism insofar as the ideology itself no longer requires a left-wing political economy to maintain the nation in the face of the realities of the Scottish economy as has historically been the case. The political economy should be understood through the lens of pragmatism rather than principle. In order to do that, I will begin by outlining Nationalism's emergence as a response to the socio-economic precarity in Scotland, then I will describe the transition this aspiration underwent from industrial to post-industrial Scotland. Finally, I will discuss the record of Scottish Nationalism since devolution.

The emergence of Scottish Nationalism and the Labour movement were not only mutually supporting but coterminous. Scotland is the cradle of the British labour movement; the Victorian Era in the Lowlands of Scotland ushered in a period of social challenges, as rapid urbanisation and industrialisation led to overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, while exploitative labour practices in the industrial sector resulted in abysmal working standards, including long hours, low wages, and hazardous environments. It also made many wealthy and created Glasgow as the 'Second City' of the Empire. Support for reforms to ameliorate life in industrial Scotland led the Liberals to unchallenged dominance over the Scottish electorate in the late 19th and early 20th century. While life in the industrial heartlands of Scotland was improving in many respects due to early left wing policies such as recognition of unions, extension of the franchise, etc; "discontent with what the government was doing for Scotland [grew] strong in the years immediately before World War I. Scottish economic prosperity was not increasing fast enough to give most Scots a decent standard of living" (Hanham, 1968, page 5). The perceived difference in standard of living and the opportunities of Empire caused the emigration of many Scots. The economic failures of the 20th century caused many more to leave. Only two years saw positive net migration in Scotland between 1856 and 1975. (National Records of Scotland, p.2). While Scottish culture may have been less oppressed, the people that built the backbone of a culture were leaving. The relative decline of Scotland posed an existential question of the powers that be; how can there be a Scotland without Scots. Every Scot that left Scotland to work south of the Tweed or across the Atlantic was one less that would carry the Scottish nation into the future, allowing Scotland to return to an economic backwater would just result in more Andersons of Altrincham and Campbells of Coventry. Scottish Nationalism thus emerged as the ideology that was seeking to redress the relative decline of Scotland. (Nairn, in Brown, 1975) Efforts for Scottish Home Rule to address purely Scottish issues, which were perceived to be ill served by being a small minority in what was effectively an Imperial Parliament, were met with either hostility or ambivalence and ultimately failure from within the Liberals whose support for and acquisition of Irish Home Rule further alienated the Scottish electorate

Labourism grew out of this rift amongst progressives north of the Tweed. The strands of socialist thought that took hold in the Lowlands are an outcrop of the very real destitution of the Scottish working classes, the slum-like conditions of Clydeside and the need to marshal phenomenal amounts of capital to invest keep the local economy afloat in the first half of the 20th century. The newly enfranchised working classes found their natural home in people like Henderson, MacDonald and Hardie who cut their teeth in the fight for Scottish Home Rule. Success in Scotland alone could not secure power at Westminster shifting focus to the national stage, lessening the importance of Scotland and causing policy centralisation in Westminster whereby “the Labour movement lost its Scottish Flavour” (Hanham,1968, page 5). The 1913 Scottish Home Rule Bill was voted down at its second reading, the McDonald government collapsed culminating in the Labour abandoning Scottish Home Rule altogether. There was no major opposition to this due to two major shifts that occurred in the following years: the first was the collapsing of many Scottish institutions into the wider British ones such as the strong Scottish labour Unions, the other was the collapse of the Scottish economy and the subsequent need for British capital. The Scottish Trade Union Congress had voted in 1918 to demand "the establishment of a Scottish parliament to deal with Scottish affairs" (Scottish Review, summer 1918, 149, Hossay, 2003, page 12) but following the collapse of industry all union "membership[s] dwindled to half [their] previous numbers and brought a new emphasis on the amalgamation of Scottish and English unions.” (Hossay, 2003, page 15). The financing of industry in the crisis interwar years was possible "due to pressure from Whitehall (e.g., motor factories were established [in Scotland] as a result of direct pressure on the manufacturers in the English Midlands). The social security structure [was also] kept at the level set by English not Scottish demand and is therefore higher than it would be in an independent Scotland." (Hanham, 1968, page 12) as the cost of living was lower. In parallel, "most of the older Scottish towns are being rebuilt with the aid of massive government grants" (idem). The weak and ageing foundations of the Scottish economy required the kind of investment that is only available by large scale state interventions especially when you consider the weakness of the private sector as is noted by Maxwell thus Scottish Nationalism could not place itself in opposition to left-wing political economics while still seeking to redress the relative decline. There was no conception of Scottish nationalism without this left-wing flavour because the emergence of both was so strongly linked. As long as that investment continued the economic underpinnings of the Scottish nation were maintained and the country was competitive on the British scale the fears of Scottish nationalists were assuaged. This translated into net migration figures roughly halving compared to the 30 first years of the century, a relative success in stemming the tide.

A separate branch of Scottish Nationalism also grew out of the Scottish Labour Party. Its co-founder and first president Cunningham Graham, the UK’s first socialist MP, went on to found the National Party of Scotland, and was then the first president of the SNP upon the NPS’s merger with the Scottish Party in 1934. The SP was the NPS’ equivalent which split from the Unionist Party, driven by the same analysis of loss of relative power and drift southwards of people and industry. The merger was agreed on the condition that the party would become a single-issue party advocating for the creation of a Scottish legislative assembly. Under the dual leadership of Graham and the Duke of Montrose, the party trimmed the more ideological fringes of its membership and gave up formulating policy. British politics were seen primarily through the lens of class. (Mishler, 1983, p.5) By attempting to transcend the left/right divide the SNP was also attempting to transcend the class divide by creating a ‘third way’. From the merger until 1979, the electorate in Scotland were uncertain about the ideological placement of the SNP (Brand, 1994). Although generally perceived to be to the left of the Conservative the electorate was split as to whether the SNP was closer to the left or right end of the spectrum throughout the 60s and 70s. For the early part of the post war period, the party’s "support came from the upwardly mobile and middle classes'” (Lindsay, in Bromley, 2006, p52). This group was to form the basis of the future growth of the SNP as through the period preceding and during the institutionalisation of Thatcherite neoliberalism the growth of the 'post-materialist' and 'post-industrialist' electorate was to be explosive (Duclos, 2017). This ‘third-way’ alignment was however not electorally successful. The party achieved more than 2.5% of the vote only once in the period before the 1970 general election.

Although, not without exceptions, such as the Hamilton by-election win, the majority of the SNP's electoral success was found in rural constituencies culminating in the 1974 general election where the SNP won 11 seats but not a single one in the central belt, known for its left wing leanings. This encouraged accusations of the SNP being 'the Tartan Tories' but this was based mainly on the aesthetics and rhetoric associated with nationalism and not their single-policy platform. It was not aided by the revelation of SNP correspondence with the Nazi party during World War II. The SNP campaign of 1970 differed from previous campaigns because rather than a pure platform of devolution they added insistence on the North Sea oil discoveries of 1969 and the benefits that they could bring to the Scottish economy. There was a noted shift in the public perception of the SNP as "shifting further left" (Brand, 1994, p. 620). Coupled with the endemic stagflation in the UK, the result was a more than quadrupling of votes cast for the SNP to 11.4% in 1970, rising to 30.4% in 1974. Having freed itself from the shackles of the merger agreement, the SNP leveraged their electoral success to force the Wilson government into a devolution vote, after the failure of which support for the SNP fell back to the mid-teens.

The defeat caused a crisis within the party. The '79 Group, members who sought to take an active left-wing position, arguing that it had won more support, upon returning from their short exclusion from the fold took the reins of the party. The leftist contingent were bolstered by the collapse of Sillars's Scottish Labour Party which allowed the party to decide on a ‘social democratic’ platform for future campaigns. A clear vote winner, the emphasis on Scottish oil was not only an electoral ploy but analysis of the change in an independent Scotland’s capacity "to revitalise the Scottish economy and to make the most productive use of Scotland’s oil wealth” (Jackson, 2020, page 14). The prospect of maintaining this wealth in Scotland, accounting for up to 10% of Westminster's revenue, (Jack, 2013) via the creation of a Scottish State that would no longer be beholden to the government in Westminster to provide the capital needed to keep Scotland competitive became an integral part of all campaigns. The instrumentalisation of oil marks a clear shift towards using policy not as a reflection of principle but in the pursuit of electoral success marking the beginning of contemporary Scottish Nationalism.

What followed 1974 was eighteen years of unassailable Conservative government. The British Labour Party moved to surrender its orthodoxy; under Blair the party divested itself of its socialist trappings, no longer did its left wing political economy come in the form of nationalisation and strong market interventionism. The resulting platform was one that held the market as sacred in accordance with the neoliberal consensus. Instead, stronger workers rights (e.g. minimum wages and union recognitions) were the economic policies pursued. Blair’s constitutional reforms provided Scottish Nationalism with its long standing goal of a Scottish Parliament, in which from 2007 until the present that ideology was to be the driving force. This dominance at Holyrood was caused by the very shift within the Labour party that allowed for its creation. Having for a long time vied for the same support base within the self-identifying ‘working class’ with Labour, the SNP (and Greens who split from the UK party in 1990) were now viewed as the more committed left-wing party causing the decline of Scottish Labour (Baldi,2022). The question remaining to Scottish Nationalism, the question that would consume Alex Salmond’s entire tenure from election as Thatcher leaves office to the 2014 referendum, is what does Scottish Nationalism mean in a neoliberal world. “[The] essential ideological homogeneity between the two major parties of the British state nurtured in some quarters the beguiling notion that ending rule from London would definitively disentangle Scotland from neoliberalism’s tentacles” (Jackson, 2014, page 5) however, “Thatcherism ha[d] already happened to Scotland. The question that left nationalism raise[d was] whether the slow, difficult task of building a more social democratic Britain out of this new economy [was] best served by the creation of a new Scottish state” (Jackson, 2014, page 8). Since entering office, Scottish nationalists have pursued social democracy. In the context of western governments over the past fifteen years, the abolition of tuition fees, rent freezes, child support packages, free buses for the young and the elderly and the acquisition of ScotRail and ScotWater constitute continued and impactful successes of the model. The Scottish Government already administers 7 benefits programmes that are unique to Scotland. There are also further commitments to left-wing concepts such as the four day work week (SNP website pledge), workers on company boards, UBI and a wealth tax (Greens website) and removing the two child benefit cap, 50% fuel subsidy and creating a state owned energy company (ALBA website pledge). These reforms mark another shift in the development of nationalist ideology. Following Thatcher, Scotland transformed fully into a service based economy. Edinburgh and Glasgow are second only to London for financial services, call centres are dotted across the country. The aspirational middle classes that had carried the SNP to power became the established middle classes that are the main beneficiaries of free university. White collar Scotland embraced neoliberalism and thus the attractiveness of left-wing political economics has lessened. The debate is no longer about how best to protect jobs in Scottish industry, nor about the mobilisation of capital; instead the focus is around the twin poles of growth and welfare. This is the same debate as is being had in the rest of the UK. The prospect of any future Scottish state abandoning neoliberalism is farcical. Proponents of the four day work week are no longer making arguments towards lessening Scotland's relative decline as a periphery of global capitalism but as, at best, the social heart of a lively neoliberal stronghold.

The instrumentality of left-wing political economy in contemporary Scottish politics is analogous to the many instrumental uses of right-wing and often technocratic notions. Notably, in the run up to the 2014 referendum “Salmond hypothesised that Irish levels of corporate tax would actually increase Scottish tax revenues. In support of this proposition, he brandished the Laffer Curve, the traditional recourse of the neo-liberal right when faced with awkward questions about the revenue implications of tax cuts” (Jackson, 2012, page 3). This was a trend in looking towards Ireland as a model to be replicated as the only other State to emerge from the UK, but it is clear that the political economy of the Republic is incompatible with a social democracy on the Nordic Model. Salmond's move to continue with the pound, or peg a future Scottish currency to the pound unilaterally, also shows that the new Scottish state would find its fiscal policy constrained in a currency union by exactly the sort of “undemocratic, technocratic, neoliberal rules that left nationalists stringently oppose” (Jackson, 2014, page 8). In their agitations for independence, the SNP have not shied away from instrumentalising policy even when that policy is in direct conflict with their stated social democratic goals. “Unlike modern social democratic parties, the SNP is now and has always been a party openly committed to making Scotland more successful in capitalist terms. [...] support for a liberalised global economy and for EU integration as the most sympathetic environment for small scale independence, and a social democratic stance on social issues” (Davidson, 2010, p.339). “The SNP can emphasise the “social” elements of social neoliberalism, precisely because these are the ones over which the devolved government has most control: the main economic [powers are] retained at Westminster” (Davidson, 2010, p. 349). Given that for 14 of the SNP’s 16 years in power have been in the backdrop of austerity and heavy swings towards the right in English politics it is almost a given that any policy would be further to the left. The SNP do not need to dirty their hands with supporting unpopular elements of neoliberalism, as Labour’s failure to offer anything other than further status quo at Westminster means that they will continue to be implemented anyway. The SNP gains credibility as a left-wing party for enacting social policies with the help of generous block grant attribution; all expressly without challenging the fundamentals of a system it has no control over (customs, interest rates, etc).

In conclusion, the trajectory of Scottish nationalism's relationship with left-wing political economy reflects a nuanced interplay between historical roots and pragmatic bent. The early symbiosis with the Labour movement laid the foundation for left-wing principles, evolving into a more nuanced approach within nationalist thought. As times changed it exchanged state subsidised industry for deregulation and ‘Silicone Glen’. The instrumental use of North Sea oil marked a pivotal shift, contributing to the SNP's dominance. However, in the contemporary neoliberal landscape, the need for classical left-wing political economy has been superseded by the need to cement itself as a central element rather than a periphery of the global economy leading to the increasing use of instrumental policies.

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