Gerald Warner: A question of bluff as Salmond 'fights' for referendum

THEY claimed the brilliant generation of Scottish comedy, represented by Jimmy Logan, Rikki Fulton et al, would never find worthy successors. They reckoned without Alex Salmond, Fiona Hyslop, Mike Russell and the rest of the SNP team, a dazzling medley of effortless, spontaneous – and, above all, unconscious – comic genius currently convulsing the nation with mirth.

Let English comedy anoraks bore on about their "Dead Parrot" sketches and similar contrived scripts. They can never compete with Alex Salmond's greatest hits: "A Penny for Scotland"; "Kosovo Unpardonable Folly"; "A Thousand Extra Policemen Means Five Hundred"; "Primary Class Sizes Shrinking"; "An Oil Fund for Scotland"; "Ireland and Iceland: The Arc (or was it Ark?) of Prosperity"; and, most side-splitting of all, "What Do We Want? A Referendum! When Do We Want It? Er…" These you have loved.

When the omnibus edition is compiled for posterity, the clever money is on "Gimme a Referendum!" topping the charts. This is Alex at his cheeky laddie best. The audacious gambler holds a hand that consists exclusively of jokers, but he has still managed to bluff his brain-dead, risk-averse, politically illiterate pseudo-Unionist opponents into denying him the independence referendum he desperately does not want. In this way he can appease the fundamentalist wing of his party ("Gee, guys, I tried, but those Unionist lickspittles headed me off at the pass.")

Plan B (which, in Salmond's strategy, is actually Plan A) will be to wait for an incoming UK Tory government, scream "Thatcherism is back!", pick fights with Westminster at every opportunity and ascribe the spending cuts imposed by the recession to English exploitation of Scotland, particularly its oil wealth, even if there are only half a dozen bucketloads of it left in accessible locations. It is just possible, in the Salmond scenario, that the confusion and resentment sown in this way could precipitate an emotional spasm leading to independence.

Even Salmond knows there is no certainty of that ploy working. Scepticism about independence is now heavily ingrained in Scotland's political consciousness; but it offers the Nationalists a fighting chance, which the alternative Apocalypse Now scenario certainly does not. The latest Ipsos Mori opinion poll shows an unprecedented 75 per cent of Scots now want a referendum on independence. So, are they in a fever to break up the United Kingdom, then? No. On the contrary, only a derisory 20 per cent intend to vote for separatism, a record low.

Even among SNP voters, only a minority – 49 per cent – supports independence. This, after two and a half years of the first ever Scottish Nationalist government running the country, is immeasurable catastrophe for the SNP. It represents the total destruction of all its hopes, of its historic raison d'tre. It presages a worse disaster than the Tories experienced in 1997. Yet Alex Salmond, like a schoolboy in a playground stand-off, has to play the part of eager aggressor ("Haud ma jaiket!") only being restrained by bystanders.

Happily for him, those bystanders have duly obliged. Three musketeers – Iain, Tavish and Annabel – have ridden to Alex's rescue, pledging to vote down his referendum bill and block any attempt to hold a plebiscite on independence. Why? Any opponents with a modicum of political nous would recognise that now – not George Robertson's devo-appeasement that so spectacularly failed – is the time to "bury nationalism stone dead". They should be waving Salmond through green lights at Holyrood, giving a referendum a fair wind, while using their parliamentary majority to eliminate any trickery, such as a triple-option question, designed to split the Unionist vote.

The problem is that these opponents do not have political nous. Labour is burned out, the Liberal Democrats are a joke and the Holyrood Tories – well, this is a column about politics, so it risks going off-topic to mention them. Someone wrote a humorous book called 101 Uses Of A Dead Cat: the author would have been hard-pressed to write a sequel on the subject of Tory MSPs.

Annabel does not do politics. If there is a potentially combustible situation in the presbytery when Mrs MacWhockle has been accused of sharp practice in the home-baking competition, Annabel is a useful woman to have around. But she does not do politics; and she regards her role at Holyrood as ensuring that no other Tory MSP lowers the tone by doing so either.

If Alex Salmond got his referendum in the present climate of economic realism, the polling stations would be abattoirs for nationalism. Instead of herding the separatists inside, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories are barring the way, rejecting the option of putting independence to bed for a generation and leaving open the opportunity for Salmond to fight another day on more favourable ground. Whom the gods wish to destroy…