How Alex Salmond exposed the SNP
No one did more to drive the Scottish National Party into power – or to plunge it into crisis.
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Alex Salmond’s sudden death at the weekend, aged 69, marks the passing of a serious and consequential politician. He transformed the Scottish National Party during the 1990s and 2000s, turning it from a marginal into a centrifugal force north of the border. Then, in 2014, he helped bring Scotland close to the brink of independence. His impact on British politics has been profound.
Strange as it may seem today, when Salmond became SNP leader in 1990, he was seen as an odd fit. There was no doubting his oratory, or indeed his unique, Marmite-like charms. But at the time, the SNP was seen as a right-leaning, largely Eurosceptic party – its members were even known as the Tartan Tories. Salmond, by contrast, was soft left. So much so, in fact, that he had been expelled from the SNP for a time in the early 1980s. From his student days at St Andrews in the 1970s, studying economics and history, to his early job in the civil service, Salmond was social-democratic, increasingly pro-Europe and anti-Tory.
Under Salmond, the SNP set off on a new course. It opposed the then Tory governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, but it attempted to do so on what amounted to Labour-lite turf. As General Election results show, it started to work. Out of Scotland’s 56 seats, the SNP won three in 1992 and six in 1997. Each time, it did so on an increased vote share, reflecting the expansion of the SNP’s support from its traditional base in the wealthier north-east and out into Glasgow and the central belt.
New Labour was clearly aware of this threat to its Scottish heartlands. In the shape of the Scotland Act 1998, Tony Blair’s newly elected administration attempted to use devolution to blunt the growing appeal of Scottish nationalism and the SNP. By allowing Scotland to elect its own legislature (albeit with limited powers), the aim was to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’, to quote Labour’s George Robertson from 1995.
For a while, it seemed to have had the desired lethal effect. The SNP struggled in the 1999 elections for the new Scottish assembly, coming a distant second to Labour. Salmond himself, aged just 45, seemed battle weary, and in 2000, he resigned as SNP leader and as an MSP. As one SNP MSP put it, ‘I don’t think he has the same appetite for the job’.
Yet Salmond’s appetite soon returned. The public’s growing disillusionment with New Labour, particularly pronounced in Scotland, presented an opportunity for the SNP. It could start posing as the anti-Westminster party, exploiting people’s growing disaffection with both Labour and the Tories. It was always a negative, largely anti-politics strategy, but it was to prove effective.
Salmond, who had been elected MP for Banff and Buchan in 2001, began to use his Westminster platform to launch withering attacks on Blair over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As disaffection with Blair’s New Britain spread during the 2000s, the possibility of the SNP supplanting Labour as the dominant force in Scottish politics steadily grew. It was not much of a surprise when Salmond returned to take advantage of Blair’s woes, replacing the eternally ineffective John Swinney as SNP leader in 2004.
Fuelled by the slow implosion of Labourism in Scotland, Salmond promptly led the SNP to a narrow victory in the 2007 assembly elections, becoming Scotland’s first minister in a coalition government with the Lib Dems and the Tories. Then, in the 2011 assembly elections, the SNP won an outright majority. For Salmond, this was the moment to push on from devolution to full independence. ‘Just as the Scottish people have restored trust in us’, he said in his victory speech, ‘we must trust the people as well. Which is why, in this term of the parliament, we will bring forward a referendum and trust the people on Scotland’s own constitutional future.’
The independence referendum – eventually granted by Westminster, to be held on 18 September 2014 – was to provide the bittersweet high-point of Salmond’s political career. In early 2014, just 30 per cent of Scottish voters wanted to exit the UK. But as campaigning began in earnest, the nationalist cause slowly picked up more and more support. It wasn’t difficult to fathom why. The pro-Union ‘No’ campaign, waged by already unpopular Westminster politicians, was complacent, negative and fear-mongering. The pro-independence ‘Yes’ campaign, combining the SNP’s moderate managerial vision of independence with faux-socialist flights of fancy, at least looked vaguely optimistic, if only by contrast. Beyond the bromides, the campaign for ‘independence’ was steeped in an anti-majoritarian, self-victimising sentiment – a sense that the backward voters of England were holding Scotland back. Still, by the time of the ballot itself, a huge 45 per cent of Scots had decided to vote for independence.
As unexpectedly narrow as the ‘indy ref’ result was, it was nevertheless a defeat – and one Salmond did not take well. He resigned the day after the referendum, paving the way for his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, to take over.
Up until then, the relationship between Salmond and Sturgeon had seemed watertight. She was his ‘protégé’. He was her ‘mentor’. They both proclaimed the depth of their friendship. Yet from the moment Sturgeon took over as SNP leader and first minister, Salmond seemed to struggle with losing control over the party he had led for so long.
Unable to step away from frontline politics, Salmond re-entered the Commons as an MP at the 2015 General Election, before losing his seat in 2017. After that, he began eagerly broadcasting his views on Russia Today and enjoying controversial stints at the Edinburgh Fringe. He was not embracing the elder-statesman role Sturgeon and her SNP allies envisaged for him. Instead, he seemed to be positioning himself for another run at the SNP leadership.
That all became moot in August 2018, when the Daily Record revealed Salmond had been reported to the police over sexual-assault allegations dating back to his time as first minister. He denied the claims, resigned from the SNP and announced he was taking Sturgeon’s government to court to challenge the complaints procedure that had led to police involvement. And so began a years-long legal and political battle that did much to plunge the party he had led into crisis.
He was acquitted of all charges at a criminal trial in 2020, although Salmond’s behaviour prompted his own lawyer to call him an ‘arsehole’ and an ‘objectionable bully’. The damage the case did to Salmond was nothing compared with the damage it did to Sturgeon and the SNP. An initial judicial review into the government’s handling of the allegations against Salmond culminated, in 2019, in a judge’s damning verdict of Holyrood’s internal workings. The judge ruled that the investigation into Salmond was ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’ – the investigating officer had even had prior contact with Salmond’s accusers.
Salmond’s acquittal at the trial reinforced the impression that the internal investigation and subsequent prosecution of the former first minister was, at best, misjudged and, at worst, motivated by a desire to finish off his political career.
The Salmond affair revealed the autocratic tendencies at the heart of Sturgeon’s government. At every stage of every inquiry and investigation, Sturgeon and pals resisted public accountability, withholding key documents and even redacting parts of a submission from Salmond deemed to be damaging to Sturgeon. As then Scottish Labour leader Jackie Baillie put it at the time, ‘We are seeing that there is something rotten at the heart of the SNP’.
In February 2021, with Sturgeon’s government still reeling from the Salmond case, the man himself launched Alba, a new nationalist party. While hardly a political success in itself – the party won zero seats at this year’s General Election – it did draw further attention to the political failings of Sturgeon and the SNP. It continually suggested the SNP wasn’t serious about independence. Perhaps most damaging of all, it helped turn a spotlight on Sturgeon’s disastrous embrace of gender self-ID, as gender-critical SNP supporters and even one MSP defected to Alba in protest.
Two years after Alba’s formation, Sturgeon resigned amid the scandal over allowing rapists into women’s prisons. The SNP has been in something approaching freefall ever since.
Alex Salmond’s life and career is inseparable from the highs and lows of the SNP. No other leader did more to lift the party up – or to bring it crashing down.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
Picture by: Getty.
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