Why Scotland Should Vote Yes

[xchrom]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/why-scotland-should-vote-yes/



On the evening of May 16, 1973, around halfway through the Aladdin Sane tour, I watched David Bowie play his second sold-out show at the Aberdeen Music Hall. I could not have imagined that one day I would be listening to him — or, rather, listening to Kate Moss speaking on his behalf — intervene in the debate over a Scottish independence referendum. Mind you, I cannot pretend that the national question was a high priority for my 15-year-old self; nor could I have imagined that there would ever be a Scottish independence referendum.

The message that Moss read out for Bowie at the Brit Awards on February 20 this year — “Scotland, stay with us” — nevertheless deserves to be taken more seriously than it has been, and certainly more than the mixture of bluff and bullying that Scots have recently received from George Osborne, Jose Manuel Barroso, and the directors of Standard Life plc. Bowie is actually a more political artist than is often supposed, but he is in no sense a conventional left-wing one. Yet his intervention was typical of a widely held view on the Left that a “yes” vote for Scottish independence on September 18 would be a disaster for “us” (meaning the English), and perhaps also for the Scots themselves. These views are also widely held in Scotland itself.

Before turning to these arguments, it is worth considering one pro-independence position that can only be held in England. Expressed most recently (if eccentrically) by Will Self in the New Statesman, this holds that an independent Scotland would be a social-democratic — perhaps even socialist — inspiration to the English Left, finally galvanizing it into posing a serious challenge to neoliberalism and imperialism. And in some respects, a survey of social legislation in Scotland even under devolution, including that passed by the first two Liberal/Labour coalition governments, tends to support this perspective.