SCOTTISH workers rejected the narrow reactionary nationalism of the SNP on Thursday because of the fact that they hate both the Scottish and English Tories and despise the Labour leadership which loves capitalism.
But the most important lesson for the working class that has come out of this campaign is the decisive issue of leadership and the treachery of the Labour Party.
In what has been traditionally the great strongholds of Labour in Scotland – the big working class cities of Glasgow and Dundee – the entire campaign run by the SNP focused on urging Labour voters, if they really wanted to smash the Tories and drive them out of Scotland, they should vote for the SNP not the capitalist-supporting Labour party.
Leaflets were issued calling on Labour supporters to turn their backs on Labour and vote SNP and for independence as the only way to get rid of the Tories.
The big ‘Yes’ vote recorded in these cities reflects the desire of the working class to be rid of Toryism and capitalism and is no way a real extension of support for the Scottish National Party.
At the same time, it reflects the fact that the Labour Party through its treachery has forfeited any loyalty amongst masses of workers.
The ‘Yes’ campaign obtained their majority here through default – through the treachery of a Labour leadership that came to power in 1997 after eighteen years of Tory rule under Thatcher and Major and went on to completely betray the working class, acting at all times as the ‘businessmen’s government’ that Blair boasted about.
That Scottish workers hate the Tories and despise the treachery of the Labour leadership is perfectly understandable.
With Cameron and the Tories so hated that every time they opened their mouths it added several hundreds to the ‘Yes’ vote, Labour was drafted in to try and shore up the Union with Gordon Brown playing the leading role.
Brown, who ‘saved’ the banks from collapse in 2008 by taking on their huge debts and making the working class pay, was once again called upon this time to save the Union from the SNP – which had emerged out of the very betrayals of the Labour Party.
This was the role that Labour assumed, as saviours of British capitalism, riding to the rescue whenever called upon.
With Cameron now dead in the water and the Tory party wracked by crisis and split from top to bottom over everything from UKIP to all the ‘vows’ made by him about increased spending powers for the SNP, it is becoming clear that the Labour Party leadership will once again be called upon to save the day.
This could be in the form of a coalition with sections of the Tory party or going it alone in an attempt to impose on the working class the draconian cuts and austerity measures that the capitalist crisis demands for its survival, relying on the equally treacherous leadership of the TUC to support them and keep the working class under control.
At the recent TUC conference, this took the form of refusing to even discuss their own policy of considering a general strike and instead denouncing it as ‘unreal’.
Instead of fighting, these traitors work full-time to limit the trade union movement to protest and the hope that a future Labour government will somehow be better than the Tories; all in the full knowledge that any Labour government will be driven by the world crisis to carry out the same attacks as Cameron and Osborne.
What is clear is that the question of leadership is now absolutely decisive.
With capitalism bankrupt and unable to provide any future for workers or youth, the only way forward for the working class is the revolutionary transformation of society through the socialist revolution.
This requires the building of a revolutionary leadership in the working class to replace these labour lieutenants of capitalism – a leadership prepared to call and lead a general strike to bring down the government and go forward to a workers government that will advance to replace the capitalist Union with the British workers republic and socialism.
This crisis of leadership must be resolved through the building of the WRP and the mass Young Socialists – join today.
