Alex Salmond Biography: One letter and a case of 'intellectual suicide'

Published on Tuesday 5 October 2010 14:45

THE letter kicking Alex Salmond out of the SNP came by recorded delivery on 21 September, 1982. When Salmond opened it, he found a brief and perfunctory two-paragraph note.

Dear Alex

Annual Conference 1982 - Resolution regarding organised political groups. I refer to your letter of 18 September 1982 in response to my letter of 13 September conveying to you the decision of the National Executive Committee in regard to organised political groups within the Party. As you have not indicated your resignation from the Interim Committee of the 79 Group Socialist Society, I have to inform you that you are expelled from membership of the Scottish National Party with effect from the date of this letter.

In terms of Clause 67 of the Constitution and Rules you are entitled to exercise a right of appeal against this decision.

Yours sincerely

Neil R MacCallum

National Secretary

Six others, Stephen Maxwell, Chris Cunningham, Douglas Robertson, Brenda Carson, Kenny MacAskill and Andrew Doig all received identical missives. "The Scottish National Party," stormed the academic Owen Dudley Edwards in The Scotsman, "by expelling Mr Stephen Maxwell, Mr Alex Salmond and their five associates, have committed intellectual suicide."

The 79 Group was formed by left-wing nationalist firebrands in response to what they saw as the SNP's refusal to fight for the Scottish working class, and a British state that had conned Scotland in the 1979 referendum on devolution.

It was the Australian-raised Scot Roseanna Cunningham, right, who together with her brother Chris, first floated the idea for what became the 79 Group during the February referendum campaign. They named the group after the year of its formation. On the Saturday following the referendum "defeat", Margo MacDonald, the party's deputy leader, also made an influential speech at a meeting of the party's National Council.

MacDonald's analysis was simple: while working-class Scots had voted "yes" in the referendum, Scotland's middle classes had voted "no". The SNP, therefore, had to look to the former in order to build future support. Eight Nationalists sympathetic to MacDonald's viewpoint met in Edinburgh on 10 March, and between 30-35 attended a second meeting. There, the "Interim Committee for Political Discussion" became the 79 Group.

MacAskill was a radical young lawyer whom Salmond had persuaded to join the SNP following years of intermittent activism. Maxwell called the contingent the "West Lothian Left", which also included Stewart and Sandra Stevenson, who hailed, like Salmond and MacAskill, from Linlithgow."Their influence within the Group", recalled Maxwell, "helped to confirm a model of Scottish society in which the industrial working class figured as the only potential challenger to the British state."

Among them there was a growing acceptance that the SNP could only build stable political support if the desire for constitutional change and the demand for social change could be forged together. Salmond argued "that a real Scottish resistance and defence of jobs demands direct action up to and including political strikes and civil disobedience on a mass scale". Salmond also drew inspiration from the nascent Solidarity movement in Poland, where the Polish flag had played a prominent symbolic role. At the 1981 party conference, the 79 Group came within one vote of having a majority on the party's governing National Executive Committee, including a place for Salmond at the age of only 26. He was elected to the SNP's Election Committee, beating Winnie Ewing.

This prompted an angry letter from Margaret Bain (later Margaret Ewing, and Winnie's daughter-in-law], which betrays how many in the party perceived Salmond at this time. "I am extremely angry at the exclusion of Winnie from that committee in preference to someone like Alex Salmond - most definitely the 79 Group's nominee," she wrote to party leader Gordon Wilson, "and whom I regard as a lackey to the anti-MP faction within the party. I now believe we are in a situation that candidates selected by the current composition of this committee will be devolutionists, extreme lefties concerned (so they say) with the West of Scotland, and who will give no real cutting edge to the Scottish dimension."

On 16 October, 1981 Jim Sillars and five other members of the 79 Group broke into Edinburgh's old Royal High School building, the proposed home of the Scottish Assembly. As an act of "civil disobedience" the symbolism was obvious, but tactically disastrous. The SNP establishment responded with the formation of its own group, the Campaign for Nationalism in Scotland. At its launch, Winnie Ewing declared: "I am now fighting back for the survival of my party." For the next few months the SNP's internal battles were played out in the letters pages of The Scotsman, as well as in private party meetings. In a long letter on 24 June, Salmond accused certain SNP members of "running away from political reality", adding: "The SNP could position itself to be a real alternative to Labour - not by borrowing voters as in the past, but by winning activists, shop stewards and stable political support to the Leftist nationalist programme which meets the aspirations of the majority of the Scottish people."

When more than 100 members of the 79 Group met in August 1982, a motion was passed disbanding the group. But,that meeting also took the decision to simultaneously re-form under the same name, but with a wider membership drawn from other political parties.Wilson warned that members of this new organisation (subsequently the Scottish Socialist Society) were "following a high-risk policy which could place in jeopardy their continuing membership of the SNP". The post on 21 September, 1982, proved him correct.