What lessons can we learn from the Grangemouth Crisis?
A multi-national company, with substantial investment from the Chinese state, locks out its Scottish workforce. The union, its headquarters in London, is ham-fisted and leaden-footed. The company's founder and chairman is an Englishman, living in Switzerland. The union's leader and the plant convenor are prominent members of the Labour Party.
The dispute is played out in the context of the UK's 'master-and-servant' employment legislation, not a relic from Victorian times, but created in the course of the last generation by Labour and Conservative administrations. With economic planning and business regulation long ago consigned to the dustbin by successive London governments, the company is able to hold the whole Scottish economy to ransom. An oil-rich nation is faced with losing its only refining facility. The devolved Scottish government plays its very limited hand to brilliant best advantage and staves off a national catastrophe.
So what lessons can we learn from this crisis? That Scotland could never be independent - according to the 'No' campaigners, that is. Eh? What? Run that past me again. Och, don't bother. It was ever thus.
The Highland Clearances and mass emigration? If Scotland had been on its own, many more would have left. The poverty and squalor bequeathed us from British industrialisation? It would have been a lot worse if we hadn't been part of the Empire. The collapse of the UK's reckless, debt-ballooned financial sector? Scottish banks were to blame. The latter-day Raj's military adventures from Suez to Iraq? Well, an independent Scotland would probably have invaded Iceland. Maybe England too. And built TWO nuclear submarine bases.
I'm afraid logic and rational analysis go out the window when it comes to assessing the case for Scottish independence. Case studies like the Grangemouth crisis, which indicate that being locked into the UK is the worst possible option for Scots, are somehow turned on their head.
In his classic novel, "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists", Robert Tressell describes workers who doggedly put up with long hours, low wages and appalling working conditions. They line the pockets of their uncaring employers while their own families struggle on the breadline, only a dismissal or lay-off away from the workhouse. The hero of the book, Frank Owen, is unable to persuade his fellow workers that there is any alternative to the status quo. They acquiesce in their own exploitation. They consider their desperate plight and the contributions they make to the wealth of their privileged betters as 'normal'.
Like Tressell's workers, Scots have been conditioned to believe there is no alternative to the status quo. It's being going on now for four centuries so it's a belief system that has a very strong hold on our minds. We accept it as 'normal' that Scotland is bottom or near the bottom of every UK league table that measures indicators like income, deprivation, sickness, housing, unemployment. The progress the Scottish government has made in areas such as health, university fees and social care will end, we are told, in tears. Like Tressell's workers, it seems Scots need to be looked after by their betters.
Tressell set his novel in the fictional Mugsborough. It's hard to resist thinking of Scotland as the national equivalent. Our huge oil wealth which has brought Scots hardly any tangible benefits? Och, we'd only fritter it all away if we had it to ourselves. As for the billions those Norwegians have stashed away, well, Scandinavians are just so boring. The £1 billion in tax the whisky industry sends annually to the Exchequer in London? Och, left to ourselves, we'd only drink it all.
The Bible says, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Well, if the Christians are right, the streets of paradise must be echoing with Scots accents. Maybe the language of the angels really is gaelic, after all!
The 'Yes' campaign has it all to do to overcome centuries of conditioning that our natural situation is to tug our forelocks at London's command. The NO campaign incessantly drums it into our heads that Scotland's hapless position compared to the South-east of England is 'normal'. The modest goal of Scotland achieving at least parity with other prosperous small European states is derided as an irrelevant fantasy. That's because, we're asked to believe, Scots will be Better Together with the spivs and wide boys of the City, Better Together with Jim Ratcliffe, Len McCluskey and the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
Unable to find a publisher for his book - the establishment didn't like its message - Tressell in despair threw the manuscript onto the fire. Only the quick actions of his daughter rescued it from the flames.
But let's not give up as Tressell did. There's almost a year to go. Like his precious manuscript, the cause of Scotland can still be pulled out of the fire.
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