Greece’s Syriza is a genuinely new phenomenon—a multifaceted party of the left, run by the young, supported by the old, driven by dissatisfaction and frustration with regard to the prevailing global capitalist system, media-savvy, but not bogged down in age-old leftist internecine feuds; prepared to be pragmatic and open to alliances even with emerging voices of discontent that veer to the right. This is coalition as Gramsci would have wished it. It is a joy to behold.

The wave is already spreading to other European countries wracked by an austerity that ordinary people did nothing to bring upon themselves. The neonate Podemos party looks poised to take power in Spain in the fall. The regrouping of the Italian PSI, now styled Democratic Party, is becoming the major force in that perennially fractious peninsula.

In Britain, another country lashed by austerity, albeit to a lesser degree and with much greater resources to fall back on (or squander), no such movement seems to have emerged, except in the far North. The British Labour Party trundles on much as it has done in the past: not rocking the boat too much, hoping that one last push of a well-meaning, if uninspiring, mixture of good-will and good sense will finally win the day.

One of the surprising revelations of the last few years, is the extent to which the United Kingdom is far from united. Relations between its ethnically, constitutionally and regionally disparate parts have never been more strained. The divisiveness and inequality engendered by Thatcherism in the 1980s and entrenched now by Cameron has produced a large body of disaffected elderly and youth, who veer to the fringes of UKIP or the Greens, or—probably for the most part—choose not to vote at all, thereby creating a situation where no traditional party can reasonably expect to be entitled to a firm majority. The fair-weather party in the middle that aimed to hold the balance of power has been reduced to a rump.

Britain’s Syriza is the Scottish Nationalist Party—a party that only fields candidates in one relatively small but symbolically and economically important part of the country—and recently narrowly lost a referendum on secession of this region from the UK.

I can’t vote in Britain—since I don’t live there—or anywhere else for that matter, since I am still technically a British citizen. But, if I did still live in England, I would feel equally disenfranchised, as my party of choice—even as an Englishman—would be the SNP.

Scotland and England are wedded together by geography, but it has been a rocky marriage, to say the least. There have been times in the past when Scotland clearly held the high moral ground—its stern yet ultimately flexible commitment to the Reformation against the brief Marian interlude of Catholic terror in its more powerful neighbor; its firm support of the Enlightenment, while Anglican England wobbled about on a new-fangled mixture of prejudice, pragmatism, extremism and superstition.

In the early 21^st century, Scotland has regained this high moral ground, advocating social justice, tolerance, and the fair distribution of wealth against a UK government clearly tepid, if not outright inimical, with regard to these obviously desirable goals.

Who wouldn’t want to vote SNP?

The Scottish Nationalist Party looks set to sweep the board in the upcoming UK general election, despite—or perhaps (by some cunning of history) because—they failed to garner a majority vote for secession in the fall of last year. I have argued elsewhere that I never really felt that the SNP were really committed to full secession; their preference was always for maximal devolution within a continuing United Kingdom. The scale of support for independence and the panic on the part of the mainstream UK-wide parties and the monarchy (let us not forget that unelected focus of power) led the UK government to promise to grant unprecedented powers to the Scottish parliament to pursue a more socially progressive local polity, increasingly at odds with that of the UK as a whole.

Syriza is the European Union’s Scottish Nationalist Party; Scotland is the Greece of the United Kingdom. A much more ancient ‘European Union’ writ small, let us not forget, which squandered much of Scotland’s new-found oil wealth in the 1980s on tax-cuts for the rich, privatizations, and increasingly miserly benefits for a growing disenfranchised under-class; rather than investing in new government-funded industries, creating jobs, and redistributing wealth.

If we want something like Syriza in the UK—a left-wing government seriously committed to resolving the economic crises of late capitalism, without further exacerbating inequality—the best we can hope for on May the 7^th is a Labour government heavily dependent on the SNP. Not just some sort of agreement not to vote against government bills, but a true coalition. SNP MPs holding important positions in government, just as opportunistic Liberal Democrats do now. This kind of participation at the national level of government for this vital ethnically and politically distinct part of our diverse union is clearly deserved and surely long overdue.