Best way for SNP to honour Alex Salmond's memory is to reveal all about court case
If a line had been drawn under Alex Salmond’s career in 1997, it would not have been considered a great success. After 18 years of the Tories and seven of his leadership, the SNP won six rural seats and 22 per cent of the vote.
He had been noisy but not particularly effective. The dominant Scottish political figures of the 1990s were John Smith, until he died, Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown with Michael Forsyth worth a mention. There is no need for myth-making in order to pay due respect to Salmond’s unquestionable subsequent significance.
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Hide AdCritically, the SNP under his leadership had shunned the Constitutional Convention which laid the ground for a Scottish Parliament that the incoming Labour government was in a hurry to deliver. Despite this, it was devolution which then offered Alex Salmond a clear route to success.
Tactical skill
To some, myself included, this was predictable. To others, it was an alarming consequence which the electoral system was naïvely intended to frustrate. Once offered to him, Alex Salmond seized the opportunity with considerable tactical skill and even greater relish, to which he was entitled. He really had beaten the system.
For entirely understandable reasons, I was not in the inner circle of Labour’s 1997 referendum campaign, happy to get on with my Scottish Office ministerial duties. So I was as startled as many others to wake one morning to a Daily Record front page of Alex Salmond and Gordon Brown in front of the Forth Bridge, united in campaigning for a yes vote.
It struck me as an act of political self-harm, driven by Labour paranoia that if SNP voters did not turn out to support devolution, the referendum might be lost. However, its effect was to signal common cause and wipe out a decade of promoting devolution as an end in itself – the “settled will of the Scottish people” – rather than as a stepping stone to something else, as Alex Salmond certainly intended it to be.
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Maybe it would have worked out the same way in the long run, but enlarging the pro-devolution tent at that point confirmed that Holyrood would represent the “settled will” about nothing and certainly not the constitution. If I understood the significance of that concession, so too did Alex Salmond, who only had to bide his time and could even afford to take a few years break back at Westminster.
Cruel and demeaning
Personally, I always regarded Alex Salmond as an opponent rather than an enemy. I bumped into him a couple of weeks before he died and we had an amiable chat about shared interests, as had often happened over the years. At a human level, I regret his passing because what had been inflicted upon him in recent years was cruel, demeaning and far beyond anything he might have deserved.
He was distinguished from his successors by being genuinely a man of ideas which extended beyond his ultimate goal. He had the sense to realise that identification with competent government was probably the most plausible route to reaching it.
He was, above all, a tireless political operator and combating whatever he was up to – and he was always up to something – was largely dependent on being up a bit earlier than him. We were pretty good at that in the 1990s. By the time he returned as SNP leader in 2004, nobody at Holyrood was able to remotely meet that challenge at a time when Labour had lost its political momentum and the rest, as they say, is history.
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There will be plenty time for his political achievements and failures to be debated. His indisputable, historic success from any perspective was negotiating the right to hold a referendum on Scottish independence which came within 5.3 per cent of breaking up the United Kingdom. By any standard, that merits his place in Scottish history and made him an icon to many who shared his ambition. To most who opposed it, he remained an opponent worthy of respect, however grudging.
It is ironic that the only people who were determined, quite literally, to deny these realities were his successors in the SNP who perpetrated a rewriting of history which, in itself, indicates how they became blinded by vindictiveness to rational recognition of inconvenient facts. The official SNP line in 2020 became that the “then deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon spearheaded” the pro-independence campaign in 2014. Oh no, she didn’t.
Decency dictates that speaking ill of the dead should be avoided while the grief of the bereaved is raw. Equally, the hypocrisy of eulogisers who tried to put him behind bars is not exonerated by prefaces like, “although we had our differences in recent years…” Sometimes silence is the better option.
Myriad questions remain unanswered
If his erstwhile colleagues in the Scottish Government want to honour Alex Salmond’s memory, there is one immediate action they could take. The current First Minister should abandon the devious resistance to instructions from the Information Commissioner by publishing unredacted the Hamilton report, and all related documents, about Nicola Sturgeon’s role in the Salmond case.
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Hide AdAt the time of his death, Alex Salmond was pursuing damages from the Scottish Government for “misfeasance in public office” by named individuals. It is up to his family and friends to decide whether or not to pursue that action. But would it not be better if the eulogisers of the past week were to render that unnecessary by releasing every piece of paperwork which could help answer the myriad questions which remain outstanding?
The salient fact is that in Scotland’s highest criminal court, Alex Salmond was acquitted of all the charges brought against him. If the law really is above politics, and if government respects the law, the moral corollary must surely be that it applies the same standards of justice to itself?
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