There’s a fourth person in this SNP leadership race, only he’s not on the ticket and he can’t be elected as leader. The former SNP leader and First Minister, Alex Salmond is using this chaotic leadership election to engineer his rehabilitation.
Ash Regan, the former community safety minister, who launched her leadership campaign on Friday is a Salmond protege. She echoed his call for an ‘independence convention’ to bring all independence parties together, including Mr Salmond’s breakaway Alba party.
This would propel Alex Salmond back into the centre stage of Scottish politics. He would be a big presence in such a body, given his experience and history – not to mention his ego. It would be the Salmond show redux.
Ash Regan is her own woman, of course. But her policy agenda is pure Alex Salmond.
This week we can expect the various factions that support gender reform and Net Zero to rain fire on Ash Regan if she appears to be making progress. The ‘continuity’ faction nearly drove Kate Forbes out of the campaign last week by a coordinated media assault on her Christian values and historic opposition to gay marriage. Regan will be accused of being a transphobic climate change denier who is in the pocket of a disgraced former SNP leader.
Salmond led the first ever SNP government in 2007 and its first landslide in 2011. He then secured the 2014 referendum, after which he stood down for Nicola Sturgeon. She effectively drove Salmond out of the SNP after he was accused of sexual misconduct in 2020. Now she is history.
Alex Salmond was, of course, exonerated by the highest courts in Scotland. Indeed, the Court of Session ordered Nicola Sturgeon’s government to pay him £512,000 in costs for acting ‘unlawfully’. The chief constable who ultimately presided over the abortive investigation of Salmond, one of the biggest in the history of Police Scotland involving 400 witness interviews, was one Iain Livingstone. He announced his resignation last week provoking a flurry of conspiracy theories. Salmond’s two bêtes noires are now history.
Ash Regan is her own woman, of course, a PR consultant who used to work for the left wing Common Weal think tank. But her policy agenda is pure Alex Salmond.
She will scrap the Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed by the Scottish parliament before Christmas, which Salmond has called ‘absurd’ and ‘self-indulgent nonsense’. Regan made her name by resigning as community safety minister over the Bill, which she said lacked adequate protections for women and girls. At her campaign launch, she cited the scandal of rapists being sent to women’s prisons as grounds for not proceeding with it.
Regan also said she will concentrate on growing the economy and protecting jobs in the North Sea oil and gas industry even if that means slowing Scotland’s transition to Net Zero. She seems relaxed about losing the Scottish Green party, the SNP’s coalition partner. Its leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, have anyway said they will ‘walk’ if the GRR Bill is scrapped or changed – which, under Regan, it would be.
Nicola Sturgeon was persuaded by the Greens that Scotland should ‘keep it in the ground’, accelerate the closure of the North Sea and oppose development of the new Cambo and Rosebank fields. Regan says it makes little sense importing oil and gas when Scotland has its own hydrocarbon resources.
Salmond was an oil analyst for the Royal Bank of Scotland before he entered politics. He was converted to green energy in the late noughties and was a prominent advocate of carbon capture and storage.
Regan has also backed Salmond’s call for a rethink of Sturgeon’s policy to rejoin the European Union after independence – a cast iron commitment of the Scottish government since the Brexit referendum. But Alex Salmond has been travelling around Scotland for the last two years arguing that it would be preferable and quicker to join the European Free Trade Area, EFTA. The so-called ‘Norway option’, it would allow early entry into the single market and the European Economic Area.
Finally, Ash Regan has dropped Nicola Sturgeon’s much criticised ‘de facto referendum’ and started talking instead about a ‘voter empowerment mechanism’. It is not be entirely clear what the difference is here. Regan also claims she would regard a 50 per cent plus vote at the next election as a mandate to commence negotiations on independence. But, like Sturgeon’s de facto plan, this virtual plebiscite faces the rather obvious problem that the UK government would not recognise it. Nor indeed would international bodies like the European Union.
These departures from Sturgeon’s green and pro-trans policy agenda will provoke a fierce response if Regan’s campaign gets traction. So far it hasn’t – she is still a relative unknown.
But she insists she is ready for it. And so is Salmond. His tank isn’t empty and at 68 he is still relatively young – at least by the standards of US politics. But is Scotland ready for the return of the nationalist Lazarus?
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