Let's write our own constitution for Scotland

In a doorstop of a White Paper published this week, Scotland's SNP government promises an opportunity for people to be involved in drafting a new constitution for Scotland. We should seize this rare chance to identify where power actually lies and map out what real self-determination would look like.  

The SNP government has to propose a new constitution, because how could you have a new country without one? The other main political parties must oppose the whole idea – because they believe the British constitution and the union of England, Wales and Scotland is the last word on democracy. Were it so!

Scotland's Future promises "an open, participative and inclusive constitutional convention" to "ensure that it reflects the fundamental constitutional truth - that the people, rather than politicians or state institutions are the sovereign authority in Scotland". The convention will have a direct role in shaping the constitution following the approach of the US constitutional convention of 1787, the SNP government claims.

But the truth is that the draft people will be consulted on is certain to consist of a robust defence of the status quo, where profit-driven growth invariably trumps the needs of people and the environment. It will enshrine capitalist property “rights”, support company law and leave land in private hands. Political power will remain firmly out of reach for the majority.

And it won't be the people living on estates and battling poverty that are consulted, but the bodies that make up Scotland's close-knit elite. So in order to discuss the kind of revolutionary constitution that shook the world in 1787, we will need to draft it ourselves. We should establish People's Assemblies across Scotland to ensure that the people, not the corporations and not the professional politicians of any stripe, decide matters.

Most of the White Paper is a referendum day shopping list of childcare, inflation-proofed pensions and wages, and an end to the hated bedroom tax and universal credit. All this is promised in the midst of a global economic crisis and Scotland would have no immunity to a renewal of the banking crash. In fact, with RBS in line to be the trigger of the next financial crisis, Scotland would be hit hard.

Further, fiscal independence is a myth whatever the currency. With the SNP government determined to remain in the pound, its room for manoeuvre will be minimal, to say the least. In any case, the Bank of England, which decides money supply, interest rates and so on, does so in the interests of the bankers and the corporations. If an independent Scotland is compelled to join the euro as the price of European Union membership, it wil be a case of out of the frying pan into the fire.

The White Paper points to the eurozone as an example of a single currency operating well in many independent states. Where has the SNP been for the last five years? What price Greek, Spanish or Irish independence when it came to defending people from horrifying austerity, mass unemployment and poverty imposed by Europe in the name of defending the euro?

‪In 670 pages and 170,000 words the SNP outlines a social democratic paradise to emerge fully formed from a “Yes” vote. First minister Alex Salmond says it is "a mission statement and a prospectus for the kind of country we should be". But we all know what happens to company mission statements and prospectus's when the market crashes and the economy slumps!

Opening up a discussion about what a new constitution should contain is very important. But to use all this flannel (from the Celtic "wlana" wool - as in pulled over eyes) as our starting point would be accepting a nationalist and mostly illusory explanation of the future.

   

The referendum creates an opportunity to adopt a fundamentally different approach to independence, self-government and self-determination and we should take it up now, not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked by the SNP's false dawn.

We have launched a discussion about an alternative view of self-determination for Scotland on A World to Win’s network. Let us know what you think. 

Penny Cole

Grangemouth workers hung out to dry by Unite and SNP

The fate of jobs at the Grangemouth petrochemical plant now lies solely in the hands of a ruthless corporation that buys firms and then drives them back into profit at the expense of their workers’ wages and benefits.

The 1,800 Grangemouth workers have found that neither the Unite union leaders, who they pay for, nor Labour or SNP representatives they voted for, would stand with them, if they decided to mobilise a real fight against Ineos. In an amazing display of solidarity and determination, the majority of the Unite members had  voted to strike and reject the company’s blackmail.

But within hours of their vote on Wednesday, the message from all sides was that there was no alternative to accepting destruction of living standards and the pensions of any future workers. A media outcry held the workers responsible for the fate of the 10,000 related jobs in the local area.

So yesterday, their union leaders simply caved in. Unite general secretary Len McCluskey left earlier negotiations up to local officials but hurried up from London to capitulate in person. Within hours he had unreservedly accepted the company’s terms, “warts and all”. Shocking but true.

McCluskey has breathed fire and brimstone since the ConDems coalition took power, threatening strikes, civil disobedience, even a general strike against austerity, the public sector wage freeze and pension curbs. When it came to the crunch, he had no fight. Hot air and nothing more.

Later today it will be discovered whether this treachery is enough to keep the plant open or if in reality the company never had any intention of staying their hand. The closure of the petrochemical plant at Grangemouth would reduce global capacity and drive up prices to the benefit of Ineos plants elsewhere.

And that's the big lesson. When it comes down to it, the corporations make decisions on the basis of their own business plans, on the grounds of costs, shareholder value and profits. And so who holds the power?

The Scottish SNP government lined up with the Westminster government to demand that the Grangemouth workers accept the inevitable. First minister Alex Salmond was in talks begging Ineos not to close the plant. Finance minister John Swinney, the great champion of an oil-based independent economy, stood shoulder to shoulder with ConDem Scottish secretary Alistair Carmichael.

SNP claims that a capitalist Scotland would be in some way better for Scottish workers have been exploded. Ineos, like all Scotland's key industries from oil to whisky, is not "Scottish". They are run by freebooting global capitalist transnationals with no care for local conditions, except where they impact on profits.

The adjacent oil refinery, whose waste product is processed at the threatened plant, is owned by Petroineos, a refining and trading joint venture between Ineos and the Chinese government-owned PetroChina. Its other refinery is at Lavera, near Marseilles.

As the recession continues and fracking throws more cheap US coal and gas on to the world market, who knows what will happen to the offshore oil refining business. There is no such thing as security for workers, whatever the status of their country's governance.

The Unite members were ready to fight and their union could have organised an occupation to prevent the dismemberment of the plant, but they did not and will not. Independence will not change that.

Those who limit their vision for the future to achieving a "Yes" vote in the 2014 referendum have missed the point. Independence and self-determination should not be reduced to whether a Scottish elite should be in charge of a capitalist Scotland.

It has to be about acquiring a revolutionary independence, forging a new solidarity across the UK and Ireland, based on the struggle for a democratic state, for the socialisation of Scotland’s resources, for a new commons. That would provide a platform for a sustainable energy strategy that protects both jobs and the environment.

Penny Cole

Scottish independence is not a question of 'empathy', Mr Salmond

Scotland's SNP first minister Alex Salmond is basing his plans for the country's future on the ideas of Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith. He told an American audience he would be looking to both of Smith's great works - not only The Wealth of Nations but also the less well-known Moral Sentiments.

In this, Smith notes that there is something in human nature that makes us care about others, feeling what they feel not in our senses, but in our imaginations. This "empathy" is, apparently what David Cameron lacks and what Salmond has.

Yeh, right, that's what they all say! Here's Cameron speaking in 2010: “There’s something else you need to know about me which is that I believe the test of a good and strong society is how we look after the most vulnerable, the most frail and the poorest. That’s true in good times, but it’s even more true in difficult times.”

But as we all know, when financial crisis push comes to shove, the needs of capital win out every time. That’s why we are enduring austerity-plus from the ConDem coalition. The only sense of us all being it together is the fact that most Europeans are suffering the same pain.

A recent leaked Scottish government paper showed growing concerns in Edinburgh about oil revenues and public spending projections. Under such pressures would empathy trump the interests of global capitalism, whether in an independent Scotland or not? No way.

Empathy is not some national quality shared by all Scots regardless of their class or politics. If it were, some of the most miserable conditions in any advanced capitalist state would not have been created and tolerated for so long!

The House of Lords economic committee this week called on both the Westminster and Scottish governments to publish detailed studies of what would happen to the Scottish economy in light of a “Yes” vote. In that way voters could consider the implications fully.

But neither Westminster nor Holyrood will do this, for two reasons. First, they are both of them incapable of producing a document that is not riddled with propaganda for their side of the independence argument. And second, neither of them have the least idea of what is going to happen to the economy in the short, medium or long term - not in Scotland or anywhere else in the UK.

They are aboard a floundering ship which they claim to be piloting but that is actually controlled by a phantom crew nobody dares name. These are not supernatural forces, but the invisible forces of corporate debt, junk bond investments and financial instruments whose real value, or lack of it, nobody can pinpoint.

The wreck is imminent in a fresh banking crisis on the horizon. What price empathy when that happens?

We no longer live in a welfare state, but in a market state where the private sector delivers public services for profit. This is just as true in Scotland with its "arms length bodies" with big budgets, big fat salaries for councillor/directors and big fat pay offs for executives.

A Scottish government operating the existing capitalist state form would neither change nor challenge this status quo. We live in a state where benefits can be cut, removed or changed - not because people's needs have changed but because capitalism's crisis has deepened, and this would remain the same in an independent capitalist Scotland.

Of course we must defend all benefits and public spending but we must not stop there.

The independence referendum gives us a chance to debate and decide on a very different kind of society. People’s Assemblies could come together in every part of Scotland to draft a revolutionary new constitution.

That would aim to transfers power from the ruling elite to the people alongside measures to achieve economic democracy through new forms of common ownership of the corporations and banks. That is the real essence of self-determination for the 21^st century.

A campaign for a “Yes” vote that is not based on fighting for that kind of transformation, is simply leaving the ship in the hands of the wreckers whilst painting a big Scottish flag on the side.

Penny Cole

Scots need a people's constitution, not an SNP one

The deal struck between Edinburgh and Westminster to hold a single question referendum on independence in the autumn of 2014 should not obscure the fact that the needs of ordinary Scots are secondary to this political manoeuvring.

Even though it seems most Scots would like to have the option of greater devolution as an alternative to independence, this will not be on the ballot paper.  The Tories, who have no support whatsoever in Scotland, want the electorate to face a stark choice – “in or out”. Labour supports that position.

The big three parties are united on the need for a strong, united British state –  not for the benefit of the people, but as part of feverish attempts to hold the crumbling economy together.

The big question facing people in Scotland is not “do we want independence from England” (a completely inaccurate and historically wrong formulation) but what  kind of society do we want? What kind of economy, what kind of politics, what kind of life for the people? And these are the same questions that face people everywhere, in this unprecedented economic and ecological crisis.

None of these questions will be on the ballot paper, nor raised by Scottish National Party. The SNP makes the right to self-determination of the Scottish people synonymous with a crude nationalism that masks its reactionary policies.

The referendum campaign presents a massive opportunity to build something genuinely new and independent and we should not let it pass us by. We should refuse to spend two years as onlookers as they haggle over a constitutional settlement that will still put the needs of the corporations above the needs of the majority.

The argument put forward by some on the “left”, that if we get independence within the framework set out by Salmond and Cameron, that will somehow strengthen the power of the people for the future is unbelievable.

How would a Holyrood Parliament organised on the same lines as its counterparts in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland save us? And if an independent Scotland is still using the pound, as SNP leader Alex Salmond says it would, then the Westminster Treasury would still call the shots on spending, interest rates and borrowing.

For the next two years the SNP government and local councils of all stripes will go on cutting health, education and the voluntary and community sector. They will destroy further education colleges and oversee rising youth unemployment and destitution for families.

Whatever their disagreements over independence, all the parties agree there is no alternative to this. Labour in Scotland wants to remove universal benefits not enjoyed elsewhere in the UK right now. The SNP wants to keep them as a kind of bribe.

But for independent thinkers, the question is why are these benefits not rights? Why do people not have the right to work, to adequate food, to a home, in our rich country? Why are these subject to degrading rules, and dependent on whether capitalism decides to afford them or not?

If we are really talking about an independent future, let’s plan for a society where dependence on benefits is eliminated, where everybody participates and in return receives a share of the collective wealth that is enough to live well.

Salmond’s top priority for a post-independence constitution is keeping Scotland in NATO. We should develop a constitution that rejects NATO and its corporate-sponsored wars.

All Scotland’s politicians and businessmen want the corporations to drill for oil in deep water off our coast, and they support more open cast mining. We should demand an end to fossil fuel burning and a rapid transition to renewables. Let’s plan to place all land and sea in Scotland into a new commons, where it can be used for the benefit of all.

Those who want to bring about such real, fundamental changes should get together and write a people’s constitution. Then we can support and promote local initiatives that build into a network of democratic People’s Assemblies – in Scotland and beyond – striving for real political change. That would give real meaning and a modern content to the right to self-determination.

Penny Cole

Midwinter sends Scottish Labour into the freezer

If you want to know what a future Labour government at Westminster might look like, the leader of the party in Scotland, Johann Lamont, has given the game away.

When Lamont finally explained what Scottish Labour stands for it turns out to be ending universal benefits, cutting apprenticeships, fewer university places, making older people pay for care and unfreezing council tax.

Apparently, it’s free bus passes and prescriptions that are to blame for 30,000 public sector job losses – not the bankers and corporations whose crisis is being imposed on ordinary people right across Europe.

Lamont puts forward the usual hoary old right-wing arguments about universal benefits helping not only the poor but also the rich who don’t need it – which misses their purposes entirely.

Universal benefits are a recognition by society as a whole that health and education should be available freely, and that at some times in their lives – when raising children or when they are older – society should offer its members extra support.

Otherwise, what is the point of society? Most of us get that, but New Labour Mark II doesn’t. Ed – “I am for a responsible capitalism” – Miliband will be giving out the same miserable message at his party’s conference this week.

Lamont has announced a review of Scottish Labour’s economic policy, led by the aptly named Professor Arthur Midwinter. He has already made up his mind, claiming 18,000 jobs in the NHS and local government have been lost to fund the council tax freeze, free prescriptions and free university tuition sustained by the Scottish National Party (SNP) government.

But he is entirely wrong. Public sector jobs have been lost because of the global economic and financial crisis. And every one of the political parties is committed to doing whatever is necessary to prop up the system responsible for it.

Some 5,000 more jobs are to go in Glasgow over the next year and 1,400 in North Lanarkshire. More job losses will be announced elsewhere. Unemployment is 220,000 or 8%, and rising for those aged between 25 and 49.  Many young people do not show up in the figures because they are on job schemes or college courses that will not lead to a permanent job.

In two years, Scotland’s budget has been cut by 7% or £2.1 billion, and by 2016-17 it will be 17%, or £5.3bn, less than it was in 2010-11.

Is Lamont really claiming that ending universal benefits will bring an end to cuts and unemployment? Does she think we’re stupid or what?

The reality is that if they were removed tomorrow, the savings would not transfer to other services, but be swallowed up by the deficit. If you want to know what is coming, just look at Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

Lamont accuses the SNP of “trying to find the question to which independence is the answer”. But if the fundamental question facing Scotland is the social and economic future of its people, then Labour has no answers.

“We need to say what we want Scotland to be, what we can realistically afford, and how can we, in reality, make Scotland better,” she says.

And that’s the conundrum – what we can afford whilst still propping up this disastrous capitalist system cannot support communities to become healthy, better off and well educated.

There have been calls since Lamont’s speech for the creation of a breakaway independent Labour Party but that can’t help us (it was tried in the 1970s and failed miserably).

Operating within the current parliamentary system, whether in Edinburgh or Westminster,  means we can only ever have what the system chooses to give us – so it is the system itself we need to challenge.

We need to prepare ourselves for a leap to a new political framework, where democratic People’s Assemblies in every part of the country agree creative, not-for-profit, community-based solutions that openly challenge the existing powers.   

Penny Cole

Self-determination for Scotland has to end minority rule as well

It is hardly surprising that Scots hate rule from Westminster - they are not alone. Millions of workers all across the UK have come hate the ConDems Coalition for imposing the full burden of the economic crisis on their backs.

Whatever question is on the ballot paper for Scotland’s proposed referendum, there will be none that will bring about independence from cuts, closures, poverty, capitalism and the banks.

It will simply give people in Scotland the chance to swap rule of the 1% based at Westminster for the 1% based in Edinburgh. Or rather, continuing rule by the global corporations that rule everywhere, supported by their cohorts in the Scottish banks, the oil industry and the landowning, shareholding, political elite.

We will be asked to vote out the sham UK democracy and replace it with a sham Scottish democracy that will provide self-determination for an elite only.

The reality is that as a small economy, Scotland’s fate would be decided by global events and the decisions of the major capitalist states. This is the experience of Greece, Hungary, Iceland and Ireland among others.

It has been the experience of devolution, which has been unable to insulate Scots from the ravages of the global financial and economic crisis. One in three children in half of all local authority areas live in poverty, one in two in Glasgow. Unemployment is once again higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, and youth unemployment stands at 25%.

Further Education colleges face unprecedented cuts and an unwanted and badly-planned restructuring. The infrastructure of both Edinburgh and Glasgow is crumbling. Both cities’ councils are riven by scandals, waste and a ruthless determination to ignore the views of the people.

It is just crude nationalism to talk about being “free from England”. Who do we want to be free from? The tenacious battlers who continue to occupy at St Paul’s? The electricians striking across the UK to prevent the destruction of their wages and working conditions? The disabled people and their supporters fighting cruel cuts in benefits? Do Strathclyde Police have a kid glove where the Metropolitan Police have an iron fist?

There is not one England any more than there is one Scotland.

From Labour we get a kind of greater British nationalism, a support for the union that has more to do with the big fat prize of Westminster government jobs than any principles. It certainly has nothing to do with defending the unity of the British working class and trade unions.

Labour can only win at Westminster with Scottish votes, and Ed Miliband makes clear they would use those votes to continue with cuts and attacks on living standards. It is no wonder that Scots have come to detest Labour almost as much as they detest the Tories, and the SNP under Alex Salmond has benefited from that.

Cameron’s “defence of the union” is equally self, or rather power-seeking. Ditching Scotland might ensure a permanent Tory majority in England. That’s why they want just one question - independence, yes or no - on the referendum ballot paper.

And as a result, Cameron sets out to deny Scots the right to vote for a greater degree of devolution, even although polls suggest that is what they would prefer and even although people in Wales had a referendum on this in March 2011.

If it comes to a referendum, A World to Win will support the right of the Scottish people to self-determination but will campaign for real liberation from the likes of Salmond, the banks, landowners and the Scottish ruling elites.

What we need is to form People’s Assemblies all over Scotland now, to create the basis for a truly profound shift in decision-making, authority and ownership - directly to the people. We can’t vote for a revolutionary form of independence, that combines self-determination with an end to minority capitalist rule. They won’t put that question on the ballot paper. So we will have to put it on the agenda ourselves.

Penny Cole

Scots political elite united - against working people

As the political élite in Scotland focus on wrangling over future of the union with England, they are united on one thing - the need to impose the full burden of the crisis on people already struggling with low pay, part-time work and fuel poverty.

Scotland’s local authorities have now agreed to impose a public sector pay freeze, a freeze on council tax and an agenda of cuts and privatisation, in pursuit of what Scottish National Party (SNP) finance minister John Swinney calls a “relentless pursuit of efficiency”.

His budget means annual spending will fall by 11.3% per year by 2014-15. A council tax freeze will benefit those living in the most expensive homes whilst leading to cuts in service for the many thousands living on the margins. Another year’s pay freeze for many public sector workers will mean a real terms cut as fuel and food prices soar.

The SNP is transferring money out of revenue budgets into capital spending by measures like forcing further education colleges, the police and fire service to merge and in the case of further education, to make massive cuts. The resulting capital projects will create little more than short-term, sub-contracted jobs without making any real economic improvements because they will not add anything to real demand in the economy, or long-term, stable employment.

What it will do is lead to more job losses, and particularly for women who work in education, the NHS and voluntary sector organisations contracted to deliver welfare services. Scotland already has a deficit of 17.25% in full-time jobs. Many women survive by working two and even three part-time jobs, and that is becoming more and more common.

The SNP blames the cuts on the Westminster coalition, but if that is true, why don’t they go straight for an independence referendum and get Scotland out of Cameron/Clegg’s clutches? It’s not only because they fear they might not win the vote. It’s also because Alex Salmond, a capitalist economist and banker, knows that during the current euro-zone crisis, an independent Scotland would face financial meltdown.

And since it would be impossible to join the euro, what kind of independence would it be if Scotland kept the pound? Basically, Salmond is hoping if he holds on until the end of this parliament, the eurozone crisis will be solved and his dream of a modern capitalist Scotland, pouring renewable energy into the grid and oil into the power stations, will be back on the agenda. Fat chance!

Labour-controlled Glasgow City Council huffs and puffs about the SNP government, but makes the cuts anyway. Edinburgh complains, but is itself mired in a growing scandal over inflated costs for repairs to homes, with a number of staff under police investigation. Aberdeen plans even more cuts in disability service, but is ready to squander millions on destroying one of the city’s best-loved parks.

Labour is leaderless and has not a shred of integrity or a political idea between them. In the place where the working class first realised the need for a political party to represent its interests, that party is now a self-serving unrepresentative clique. The Tories are ready to change tack and change name, using the Ulster Unionists as their model. The Liberal Democrats are desperately trying to distance themselves from Clegg and co - but the voters are not swallowing it.

Nowhere is the collapse of the political class clearer than in Scotland, where the three main political parties manage between then to make a minor figure like Salmond look like General De Gaulle; after the local elections next year he could be presiding over a one-party state. Truly, apres-moi le deluge.

There is an urgent need for People’s Assemblies, not with the aim of holding the political class to account but to plan how to replace them entirely, with a democratic body ready to meet the challenge of the crisis with radical plans for social justice, workers’ control and an end to poverty.

Penny Cole

The break-up of old politics

The long-term break up of traditional party allegiances is confirmed by yesterday’s national and council elections. Last year’s general election stalemate may well prove the rule not the exception.

Neither the Tories nor Labour can command overwhelming support, especially as turn-out remains stuck in the low 60% range at general elections and much lower in other polls.

Labour’s loss of key seats to the right-wing populist Scottish National Party is indicative of the trend. Who would have thought that Lanarkshire, home of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader, would go over to the SNP? Once Labour could put up a donkey (and often did) and it would win in Scotland, enabling it to win at Westminster elections.

No longer. Labour’s bankrupt politics of embracing market capitalism has less and less appeal to working people in Scotland and elsewhere. New leader Ed Miliband’s appeal is so diffuse and undifferentiated from the Tories that he makes little impact. His support for the AV on the basis that it would force parties to broaden their appeal went down like a lead balloon.

The SNP’s demagogic populism even attracted the support of trade union leaders, according to party leader Alex Salmond. With half of Scots entitled to vote staying at home, it was hardly a resounding victory for the parliamentary democratic process or a vote for independence, which Salmond is now promising.

Political fragmentation brought the Lib Dems into a coalition with the Tories – and they took on the role of human shield for David Cameron and his “deficit reduction” plan – aka as massive public spending cuts. As a result, Nick Clegg’s party took a massive hit at the local elections and in Scotland while the Tories escaped relatively scot free.

This can only intensify tensions and contradictions at the top of the government, and even threaten Clegg’s position as leader. It is surely no more than 50-50 whether the coalition is able to stagger on for more than a year or so. Only a lack of organised opposition to its policies from Labour and the Trades Union Congress allows it to remain in office in any case.

The cuts in services and jobs at town hall level have been implemented by Labour, Tory and Lib Dem councils alike. Nothing will change as a result of yesterday’s elections, except that more Labour councils are ready to do the government’s bidding.

As they take control of town halls around the country, they will inherit cuts budgets and carry on with their implementation. Later this year, the new Labour councils will start work on budgets for 2012-13 which will involve further reductions in spending. Anyone who thought a vote for Labour was a vote against the cuts is sorely mistaken.

The elections solve nothing in that respect. Economic conditions continue to deteriorate, as the National Institute of Economic and Social Research pointed out this week. Its briefing said:

The weak recovery will feed through to lower tax revenues. That will mean that even if the spending plans are met over the next four years, public sector net borrowing will fall only to 3.6 per cent of GDP in 2015–16 rather than the 1.5 per cent projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility.



In plain language, it means that the government’s deficit is out of control and that deeper and deeper cuts are on the cards. The market capitalist economy has failed. Replacing it with a sustainable, not-for-profit economy is a political task that of necessity means going beyond the existing system and creating a real democracy.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Hang on to your vote on May 5

At last year’s general election, we argued that a vote for any of the major parties would be a wasted vote. Subsequent events proved we were right and on May 5 we again urge people to withhold their vote in the national and council elections and in the referendum.

In 2010, none of the mainstream parties were honest about the spending cuts they would make and the election was therefore a fraudulent one. The ConDem government has since made savage cuts in public spending, raised tuition fees to unaffordable levels and attacked the NHS.

Councils, many of them Labour-controlled, throughout Britain have implemented the cuts at local level. Whatever councils Labour may take control of on Thursday, they are certain to uphold exsiting cuts budgets and implement new attacks on jobs and services in 2012. No point in voting for Ed Miliband’s crowd then.

As for the referendum on the voting system, it really amounts to no choice at all. Under first past the post (FPTP), New Labour won huge majorities with the backing of only one in four of registered voters. The alternative vote (AV) system would enshrine coalition politics and make it almost impossible for smaller parties to win a seat in Parliament.

As a previous blog said: “Surely the point is that an unfair voting system reflects a broken political system. Traditional bourgeois politics is more about managing state structures on behalf of corporate and financial interests, than offering real choice.”

The experience in of elections to the Scottish Parliament, where a mixture of proportional representation (PR) and FPTP prevails, is salutory. PR does not increase the power of voters, but significantly increases the level of horse-trading and jobs for the boys and girls.

Since 1999, first Labour, then the SNP, have led minority governments, and none of them have been able to change the reality that one in seven Scots lives in dire poverty, or prevent youth unemployment soaring. Currently more than 20% of 18 to 24 year olds are out of a job, the highest level since comparable records began in 1992.

Labour leader Ian Gray claims that if elected this time, they will “eradicate youth unemployment”. This is nothing more than hot air and is rich coming from a party that, when in office, presided over the conditions that led to the current job crisis.

In the televised election debate, all the main parties refused to say how many public sector jobs they would cut in the course of the next parliament. One in four Scots work in the public sector. Finance Secretary John Swinney has admitted that 30,000 jobs are likely to go. The axe is already falling in the NHS and in voluntary sector organisations who deliver care services for councils.

The SNP have promised time and again to hold a referendum on independence but it is again retreating into the future. Polls have told them that people won’t vote for it while the economic situation continues to be so desperate.

The Welsh Assembly elections are an irrelevance for most voters. In March, by an almost two to one majority of the 35% of people who voted, a referendum gave the Welsh Assembly Government new primary law-making powers.

But it does them little good.

Successful candidates still don’t have any power over the economy – the single most important concern to most people. Wales remains entirely dependent on Westminster for a block grant, so, like the councils of England, Assembly Members are reduced to arguing over how to allocate the cuts in education, health and every other part of public sector the ConDem coalition has decided are needed to deal with the national debt.

At a hustings in Carmarthenshire East, the main parties’ candidates – Plaid Cymru, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Conservative were asked whether a referendum, similar to that in Iceland, should be held to allow the people of Wales to vote on the decisions to implement cuts in services. All hid behind the parliamentary system falsely claiming that the forthcoming election gives voters the opportunity to express their opinion.

And that’s about right. An “opinion” that counts for very little indeed. Another good reason to hang on to your precious vote on Thursday.

A World to Win editorial team

Devolution leaves power in same hands

The Scottish people have first hand experience of what it is to have greater devolution without any real power over their lives and communities.

For example, the Scottish National Party-led government is colluding with privatised rail companies to break the RMT union and introduce cuts that threaten rail safety soon after the election.

The Edinburgh government agreed to indemnify Scotrail against losses resulting from the company going all-out to win a dispute over driver-only operation (DOO) on the Airdrie to Bathgate route. By defeating RMT members on this route, they hope to force in driver-only trains across the Scottish network.

Letters between Transport Scotland and Scotrail show clearly that:

- Scotrail planned to recruit and train an army of scabs, and expected Transport Scotland to foot the bill. It kindly offered to “cap” its claim against the Scottish taxpayer at £300,000 – about the same is would cost to settle the dispute, says the RMT.

- Scotrail threatened that it would not go ahead with expanding DOO unless ministers agreed to indemnify it against losses from industrial action.

And since Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson admitted to RMT that there was no economic case for scrapping guards on this route, this is clearly a union-busting exercise and nothing more.

During the Westminster elections, SNP leader Alex Salmond’s only policy has been low level pork-barrel politics, where he prays for a hung parliament so that Scottish Nationalist MPs can play the same role as Ulster Unionists in propping up the Major Tory government of 1992-97. This might keep a few more jobs for the élite in Scotland, but it won’t stop wholesale cuts in public spending.

The SNP offers fine rhetoric about cancelling Trident, but knows it is entirely dependent on the Westminster government, which over the next three years will wipe out whole swathes of public services in Scotland.

In fact, last year they drew up plans for cuts of up to 5%, and transport is likely to be a key target. Regional transport bodies set up to work for integrated transport, have lost their funding and the SNP government plans to put transport back into central management.

This combination of cost-cutting, constant failed restructuring, and decisions that have more to do with ensuring the jobs of senior officials than providing better services, is about as much as the Scottish people have got from the long struggle for devolution.

Between August 2007 and August 2009, the numbers of young people on Jobseeker's Allowance rose by more than 100% in six local authority areas: Borders (109%), East Dunbartonshire (116%), East Lothian (158%), East Renfrewshire (143%), Midlothian (144%) and South Lanarkshire (114%).

The SNP and the other leading parties are as silent about the extent of the cuts coming in Scotland as the main parties in England. Labour MSPs are even claiming there will be an INCREASE in public spending if New Labour is re-elected nationally!

Almost 100,000 jobs are threatened by the cuts, but the Scottish banks at the centre of the financial collapse are about to post much-improved profits. The oil corporations, have done better than expected in the North Sea this year – but none of this will improve the lot of jobless youth or halt the cuts.

There is no mechanism for transferring increased private profits to improve the lives of ordinary people. And this would still be true if Scotland were entirely independent, but still ruled by the same corporate interests as it is today.

Nowhere more than in Scotland does AWTW’s policy of “Hang on to your vote – Build People’s Assemblies” have greater resonance because there is no way that a real transfer of economic and financial power to ordinary people will be achieved through the Edinburgh Parliament.

Penny Cole

* The RMT is holding a lobby outside the Scottish Parliament from 12.30 tomorrow as MSPs debate the rail dispute.

Mega-pylons will destroy landscape in name of profit

The Scottish Nationalist government in Edinburgh has given the go-ahead for an upgrade of an existing power line that runs 137 miles from Beauly, near Inverness to Denny, near Stirling, despite massive local objections.

Two major energy companies, Scottish & Southern Energy and Scottish Power, can now go ahead and build 600 pylons, up to 217ft tall, through spectacular wilderness, including the Cairngorms National Park.

The plan is to increase the transmission capacity of the lines from 132,000 volts to 400,000-volts, to bring power from new onshore and offshore wind farms in the north of Scotland into the national grid.

This is only phase one – phase two will come when the power companies apply to link the line from Denny to Newcastle; the plan is to make Scotland Europe’s major producer of renewable energy.

Cash from the weather – a dream come true for a country that has little of the former and lots of the latter, you might think. But where are the benefits for ordinary Scots? Maybe some temporary jobs. That’s it.

Those opposing the scheme include every single local authority the line passes through, the Cairngorm National Park Authority, and 18,000 individual objectors as well as conservation organisations. They are all accused of “NIMBY-ism”, including by environmental campaigners who should know better.

To present this as a green project is a big lie – only the most recent in the whole “green new deal” fraud.

This is a money-making venture, by two transnational energy corporations – Scottish Power is a subsidiary of Iberdrola, one of the world’s largest energy companies; Scottish & Southern operates across the UK and Ireland.

it gives them an opportunity to offset carbon emissions from other forms of power generation whilst cashing in on subsidised green energy. If the subsidies end, and the profits fall, the power line will become a white elephant.

The real reason for the scheme was clarified by Willie Roe, chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, who said the power line paved the way for the region to capitalise on its place as the renewable-energy "engine room" of Europe.

And Liz Cameron, chief executive of Scottish Chambers of Commerce, said the go-ahead was “precisely the kind of positive action the government must take to create the right environment for business to flourish”.

As Helen McDade, head of policy at conservation charity the John Muir Trust, said: "Marching a mega-pylon line through some of our most world-renowned landscapes may be the most lucrative option for the energy industry but it is the wrong choice for Scotland."

The right choices would be:
• A subsidised crash programme to super insulate every home in Scotland, including triple-glazed windows standard in Scandinavia. Around 850,00 Scottish households live in fuel poverty.
• Taking energy generation into public ownership, with democratic control, enabling planning and investment for need, not profit. Would such a power line scheme be part of a not-for-profit energy plan? Very unlikely!
• Investing in local and small regional power generation strategies – long grids are wasteful of energy and expensive to build and maintain.

As the pioneering 19th century conservationist John Muir said: “The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.” And he also remarked: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

Penny Cole
Environment editor