Tavish Scott: Referendum a question of timing for Salmond

THERE’S a small viewing gallery just behind the opposition benches in the House of Commons. The vantage point provides a grandstand view of politics in the raw.

It is where I witnessed Mrs Thatcher handbagging Neil Kinnock.

Thatcher’s premiership ended in tears. So too did Tony Blair’s, who left office after a calamitous foreign policy decision. Alex Salmond doesn’t appear to do political history. He is seeking to create it, which doesn’t afford a whole lot of time for reflection. But when the First Minister veers into the kind of territory seen this week, Scotland may want to consider the lessons of political leadership.

Salmond said this: “There is no-one on the Scottish Affairs Select Committee apart from Eilidh Whiteford that has a mandate to say anything about a referendum. The only ones with a mandate sit in the Scottish Parliament.”

Dr Whiteford, for the avoidance of doubt, is the SNP MP for Banff and Buchan and has a mandate from her constituency. So too does every other member of that parliamentary committee and every Scottish MP. Just what part of that democratic fact does Mr Salmond not get? This, even by Mr Salmond’s standards, is breathtaking arrogance and foreshadows the kind of one-party rule that Soviet leaders would have been proud of, and the current generation of Chinese leaders would find highly appealing.

The Nationalists are using every facet of the Scottish Government to create the conditions for a referendum on Scotland leaving the UK. Salmond dangles the carrot of a second question, but as one would expect it’s a very clever wheeze. Few could oppose a question on some ill-defined concept of economic independence with defence and foreign affairs remaining the responsibility of a UK government.

Mr Salmond’s desire to ditch the worries of defence policy came into stark focus this week with the timely intervention of General Lord Dannatt, a former head of the British military. Lord Dannatt simply observed that the Nationalists would have to say what their defence policy is, and for this observation he was condemned in typical fashion.

But the real point is that a second question keeps the Nationalist movement together. Salmond talks about wanting all the powers of a sovereign nation. But then there’s no-one else to blame, and that would take away his greatest political shield: that of the UK government’s need to deal with the financial deficit and the corresponding cuts in public expenditure. They are manna from heaven for Mr Salmond and helped to give the SNP the overall majority it enjoys at Holyrood.

“Devolution Max” keeps his gradualists happy, as they contend that remaining within the UK but with greater powers is Scotland’s best option. And if the people have decreed that Scotland should remain part of the UK, Mr Salmond can tell his fundamentalists who want nothing less than outright Scottish nationhood that we will simply try again in a few years’ time.

But the second question will be dropped quicker than Nationalist commitments on business taxes if Mr Salmond gets a sniff that he might actually win a simple yes/no. A recent poll said that could happen, and while the number of Scots asked was derisory, it would only take a sequence of these and it would be game on.

The date of the referendum is easy. It’s not some great point of parliamentary principle. It’s when Mr Salmond thinks he might win. It’s time everyone who cares about the future of Scotland and the UK got interested, because an independent Scotland dominated by the arrogance the nation witnessed this week would not be democratic, pluralistic, positive or Scottish.

• Tavish Scott is Liberal Democrat MSP for Shetland