Nationalists for Globalization

The SNP had opposed membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), a precursor to the European Union, in the 1975 referendum on sovereigntist grounds. In the 1980s, figures on the left of the party, including former Labourite Jim Sillars, adopted the rising EU as the basis for an independent state outside of Thatcherite Britain. A view would eventually pervade the SNP that Scotland should join a globalizing world where the traditional nation-state was waning, but the antique Union of 1707 was also being supplanted by new forms of transnational organization.

Globalization allowed a redefinition of Scottish nationalism, not as an insular project based in particularism and mythologized history, but as the vehicle for a cosmopolitan society whose stability was guaranteed by powerful institutions like the EU and NATO. Neighboring countries including Ireland and Norway would be seized upon as examples of successful secessionist states that had adapted to the new world, and quietly dropped when, as in the case of Ireland after the crash of the “Celtic Tiger” economy, they demonstrated the destructive contradictions of the new paradigm.

This was the Scottish version of a silent revolution taking place across the Western left. In the coming decades, it would hollow out Scottish nationalism as an intellectual project, just as it would Europe’s old social democratic parties. But none of that was obvious in the 1990s and 2000s, as Salmond proceeded on a long march to power, developing the artful and pugilistic style he is remembered for. He took opportunities to stamp his antiestablishment credentials on Westminster, riding roughshod over parliamentary tradition to attract attention, beginning with his interruption of Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson’s budget speech in 1988.

Meanwhile, he assiduously cultivated networks in civil society, schmoozing wherever possible with notables in Scotland’s Asian and Irish Catholic diasporas in a bid to shake an image of the SNP as Protestant nativists rooted in the country’s northeast. Salmond set his sights on the densely populated central belt, the habitat of a complacent and rightward-traveling Labour party.

This required an oppositional posture, from the Poll Tax and deindustrialization to nuclear weapons based on Scotland’s west coast. The strategy continued in opposition to Tony Blair’s war in Iraq, a seminal event in the decline of Scottish Labour (though the antiwar movement would initially benefit forces to the left of the SNP). The rise of street-protest movements in the vacuum of older left-wing traditions supplied the platform for Salmond to project an image of renegade outsider, facing down the Westminster establishment.

Salmond had taken a standoffish approach to the debates around a devolved parliament in Scotland, promoted by Labour as an alternative to independence. At first, he and the SNP treated it as such, and pursued their maximal demand. But after the Labour landslide in the 1997 British general election, in which the SNP also fared well, Salmond’s party backed the campaign to establish devolved government with substantial powers.

Personality Politics

A degree of mystery remains around why Salmond chose to resign his SNP leadership in 2000, even as the new Holyrood institutions opened the way to his dream of an independence challenge. He has claimed that the party needed a new figurehead, less reviled in the press. What is certain is that his return in 2004, with his young protégé Nicola Sturgeon as his deputy, tightened still further his grip on a party that had languished without him at the helm.

Salmond was an archetype for the rise of a new personalism in Western politics, as iconographic figures replaced mass membership organizations. Sometimes characterized as a throwback, this style of leadership in fact corresponds to class dealignments in an increasingly fractious social landscape. As his long-time associate, the Marxist economist George Kerevan, has noted:

Central to Salmond’s attempt to balance the classes was his conscious project to use his personal “magnetism” (as he saw it) to win the support of — and manipulate — various layers of Scottish, British and even international society, in order to achieve his aims. These included the Royal Bank of Scotland (of which Salmond was a onetime oil specialist), the small business sector (the Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland was for a time a virtual SNP front), the Catholic Church (whose hierarchy Salmond courted assiduously), the Scottish trades unions, David Cameron, Donald Trump (who outwitted Salmond) and even the Spanish Government.

This court politics indicates some unwelcome truths. Devolution-era Scotland is conservative, infested with patronage networks and dominated by buck-passing between layers of governance. The rhetoric of an inclusive and egalitarian national spirit, stoked by Salmond, was illustrated once he was in power by a few carefully chosen social reforms such as free university tuition and the abolition of prescription charges. But behind this image, state and corporate power has quietly consolidated.

Yet Salmond’s approach, against the foil of a discredited and disintegrating New Labour, proved successful. In 2007, Salmond brought his party to power with a minority administration. The 2011 Scottish elections delivered Westminster’s nightmare scenario, a stunning SNP majority with a mandate to pursue an independence referendum.

Independence Movement

Now at the height of his powers, Salmond’s populist instinct and tenacious pursuit of his end goal made him an enemy of the British establishment — and he was quite consciously and proudly so, even as he pursued a heavily caveated vision of an independent Scotland.

At first, the official Yes Scotland campaign was strangely apolitical and overmanaged. The Scottish government’s official prospectus for independence ceded sovereignty on key questions, not least currency, with Salmond’s preferred “currency union” with the remaining UK state providing the Westminster establishment a stick to beat him. In 2012, the SNP had also switched its policy to support Scottish membership of NATO, an organization the party had defied over Trident (the nuclear program based in the west of Scotland) and over the bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Salmond had shown consummate skill in negotiating the referendum into existence. But his campaigning efforts had to be saved by the broader independence movement that emerged after 2012. Quite beyond the control of the SNP, Yes Scotland, and the exclusive networks that governed the devolution era, the reservoir of anger against decades of neoliberalism and democratic decline burst.

By September 2014, Yes Scotland was aping the language and slogans of this wider movement, demanding an end to war, austerity, and political elitism. The vote for independence surged to unimagined highs — but at 45 percent, it fell short of victory. In the months before his death, Salmond would claim that his immediate decision to resign upon defeat was the worst political mistake of his life.

Sturgeon inherited a party booming in its membership and number of elected representatives. Salmond was one of them, reelected to the House of Commons in 2015. Yet at some point in the following years, the relationship between the two began to deteriorate. Differences were muted, but real — over the party’s orientation on the EU, for example (Salmond indicated to this obituary writer that he thought independence and Scottish EU membership were being too strongly conflated). Salmond’s decision to launch a current affairs show on RT (formerly Russia Today) in 2017 brought him criticism from the new leadership.

Fallout

Worse was to come. In August 2018, Salmond announced he was resigning his membership of the SNP in order to face allegations of sexual misconduct. A botched internal investigation by the Scottish government saw Salmond awarded over half a million pounds in compensation. A separate Police Scotland investigation resulted in charges against him including sexual assault and attempted rape. Salmond admitted to wrongdoing in his behavior toward colleagues, but denied any illegal actions. He was acquitted on all charges at trial.

This multicar pileup damaged the reputation of everyone it touched. The nucleus of the nationalist project — the relationship between Salmond and his onetime understudy — split, with the shock waves still reverberating to this day. Salmond’s death leaves his legal case against the Scottish government in doubt. He, at least, will never find out the conclusions of the separate Operation Branchform, the ongoing Police Scotland investigation into SNP finances, under which Sturgeon has been questioned and her husband, the former party chief executive, charged with embezzlement. The institutions of devolution, fostered by Salmond as proof of Scots’ native ability for self-rule, are today under enormous strain.

Salmond’s movement has ended up even more damaged. Despite attempts by the continuity SNP to keep up appearances, Scottish nationalism has decisively split. Salmond’s Alba party has languished and now faces life without its guiding force. But whether his former colleagues like it or not, this is the predicament faced by all Scottish nationalists. SNP leaders may have been playing the inevitable PR game in paying tributes to the man they once reviled. But they must also feel a poignant loss.

One trite phrase tells us that movements are bigger than individuals. But with the fountainhead of their political tradition stopped, SNP politicians can look about their ranks and see that he has no living successor. Worse, the contradictions of Salmond’s “independence-lite” program, made worse by the inflexible and dogmatic Sturgeon, have trapped the independence case. Sturgeon learned her teacher’s worst instincts — the court politics, ease with big business, and opportunism — while lacking his populist sensibility and taste for bold initiative.

Probably even in his youthful, radical days, Salmond saw the working class as little more than a stage army for the national cause. It would later be demoted to one constituency among many in his personalist campaign against Westminster. If the hidden secret of that society revealed itself in brief moments — the Poll Tax nonpayment campaign, the huge mobilizations against war, the height of the 2014 independence campaign — this wasn’t enough to make him a partisan in the cause of Scotland’s laboring majority.

But what his career suggests, above all, is the destabilization of the British political order — one for which Alex Salmond had such contempt, and which he played so well.