Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century
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Photo: Kyoshi Masamune, flickr

Scottish independence: Why didn’t the working-class Yes vote win the day?

Matt Myers

Class was central to the Scottish independence referendum, writes Matt Myers. The low-waged, unemployed and young were more likely to vote Yes – so why did enough working class people vote No that the vote was lost?

In the aftermath of the referendum one thing remains clear: the vote was neither about dry constitutionality, nor nationalism per se, but existed in a class context. Class is central in explaining why people voted the way they did. Class is also critical in explaining why levels of disposable income, life expectancy, rates of unemployment, and rates of wage growth over the past 15 years, corresponded to why some voted Yes and others voted No. Yet it cannot explain everything. Good or bad ‘class consciousness’ cannot be simply extrapolated from voting data. Instead voting patterns in the referendum, although clearly showing clear evidence of the role of the class, were formed in a number of specific contexts that ward us against knee-jerk conclusions.

Yet before the narrative of the referendum is subsumed into dry elite doublespeak over constitutional changes, which will ignore the root of the social and class context that gave rise to the referendum, we can draw some key conclusions from the data available so far:

Source: @scattermoon

Source: @scattermoon

Source: Office for National Statistics  –  blue equals Yes, black equals No

Source: Office for National Statistics – blue equals Yes, black equals No

Source: ONS

Source: ONS

Source: ONS

Source: ONS

Scotind5

Scotind6

For those in the rest of the UK seeking a radical alternative to the current state of politics, there is much expectation from the results. Yet this does not mean that we should not see the complexity of the vote, and the underlying dynamics of why the vote stayed with the Union. The political space for a radical politics has been shaped in Scotland, as it has been in Spain and Greece. A popular grass roots campaign, led largely by the left, has proven it can speak to the hopes of hundreds of thousands of working people. And although the political center has held, there is clearly a mass feeling that our rulers cannot rule in the same way. Never in the past 30 years has this happened as seriously as on 18 September. The task now is to bring the spirit of the referendum to the rest of Britain.

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