Issue 191 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published November 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review

As the Review went to press, the Scottish Constitutional Convention was preparing to publish plans for the Scottish parliament it expects a Labour government to introduce after the next election. The convention comprises--in descending order of importance--the Labour Party, the Scottish Trade Union Congress, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish churches and various community groups.

Only two Scottish parties stand outside the convention. One is the Tory Party. From being--as recently as the 1950s--the biggest party in Scotland and the only one ever to have gained more than 50 percent of the vote, it currently has only ten out of 70 MPs and opinion poll support of 14 percent. Nevertheless, as Major's conference speech showed, the Tories have refused to back any form of devolution and have offered instead a super-quango called the Scottish Economic Board which will centralise economic decision making in the hands of a small group of capitalists.

The other is the SNP. The nationalists understand that in order to compete with Labour they must attract the working class vote, but in the May local elections they were only able to gain one additional council scat across the entire central belt. This has resulted in sharp tensions within the party over its future strategy, with one 'fundamentalist' wing arguing at its recent conference for no deals with Labour and abstention from any future Scottish parliament. The other, 'pragmatic', wing, led by Alex Salmond, argues that devolution would allow the SNP an opportunity to advance the argument for full independence. The latter position is tactically astute since it assumes that Labour will win the next election but that Blair will fail to do anything to satisfy workers' expectations.

While socialists support the right of the Scottish people to decide their constitutional future, all sections of the labour movement from the Blairites to Scottish Militant Labour have uncritically argued that a Scottish parliament would solve Scottish workers' problems. In fact the parliament which the convention envisages will have very few powers. Although it will theoretically be able to raise up to 3 pence in the pound in extra income tax, the main source of its funding will come from a grant from Westminster. It will have no say over foreign affairs, defence, social security, fiscal or macro economic policy.

What is significant is that the final agreement over the shape of the parliament was pushed through by Blair personally against the bitter opposition of the STUC and its general secretary, Campbell Christie. The disagreement, ostensibly over the number of seats in the parliament, in fact reveals that sections of the bureaucracy feel very uneasy with the ways in which Blair is attempting to impose his views on the government. It is clear that Blair is more concerned with arriving at an agreement with the Liberal Democrats than heeding the wishes of the STUC. It is ironic that the much-heralded compromise between the Lib Dems and Labour has occurred, not in the south east of England, but in the Labour heartlands of Scotland.

The one thing which could blow apart these manoeuvrings is a revival of the class struggle across Scotland. Since Scottish workers are subject to exactly the same attacks as those in England, there is no objective reason why this should not happen.

For many Scottish workers there is a belief that having their own parliament would have prevented the worst ravages of the last 16 years of Tory rule. There is also a belief amongst some nationalists and sections of the left that a Scottish parliament would set a radical agenda irrespective of how right wing a Labour government will be.

The reality is that the proposed parliament will be a toothless tiger. It won't have the power to scrap Trident and spend the money on the NHS, or to renationalise water, gas, electricity or the railways. Nor will it have the ability to set a national minimum wage or raise the level of welfare benefits.

Increased democracy should be welcomed, but real gains that improve workers' lives across Scotland will have to be fought for.
Keir McKechnie and Neil Davidson