Much has been made about the SNP's new “blueprint” for an independent Scotland, which indicates a move away from the mooted Nordic model towards a more neo-liberal prospectus. But Hugh Cullen, Scottish Socialist Party organiser in the Lothians and member of the party's NEC, argues the Nordic model itself is no quick fix and fails to address key issues...

Near the end of this month, the author, socialist activist and trade union leader Asbjørn Wahl will be speaking at a Scottish Socialist Voice forum in Edinburgh. He may not be well known to readers, but there are few people with greater insight to the potential gains and ultimate limitations of social democracy. Hailing from Norway, perceived by many as an inspiring panacea whose example Scotland should follow, he is a trade union leader on the front line of the fight to resist the last 20 years of austerity and attacks on workers in Norway and across the world.



Despite Norway's successes, he argues the process his home country has undergone as “supping with the devil”. It's something we in Scotland can learn a lot from. I attended both the recent Scottish Independence Convention and Radical Independence Campaign conferences (not so aptly named as no decisions were made) and found myself disappointed at the lack of direction and ambition coming from the platforms.



Since defeat in 2014, due to an inability to convince Scotland’s working class majority of the gains that can be made from Independence, key events in our movement have rolled out the red carpet for speakers who have told the audience to imagine a “better Scotland” based on liberal principles. Nations with social democratic programmes are held up as end goals we should strive to imitate.



While this vision, championed by Lesley Riddoch and peddled by ‘left voices’ in the Greens, SNP and other pro-independence charismas, is undoubtedly better than the neoliberal UK plc that we currently suffer, there are lessons to be learned from Whal’s analysis of his native Scandinavia if there is to be a meaningful and lasting transformation of the economy.



Whal notes that a force of organised labour was able to make significant gains in Norway when the social democratic Labour Party won power ahead of the second world war. However, this included “the acceptance of major political interventions in the market. Thus, the basis was laid for great social progress for workers. The welfare state developed. The Norwegian, or Nordic, model came into being.”



At this point, however, the leader of the workers movement effectively entered into a compromise with the forces of capital. This ideology of ‘social partnership’ is a form of Keynesian economics based on the belief that “employers also understood that cooperation, rather than struggle, was in their interest”.



The problem? They failed to take that final step to take ownership of the means of production. They left behind a system where the workers who created all the wealth had to annually negotiate their share of that wealth at a table with the bosses. While this ended an era of desperate poverty and mass unemployment, the forces that had won these gains dissipated. Understandably- off to enjoy the spoils of their victory and get some rest. Yet along with them went the energy and power of class struggle.



The nature of capitalism is that in order to survive, owners must perpetually grow and accumulate more and more capital at the expense of others. Bosses began to claw back the gains of the early to mid twentieth century, primarily because workers' power had waned, there were few flagship gains to be made, and many remained under the illusion that this 'Nordic paradise' would sustain itself.



Countries don't exist in isolation and we live in a perpetually globalising world. The neo-liberal counter-revolution that took place across Europe pressured Scandinavian nations to reform in order to stay competitive and keep growing returns for shareholders. Wahl (below) says that: "Compliance towards the neoliberal offensive became the answer. Gradually, social democratic parties adopted more and more of the neoliberal agenda – with privatisation, deregulation and restructuring of the public sector to market-oriented New Public Management-inspired organizational and management models."