Alex Miller
The opening of the new Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh by Queen Elizabeth II on October 9 was upstaged by an alternative republican ceremony organised by the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and other Scottish republicans.
As Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) from the other major parties — Labour and the Scottish National Party (SNP) included — were bowing and scraping to the royals at the official opening in Holyrood, there was a mass signing of the "Declaration of Calton Hill" at the nearby unofficial opening.
The declaration (available at <http://www.scottishsocialistparty.org>) calls for "an independent Scottish republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity". The declaration also states that these "principles can never be put into practice while Scotland remains subordinate to the hierarchical and anti-democratic institutions of the British state".
As the queen opened the new £431 million parliament building (a massive overspend on projected construction costs), 1000 protesters watched the burning of the Union flag and listened to speeches from the SSP MSPs Rosie Kane, Colin Fox and Tommy Sheridan.
The unofficial opening was publicly supported by a range of prominent Scottish actors, artists, and writers, including writers Alasdair Gray, Al Kennedy, James Kelman, Iain Banks and Irvine Welsh, actors Peter Mullan, Bill Paterson and Tony Roper and musicians Craig and Charlie Reid (The Proclaimers).
In an SSP press release issued on October 3, Gray was quoted as saying that, "We do not want an independent Scotland because we dislike the English, but because we want separation from that union of military, financial and monarchic establishments calling itself Great Britain".
In the same press release, Welsh said: "It's my view that until we gain the sort of political maturity that can only come from sovereignty, we'll keep on making daft mistakes like the Holyrood [overspending] fiasco".
Banks said the Calton Hill declaration had his full support.
"I rarely read anything that long — especially originating from politicians — without wanting to disagree with or edit something, but frankly I don't think I'd change a word."
According to the October 7 Glasgow Herald, Scotland's 84-year-old poet laureate, Edwin Morgan, said that his sympathies were very much with the republicans.
The republican event was also supported by defectors from the SNP, including expelled MSP Campbell Martin, who was quoted on the SSP website as saying of the declaration: "I think this is highly significant and it highlights the new reality of politics in Scotland — while the SNP are in Holyrood bending the knee to the British queen, I will be out on Calton Hill celebrating a different vision of Scotland."
In an article in the October 7 Scottish Socialist Voice, the SSP's Kevin Williamson reiterated that the party's demand for an independent Scottish socialist republic is motivated by an internationalist desire to break up the reactionary British state: "The resurgence and reclamation of a Scottish identity has nothing to do with narrow-minded nationalism — as the dull-witted British establishment would like to have us believe. It comes fundamentally from the legacy of the last 700 years of Scottish history, but also from a growing maturity among the Scottish working classes that being part of the so-called United Kingdom is a liability to our interests.
"People in Scotland are waking up to the fact that the British state — [which] has become the war-mongering lieutenant to the interests of the New American Empire — has no future and a blood-stained past. It is a state grown bloated upon the exploitation and plunder of a quarter of the planet's population at the height of its militaristic Empire.
"From India to Africa, from the Far East to the Middle East, and even within the borders of the current British state, in the north of Ireland, the history of the British Empire has been one of oppression, war, conflict, massacres, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and the theft of natural resources".
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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