Questioning the ‘common sense’: Was Scottish independence really an alternative to UK neoliberalisation?

Abstract

This paper questions whether the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) 2014 independence campaign offered an alternative to Westminster’s neoliberalism. This doubt arises because the SNP’s social justice and Nordic model discourse promised a departure from existing UK policies, but this seemed contradicted by the SNP’s guarantee of European Union (EU) membership. The paper explains this contradiction by identifying the SNP’s commitment to a neoliberalising rather than collective Nordic model, and the neoliberalisation agenda of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy and Europe 2020. Consequently, the SNP evoked the language of radical economic, political and social change, but was committed to maintaining a neoliberal capitalism similar to Westminster’s.