WRITING in mid noughties Professor David Miller made the point that “Scotland is governed not simply via the institutions of formal governance… Scotland is also run by political and economic decision-makers, only some of whom are based in Scotland.

“Other centres of decision making are obviously London and Brussels, the Headquarters of the World Trade Organisation, IMF and World Bank and the boardrooms of the transnational corporations, including those which have no interest or base in Scotland (even a negative decision not to site a factory or not to launch a product in Scotland is consequential).”

Arguably a Scottish election of the sort we have just had might have provided an opportunity to explore who owns and runs Scotland and what that ownership means for Scottish society and its industry and services and more importantly still, its democracy.

Of course, we did not have that discussion. As Stephen Low reported in the Star yesterday, the election was dominated as political discourse in Scotland unendingly is nowadays, on the question of whether 8 per cent of the population should secede from the UK.

Ironically, the desire which fuels working-class support for independence, a sense of unseen forces destroying whole swathes of Scottish society including its industries and services and the sense of community that went with it replaced with precarious employment and diminishing social support and solidarity – that desire springs from the damage that globalisation and financialisation have inflicted on British and Scottish society.

It is disturbing, then, that the SNP not only does not address this real threat to Scottish democracy and wellbeing, but by arguing that changing the system of what Miller terms “formal governance” is the solution to all of Scotland’s ills, it helps disguise the real nature of the control of Scottish assets and how they are exploited by the forces of global capital.

Scottish Labour was better. Its manifesto, badged as a National Recovery Plan, acknowledged that pre-pandemic the “Scottish economy suffered from low investment and productivity, limited domestic ownership, coupled with labour market inequalities.” It also made a commitment to end privatisation of services and promote public ownership.

“The privatisation of public services has failed our economy, with investment only serving private corporations’ interests rather than the people of Scotland. Scottish Labour will halt this economic model by promoting common ownership nationally and locally.”

During the campaign Radical Options for Scotland and Europe (Rose) produced a series of leaflets designed to amplify the issues outlined in Labour’s manifesto and expose the role of global actors in Scotland’s exploitation. Scottish Labour could not do this because it remains committed to working closely with one of the key actors in the neoliberal cast — the EU.

Rose asked, for example, how much Scottish steel was in the new Forth Bridge. It cost £1.5 billion to build and the steel in that was worth £790 million. The answer is none. Instead, we imported it from China, Poland and Spain.

And why was this? Partly at least because EU directives, the same EU the SNP is committed to re-join and Anas Sarwar wants to be as close as possible to, has rules on public contracting designed to ensure that global capital and not local economic development determine access to contracts.

Incidentally, many of the EU rules have now been carried over into British law through Boris Johnston’s Internal Market Act because he and the SNP share a commitment to the dominance of the free market.

Rose pointed out that “Scottish” Power is owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish-registered firm. Who owns Iberdrola? The largest shareholders are the Emir of Qatar and Blackrock, the world’s biggest investment company.

In other words, Scottish Power is controlled by external investors primarily interested in maximising profits — rather than serving the needs of consumers in Scotland and of our productive economy.

Of course, it is not just energy. Virtually all public services including transport, telecommunications and postal deliveries are currently in private hands. Dominant shareholders are investment companies driven to maximise profits by the demands of their investors.

Their indifference to British and Scottish workers is only too plain to see in how they treat them with British Gas using fire-and-rehire tactics and British Telecom using compulsory redundancies right in the middle of the misery of the Covid pandemic.

These are the kind of issues that we should have debated in the Scottish election campaign. Instead, we have had a surrogate binary referendum on a choice that is no choice.

We have been offered a “choice” between a neoliberal British elite using antiquated and undemocratic state machinery to secure continued dominance through centralised state power and, in Scotland in the shape of the SNP, a wannabe elite of comprador capitalists, every bit as committed to neoliberal norms.

They want to ensure that Scotland will remain ensnared by the neoliberal rules of the EU and global capital, rather than developing Scotland’s own industrial capacity.

Scottish Labour still has time to develop a radical alternative to independence and the status quo and insist that this third option be put on the ballot paper in any future independence referendum. That must be an urgent political priority for the new group of Scottish Labour MSPs in the Scottish Parliament.