The 2014 Scottish independence referendum was the first of a series of political earthquakes that shook British politics in the past decade.This journal has contributed to an argument that the Scottish independence movement was an expression of revolt against the politics of austerity following the 2008 economic crash as well as against decades of neoliberal reforms.

The radical energies unleashed by that movement were largely deflected into electoral support for the Scottish National Party (SNP). Although the SNP shared the movement’s ambition for Scottish independence, the party stood for a vision far removed from the aspirations motivating working-class people to back rupture with the British state.

The party plunged into what party president Michael Russell has called “its biggest crisis in 50 years”.In February 2023, Sturgeon suddenly resigned as first minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP. Sturgeon’s departure represents the failure of a nine-year trajectory. The scale of crisis engulfing the SNP exposes a deep malaise that had long been growing beneath the surface, even if the arrests and scandals can obscure this.The priorities driving the party today are shaped by its position of power and its role in the management of the needs of British and multinational capital through the devolved institutions of the Scottish government. The SNP has morphed from “a democratic, mass movement governed by its membership into a ‘normal’ bourgeois political party—one dominated by its parliamentary apparatus”.

For the SNP, keeping independence alive as an issue was key to maintaining its newly established hegemony in Scottish politics—and to beefing up support for its domestic economic agenda. However, it could not do so without encouraging renewed hopes in a break with all the ills associated with Tory Britain.

Nine years on from the 2014 referendum, much of the left has been subsumed under SNP dominance, with diminishing influence among working-class people and declining capacity for independent initiative. The key reason behind this weakening of the left is not that it threw itself into the mass independence movement, but rather that it moved away from the “conditionality” stressed by Davidson.

The legacy of 2014 continues to haunt Scottish politics, but the dominance of the SNP is fragmenting, and there is no basis for a credible challenge for independence. Three things are necessary if the left is to effectively reorientate itself in this context.First, while engaging in struggles against the Tory government in Westminster, the Scottish left needs to be prepared to take the fight to our own government. Socialists should be part of campaigns that place demands on the government and emphasise the contradictions of the SNP leadership. Failing to do this will mean allowing opposition to the SNP’s neoliberal programme to be dominated by the Tories and the version of Labourism associated with Keir Starmer and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar. Second, socialists should continue to support the breaking up the British state.The deep crisis in British politics means mass support for independence could find new organisational expressions in the future, even if they hardly exist at present.Our attitude should continue to be “conditional upon class struggle”. Third, we must shape a revolutionary force in Scottish politics that places independence within a wider context: the need for a socialist transformation of society, the economy and our relationship to our environment. As revolutionaries in Scotland, our involvement in the struggle for independence has been about creating better circumstances for working-class people to engage in the fight to overthrow of capitalism. The hopes raised by the 2014 moment are yet to vanish, but we must recognize that these were not simply aspirations for Scottish independence. Rather, they were infused with longing for a different society. Socialists now need to ensure those hopes do not turn to despair but instead find new avenues.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Liu Tingting

From:http://isj.org.uk/independence-and-the-snp-crisis/（2023-6-13）