We Can Defend the Welfare State: We Can Vote “Yes”.

I have no great faith in politicians. They seldom live up to the hopes of the electorate, but instead spend their time and effort in protecting privilege and thwarting democracy.

When progress is made, it is usually made despite politicians, as a result of an unstoppable tide of demands they can no longer stem, at moments in which the state realises that compromise is necessary.

The Welfare State is a case in point. It was won through pressure from ordinary working people who returned from war seeking a new settlement, determined that post-war Britain would be different, and that as a result of fighting and beating fascism, they had also won the right to protection from “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness”.

The state had no option but to acquiesce to this compromise between labour and capital; the decades of struggle by ordinary working people had laid the groundwork, but the moment that those concessions were won was when the state realised that the determination of people emerging from war, whether abroad or on the Home Front, was not something they could resist.

The Welfare State is indeed an achievement to be cherished. But it is coming undone. The recent assault on it by the Coalition government, starting with Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review in 2010 – but which he has promised to deepen and extend – is but the latest round of attacks on that hard-won post-war settlement.

The attacks began in the 1970s, deepened under Margaret Thatcher, and were continued by Blair and Brown.

However, while both Blair and Brown showed that they could not be trusted to defend the post-war settlement, the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition has shocked with the ferocity with which it has privatised and cut. The Royal Mail was sold off at a bargain basement price; the NHS in England is being sold off bit by bit to companies that many government ministers have stakes in, and the protections that the post-war generation won for us are being dismantled.

The firestorm rages on. And yet election after election and poll after poll amply demonstrates that public opinion in Scotland does not support any of this.

Let me back up here for a moment. I’m talking about “the people of Scotland”, so what do I mean by that? I simply mean people who live in Scotland, wherever they may have been born.

But what can people who live in Scotland do to stop these attacks on the post-war settlement? For three decades and more every Westminster government – Tory, Labour, or Tories aided by Lib-Dems – has continued the assault.

However, we do have an opportunity in front of us. The independence referendum provides us with a tool that could be used to defend the welfare state in Scotland.

I am not naive enough to think that Scottish politicians area different breed. But I do think that a Yes vote will be another of those moments when politicians will be faced with the determination of the people. They will see that a Yes vote is as much a reaction against the culture of privatisation as it is anything else. They will see that the major driver behind the desire for independence is a rejection of the rightward drift of British politics. No incoming government of an independent Scotland will be able to turn back that tide.

What of those who might say that we who live in Scotland are abandoning those who live in England; that we may be defending ourselves, but what of our friends in England? Well, that is a counsel of despair; a race to the bottom. It does none of us any good to lie down together to resign ourselves all to decades more of continued state withdrawal from social welfare provision, privatisation and ever rightward drift. We can and should call a halt here. We have only ourselves to blame if we do not take this opportunity.

A Yes vote is, then, a major step in defence of ordinary working people in Scotland. But it is also something else: it is a beacon of hope for people in England, who will see that it is possible to resist the rightward advance of British politics; that the determined will of the people can win concessions; and that the post-war settlement can be defended. It is therefore not only to ourselves here in Scotland that we owe the responsibility to take this stance; to vote “Yes” and defend the welfare state. We must do it for all in these islands.