The sudden death of former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond has been met with glowing tributes from across the political spectrum throughout Britain.
There is no denying that Salmond was a towering figure of Scottish politics and the independence movement. But there are some things about the legacy of ‘Big Eck’ that risk being forgotten.
Salmond’s political skills and passion are duly praised by those who stood alongside him and those who stood against him.
Even the Tories and mainstream Unionist media – who not a few times portrayed Salmond and the SNP as narrow-minded nationalists, petty grievance-mongers, utopian dreamers, and even subversive radical separatists – are pouring admiration onto their former adversary.
It is a sign as certain as any that the former First Minister of Scotland had made it into ‘the club’, despite the recent ruin of his career and reputation.
Alex Salmond made the SNP into what it is today. This is said by practically everyone, but without much thought of what it really means.
The focus is on the legend of how Salmond led the party from the relative fringes to become the established party of government in Scotland. But little is said about what this did to the SNP.
This silence is particularly awkward now, as everyone in Scotland is aware of how the SNP’s internal coalition and popular support have almost completely unravelled in little over a year.
There are many supporters of Salmond who lay the blame for this on former leaders Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. But this short-sighted view ignores how the seeds of the SNP breakdown were sown by the very man who built its political machine.
Party of big business
It was Salmond, the ex-economist from the Royal Bank of Scotland who – well before the party formed its first minority government in 2007 – made the close connections between the SNP and big business in Scotland.
The party would have lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the business class, and found it practically impossible to govern Scotland, were it not for their friendship with the banks and financiers in Edinburgh, in particular the Charlotte Street Partners.
By shaking hands and clinking champagne glasses with CEOs and managing directors, Salmond was able to get them to overlook independence – which few of them supported – while letting them know that the SNP were always ready to receive donations, and the First Minister was always ready to receive a delegation of business leaders.
To our ruling class, this is how politics is done. And Salmond was always a keen and co-operative partner.
Despite the occasional populist rhetoric, his mission was always to ingratiate himself and his party with the establishment. He always hoped this deal with the devil would one day garner permission for Scottish self-determination.
Under Salmond, the SNP itself became a bureaucratic, stage-managed affair. He is praised for his opposition to the Iraq war and the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
But it is apparently forgotten how he got the party to drop its opposition to NATO at its 2012 conference.
This historic stance of the SNP was once held as a fundamental point of the party’s left wing, of which Salmond was once a member.
This betrayal provoked a split within the party’s Members of Scottish Parliament, and its youth wing.
It perhaps marked the beginning of the bureaucratic methods used at SNP party conferences, whereby the leadership forces through their agenda with minimal debate and little rights for opposing delegates.
Alongside this bureaucratisation of the party machine, was its practical merger with the devolved Scottish state.
Much attention has been drawn to how the top leadership clique of the SNP and Scottish Government overlap with the supposedly impartial civil service.
This was pointed out most of all by Salmond and his supporters, as they accused Nicola Sturgeon of running a conspiracy against Salmond!
Salmond’s latter-day criticisms of Sturgeon’s “second-rate tin-pot dictatorship” were particularly ironic, as it was Salmond who first led the party in a presidential style, and headed the bourgeois clique that still maintains itself at the top of the party.
Spurned by the party after launching his post-ministerial career as a talk show host on Russian TV – offending the party’s liberal sensibilities – Salmond infamously found himself in court on a host of charges relating to sexual harassment and rape.
Having put about the notion that Sturgeon and the Scottish Government were out to get him, the trial resulted in his acquittal.
It did not help, however, that his own defence lawyer admitted to the ugly reputation Salmond had behind closed doors. The whole episode was a juicy psychodrama for the press, out of which Salmond attempted to relaunch his political career.
‘Good old days’ are over
Reinventing himself as a hard-line pro-independence critic of the SNP, Salmond took whatever malcontents he could find to forge a new party, Alba.
With its founding leader gone, and having made little impact in the opinion polls, it seems unlikely that the party has any future now.
With Alba, Salmond attempted to repeat the formula that won the SNP its top position in Scotland.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the SNP flanked to the left of the Labour party – not difficult to do when the Labour Prime Minister is Tony Blair – with numerous reformist policies and pledges.
Many of these policies, of course, were a genuine benefit to the working class in Scotland. Some, however, such as abolishing council tax, are infamous for having never once been seriously raised outside of election time.
It worked, however, in cutting ties with the ‘Tartan Tory’ image of the past and creating a bright new social-democratic façade to the SNP.
While this reformist strategy worked well for the SNP twenty years ago, when British capitalism was in a relatively healthy state and could afford certain reforms, it has now begun to break down completely.
Now Salmond’s old pal John Swinney holds the top job in the Scottish Government and is forced to admit that austerity is on the order of the day.
The era of Holyrood reformism – first devised by Salmond – is over.
With the death of this archetypal bourgeois political opportunist, comes the severing of another thread that connected the SNP to what are now its ‘good old days’.
The party now keeps all the negative sides of Salmond’s legacy, with almost none of the ‘positive’.
