Alex Salmond’s death must not be used to push SNP back to its fundamentalist past

Alex Salmond’s greatest achievement was to transform the SNP into a socially liberal, social-democratic party that was increasingly green and unfailingly pro-European

A couple of weeks ago, just after the announcement of Alex Salmond’s sudden death in North Macedonia, aged only 69, a Norwegian journalist with a strong interest in Scottish affairs called to ask me if I had any vivid memories of the former First Minister that he could share with this readers.

Like anyone who has been involved in the last half-century of Scottish politics, I had dozens, of course. The most vivid memory of all, though, is of the colossal roar of assent that greeted Alex Salmond’s appearance on screen during the world premiere of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch, about Scottish soldiers in the Iraq War, at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival.

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The clip played was the one in which Salmond denounced the fierce bombardment of Iraq, led by the US and UK, as “unpardonable folly”; and the mighty surge of approval from a hugely mixed audience of Fringe-goers and military veterans made it absolutely clear that the tectonic plates of Scottish politics were shifting, and that 40 years of absolute Labour dominance were coming to an end.

Working with Labour

And it’s because I so vividly remember the Alex Salmond who made that earthquake in Scottish politics possible, in the years between 1990 and 2007, that I feel increasingly anxious about the way in which his legacy is being framed now, in the aftermath of his death. For what Salmond had done, during those years, was to focus with ever-increasing clarity on transforming the SNP from a marginal group obsessed with the cause of Scottish independence, into a credible social-democratic party, sitting just to the left of New Labour, that a near-majority of Scots were prepared to trust with their practical future.

The key stages along this path were many, and often contested by his party’s more fundamentalist wing; notably his crucial decision, in 1997, to work with Labour and the Liberal Democrats to help deliver a massive 75 per cent “yes” vote in that year’s devolution referendum. The abuse he received from fundamentalists at that time was very similar to that showered on the SNP leadership today; the allegation that devolution was a joke and a trap, and that anyone supporting it was not really interested in independence.

Following his death, Alex Salmond must not been turned into a standard-bearer for backward-looking, constitutionally obsessive politics that once kept the independence movement at the margins of Scottish life (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell)Following his death, Alex Salmond must not been turned into a standard-bearer for backward-looking, constitutionally obsessive politics that once kept the independence movement at the margins of Scottish life (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell)
Following his death, Alex Salmond must not been turned into a standard-bearer for backward-looking, constitutionally obsessive politics that once kept the independence movement at the margins of Scottish life (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell) | Getty Images

Unprecedented electoral success

Salmond was an astute enough leader, though, to know that the vast majority of voters have no time for, and no interest in, that kind of constitutional purism. Instead, the Scotland that he imagined, during those years – and shared with close colleagues and mentees including Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney, and later Humza Yousaf – was to be socially liberal and culturally inclusive, social-democratic in politics, increasingly green, and unfailingly pro-European, outward-looking and internationalist, pursuing Scottish independence as a means to those ends. This was the strategy that delivered the SNP’s astonishing majority victory in the Scottish election of 2011, the remarkable rise in support for independence during the referendum campaign of 2013-14, and the SNP’s unprecedented electoral success in the years between 2015 and 2021, under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership.

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Now of course, much has been written about how all of this went wrong, after Salmond stepped down as SNP leader in 2014. The allegations of sexual misconduct which emerged against him in 2018, at the height of the #metoo movement, could not be ignored or dismissed, as he seems to have hoped; but they were lamentably mishandled within the Scottish Government, before his final exoneration on all criminal charges in 2020.

Alba’s brutal failures at ballot box

And his response, when he finally broke with the SNP to set up his new Alba Party in 2021, not only guaranteed a constant supply of media stories about splits in the independence movement, but also attracted to his side a cohort of supporters – still left-leaning, but increasingly reactionary on social matters, and ever more fundamentalist in their fantasy pursuit of immediate independence – whose views conflict with much that Salmond achieved in his years as SNP leader, and have ensured the Alba Party’s brutal failure at the ballot box, in every election since it was founded.

Historians will debate, of course, how far Salmond himself changed his views in those years. In his last, powerfully written tweet from North Macedonia, he berated the current First Minister John Swinney for not standing on Scotland’s dignity as “a country not a county”, when he agreed to attend Keir Starmer’s new Council of the Nations and Regions; although as First Minister, Salmond would surely have made the same decision, recognising that non-cooperation with such a body would be highly unpopular with the vast majority of Scots.

Rabid misogyny towards Sturgeon

And angry and disappointed though he may have been, on a personal level, it is hard to believe that a man of Salmond’s sharp intelligence and liberal views would have had much time for the rabid misogyny many of his admirers now direct towards Nicola Sturgeon, or the raging bile with which they damn the current SNP leadership, as it faces the fierce political headwinds of post-Brexit Britain.

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The SNP that is in government now – still liberal in its instincts, still social-democratic, still defending a universalist welfare-state model, still trying to carve its own international path on issues including the slaughter in Gaza – is the SNP that Salmond made, led by the politicians with whom he worked most closely, in his most successful years.

And it would be a tragedy now, following his death, if his name were to be become a rallying point for those who do not share those values, or honour the full scale of that achievement, but instead want to make their lost leader into a standard-bearer for the kind of backward-looking and constitutionally obsessive politics that once kept the independence movement at the margins of Scottish life – and may help to ensure that it returns there, if their false vision of Alex Salmond’s life and achievement is allowed to prevail.

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