Social democracy and labourism

The chapter asks whether labourism continues to have any relevance for social democratic Scotland in the greatly changed context of a reconstituted working-class and a highly constrained union movement contending with the crisis-ridden rapids of neo-liberalism. As the local fraction of ‘the planetary neoliberal vulgate’ identified two decades ago by Bourdieu and Wacquant (2001), Scotland is governed by a highly educated, socially unrepresentative professional managerial class (PMC) which has banished all talk of ʻcapitalismʼ, ʻclassʼ and ʻexploitationʼ as obsolete. This takes on additional significance for a small, inter-connected polity like Scotland where neo-liberal prescriptions are advanced alongside social democratic verities in the form of competitive nationalism. An independent Scottish state, it was (and is) hoped, would undo the iniquities inflicted on society and economy by neo-liberalism. Yet the competitive nationalism advanced in some quarters of the Independence movement suggests otherwise.