By choosing the title In Place of Fear II, Sillars is deliberately positioning himself on the Bevanite left, which will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Sillars’ history. In the book he specifically says that his programme is designed to be to the left of anything the Labour Party has done in government. He says this to place distance between himself and those former Bevanites who later led Labour Governments.
As a personal statement it may make sense, but as a public statement it’s puzzling as to why Sillars has chosen this language. I doubt that many people still read In Place of Fear, and yet many of the terms Sillars uses depend upon the reader being familiar with the 1952 original.
Sillars writes that his intention is to “replace the weakness and latent insecurity of labour by controlling capital in the interests of the general community” (p21). To that end, he proposes a mixed economy with nationalisation where strategically necessary (for example, in the unlikely event that whisky manufacturers were to walk away), or where necessary as a tool for redistribution, but resurrects Bevan’s notion of state control of the “commanding heights” of the economy rather than a full-scale policy of nationalisation. He acknowledges that the economy today differs from that of Bevan’s day, but suggests that there are still “important heights” to be conquered in the “workers’ interests”. In a Bevanite turn of phrase, he says “[...] audacity in the face of orthodoxy can make a difference in the power equation between capital and labour.”(p23).
As an example of this control of the commanding heights, arguing that the oil take needs to be greater than what comes from taxes alone, Sillars proposes a Scottish National Oil Corporation, with the right to a stake of 10% in the production and profit from each company operating under licences “up to and including the 27th Round. Thereafter, in any future Round, the stake will be 25%”. (p58). He says that the “idea that when challenged via taxation or regulatory policies or laws to protect workers, all global companies will up stakes and depart for elsewhere, is infantile.” (pp18/19).
Sillars’ language is rooted in the era of Bevan. He doesn’t talk about neoliberalism, but refers always to capitalism. He writes: “When workers withdraw their labour, there is a great stramash with warnings of the economic cost to the national GDP. A ‘strike’ of capital is hardly remarked upon”. (p20). For Sillars, the lesson of the October 2013 INEOS ‘closure’ at Grangemouth is that “the socialist ethic of public good above all must again be embraced”.
His goal is to analyse where power lies, and how in an independent Scotland workers can take power into their own hands. In this, like Bevin, he aims to be “realistic” and to make sure that his proposals are “achievable”. The answers he comes to are not always the ones I’d come to. But his stanch condemnation of global capitalism is refreshing to read. He remains that rare bread, a conviction politician. Time and again he refers to the moral purpose of socialism, and to the principles of redistribution of both wealth and control.
As well as the Bevanite programme, Sillars believes that Salmond’s policy of a Sterling Zone currency union is an own goal. He points out that businesses in Scotland will trade via Sterling if they want to, currency union or not. He argues for Scottish membership of EFTA rather than the EU (he has revised his “Independence in Europe” view, which he says fitted conditions in the 80s but not now). He argues for renationalisation of the railways, endorsing Kevin Lindsay in the Red Paper on Scotland 2014: “simply wait until the TOC franchise runs out, and take it into public ownership at no cost” (p80).
He does not, however, argue for all public utilities to be taken back into public control, not, it seems, because he is averse to the principle, but because “these companies obtained their positions legitimately in law” and that there is no “prospect on cost grounds alone for wholesale nationalisation”. Instead there will be “commanding heights” stakes of 15% in electricity and gas companies and a new Act to change company law. This is a taste of the measures Sillars suggests. I won’t enumerate them all here.
This little book is a manifesto, but it is a manifesto with a difference: there is no party proposing it as a programme. It differs a great deal from the SNP white paper, although Sillars remains an SNP member. And yet here is the intriguing part: the book mentions Sillars’ old SLP several times, and he thanks former SLP comrades, although not his old SLP side-kick, Alex Neil, now very much part of the Salmond project. Sillars specifically says that a Yes vote is not necessarily an endorsement of the SNP and a vote for “change but no change”.
Sillars is putting forward an old school democratic socialist programme, the type of programme that many once looked to the Labour Party to implement (and which, as Sillars points out, they always failed in power to achieve). But who is he hoping will carry it into being? I think he is staking out the ground for a split in the SNP post “Yes”. His mention of old SLP comrades is telling: he is saying to the socialists of the SNP: “ditch the Salmond project once a Yes vote has been delivered. Here is a direction we can take instead”.
Reading:
Jim Sillars, (2014), IN PLACE OF FEAR II, Glasgow: Vagabond Voices.
Drucker, H. M.,(1978), Breakaway: The Scottish Labour Party, Edinburgh: EUSPB.
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