THE LEADER of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Nicola Sturgeon, dropped a bombshell yesterday with her announcement that she intends to push through a vote in the Scottish Parliament demanding that the Tory government give its permission to hold a second referendum on Scottish independence.
The SNP with the support of the six members of the Green party will win this vote setting the scene for her to request government permission for another referendum which the SNP want to take place between autumn 2018 and the spring of the following year.
Sturgeon’s bomb was carefully timed to coincide with the debate on Brexit in Parliament and has only one aim – to split the working class in Britain at a time when the crisis of capitalism demands the maximum unity of workers not just in Britain but across Europe.
The ‘independence’ the SNP are demanding is nothing more than keeping Scottish workers on board a ship that is sinking by the hour, drowning in a sea of debt and pounded by the world economic crisis to the extent that the entire banking system of Italy is collapsing and its largest bank, the German Deutsche bank, is technically bankrupt.
An EU where Greek workers are fighting on the streets against having their pensions destroyed and every state asset sold off in order to pay back the bail-outs forced on them by the banks and IMF.
Sturgeon wants Scotland to join with Greece in becoming another bankrupt outpost of European capitalism forced to live under the vicious yoke of austerity. Even the ludicrous promises of prosperity through the oil industry, an illusion they promoted during the first independence referendum in 2014, has been shattered by the crisis in the oil industry internationally and the stark fact that this resource is far too expensive to survive in the cut-throat world of US shale production.
The Scottish working class are not stupid, they see every day a capitalist Europe that is disintegrating as workers rise up in their millions against austerity. They see a Europe where workers and youth fought riot police in Naples at the weekend to prevent the reactionary Northern League, who believe that Italians from the South are nothing more than lazy barbarians leeching off the north, from marching through the city spreading their racist filth.
It’s an EU where German bankers declare that the southern countries of the union are just spongers dragging down the profits of the bankers and bosses and proposing that they be cut off and left to rot on their own now every ounce of profit has been screwed from them. Scottish workers are very aware of what is going on, and every indication is that a new referendum would be defeated by an even bigger majority than last time.
The SNP knows this, what they really want is the Tories to refuse permission for the vote to take place. This would enable Sturgeon to whip up a campaign based on the most reactionary nationalism, pitting Scottish workers against British workers.
Her bombshell is nothing more than a device to completely split the working class for the benefit of the most backward section of the Scottish bourgeoisie who dream of a return to the days before the Act of Settlement in 1701 which established the United Kingdom and paved the way for the development of capitalism in Britain.
The answer to the crisis of capitalism today is not to go backwards over 300 years but to advance to a higher stage through the overthrow of bankrupt, historically redundant capitalism and go forward to socialism.
The trade unions must take a lead in rejecting the splitting tactics of the SNP and demand unity of the working class through the organisation of a general strike across the country to bring down the Tories and go forward to a workers government that will replace the capitalist union with a workers republic and socialism.
A workers government that will join hands with the working class of Europe and lead the fight to overthrow the capitalist EU and replace it with the United Socialist States of Europe.
