Scottish independence - in context.

Political crises follow economic crises - as sure as eggs is eggs. All the official pundits are now falling over themselves to tell us that the current capitalist crisis is as bad (or badder!) than the 1930s or the 1880s and 90s and both changed the political world completely. Some add 'no crisis in China, or India, or Brazil!' Just wait. These economies are inserted into the world economy at a different place than the west. That's all. Social unrest in China per head is already the highest in the world according to the UN.

Anyway. Each new stage of the the economic crisis in the west produces another political lurch. Already austerity is failing. Ireland (and the UK's) debts are worse than when their austerity programs started. A new economic car crash will be showing soon at a cinema near you. But there is no manual. No holy book that tells anybody how history will spin out. No gurus who can predict the precise political consequences. Reality, as always, is ahead of any theory.

Nevertheless, we can catch sight and hold of basic trends. And one is unravelling in front of our eyes in the course of the debate now started (in England) over Scotland. (The Scots have been discussing this for decades.)

Front and centre of the Scottish question is not the Tories, or the Lib Dems (good riddance!) Or even Alex Salmond's SNP. It is the British Labour Party. Formed after the 1890s, starting largely in Scotland, British Labour is the only party in Britain with a base in England, Wales and Scotland. The existence of the British Labour Party depends, like no other party, on its support in all three countries. Independence for Scotland would take the lynchpin out of what remains of its framework. Labour's position in Scotland is the sole weapon left in the armoury of the British political establishment as they go into this fight for the union.

Labour's actual party structure and organised base in most constituencies has long been an 'empire of skulls.' It still scored eight and a half million votes in the 2010 General Election. (The Lib Dems scored nearly seven million.) Labour's 'weight' with voters is an 'in the absence of anything else' type of vote. And in the 2011 elections for the `Scottish Parliament, there was something else.

Labour are the only (shadow) organised political force in Scotland holding up the union. They will draw their power and authority in the coming debate, not from their alienated electoral base in Scotland but from the British, read English financial and political establishment. An alliance made in Hell. They will make this alliance for the same reason that Miliband now publicly supports austerity. When Labour leaders (as some inevitably will) start taking about the threat to the sacred unity of the British working class movement, they will mean Scots should rally to the protection of Labour's sacred requirement for an all-British electoral base in order to cement its worth to our financial and political rulers.