In part two of their overview on Scottish political culture, James Foley & David Jamieson break down Scottish Labour candidate Richard Leonard's socialist prospectus, what lessons can be drawn from the resurgent English left and 'the marsh' of Scottish social democracy...

In this parliament, Scottish Labour might emerge as the most likely candidate for serious new thinking on capitalism, thanks largely to the second-hand influence of Corbynism in England. It’s worth reflecting on how strange this would be. Only three years ago, the Scottish party had swung further to the right than ever before, electing, in Jim Murphy, a leader with pronounced neoconservative leanings. A member of the Henry Jackson Society, Murphy proved how closely New Labour could move towards the oil and gas wing of American imperialism, even a decade after the Iraq War disaster, while still proclaiming “democratic socialist” values.



Scotland was the area most opposed to Corbyn in internal party elections, which reflects the roots of Corbynism outside of the party’s main core of candidates and officials. Scotland never received a large influx of new members, partly because of the national question, but mostly because of Better Together, an alliance with the Conservatives which made Labour toxic to a huge layer of potential recruits and helped shift internal party opinion further to the right. Even as recently as May 2017, the party’s strategic focus was on electing Better Together chief Blair MacDougall in middle class East Renfrewshire, formerly home to Murphy. Notably, the one seat that survived the party’s apocalyptic 2015 election was the exceedingly leafy Edinburgh South, where Ian Murray MP was a bitter factional opponent of Corbyn. Scotland, then, proved to be the most enduring outpost for the classic version of New Labour: “middle Scotland” outlasted “middle England”.



While Corbynism in England has a mixture of younger, social movement activists and older, long-suffering socialists, the latter group dominates much of the Corbyn message in Scotland. Richard Leonard, a newly elected MSP, is the pro-Corbyn candidate to replace Kezia Dugdale; revealingly, his message is, “I’m too long in the tooth to be a Corbynista”. He's expected to win, which would complete the unification of the party under an all-British left-wing leadership. Intellectually, Leonard has been close to the Scottish Left Review and the Labourist wing of the Morning Star, and has helped produce, alongside John Foster, some detailed and important analyses of external control in the Scottish economy. His personal project has been to reconcile the Christian socialism of his hero, Keir Hardie, with Marxism, an approach outlined in “Socialism: More Than a Creed”, where he tries to reclaim Labour’s founder as a model of twenty-first century politics.



Like Hardie, Leonard favours a brand of Home Rule for Scotland. Specifically, he associates with the Red Paper Collective’s plans for “progressive federalism”. In a series of pamphlets, they have set out their vision, which largely revolves around economic planning and power relations in the Scottish and British economies. This work has brought a welcome focus on issues often neglected by the independence campaign, especially the politics of ownership and workplaces. However, what’s unclear is how their economic proposals are actually linked to federalism: the knots and complexities of the latter are never really untangled. So far, they have left three “wicked” issues hanging. First is how more devolution, or federalism, links specifically to the issues they actually want to talk about, planning and/or economic redistribution. Second is what failed in Labour’s last model, and how their plans would rectify it. The third is what should be done with England, an entity that is several times larger than the others put together and has its own distinct politics of grievance.



Leonard and colleagues are largely interested in planning and economic redistribution, which thoroughly dominates their papers on federalism. This raises the question: how are these two aims connected? Is the link between federalism and economic democracy necessary or accidental, and is it positive or negative? There are hints at answers to these questions in their writings, but nothing definite. In Scotland, many believe that more devolution will inherently lead to more equal outcomes, usually citing positive examples from Holyrood such as tuition fees and the partial eradication of the bedroom tax. However, Neil Davidson, the only theorist to bring much analytical rigour to these questions, reaches precisely the opposite conclusion: he suggests that greater devolution is part of the essence of the neoliberal project, the delegation of responsibility further and further away from the nation state.



Davidson’s theory isn’t necessarily the last word on this question, but, so far, it is the only serious left-wing account of the issue. The Red Paper, with their intellectual roots in 1970s planning debates, are certainly aware that devolution can weaken economic democracy, and has often been designed for this purpose. They insist that it should not, which, they argue, is what distinguishes “progressive” federalism from its other variants. But this implies that federalism is inherently desirable, and since it’s not clear what separates the essence of federalism – progressive or not – from devolution, it’s not always clear why. For this reason, much of our account here is inevitably guesswork, an attempt to fill in some blanks.



Superficially, the way to distinguish federalism from devolution is with the question of sovereignty. Andrew Heywood, in a standard politics textbook, compares the two: “although their territorial jurisdiction may be similar, devolved bodies have no share in sovereignty; their responsibilities and powers are derived from, and are conferred by, the centre”. With devolution, the state delegates its power down to lower levels, but, remaining sovereign, it may withdraw it at will. By contrast, typically, federalism would acknowledge a fundamental arena of last-word power particular to Scotland’s people. Of course, the notion of popular sovereignty in capitalist states is always imaginary, but Catalonia shows the distinctions are often extremely meaningful in practice. It’s not clear whether Leonard and colleagues intend to draw this contrast, since their essays are not really focused on constitutional questions.



Assuming they do mean it, the implications of such a position would be vast for the whole edifice of the British state, which has never been based on any form of popular sovereignty, real or imagined. This question of Britishness hangs in the background but is never actively confronted. In one essay, Pauline Bryan starts by saying: “State structures and constitutions are not neutral. They are moulded by class forces and over time are adjusted to produce particular outcomes.” This is indeed the crucial point, but her examples are exclusively from the European Union and the Scottish Parliament, with what Tom Nairn called “Ukania” left in parentheses. One explanation is that the Paper are unconsciously British nationalist: there is a tradition in Scottish Labour leftism of equating the UK state with internationalism, and their analysis does seem somewhat confined to Scotland and its role in the “British road to socialism”. However, it’s more likely the Paper’s authors are fearful that any radical critique of the British state becomes a concession to the SNP, leading, by successive steps, down the road to Scottish nationalism.



Paradoxically, though, because their ultimate rationale for federalism isn’t explained, it often feels like a grudging acceptance that Scottish Nationalism should be met halfway, with the lure of greater Scottish control used to simultaneously divide the SNP and Labour centrists and help the Labour Left achieve its actual, bread and butter goals. This would imply that while their economic proposals dominate their account of federalism, they have little to do with federalism per se; instead, they're simply the necessary steps to ensure federalism is progressive. If this interpretation is correct, we are entitled to raise doubts about the limits of their programme. True, economic planning and workplace democracy are essential to progressive politics, and often neglected – but why stop there? Important as these issues are, they do not constitute the limits of a progressive critique of state power.



The latter would require, at minimum, examination of borders, national identity, gender and war. In contemporary politics, these issues are not mere superstructures but rather increasingly inherent parts of how capitalist states manage workplaces, the labour market and the social wage. They are also the issues most likely to provoke intense ideological conflict and divisions on the Left, but this doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Quite the opposite. It means ignoring them will lead to inevitable trouble down the road: just ask the SNP about their currency policy.



The Red Paper’s goals would be much clearer if they reached an explicit understanding of what went wrong with Labour’s last administrations. We mean nothing moralistic here. Virtually everyone agrees about the slaughter in Iraq, the foolishness of private finance initiatives, and the ultimate collapse of Blair/Brown’s bargain with the City. There is no need to slander the Labour Left by association. Equally, New Labour did make progress on child and pensioner poverty, albeit under propitious conditions, and did, by half measures, tackle the “backwardness” of certain institutions like the House of Lords. One part of these reforms was devolution. The ultimate rationale for it was to tackle growing regional inequality, a marked feature of UK capitalism since the 1970s that particularly accelerated in the 1990s, and to restore a sense unity around the central state. Clearly, neither aim has been achieved with any success.



The Red Paper shares an awareness, often lacking in Scottish politics, that the true geographical conflict is between London and the South East and everywhere else in Britain. We would take this further, and suggest London’s uncontrolled growth is a central factor both behind the perceived success of the British economy and also behind Brexit, Scottish nationalism and the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. The greatest achievements in thwarting London and promoting the regions occurred in the post-War era, with a highly centralised, unreformed imperial state. Quite why New Labour’s regional model failed so profoundly is never explained: perhaps the trauma of Blair’s long administration remains too raw for the Labour Left to really explore it. Explanations for the failure of devolution that rely on bad faith, however, must be ruled out. It’s not enough to say New Labour was biased towards the rich, or that the SNP’s nationalism deluded people, and to count this as a sufficient explanation. This is why Davidson’s model is appealing: it accounts for the neoliberal direction of devolution in structural terms.



If New Labour’s bad faith is a weak explanation for its failures, equally the good faith of Corbynism is not enough to guarantee a political mandate for radical economic reform will be honoured. Scottish Labour, always more marked by Stalinist influence than by the New Left, tend towards a British exceptionalism and thus rarely discuss the problems of genuinely left-wing governments elected elsewhere. It seems fair to conclude that Corbyn is in a weaker position than leaders like Tsipras or Mitterrand. Labour’s leader, unlike the latter two, is considerably to the Left of all but a handful of his parliamentary group. They have made every attempt to overthrow him, long before he even fought an election.



Added to all the standard problems for social democratic leadership under neoliberalism, then, Corbyn has a mutinous core to his party, composed of those who actively hanker for a return to what they perceive as a golden age of Blairism before Bush. This group has the sympathy of all pro-Labour media outlets and many of the institutions that surround the party (although, crucially, not the unions). So far, Corbyn has had extreme good fortune: with Trump as US President, liberals are temperamentally opposed to supporting American aggressions. This has allowed him to pursue an anti-austerity agenda increasingly untroubled by conflicts over British involvement overseas. However, under, say, a Clinton leadership, the conflict between Corbyn’s pacifism and the hawkish liberal “internationalism” that blends so well with British nationalism, a creed which intellectually dominates among the insiders of UK politics, would be intense.