I HAVEN’T expressed a view about the leadership of the Labour Party. I’ve never been a member. And unlike most of my age and Glaswegian working-class background, I’ve never even voted for the party. Not once.

My earliest memories of the party are of the notorious 40 per cent rule driven through Westminster by unionist Labour MPs backed by the Tories in the run-up to the 1979 devolution referendum. It meant that everyone who abstained – including the dead whose names hadn’t yet been removed from the electoral register – were counted as No voters. It was democratic outrage.

Then Michael Foot, the veteran pacifist who opposed the Falklands War and led mass marches against nuclear weapons, was systematically undermined by most of his own MPs from the day he was elected leader. Then there was Labour’s failure to stand up for those persecuted by Thatcher, from mining communities facing oblivion to people in poverty being hounded for the poll tax. And their 18 years of indifference in Scotland while Thatcher and Major ran amok. Even the Scottish media branded their MPs the “feeble fifty”.

So, I haven’t felt Labour’s procession of leadership contests over the past two years – five in two years at Holyrood and Westminster – have been any of my business.

Not long after New Labour came to power in 1997, I found myself embroiled in trade union activism in Unison. I was frustrated beyond belief when campaigns and strikes, initiated by health workers, were frustrated or blocked by trade union officials desperate to close down any resistance that might embarrass Labour governments in Westminster and Holyrood.

Even self-proclaimed left wing socialists insisted that the party’s radical edge had to be smoothed off to be acceptable in the English shires. Any struggles for higher pay, or equal pay, or against privatisation had to be done quietly, in “partnership” with the employers.

My experience provided a glimpse into the arrogance at the heart of the Labour Party in Scotland. For generations they had taken the Scottish working class for granted, weighing their votes in elections while treating them with contempt in between times. A million Labour voters in Scotland had one purpose and one purpose only – to deliver 50 or more MPs so that the party could gain a majority at Westminster. And for the best part of two decades, the huge block vote for Labour in Scotland counted for zero.

I have to admit that I really never thought I’d see the day when the left did actually reclaim Labour. I have profound disagreements with Jeremy Corbyn, for example on prostitution – he sees it as “work” like any other, I see it as exploitation that should criminalise those who demand the right to access, use and abuse another human being’s body for money.

But I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at the gubbing of the suited and booted Blairites at the hands of the amorphous, organic, grassroots rebellion around Corbyn.

Should the independence movement be worried by the long overdue recapture of Labour by the left? Well, no.

First because for maybe the first time in history, Scottish Labour, reduced in stature, strength and influence, is to the right of the UK party. According to an all-Britain poll, 58 per cent of Labour’s Scottish membership voted for Owen Smith, making Scotland the only area where Corbyn was in a minority.

Kezia Dugdale, as we know, could hardly hide her disgust at the result. Suddenly the Blairites are desperate for autonomy for Scotland to help them compete with the Tories on centre right territory. And ironically, it is their hated enemy Jeremy Corbyn who is about to deliver a new constitution that will allow the right wing a free hand to do as they please in Scotland.

The problem for the Scottish Labour left is that the kind of left wing progressive people who flooded into the party in England and Wales are now affiliated in Scotland with the independence movement. Tens of thousands joined the SNP, and hundreds of thousands voted Yes in the referendum and will do so again in the future. Radicalism and independence are now wedded together. To paraphrase the Irish socialist James Connolly, the cause of the left is the cause of the Scotland – and the cause of Scotland is the cause of the left.

The truth is the independence movement has more in common with the Corbyn movement in England than it has with Scottish Labour. It is part of the same democratic and radical rebellion against neo-liberal elites that is unfolding across the world. It may manifest itself in different ways, and people like Neil Findlay MSP might not appreciate me saying so, but without the great progressive upsurge in Scotland unleashed by the 2014 referendum, and the subsequent annihilation of Scottish Labour at the hands of the SNP, Jeremy Corby would still be a backbench MP.

I have a lot of friends who have rejoined the Labour Party in England after decades of disillusionment. These friends were inspired by and supported the Yes movement. If I were in England, I would struggle to think of an alternative.

So I have two messages to two distinct but similar political movements. To the Yes camp in Scotland, I would say: welcome New Labour’s comeuppance. A revitalised Labour Party in England will fertilise the terrain for independence by pulling general political discourse to the left. If Corbyn and his hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers continue to reawaken the working classes in England, and succeed in dragging them away from the lazy jingoism of the right, progressive politics will start to flourish again across these islands, bringing independence for Scotland even closer.

And to the Labour left I would say: please think again about Scottish independence. Unionism and socialism are like oil and water. The labour movement was not founded to prop up the Westminster establishment. It began life by demanding Home Rule for Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

It can thrive again in Scotland if it leaps into the broad river that is flowing inexorably towards independence. By making that move now, the Labour left will guarantee itself a glowing future in a self-governing Scotland.

We have nothing to fear in expressing solidarity with the Corbyn movement in England. And who knows: maybe that will help Jeremy better understand the dynamic of Scottish politics, and encourage him to reposition Labour as an ally rather than an enemy of the national movement in Scotland.

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