EIGHT years after I first began seriously to consider that Scotland should arrange its own affairs the prospect of independence seems beguilingly close. A run of 21 consecutive polls (or is it 22?) indicates a clear majority in favour not only of a second referendum on the question, but of outright self-determination.

Crucially, the main reasons why I and many others began to move towards support for independence have become clearer still in the passing of those years. And in these last 12 Covid months the UK has been a laboratory for them. As the epidemic has menaced the health of the population the contagion of unfettered capitalism has preyed on the chaos, exploiting the state of emergency and our collective mortal peril.

In a truly civilised country a judge-led independent inquiry would already be in motion to investigate why a cadre of favoured entrepreneurs with shady connections to government ministers and their families were encouraged to gorge themselves on PPE contracts. And yet, you know too that, just as with the banking crisis and the collapse of Carillion, those with their fingers in the UK cash register will live to exploit another way.

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A properly-functioning Labour Party would be asking why, in the early stages of the pandemic, low-paid workers under orders to attend their places of employment packed on to public transport fearing for their jobs if they didn’t. This is what happens when workers’ rights are eroded to the point where corporate UK regards them as serfs. Under the multi-millionaire Sir Keir Starmer though, the Labour Party has acted as an extension of the Boris Johnson administration: meek, servile, compliant, supine; just the way the Tories like them.

One story which emerged last week in Scotland, passing largely unnoticed, ought to have signalled a degree of unease amongst those who regard independence as an opportunity to re-calibrate the management of society from the bottom up. The founders of the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) announced that the organisation was to fold, as they felt it had come to its natural end. I suspect there was more to it than this but we’ll accept it for the moment.

RIC was formed to ensure that the disenfranchised voices of those who have lost most under the UK’s economic policies would be heard in the independence movement. When it stood up to speak I felt it captured my own aspirations for an independent Scotland.

Writing in The National, one of RIC’s founders, the Trade Union activist and writer, Cat Boyd reflected on its philosophy. “RIC started because the official Yes Scotland campaign simply could not tell the story that needed to be told,” she wrote. “Independence, we argued, was a class issue and it would be won in Scotland’s working-class communities; not among business lobbies or boardrooms.”

Thus, RIC seemed a natural home for those of us whose support for independence wasn’t based on dewy-eyed emotionalism but something more practical and pragmatic: a sovereign opportunity of ensuring that Scotland would be governed in future for the many and not the few. We weren’t re-claiming an ancient birth-right or righting the wrongs of 300 years of occupation.

Some occupation. The people who owned Scotland in 1707 willingly sacrificed sovereignty to participate in Britain’s imperial adventures. Thereafter we filled our boots in Britain’s slave trade and provided enthusiastic arms for Britain’s dirty little wars in Ireland and against all those other peoples it liked to subjugate for the enrichment of the aristocrats.

Rather, we simply desire to live in a country which doesn’t spend billions on weapons of mass destruction; stage Halliburton wars in the Middle East or belong to Nato’s Might is Right club. We want an independent Scotland to provide checks and balances on the predations of capitalism and to have a mature and unsentimental discussion about the EU. We also want our sprawling and populous working-class communities to gain the most from our economic decisions. We want this because in this way we’d be able to unlock Scotland’s great potential for economic growth.

The pandemic’s aftermath will demonstrate cruelly why radicalism is necessary. In the next 10 years our poorest communities will be decimated and harrowed by the after-shocks of coronavirus. The last 12 months have given us a glimpse of what form this will take: the increased death rates; the unregulated gig economy; more anti-trade union laws; care home capitalism and an increase in emergency powers. The piracy of energy cartels will maintain the prevalence of fuel poverty in these communities.

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It’s a wretched and perverse circumstance that Scotland must encounter this governed by a party which, in the midst of such inequality, has chosen to become obsessed with the self-indulgent narcissism of gender politics. This party has also slowly and covertly allowed itself to become a plaything of big business. It already sides with the powerful cartels which have turned our marine habitats into ploughed fields and which have annexed most of our wild spaces for the exclusive use of aristocratic shooting parties.

And so, it’s imperative that a new Radical Independence Campaign is established and quickly. Corporate interests are already carving up post-independent Scotland in the same way that Halliburton carved up post-war Iraq before invasion. Yet, naive and foolish nationalist voices still sleepwalk with their don’t-rock-the-boat-until-independence-is-gained delusions.

By then, of course, it will be too late. Why do you think Andrew Wilson, managing partner of Scotland’s biggest lobbying firm and armed with a secret corporate client list, was chosen to pilot the Growth Commission? And why do you think it urges the continuation of austerity and attachment to sterling for a decade? Hands up who still thinks after a decade of this in the hands of these people an independent Scotland will simply decouple from sterling and establish its own economic imperatives?

The SNP can almost reach out and touch independence. Yet it’s visited a terrible dilemma on those of us who know it must be returned with a majority in May to achieve this: how can you vote for a party such as this and square it with your conscience?

 

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