The left in England and Wales have seized the political initiative in society for the first time since the early 1970's. There maybe constant reminders in the mainstream media that the Tories took most votes and that they have the largest number of MPs in the British Parliament - but the UK election result was a disaster for them. They have continued to stumble over the London Grenfell Tower fire and the endless 'about to be concluded' talks with Ireland's most reactionary party, the DUP, which are meant to guarantee majority votes for future Tory legislation. A national demonstration has been called for July 1st by the anti-austerity movement including the Peoples Assembly, many unions, most of the campaigning organisations with respect to health, education, housing and now those fighting for safety in the tower blocks. The main slogan of the demonstration is that the Tories must go. The potential size and spirit of this march is already haunting Tory spokespeople in the media.
In Scotland however 12 new Tory MPs produced more than half of the Tory 'gains' across Britain. Scottish Labour clawed back 6 seats in Scotland's traditionally most radical and working class areas in Glasgow and Fife. The Scottish National Party lost 13% of their vote and 30% of the MPs that they had won in the 2015 General Election.
Now the left throughout Britain are confused by the Scottish results. From being the most radical corner of Britain in 2015, with a leading party, the SNP, hostile to austerity and nuclear weapons, looking like an indispensable part of an answer to the Tories' continuing domination of Westminster, the 2017 election looks substantially different. The Scottish vote seems neither to link to the successful insurgence of Corbyn's Labour Party. Nor does it grasp the main means that the SNP offered - another referendum on Scottish independence - which seemed such an obvious solution to endless Tory rule. On the contrary, 60% of the Scottish vote went to unionist parties.
There are technical reasons advanced as explanations for Scotland's unexpected vote in Scottish newspapers and on-line. They include the fact that Scotland has had 7 polls in 3 years. Ex SNP leader and now ex MP Alex Salmond argues that the Scottish Labour Party's partial come-back was accounted for by the Corbyn upsurge and was not a sign of growing support for Scottish Labour as such. In the radical left, including in some of the unions, the traditional view that Scottish Independence would divide the British working class and their organisations has strongly re-emerged, particularly among supporters of the Socialist Party (ex-Militant) and the British Communist Party. Even Kezia Dugdale, leader of the Scottish LP (and supporter of Owen who challenged Corbyn in his second leadership contest) is now keeping quiet about her own plans for a Federal Britain. She also denies telling leader of the SNP Nicola Sturgeon that she would support a new referendum for Scotland following the Brexit result.
Is the Scottish result simply 'a return to normal'? Has the Scottish interest in the national question now begun to recede in favour of what some in the left call 'the class question'? Has the Corbyn led national Labour Party's undoubted progress overcome the attraction of a Scottish national answer to endless Tory governments?
A key to understanding the Scottish result, indeed where Britain as a whole is heading, is to recognise that the UK is in a process that has barely begun. The fundamental character of this process is the deep political crisis of the traditional ruling classes that has opened up in the West. Fluctuating, even wild (albeit short-term) solutions come and go, from Trump to Macron. All are temporary. All represent increasingly desperate efforts to use various different political instruments to stabilise a system that is dissolving. Getting out of the EU is one such initiative. Will it give the UK any sort of 'control' over its borders, its trade deals, its economy? No more than before. Maybe less. Looking at Britain's political context directly; will the Corbyn led Labour Party (as opposed to the big majority of right wing Labour MPs who are constantly plotting to reform their own Labour Party) come to government and carry out its manifesto if the Tories fall, as seems likely? Not unless the Corbyn Party out-builds the old Labour Party on the streets, in the housing schemes, in the workplaces and across the land. This means a Parliament in the hands of its people.
In this context Scottish voters have lived with the SNP for a decade. Nothing very spectacular there. And what did an SNP version of Scottish independence look like? A bit more of the same. In the Scottish election, where SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon put a second referendum as the main issue in 2017 as a means of dealing with Brexit, Scottish voters were unimpressed. An extension of the same did not catch it. For or against Brexit was not the point. Meanwhile, the real and only dramatic alternative to daily life offered in the General Election was stifled out of the contest by Scottish Labour's traditional Scottish messages and its fear and hatred of Corbyn. Scottish voters split up. They could not get access to the change they saw in the first referendum campaign where they had been building towards a very different sort of country - led by the youth and Scotland's most radical areas. Instead the next referendum turned out to be a means of getting back into the EU. Even if you voted to remain, you would not want a country based on it.
So the Scottish election was about the SNP's Scottish government - at best all right. Better than the Tories and old Labour. At worst - just as bad as the rest of them. Certainly no radical image of a new type of country. The significance and potential of Scotland's national question remains to be newly identified and rediscovered. It has not gone away because the SNP has started to go away. Creating a new nation, based on meeting the needs of its working classes, in the shadow of the best of the Scandinavian past, implementing its free movement of people, eschewing the nuclear dead weight is still essential. Indeed it is essential for the reconstruction of all and every part of a profoundly reactionary Britain. But new forces and new alliances in Scotland will be needed to bring it back to the centre of things again.
None of the current political parties have yet caught up in Britain with the depth and significance of the political crises they have to face. Corbyn's Labour (as opposed to the other Labour Party) has come the furthest - certainly head and shoulders above the Macrons of this new Western world (as noted by the 60% abstention in France's recent Parliamentary elections.) All sorts of slides and shifts are on the cards in British politics. Corbyn's Labour is one key marker around which new movements and formations might be built. It is the beginning of something. Already it has shaken traditional British politics to the core. And there is the lesson about how the new politics has to be built - with the mass movement and parties or bits of them tied irrevocably into the movements of the people - sometimes against their own traditions and worn-out symbols. And this will need to be the new politics of Scotland's next move toward independence.
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