Ten years after the anti-austerity uprising – lessons from the 2014 indyref for today

Philip Stott

The contrast between the insurgent mood that marked the run-up to September 18 2014 and the prospects for Scottish independence today, on the face of it, could not be more different. Indyref 1 was an elemental working-class mobilisation, primarily on the electoral plane, that shook the capitalist establishment in Britain and internationally. 

Alongside the largest ever turnout in any election/plebiscite since the introduction of universal suffrage in Britain – 85% voted in the referendum – tens of thousands took part in public meetings, demonstrations and public campaigning amidst a ferocious propaganda counter offensive by big business and the main pro-union capitalist parties. 1.6 million defied the dire warnings of the ruling elite by voting Yes to Scottish independence.

While the No vote won a majority with 55%, the fallout ushered in an entirely changed political situation. The shattering of the Labour Party was one of the most spectacular collapses in modern political history. Reduced to a single MP in Scotland just eight months later in the 2015 Westminster election after suffering a loss of 48 MPs. 

The SNP, in contrast, secured 56 of the 59 available seats as working-class communities used the opportunity to deliver a decisive verdict on Labour’s leading role in the No campaign. As we pointed out; the winners had become the losers and the losers became the winners. 

A decade later and it is the SNP who have just suffered their own electoral mauling, losing 500,000 votes and 39 MPs – most of those to Labour – in the July 2024 general election. The sentence passed on the SNP was rooted in their own austerity-laden, pro-capitalist rule at Holyrood that has massively undermined their working-class base of support. Alongside their inability to sustain a movement on the national question to counter the entrenched opposition of the capitalist establishment to the break-up of the UK. 

These two factors are decisively linked. It was the deep erosion in support for the SNP and the complete impasse over the national question that were the key factors in Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as first minister last year, triggering the spiralling crisis in the SNP. 

Large sections of workers and young people have turned their backs on the SNP. Their own membership has fallen to below 65,000 – a collapse of 50% from the high point that followed the mass surge into the SNP after the indyref. 

One of Scotland’s leading historians Tom Devine, who voted Yes in 2014, said after Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation in 2023: “Given recent events, I would honestly have to say that the cause of independence is virtually dead for at least a generation”. SNP MP Pete Wishart bluntly stated: “The referendum route to independence is now dead”.

Bear in mind these quotes were made prior to the SNP losing 39 MPs at the general election. Wishart’s comment also reflects the long-standing disorientation and confusion among leading nationalists over how to overcome the resistance of British capitalism to Scottish independence.

The street mobilisations organised by the various pro-independence campaigns are barley one-tenth of the size they were prior to the Covid pandemic. January 2020, the month after Boris Johnson was elected as prime minister, saw 80,000 people march in Glasgow demanding indyref2. None of the recent demos have achieved even 10,000. Of course class anger that was the driving force for the Yes vote in 2014 has still been expressed, and even on a higher level, for example through the massive strike wave of 2022/23. But the collapse in authority of the SNP has certainly added to the malaise and an ebbing of the independence movement recently.

Paradoxically, support for independence is currently even higher than the 45% who voted Yes in 2014. Therefore premature declarations of the ‘end of the dream’ would be huge mistake. The collapsing poll ratings for Keir “things will only get worse” Starmer point to the explosive events that impend, including on the national question. 

A balance sheet

Ten years on from indyref 1, the drawing up of a balance sheet as to what programme and methods of struggle are required to achieve national democratic rights in Scotland is essential. Such a balance sheet must begin with an understanding that the leadership of the SNP offer no way forward on any of the issues facing the working class – from the cost of living, to cuts, to Scottish independence. 

The central task facing any movement for self-determination is the need to confront and overcome the class forces who will do all they can to prevent the break-up of the capitalist UK state. After the near-death experience of September 18 2014 the capitalist class in its majority – reflected in Keir Starmer’s entrenched opposition – have no intention of allowing a second independence referendum. 

A negotiated agreement between Westminster and Holyrood to allow a “legal” referendum to take place will, as far as they are concerned, not be repeated lightly. Not with support for independence currently at around 50%. 

In 2012 support for independence was 28%. Then Tory prime minister David Cameron was confident in agreeing a section 30 order to enable the indyref because the outcome of the referendum was to him inevitable, a sizeable pro-union majority. Yet the fear that gripped the myopic Cameron and the ruling elite as the date of the referendum approached and as support for Scottish independence grew to close to 50% was palpable. 

As we commented a week before the indyref: “The opportunity to vote Yes is being taken up by big sections of the working class as a weapon to hit back at the hated Westminster political elite, those responsible for benefit cuts, wage freezes and savage public sector cuts. It has become a mass revolt by the victims of austerity against their class enemy.”

Ten days before the referendum the mood among the strategists of big business was anxious bordering on apoplectic. The Guardian newspaper’s political commentator Martin Kettle wrote on Monday September 7, 2014: “This weekend the unthinkable has elbowed its way into the driving seat of British politics. No other issue now matters…. These may not be the 10 days that will shake the world as John Reed called the Russian revolution. But they will be 10 days that could change all our lives, shaking the British state and it’s people to their very foundations.”

Panicked late promises of more devolved powers for Scotland were rushed out by the Tory government and the Labour leadership, who acted as a quasi form of a national unity government during the crisis. At the same time, “Project Fear on steroids” was unleashed by big business, the capitalist media and the pro-union parties to save their class interests.

World leaders, from Barack Obama to the Chinese head of state, Xi Jinping, drawing in the Pope on the same side as the Orange Order, were lined up to urge frantically the rejection of Scottish independence. The Queen – who normally wished to appear neutral unless a national crisis requires it – let it be known that she was ‘concerned about her constitutional future’ arising from the referendum outcome. Workers in some defence industry multinationals faced management intimidation and were told by bosses their jobs would be gone if Scotland voted to leave the UK. 

As Peter Taaffe, then general secretary of the Socialist Party England and Wales, wrote following the referendum result in the Socialism Today magazine:

“The British ruling class which, within living memory, ruled one quarter of mankind – with its prestige and what remains of its world reputation at stake – was so terrified of a Yes vote that it outdid itself in venom against those advocating independence. “The world is saying no to Scottish separation”, shrieked Phillip Stephens in the Financial Times.

“A few days before the referendum took place, the same journal reflected the sheer terror of the capitalists: “Ruling elite aghast as union wobbles… Business onslaught over Yes vote… Business 90% against Yes”. Surprise, surprise, the International Monetary Fund was also conscripted to the anti-independence bandwagon and warned “Recession risk in markets”.

“Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and fresh from presiding over the greatest financial and economic disaster witnessed since the 1930s, returned from internal exile to warn that “a Yes vote would be an economic mistake for Scotland [and] a geopolitical disaster for the west”. And if Scotland had actually voted for independence, it would be punished: “The Scots will discover the taste of austerity”, warned the FT.” 

These examples that Peter cites were a vivid description of the elemental class interests at stake. The threat of the possible break up of the UK would have been, and still would be, a huge defeat for British capitalism. Not least its economic and geopolitical interests, including the role it continues to want to play through multinational institutions like the G8 and NATO etc. 

Added to this would be the impact the secession of Scotland would have in inflaming the national question in Wales and ratcheting up sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland. In addition, what effect would it have on the national question internationally such as Spain, Belgium and others where national movements threaten the possible dismemberment of nation states?

Not for nothing did the then prime minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, also add his weight to the anti-Scottish independence campaign in 2014. The brutality of the Spanish state response to the short-lived declaration of Catalan independence in 2017 underlined the lengths the national capitalist class will go to to preserve their interests and trample over democratic rights. The scenes of the military police smashing up referendum polling stations, assaulting voters and the arrests and jailing of Catalan independence leaders, under the orders of the same Rajoy, were another lesson in the extreme limits of democracy when trumped by the interests of the capitalist class.

There are circumstances where the bourgeois may be forced, very reluctantly, to accept an independent Scotland on a capitalist basis, cutting their losses in the face of an enduring mass movement for independence. Such a state, based on the profit system and still tied by a thousand threads to British capitalism and would be unable to resolve any of the fundamental issues facing the working class. If faced with a struggle that was moving in a revolutionary direction to end the rule of capitalism it’s certainly not ruled out that the ruling class could attempt to divert the class struggle along nationalist lines to try and divide the working class in Scotland and the rest of Britain.

Straitjacket

On two occasions since 2014 the Scottish government have formally requested from the Tories at Westminster negotiations to allow for a second referendum. Those were in March 2017 following the Brexit vote, and December 2019 after Boris Johnson’s election as prime minister. Both were rejected by the then Tory prime ministers. 

Outrageously, the UK Supreme Court ruled in November 2022 that the Scottish parliament could not hold a legal referendum without Westminster agreement. In other words there is no way to hold a so-called “legal” referendum without the agreement of the Westminster government. 

Responding to the court’s decision, and at pains to rule out a “wildcat referendum”, the SNP leadership accepted the straightjacket they were voluntary placing themselves into. The first minister Nicola Sturgeon insisted that only a legal agreement between the two parliaments could provide a legitimate pathway to independence – with both eyes on the approval of the EU which the SNP want Scotland to rejoin after independence. 

Since then the SNP have retreated even further and are no longer seeking a section 30 order for a referendum. Focusing instead, following their election defeat, on “making the case for independence” within Scotland. 

Even the Scottish Greens, now out of government and attacking the SNP from the left, today adopt a similar position. In a motion for parliament to mark the 10^th anniversary, Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, limits her appeal to Westminster by asking: “how the people of Scotland could progress a legal route to independence if that is there wish.”

Not once throughout this process have the SNP leadership, or indeed the Scottish Greens, sought to mobilise the power of the working class on this issue. Not even when many trade unions, including the STUC, were passing motions defending the right of the Scottish parliament to hold a referendum at a time of its choosing. And that is no surprise given the entrenched pro-capitalist outlook of Nicola Sturgeon – which is no different from the current leader John Swinney or indeed her predecessor Alex Salmond.

After all, the SNP since its formation has always stood explicitly on a platform of maintaining the rule of capitalism – meaning the inequality and brutal austerity that goes along with it. The mortal fear of unleashing a mass movement that could rapidly get out of control and begin to challenge capitalist rule as a whole is the last thing they want. 

In contrast, at the time of the Supreme Court ruling Socialist Party Scotland responded: “we need to draw the conclusion that not only are we fighting for the right to self-determination, we are also fighting the system of capitalism that is denying our democratic rights. A mass movement for independence could be built if it offered an end to poverty and inequality. A £15 an hour minimum wage for all. Massive investment in public housing, the NHS and free education. Public ownership of energy, transport, the supermarkets, the banks etc. under working-class control and management.” 

Potential for a new party 

The SNP emerged enormously strengthened following the 2014 referendum. They were widely seen as having stood up against Project Fear and were able to extend their base of support into working class areas previously denied them. Of course assisted by the Labour party’s descent into neo-liberal Blairism. This was despite being a party based on the Scottish middle class with no left or socialist policies historically. 

In a distorted form, the rise of the SNP reflected the enormous potential for a new mass workers’ party in Scotland. Today that political capital has been largely spent. In truth, there was a very large cohort of the working class who were significantly to the left of the SNP during the referendum whose pro-market policies commanded little enthusiasm. 

Socialist Party Scotland anticipated this development and advocated – as far back as 2012 – a specific socialist and trade union campaign for independence. One that was separate and distinct from the official Yes campaign dominated by the SNP and its pro-business platform. We understood that for big sections of the working class this campaign would become one about how to end austerity, low pay, inequality and the crisis in housing and social services. 

We argued that a socialist campaign could campaign for a Yes vote but also contrast our socialist policies with the SNP’s insistence of a low tax, big business dominated Scotland. The vision of an independent socialist Scotland, we argued, could attract significant working-class support during the indyref.

We proposed such a campaign publicly, including to Tommy Sheridan and Solidarity – the party he was a leader off at the time. Solidarity rejected this proposal in favour of seeking participation of the official Yes Scotland campaign. When this was rejected by Yes Scotland – with the support of the Scottish Greens and the SSP – the Hope Over Fear – socialist campaign for independence took off. 

Tommy Sheridan was still seen as a socialist fighter by many with a record as a leader of the mass anti-poll tax struggle when he was a member of Militant/CWI (the forerunner of the Socialist Party). As well as someone who had a high profile as a socialist MSP at Holyrood between 1999 and 2007. 

The turnout at the public meetings organised by the campaign were huge. They were also very working class and highly political, where calls for public ownership, a living wage, taking the wealth off the rich found mass support. Socialist Party Scotland helped co-organise many of these, including having our members speaking on the platform. 

One vivid example of the mood as the referendum approached was the mass mobilisation into Glasgow on the evening of the indyref. Tens of thousands of workers and youth poured into the city centre, in part hoping to celebrate a Yes victory. Brian Smith, a Socialist Party Scotland member and then the Glasgow City Unison branch secretary, addressed a packed George Square making demands including nationalisation of the banks in defiance of Project Fear. Socialist Party Scotland stalls ran out of our newspapers and leaflets and we raised thousands of pounds, such was the broad enthusiasm for socialist ideas.

There was a period of intense politicisation, in particular as the Project Fear campaign went into overdrive – the whip of counter revolution – which deepened the space for a left, socialist political alternative. However, following the result – when tens of thousands of working-class people were looking to continue the struggle – Tommy Sheridan and many on the left refused to press ahead with the need to launch a new party and instead capitulated to the SNP leadership. A major opportunity to advance the forces of socialism was squandered. 

We wrote the day after the referendum result: “It’s urgent that moves to build a new mass party are taken now to provide a new political home for the working class. If there is a delay in this development there is a danger that the opportunity can be lost and the pro-capitalist SNP can gain instead.”

“If this call is made in a clear way – including by Tommy Sheridan, leading trade unionists, Socialist Party Scotland, Solidarity and other socialist organisations in Scotland – it would attract thousands of new working class people and young people to its banner within days. Including among the many who participated in politics for the first time during the referendum through groups like the Radical Independence Campaign and other Yes campaigns.”

Tommy Sheridan called instead for a vote for the SNP – a party that was preparing to carry out £2 billion in cuts in the Scottish parliament. Tommy is now a member of Alba – the party led by Alex Salmond. 

The SSP proposed to the SNP and the Scottish Greens an independence pact – for one pro-independence candidate per constituency for the 2015 general election. A form of popular frontism which could only give the SNP a left cover for their cuts policies.

To one degree or another, the pro-independence left forces at that time gave the SNP a clear run. They were guilty of adopting a form of the two-stages policy. First independence, which justified a non-aggression pact or an electoral arrangement with a “progressive” nationalist party to try and secure an independence majority. Second, after independence a struggle for socialism can take place. In reality, it was the SNP’s refusal to go beyond the limits of capitalism and their inability to answer the Project Fear onslaught with socialist policies like democratic nationalisation that was a key factor in a Yes majority not being secured. 

The clear exception to this opportunist thinking was Socialist Party Scotland adopted a position of no trust in the SNP and an independent class position. Including standing candidates in the 2015 general election as part of the Scottish Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Making the case for a mass working-class party to fight for self-determination and socialism. 

Political capital used up 

Events since have completely confirmed our analysis. The SNP did not move to the left following the influx of almost 100,000 new members after September 2014. Yes, there was a huge electoral shift to the nationalists, but there did not exist the democratic structures inside the party to allow the new members to move the SNP into a more combative or left direction. 

Crucially, there was no socialist or left grouping in the SNP that sought to cohere a distinct working-class opposition to the leadership. The new members quickly dropped into inactivity. The cuts policies continued at Holyrood and the leadership moved even further to centralise power around Nicola Sturgeon and her closest advisors. 

The Brexit vote in 2016 saw the SNP leadership predicate demands for a new indyref on the need to re-enter the EU. Yet up to one third of Yes voters in Scotland had voted to leave – many sympathetic to the case made by Socialist Party Scotland that it was an undemocratic bosses’ cabal that existed to prioritise the profits of the multinationals over the rights of workers. 

But it was the emergence of the strike wave from the summer of 2022 that marked a qualitative change in the SNP’s relationship with the working class. With the largest number of strike days seen since 1989, many of the disputes, strike ballots and picket lines in Scotland saw workers moving into action against the SNP. Time and again, the Scottish government and/or the council employer COSLA were forced into retreat after retreat on pay. 

The rising class struggle had a decisive effect in exposing further the anti-working class nature of the Scottish government, despite its anti-austerity, anti-Tory rhetoric. Alongside this process has gone an almost complete collapse in confidence in the SNP leadership among pro-independence campaigners. And how could it be otherwise? Rising support for Scottish independence at its core is a revolt against the conditions of capitalism. A desire to seek a route out of the economic, social and national oppression whose wellspring is the rule of the capitalist elite.

It is that dialectical contradiction – the desires, even if inchoate for now, of the working class who seek an end to capitalist oppression on the one hand, versus the iron-like determination of the SNP leadership to maintain the profit system on the other. The result of this clash of aspirations has been the weakening of the social base of the SNP. 

How could a party that defends capitalism, the SNP, be expected to lead a struggle against a capitalist class that it wants to remain in power under independence? It can’t. It can of course clash with the majority of the bourgeois – as it does clearly on Scottish independence. To try and overcome this contradiction the SNP leadership’s solution was at all times to offer concessions. To try to assure the capitalist class that its power and privileges would remain untouched under independence.

So the run-up to 2014 saw Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon offer the Bank of England control over interest rates in an independent Scotland and a joint currency in the shape of sterling. The Queen would remain as head of state. Not so much independence as a form of maximum devolution. The nationalist leadership have long sought to emulate Ireland with its low corporation tax base to encourage foreign direct investment. Norway has also been a consistent model for Scottish independence. 

Since 2014, the SNP leadership have shifted even further towards appeasing big business and the money markets. Neo-liberal Kate Forbes has now been brought back as deputy leader. As finance secretary Forbes’ plan was to axe tens of thousands of public sector jobs to “return the total size of the devolved public sector workforce to around pre-Covid-19 levels by 2026/27”. Current finance secretary Shona Robison has made clear she also supports reducing public sector employment. 

Where now?

The prospects for the national question under a Starmer-led Labour government will likely become a key issue. There has been no honeymoon for a government elected on just 34% of those who voted – the lowest ever for a government party. Within weeks, over the two-child cap, winter fuel payments and promised further austerity, Starmer has seen his already shallow support take a massive dent. Labour’s “recovery” in Scotland is threadbare – only 6% ahead of the crisis-ridden SNP – and was based on a desire, above all else, to get the Tories out.

Starmer has been explicitly clear that there is no prospect of a referendum under a Labour government. Ironically, the SNP are doing both sides a favour by avoiding the issue of asking for one. They do not want to fight a referendum having been reduced to just nine MPs in an election that saw them lose all but one MP across the working-class heartlands of west/central Scotland.

There is also the issue of whether the SNP can pass the next budget at Holyrood as they are now in a minority in the parliament after the collapse of the arrangement with the Greens. An early election at Holyrood is certainly not ruled out. If they do hang on until 2026, the removal of the SNP from power is possible at the next election.

Mass working-class struggle against a Starmer government and the Scottish government’s own cuts agenda will be a decisive feature of the next period. This can be reflected in strikes, the growth of opposition forces in the trade unions and increasing support for the idea of a new workers’ parties, but the re-emergence of the national question in a sharper form can also be posed. 

The character of the independence movement will not simply be a repeat of the events that marked the run-up to 2014. During that time the SNP were accepted as the de-facto leadership. That period has ended. “The days of independence being umbilically linked to the SNP are over. The child has left the parent. We’re in the moment of decoupling. That’s a historic shift politically, leaving power wide open.” Neil MacKay – Herald columnist February 1, 2024. 

Independent role of the working class 

As a new movement emerges on independence, or demands for a second referendum, most likely a combination of the two, the vital question of programme, democratic structures and methods of struggle will be posed. The idea that the leadership of the movement would be left in the hands of the SNP, Scottish Greens and politicians at Holyrood with a record of implementing austerity must be rejected. Even a wider Scottish Independence Convention, which has been advocated by Alba, the SSP and others, and could yet be adopted by the SNP, would be dominated by forces who have no interest in building mass working-class struggle for democratic rights. 

Marxists, in contrast, have no truck with the idea that such a body dominated by pro-capitalist forces would offer the required leadership to win the right to decide and a majority for independence. In the context of a mass movement developing in Scotland, we would argue instead for the creation of a body more akin to a revolutionary constituent assembly. One made up primarily of elected representatives from committees of struggle, mass workers’ and community-based organisations, as well as the trade unions, youth bodies, political organisations including a new workers’ party and so on. 

Such an assembly would be democratically elected from the mass movement, with its representatives subject to recall at any time and with no material privileges. Its task would be to discuss and debate how to prosecute a struggle for independence, linked to the drawing up of a programme for the economic transformation of Scotland in which socialist measures like public ownership and democratic planning of the economy would be essential. 

As we mentioned earlier in this article, even in the run up to September 2014 there was a big layer of the working class that stood to the left of the SNP and were attracted to socialist ideas. Under a Starmer government it is likely that a more combative mass movement could emerge around the national question. It would be essential that socialists, Marxists and the workers’ movement generally offer a fighting leadership on the national question linked to a socialist way forward. 

Unless a mass movement is built in the housing estates, workplaces, schools and colleges across Scotland, with an appeal to workers in the rest of Britain to support them, why would the ruling class bow to the demand of Scottish independence? That’s why the mass workers’ organisations – the trade unions – should launch a new workers’ party in Scotland and help lead a struggle for democratic rights and socialism.

Were there to be a mass workers’ party that championed these ideas it would very quickly draw the support of the majority of workers and young people. It could also play a decisive role in uniting the working class in the struggle for self-determination and for an independent socialist Scotland. By linking up with the working class in the rest of Britain, a united movement could cut across the inevitable attempts by capitalist forces to divide the movement using the politics of identity and bourgeois nationalism.

A free and voluntary socialist confederation of Scotland with England, Wales, and Ireland, as a step to a socialist Europe, would put an end to the rule of the profiteers and the exploiters. It would lay the basis, for the first time, for a genuine collaboration of the peoples of the world in the construction of a planned socialist economy to end poverty and oppression permanently.