Alex Salmond: rise and fall of an ultra-nationalist 

It is fitting that an ultra-nationalist like Alex  Salmond should end his days in the ultra-nationalist West Balkans. He was attending a conference in Skopje, hosted by the most ethno-nationalist, even supremacist, government in Europe, which has set back North Macedonia’s entry into EU for years. 

The eulogies for Salmond have been uncritical to the point of parody. They are mainly written or broadcast by elite national media journalists, who left the small news parish of Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1970s and 1980s to make their name in British national journalism, leaving behind a parish pump media in Scotland.

  Salmond is a very recognisable political operator – the cynical populist who whips up emotion about the dreaded foreign “other”, who needs to be defeated so that full happiness might be enjoyed by the  native population.

We have seen it in Quebec, in Catalonia, in Serbia, in all the tiny successor states of Yugoslavia in the Western Balkans. Above all we have seen it in Ireland, especially in the North, where politics is based on endless re-fighting the 1920 war of independence which resulted in partition.

Most Scottish politicians of high ability – Gordon Brown, Liam Fox, Robin Cook, Teddy Taylor, John Smith, Fettes-educated Tony Blair, Loretto-educated Alistair Darling, to name just a few — have given into what German historians of the post-Roman empire era called the Drang nach Süden – the search for the warm south of northern European tribes hoping to escape from their frozen unfriendly territories.

So, too, ambitious Scottish politicians or political journalists — like countless others — have headed south to make a real name and real money. The brain drain to London has been going on since at least the 18th century.

Salmond challenged this convention. Every bit as brilliant as his peers, he stayed in Scotland, and used his tongue and pen to draw a picture of a Scotland liberated from England and the English, with a shining new future as a small independent European state.

He caught the mood of the anger against the excessive centralisation of the Thatcher years. He depicted the most ideologically driven government in a century dismantling the wider British state and economy to profit a greedy cabal of rent-seekers and profit-stakers in the narrow elite that came to rule Britain in the 1980s. He argued that Thatcherism had been helped by the Labour Party and trade unions, who embraced political stupidity with such fervour.

A clever economist and gifted journalist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, he painted a picture of Scotland being denied the profits of North Sea energy which, once retaken by the Edinburgh elites, would turn Scotland into a model Nordic style Social Democracy.

He was Scotland’s Boris Johnson, a silver-tongued demagogue, who believed that quitting a successfully working European Union that respected national identity was the answer to 21st century problems. We have seen in the Tory populism of separating Britain from Europe the  damage done to the U.K. economy and the hopes of its young citizens. The Scots also damaged themselves by succumbing to the ideology of nationalist separatism. (Full disclosure: I was born in Lanarkshire to a Scottish mother and after my father’s early death grew up bathed in the importance of Scotland.)

Even Labour and the Lib Dems swallowed some of the Salmond snake oil, with John Smith and Charles Kennedy placing themselves at the head of giant citizens’ marches and assemblies calling for a Bill of Rights. Just like Tories parroting Nigel Farage lines on the EU and then being surprised when voters voted for Reform, Labour and the LibDems were fellow-travellers, using the Salmond route map of differentiation  from non-Scots in the 4 nation union of the United Kingdom.

His apparent success in replacing Labour as the dominant party in Scotland with an SNP majority in Holyrood after decades of Labour one-party state rule was actually the beginning of the end for Salmondism. As First Minister, Salmond was unable to deliver good government. Education and health care, fields in which Scots had basked in the glory of providing the dominies and doctors of the British empire, began to worsen seriously under the SNP.

I loved tussling with him in the House of Commons. He had no side and just enjoyed the debate for debate’s sake. He sided with the pro-Putin groupies in Europe, claiming that Putin’s “patriotism” was “entirely reasonable”. In 1999 Tony Blair and Robin Cook decided to call time on the decade of Serb terror and torture in the successor states to the former Yugoslavia. Under John Major and the Tories, the Foreign Office had shamelessly appeased Milosevic.

Blair put together an intervention force under NATO and the EU with support from the US, France and Germany. The Milosevic era of ethnic cleansing and Srebrenica style genocidal massacres came to an end. Salmond seemed unable to criticise Putin or European would-be mini-Putinists. His Strangers’ Bar bonhomie, always reinforced by a glass of something in his hand, still made him great company in the Commons but there were disturbing Me Too reports emerging.

In the end they did for him and he turned viciously on his chosen successor, Nicola Sturgeon, even founding a rival Scottish separatist party to the SNP called Alba. These divisions and the very clear failures of government by the SNP and internal corruption collapsed the number of SNP seats in the election year to just 9 MPs joining minor single issue populist parties like Reform or the Greens. 

Salmond’s career was over long before he died. Meanwhile Scots MPs are back in power as Ministers in a Labour government. If the Tories are to return they too will have to turn their backs on Salmond-style populism and nationalist demagogy and reach out to Scottish voters who love their country but want to work with partner nations south of the border, and indeed, across the Irish Sea and Channel.

Denis MacShane is a former Minister of Europe. His latest book is Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 (Biteback)

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