http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/images/uk_2010_2015.jpgEngland backed continued austerity, neo-liberal economics and £12 billion welfare spending cuts; the Scots overwhelmingly rejected that approach. In the UK parliament Scotland is represented by 59 MPs, of whom, before May, 41 were Labour, 11 Liberal Democrats, 1 Conservative and 6 Scottish National Party. There are now 56 SNP members and one each from Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives. . . . From 1979 to the Tory defeat in 1997, hard-line Tory governments staged a counter revolution driven by free market ideology aimed at reversing the gains won by the working class. Most significantly, their drive to favour finance over industry, coupled with anti-union laws, resulted both in mass unemployment and a serious weakening of the trade unions. The most dramatic class confrontation of this dramatic period was the year-long UK wide coal miners' strike in opposition to plans to close mines in the then still state-owned industry. A year of mass struggle, mass confrontation with riot police, police rule of mining areas and hunger and hardship ended in defeat to a triumphal Thatcher. Hundreds of mines closed, thousands lost jobs, communities were devastated and the mining industry almost totally destroyed. Small wonder then that there were street parties in mining communities as the elite gave Thatcher a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. For Scotland this period held twin lessons. First was the reinforcement of the class reality of the ruthless nature of capitalism as it pursues its aims, the Tory party in power acting, as Lenin said, "as the executive committee" of the bosses. Second, however, was the unmistakable fact that the Tory government imposing the free market dogma on Scotland had no democratic mandate from Scots voters who rejected it at each election. This meant that class politics and the national question, previously regarded by many as separate issues, became inextricably linked as two sides of the same struggle. Scotland's aspirations for self-government became both a democratic and class question. It was to be the apparently anodyne question of local government taxation that would propel this unity from a question of theory to the centre of a major class struggle that not only led to Thatcher's defeat but irreversibly changed the parameters of Scottish politics. . . .

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