Scotland’s Independence and the Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid

In the recent parliamentary elections (2021), the Scottish National Party (SNP) won by far the largest number of seats (64), with the Scottish Labour Party, once the dominant political force in Scotland, reduced to 22. In Ireland, the pro-independence republican Sinn Fein, the second biggest party in the country, is calling for a vote on Ulster’s split from the United Kingdom and reunification with Southern Ireland. Independence is in the air and there is now a real prospect of the break-up of imperial Britain. At the same time, the Left in Scotland is still divided over the issue of independence. The clash of opinion in Scotland is certainly understandable given the deep-seated scepticism about the radical credentials of the SNP who have previously promoted neoliberal policies, not least with regard to Scotland’s rich North Sea oil and gas reserves. The ongoing crisis in relation to Brexit and the COVID pandemic has also deepened this process of political, social and economic fragmentation. I want therefore to situate this debate about national self-determination in the context of some classic Marxist interventions on the question. The discussion will also be linked to the figure of Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978), Scotland’s most controversial modernist poet, whose combination of communist and nationalist engagement will hopefully help throw a clearer literary and political light on the troubled relationship between Scotland and England. While European Marxism has been generally sensitive to the rights of small nations, it still seems necessary to clarify some of the important ideological distinctions between bourgeois and working-class national liberation. Taken together, these different threads provide a sustained argument about the need to support Scottish independence, much in the same way as the cause of Irish independence has been part of the left political agenda in Britain and elsewhere since the time of Marx.