Watchdogs of Colonialism: Corporate Extraction and the Limits of Scottish Devolution by Leigh Dubbels and Alan McMahon (Liberation Scotland)

Still Yours For Scotland | decolonise.scot

The piece that follows, by Liberation Scotland Committee members Leigh Dubbels and Alan McMahon, is an analytically precise and theoretically grounded contribution to the decolonial analysis of Scotland's political economy. It deploys Aimé Césaire's conceptual framework with a forensic rigour that the mainstream Scottish independence movement has consistently failed to match. It names what most Scottish political analysis leaves carefully unnamed; that Scotland's devolved settlement is not a step towards liberation but the colonial state's most effective instrument for managing liberation aspiration while the extraction continues and deepens. One small nuance worth adding to deepen the analytical charge of their argument, not to qualify it but to sharpen it further, concerns Césaire's original French. The term rendered as "watchdogs" is, in Césaire's Discours sur le Colonialisme (1950), “chiens de garde”: guard dogs. A watchdog observes. A guard dog attacks on its master's behalf; defending the colonial master's territorial and economic interests against the very people in whose name it ostensibly operates. Césaire's choice of vocabulary makes the indictment of Scotland's devolved institutional apparatus (the Scottish Administration, which is in no way a “government”, its agencies, its planning authorities, its enterprise bodies) even more devastating than the English translation conveys. They are not passive observers of extraction but its active defenders. The reader who wishes to pursue the theoretical foundations of this argument beyond Césaire would do well to consult Frantz Fanon's less-cited 1952 essay "Antillais et Africains", in which Fanon identifies the colonised intellectual's most dangerous contribution as the production of institutional legitimacy for the colonial relationship through the very sophistication of their critique of its symptoms, while leaving its architecture untouched. Dubbels and McMahon have done something rarer and more consequential. They have named the architecture itself.

Occasionally, as we see another loss to Scotland's economy or yet more resources handed out to neo-extractive globalists, our minds turn to Scotland's economic history: its heavy industrial enclaves (Michael Hechter) the older among us remember, wiped out when no longer needed for Empire; the closure of 'new' substitute industries like British Leyland, IBM, Singer, Motorola, NEC, Timex, Digital and the once-vaunted Silicon Glen's dwindled export output value down 80%; brutal removal of our oil refining capacity to an England without oil; the ethylene plant at Mossmorran shut. Yet in the meantime we see imposed huge private autonomous tax-avoidance zones in the shape of 'freeports' ("Scotland needs a piece of the pie" - a future SNP leader), the land covered in sky-scraping pylons to export energy in a way and at a speed reminiscent of plunder-purpose Indian railroads; our ports closed down and the common good assets on which they sat sold off to international 'operators'; our very stock exchange closed in the teeth of an oncoming oil boom and the forced removal of all financial activity to London; implantation without consultation or consideration of the benefit or disbenefit to Scots of colossal energy-eating data centres. 

What we are seeing is the ongoing plunder of 'corporate colonialism' applied to England's Scottish colony, with the 'Scottish Government' and its agencies providing, as Professor Alf Baird has explained, the role of Aimé Césaire's 'watchdogs of colonialism'. 

The term refers to Césaire's conceptual framework in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), applied as a political critique of Scotland's relationship with corporate power.

Césaire argued that colonialism is not simply political and cultural domination, but is fundamentally an economic system of extraction and plunder - its true purpose. The colonising power installs local institutions that appear to serve the colonised population while in reality function to protect and facilitate the extraction of wealth by outside interests. He called those who administer this system on behalf of capital the coloniser's watchdogs (Scottish Government), local enforcers of external power.

Corporate colonialism is where a foreign state - the colonising force - is corporate capital (energy companies, landowners, developers, financiers) which extract value from Scottish resources, land, and labour, with profits flowing elsewhere.

Scotland's natural resources (oil, wind, water, land) generate enormous wealth, but this wealth is not retained by Scottish communities; it is extracted by corporations, often with public subsidy.

There is a reality to be seen when it comes to how Scotland is governed. The Scottish Parliament is an institution which owes its existence to nothing more than an ordinary Anglo-British law; one which, despite the finest of 'straight-bat' British assurances, is as impermanent as Prof. Mark Elliot identified in his 2020 article, "The United Kingdom’s Constitution and Brexit: A ‘Constitutional Moment’?". The Scotland Act is the product of a Westminster parliament which had the shocking arrogance to subordinate the Treaty of Union to this run-of-the-mill Westminster statute (hint: not possible; it makes of the Scotland Act a legal absurdity). Yet - and this is extremely important - Scottish ministers and every member of that parliament only enter its portals by swearing allegiance to an English monarch. All this to say, what hope for the interests of the people of Scotland - the Scottish Crown - when members of the Scottish Parliament have sworn fealty not to them, but to another, English, Crown - of which the English monarch is the embodiment. His (and his Westminster parliament's) interests are sworn to come first. 

From this flows that fact that the Scottish Government, and thence Scottish agencies and institutions, extending to law, senior civil service, academia and press, are watchdogs of the colonial state. While the Scottish Government and its regulatory bodies (enterprise agencies, planning authorities) appear to represent Scottish interests, in practice they facilitate and legitimise corporate extraction rather than question it. They are administrators of the system, not challengers of it.

Regional political autonomy, in Scotland referred to as devolution, has by design no more produced economic prosperity than it confers economic sovereignty. The structures of extraction remain fully operational - and expanding. The Scottish Government manages the conditions under which plunder proceeds, facilitating it, regulating it with indulgence and lending it democratic legitimacy, all of which makes it functionally equivalent to Césaire's colonial administrator class.

Dubbels and McMahon then added the following to the thread, extending their analysis through Fanon's concept of the "Manichaeism of colonial rule", with a contribution from Professor Alf Baird that names the system as a system; not a collection of political failures but a colonial architecture whose every component serves the extraction that is colonialism's sole consistent purpose.

From Prof. Alf Baird:

On postcolonial theory, which also tells us of the “Manichaeism of colonial rule” (Fanon) in Scotland, where we see:

– a people in ‘colonial slumber’

– a fake national party (‘co-opted by colonialism’)

– a fake parliament (indirect rule, brings in oppressive and 'mystifying' laws)

– a fake ‘justice’ system, views the native ‘absent of values’

– colonial show trials, to rupture the independence movement

– all enabling the plunder of corporate colonialism to continue

Colonialism is far more than a dodgy national party elite – colonialism creates such an elite just as it creates all else in colonial society, including the poverty and inequality of the colonized.

References

Baird, Alf. Doun-Hauden: The Socio-Political Determinants of Scottish Independence. Edinburgh: Bàrd nan Eilean Press, 2023.

Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1950. Translated by Joan Pinkham as Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Fanon, Frantz. "Antillais et Africains." Esprit, February 1955. Reprinted in Pour la révolution africaine. Paris: François Maspero, 1964.

Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: François Maspero, 1961. Translated by Richard Philcox as The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

Elliott, Mark. "The United Kingdom's Constitution and Brexit: A 'Constitutional Moment'?" Public Law (2020). Available at: https://markelliot.wordpress.com

Scotland Act 1998. Parliament of the United Kingdom. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/46

United Nations Human Rights Council. Document A/HRC/61/NGO/210. Submitted by IPLSA and Liberation Scotland. 61st Session, 2026.