The SNP and the ANC: Radical Movements and Parliamentary politics

My piece on the ANC and the SNP for Scottish Left Project.

You can read the full piece here.

It would be fair to assume that the political culture of post-referendum Scotland and the transition to democracy in South Africa have few similarities. It is true that the unique nature of the apartheid state makes any comparison inevitable cumbersome; however, the parallels between the SNP and the ANC contain some an important lessons for the left in Scotland.

The United Democratic Front (UDF) was a broad-based grassroots anti-apartheid organisation formed 30 years ago. The group was formed in South Africa in direct opposition to P.W. Botha’s constitutional reforms, which included a tricameral parliament that would include Indians but exclude blacks. Whilst being sympathetic to the ANC, the UDF never formally affiliated. The strength of the organisation was its ability to mobilise vast swathes of people, the like of which the ANC had been attempting for decades. They did so by focusing on local grievances such as rent increases and Bantu education and giving less emphasis to the broad, national arguments the ANC were propagating. During the ‘80s and early ‘90s many actually argue that the UDF were the driving force for democratic change in South Africa and the ANC were clinging to their coattails in a bid to stay relevant. However, by the time black South Africans were emancipated and the first election was held in 1994, the UDF was no more. It had been subsumed by the all-powerful ANC/Communist (in name only) allegiance.

The ANC has been in power since those elections in 1994 and, despite Marxist rhetoric and the historic link with the South African Communist Party, they have governed like a European neo-liberal party. Despite racial apartheid ending two decades ago there remains an apartheid of a different sort. In today’s South Africa there exists a divide between rich and poor so vast it would make even the most hardened capitalist blush. There has been no redistribution of land, no educational improvement and no reduction in unemployment since apartheid ended 20 years ago. As John Pilger put it in his 1998 documentary- Apartheid Did Not Die, “The ANC pursue a policy which puts financial markets and multinational corporations over the people that they are elected to represent.”

What is worse is that they have pursued this right-wing agenda for over twenty years and been allowed to get away with it simply because the left in South Africa bought the myth that the ANC were the undisputed party of the left. The ANC was not prepared to be outflanked on its left so it attempted to co-opt the Communist Party, the trade unions and the UDF. It is only in the last few years that the ANC’s leftist credentials are being properly scrutinised by Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Party.

With this tale in mind I am inclined to think of the Yes movement and its relationship with the Scottish National Party. After all it was the radical Yes movement, like the UDF, which built a board based grassroots movement which was able to effectively challenge the stale orthodoxy of the mainstream politics. It was the radical Yes movement that reached parts of the impoverished, disenfranchised electorate that the SNP could not. And yet as I sit here today, it is the Scottish National Party and not the radical left which has benefitted most from the referendum campaign.

Eight months on and apart from a few dissenting voices the progressive flank of the Yes movement has to some degree been engulfed by the SNP and its meteoric rise. There are many good socialists who have joined the nationalists and many more who soft-peddle any criticism of them. There is a tendency from comrades to make the calculation that because the SNP is to the left of Labour we should concentrate our criticism solely on the latter.

The SNP, like the ANC in South Africa, are now the dominant political force in Scotland; it is therefore vitally important that we learn the lessons from South Africa. We must not allow a culture of conformity to develop which views the SNP as the undisputed party of the left, thus shielding it from any leftist critique. We must challenge their leftist credentials at every opportunity or I fear we will end up, like the South African left, inadvertently defending the Washington Consensus.