Watching Alex Salmond rail against Nicola Sturgeon for sidetracking the Scottish independence movement with gender identity ideology is both uncanny and oddly nostalgic. Salmond was Sturgeon’s mentor and is largely responsible for putting her in the post she now holds.
For ten magical years between 2004 and 2014, they were the dream team of Scottish politics. Together they wrested control of Holyrood from Labour, lead a nationalist march through the institutions and civil society, and convinced 45 per cent of Scots to vote for secession. They made history and came damn near close to unmaking the United Kingdom.
Now Salmond has scolded his protege in a Burns Supper speech in Dundee that is being touted by people with a limited understanding of Scottish politics as ‘devastating’ to Sturgeon. It is not, but it does make some worthwhile points and it makes them fairly well.
Sturgeon has been damaged but there is no serious threat to her leadership or her political future
Salmond contrasts his coalition-building approach to independence with Sturgeon’s red-line drawing purism and dalliance with what he regards as fringe political priorities. He hails his work with Catholics, Scots of Asian origin and businesspeople to bring them on board.
There is some self-hagiography here – this is Alex Salmond we’re talking about – but there is a lot of truth in it, too. Nearly half of Scots didn’t wake up on 18 September 2014 and decide to vote Yes for the hell of it. Rather, it was the culmination of years of work by Salmond and others to turn the SNP into the political vehicle of the Scottish people and then to convince those people to embrace the party’s goal of independence. Herculean efforts were put into winning over groups long suspicious of the SNP, some of them with good reason, and building a coalition that could withstand appeals to old loyalties and fading identities.
Without uttering her name, Salmond excoriates his successor’s decision to abandon this approach in favour of aligning the SNP with unpopular policies and minority ideologies:
I thought everybody who wanted to see an independent country understood that you must open your heart and your mind to every part and section of that population. To get to a position where you say to a majority of our people that you cannot have single-sex spaces – prized and worked and strived for – because of some daft ideology imported from elsewhere and, as we’ve seen, imperfectly understood by its proponents in Scotland, borders on the totally absurd.
Salmond is a showman but the exasperation comes across as sincere. Some Sturgeonistas accuse him of latching onto opposition to the Gender Recognition Reform Bill just to stick it to his old ally and new enemy. There probably is an element of that. But if he simply wanted to attack Sturgeon, she has plenty other failings higher up the hierarchy of priorities for the average Scot, not least health and education.
No, this is the real Salmond, the Salmond of old. The hair is thinner, the coupon ruddier, the jowls jowlier, but the man and his brand of politics are unmistakable. It is the Salmond that a generation of Scots, your humble correspondent among them, found it impossible not to vote for in 2007.
The split between Salmond and Sturgeon is not only personal and tactical but generational. He is a boomer and came of age politically in a much more British and culturally conservative Scotland. He reveres the House of Commons, felt genuine warmth towards the Queen, and respects the role of churchmen and other traditional authority figures. He revels in debate, in the clash of ideas, but is relaxed in the company of people he disagrees with.
Sturgeon is a Gen-Xer. Her political consciousness was formed in a Scotland that had gone through the nationalist spring of the 1970s and was battling the new enemy of Thatcherism. She looks to continental and other political settlements, prefers technocracy to tradition, and seeks the approval of activists rather than authorities. Never a great parliamentarian, she prefers the managed democracy of interest groups and their top-down priorities and definitions to the messy pluralism of debate guided by individual conscience.
A few years ago, I argued that Sturgeon’s party should be thought of as the New SNP, given how its leader had replaced independence with progressivism as its central purpose. That fresh purpose has not brought Scotland any closer to independence and Salmond points to a poll showing a six per cent slip in support for a breakaway. The same poll also records a fall in Sturgeon’s personal approval rating.
Public opinion on the constitution fluctuates and it’s too early to say whether recent controversies over transgender prisoners will have any lasting effect. Sturgeon remains popular with voters aged 16 to 49, underscoring my point about generational differences. Salmond, incidentally, would kill for Sturgeon’s polling numbers. Only 14 per cent of Scots hold a favourable view of him while only 12 per cent feel the same about his Alba party.
Salmond’s Dundee speech is admired by people who want to believe Sturgeon is fatally wounded by the various rows over trans rights. She has been damaged but there is no serious threat to her leadership or her political future. She is still well-placed to decide when and under what circumstances she leaves the leadership of the SNP and the premiership of Scotland. Not because she has any great achievements to her name – she has almost none – but because she has excelled at taking total control of her party and imposing her will on every part of it. It’s a formidable feat and one she learnt from the only other SNP leader to pull it off: Alex Salmond.
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