17.10.2024

Symbol of fatuity

Beginning as a left nationalist, he ended up as a nothing. A common pattern. Mike Macnair argues that claims for Scottish independence are illusory because small nations can never really be independent

Alex Salmond, former leader of the Scottish National Party, died unexpectedly on October 12. The ‘instant response’ of other politicians displayed knee-jerk de mortuis nil nisi bonum (nothing but good about the dead): Salmond was characterised as an important political figure who had changed British politics.¹

In one respect this is certainly true. Plebiscitary fraudster David Cameron set three traps for his political competitors. The first was the 2011 alternative vote referendum - the ‘price’ for Liberal Democrat participation in the 2010-15 Con-Dem coalition government (a price as valuable as a £7 note). The second was the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. This was primarily a trap for the Labour Party, conned by Cameron into taking the lead role in defending the union, then knifed by Cameron’s English nationalist speech on the day after the referendum. The result was an SNP landslide at the 2015 UK general election. Here the SNP (and Salmond in his agreement with Cameron to the referendum) served as the Tories’ political instrument.

The result was Cameron’s third and highest-stakes gamble with plebiscite frauds - this time to ‘do over’ the Labour Party in England: the 2016 Brexit referendum. Cameron’s project initially failed - Brexit passed, and Jeremy Corbyn avoided being the figurehead for ‘Remain’. It was not until the Corbyn leadership let Keir Starmer as shadow Europe minister pursue persistent anti-Brexit parliamentary games, tailing the Tory remainers and nailing Labour as dishonest, anti-Brexit manoeuvrers, that Boris Johnson was finally able in 2019 to cash Cameron’s expected gains from the 2016 fraud. But Salmond deserves, along with Cameron and Johnson, whatever odium is due for Brexit.

More generally, Salmond’s career can stand as a symbol of the emptiness of small-nation nationalism, except as an instrument for larger states and political forces; and, specifically, as a symbol of the fatuity of left nationalism.

Career

Salmond entered politics when he joined the SNP in his first year at St Andrews University in 1973. In 1979, after the defeat of the devolution referendum of March 1 (‘yes’ got 51.6% of the vote, but the referendum rules required 40% of registered voters) he was part of the creation of the ‘79 Group’. This argued for a left turn of the SNP (previously mainly based in rural areas, and seen as ‘Tartan Tories’) to present itself as a left alternative to Labour and seek to win urban seats; it was to campaign for an independent Scottish socialist republic.

In 1980, the 79 Group was reinforced by the supporters of Jim Sillars from the Scottish Labour Party - a 1976 initiative to create a left-nationalist formation. The SLP had been subject to an entry operation by the International Marxist Group, which was shortly purged; as is usual when left projects seek to purge Trot entryists, the result was to create a climate of purges and an anti-democratic appearance, so that the SLP withered. Sillars argued in the SNP for a direct-action campaign in support of devolution, starting with an abortive attempt at an occupation of the building intended for the Scottish assembly under the devolution plans.

The 79 Group was in autumn 1981 invited to send a speaker to Sinn Féin’s conference, giving rise to Tory press witch-hunting (the invitation was declined). In June 1982 the SNP voted to ban factions: both the 79 Group, and Winifred Ewing’s right-nationalist ‘Campaign for Nationalism in Scotland’. Not long after, Salmond and other 79 Groupers were expelled for violating the ban; but Salmond was readmitted in 1984, and by 1985 had become the SNP’s publicity director.

In the 1987 general election, he was SNP candidate for the rural and fishing industry constituency, Banff and Buchan, and took it from the Conservatives (he was to hold it until 2010, when he stood down). But this was by no means the end of Salmond as a left nationalist. On March 15 1988, as a pretty new MP, he disrupted the budget speech to protest the unconstitutionality of the introduction of the poll tax in Scotland, achieving instant fame and flagging the SNP as a radical anti-Tory party. In November of the same year, Jim Sillars won the Glasgow Govan by-election on a swing of 38.4% from Labour.

In this context, the SNP left clearly had the wind in their sails, and when Colin Wilson resigned as SNP leader in 1990, the choice was between Salmond and Margaret Ewing, also seen as a leftwinger. Sillars backed Ewing, but Salmond won.

Though coming from the SNP left, Salmond was an economics graduate and had been employed in 1980-88 by the Royal Bank of Scotland. His election thus falls into the context of the strong ideological ascendancy of marginalist economics and financial engineering on the post-Eurocommunist centre-left. This ideological agenda resurfaced in the SNP idea - between 2000 and the 2008 crash - that Scotland could imitate Ireland as a ‘Celtic Tiger’ centre of financial services. Salmond thus committed to a radical reduction in corporation tax after independence - a commitment abandoned by Nicola Sturgeon after 2014.

Salmond held the leadership till 2000. In this period the SNP vote remained steady at the 1992 and 1997 general elections, though Sillars lost Govan in 1992 and, on the other hand, in 1997 the collapse of the Tory vote led to the SNP gaining three rural seats. In essence, the belief (misplaced in 1992) that Labour could get the Tories out at Westminster held the SNP down to a limited vote and a rural electoral base, in spite of Salmond’s broadly left orientation.

Salmond elected to back the Blair government’s limited devolution proposals in 1997, generating opposition from both SNP leftists and hard-line independence advocates; and the scheme won. But, at first, Labour seemed to have successfully neutered the SNP through the devolution regime, with Labour as the clear largest minority in the 1999 Scottish parliament elections, which formed a coalition administration with the Lib Dems that continued until 2007.

Salmond, meanwhile, had been a ‘naughty boy’ from the British state’s point of view, by criticising the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999. Stories of dictatorial behaviour on the part of the SNP leadership, which if he had backed the bombing would have been evidence of “strong leadership”, became publicised by the press as “suppressing democracy within party ranks”.² Salmond was induced to resign as leader, but replaced by his chosen successor, John Swinney - another man from the financial services sector (Scottish Amicable Life Insurance 1992-97) and supporter of the pro-devolution ‘gradualist’ wing of the SNP.

This was the high period of the left-nationalist Scottish Socialist Party: it had won one seat at Holyrood in 1999 (Tommy Sheridan), but that rose to six in 2003; the Greens also increased their seats from one to seven. The SNP vote went down by 5% and they lost seven seats. This poor showing led to Swinney resigning as SNP leader. Salmond, who had been vocal in opposition to the Iraq war, was triumphally returned as leader with 75% of the vote. The SNP campaigned on an anti-war platform in 2007; meanwhile, the senseless 2006 split in the SSP knocked both wings of that party out of Holyrood; the Greens also sharply lost ground. The SNP narrowly edged Labour out, gaining enough seats to form a Holyrood coalition with the Greens; Salmond became Scots First Minister.

2008 saw the death of the dream of an independent Scotland as a ‘Celtic Tiger’ financial powerhouse, with the crash and bailouts of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland. But the creation of the Con-Dem coalition at Westminster in 2010 restored the conditions for SNP success: the idea that the Tories were entrenched at Westminster and the SNP (and perhaps independence?) could shelter Scotland from Toryism. The 2011 Holyrood election saw the SNP make sharp gains at the expense of both Labour and the Lib Dems. The SNP now had a Holyrood majority, and the question of an independence referendum was posed. After extensive negotiations, agreement between Edinburgh and Westminster on the referendum terms was reached in October 2013, and the referendum went ahead on September 18 2014.

Resignation

This returns us to where we began: Scottish independence was defeated. Salmond resigned as SNP leader and First Minister, and was replaced by his preferred candidate, lawyer Nicola Sturgeon. In the 2015 UK general election the Labour Party was electorally wiped out in Scotland, losing 40 of its 41 seats, while the Lib Dems lost 10 out of 11. The Holyrood elections were deferred to 2016; in these, Labour was pushed into third place by a Tory recovery, and the Lib Dems continued to lose ground, while the Greens gained, and the SNP lost its absolute majority. The principal winners from the 2014 referendum were, therefore, the Tories.

The subsequent history is of relatively marginal importance. Salmond won a Westminster seat (Gordon, south of Aberdeen) from the Lib Dems in 2015, but lost it to the Tories in 2017. He then took a job as a presenter with Russia Today, repeating his 1999 scandalous breach of the Nato solidarity required of senior British politicians.

At this point Sturgeon, seeing a need to take political distance from Salmond, seems to have decided to push hard #MeToo complaints against Salmond: the #MeToo movement was in any case then at its height, with ‘Pestminster’ figuring heavily, and had brought down SNP minister Mark McDonald in November 2017. The Holyrood internal complaints procedure against Salmond was challenged in court, and condemned in January 2019 as procedurally unfair and tainted with apparent bias;³ the Scottish public prosecutors immediately doubled down with a criminal prosecution of Salmond for sexual assault and rape, which ended in his acquittal in March 2020 - but not without Salmond admitting to conduct that, though not technically assault or rape, clearly amounted to exploitation of his authority for sexual advantage.⁴ The Alba Party, created for Salmond to offer a more ‘radical’ alternative to the SNP, fell flat, with 1.66% of the vote in the 2021 Holyrood elections.

More recently, Nicola Sturgeon announced her resignation (February 15 2023) - brought down by the implausibility of her proposal to treat the next general election as a referendum, by the ability of the Tories to turn the ‘gender recognition’ issue against her and by the alleged financial scandal that was to see her husband’s arrest in April and her own arrest in June 2023. Current polling for the Holyrood election due next year (or at the latest by 2026) suggests a sharp Labour recovery.⁵

The advertising funding of the media, and especially the daily press, amplifies the proprietors’ chosen voices and drowns out or silences other voices. As a result it allows the management of electoral processes by the choice of ‘scandals’ and ‘issues’ to be agenda-setting. The use of these powers can be seen in relation to the SNP, to force the party towards the political centre, to become merely an alternative bribe-taking group of professional politicians.

In reality, this can already be seen in the election of Salmond as leader: a ‘radical’ project, but also one that accepted the market order. It is also visible in the witch-hunt of the 79 Group over Sinn Féin, in the attack on Salmond in 1999-2000, and most recently the attack on him in 2018-20. The point is not that he was not guilty of abuses: it is that the choice of who and what to pursue served state and newspaper-proprietor interests (as was also true in the case of Tommy Sheridan).

In the push for the hope of independence, the SNP was induced to drop opposition to Nato in 2012, with the result that the call for getting rid of the nuclear submarine base at Faslane appeared inconsistent. In 1997 the SNP had called for a referendum on the monarchy; this too was dropped. The line of the SNP in the 1990s-2000s had been to adopt the euro; this had to be abandoned, and in 2012-14 debates it became clear that the SNP hoped to cling to the pound. And so on. In steering quite a lot of this through, Salmond became the sort of ex-leftist who attracts praise as a ‘statesman’.

But 2014 failed to achieve independence, and the Tory governments after 2015 proved to be willing to play hardball with the SNP. It turned out that there was no alternative route to independence that did not involve an illegal unilateral declaration of independence and a split in the British armed forces and security apparat. Indeed, the SNP majority and minority Scots administrations were not able to offer obviously better government and public services than the Westminster government in England. Forced into the political centre ground in order to govern, the SNP was just as unable to make fundamental change as Labour or the Tories (or the Lib Dems), and were reduced to tinkering and dodgy dealing.

Throughout the period of Alex Salmond’s political life, the SNP could be talked up when it served Tory electoral interests, or when it could be used to put pressure on Labour to move more into the bribable centre. Or talked down - as it was between the mid-1990s and 2003, and as it has been since 2022 - when the Tories had lost so much electoral support that the state needed to put its Labour ‘second eleven’ into office.

Independence

2014 failed to achieve independence at the end of the day not because of dirty tricks from Westminster, but because the project was only persuasive to 44.7% of voters on an 85% turnout. 55.3% voted ‘no’: a clear, not a marginal rejection. This rejection seems to have been primarily motivated by fears for the economic consequences of Scottish independence. The ‘yes’ vote was a vote to gamble with the Scots economy, and this character as a gamble was reflected in the fact that it was primarily a vote of the youth, of men and of the worst-off (which is not quite the same thing as the working class).⁶

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the SNP’s offer was ‘independence in Europe’, analogising Scotland to the 26-county state in Ireland and to other smaller countries in the EU. This had a certain level of plausibility, but was always illusory: both France and Spain would veto such an encouragement to their own secessionists. European backing for Scottish independence would need something a lot more hard-edged to happen before it would become likely: eg, a Franco-German-led Europe breaking with the USA and, in consequence, resurrecting France’s ‘Auld Alliance’ with Scotland as a full military alliance against England.

Without this prospect, Scots independence would only work economically if the remaining UK was prepared to grant Scotland highly favourable deals for trade, freedom of movement, and so on. It should have already been apparent that this was unlikely from the way in which Scotland was forced into the union by the English Alien Act of 1705, to block Scots trade with England as a response to the Scots Act of Security 1704.⁷ (After Brexit, it should be even more obvious, given the very tough negotiations between the EU and the UK and the limited concessions made to the UK.)

More recently, the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and tsarist empires at the end of World War I in each case led to economic regression. The Austro-Hungarian case is particularly clear; but Polish independence, severing western Poland from its existing markets in Germany and eastern Poland from its existing markets in Russia and the Baltic states, produced sharp weakening of industry and the working class, and a clear ascendancy of the szlachta feudal nobility between the wars. Only in Czechoslovakia, which the Entente powers promoted as an ally in central Europe, was pre-war prosperity preserved.

This was not an unpredictable result. It was actually predicted both by the Austro-Marxist writers on the national question (Otto Bauer and Karl Renner) and by Rosa Luxemburg. The Bolsheviks’ line was to support the right to self-determination, but to argue against separation where the issue was actually posed. It was only Karl Kautsky who argued that states must be nation-states (and this position led him in 1917 to support the war aims of the Entente powers).⁸

Nor should we imagine that more recent history argues for separatism. We have, after all, seen 77 years of neocolonialism since Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947, leaving aside many more recently ‘decolonised’ countries; and in spite of the ‘neo’ in neocolonialism, the form of economic dependence, irrespective of formal legal independence, goes back to Dutch relations to Baltic countries in the 17th century, and to British and French relations to Latin American countries in the 19th.

In the feudal world, arms production and actual military operations were artisanal in character. Hence Scotland could obtain independence from England, Poland from encroaching Germans, Japan from China. Under world capitalism, in contrast, arms manufacture and military operations are industrial-scale. Hence political independence only yields economic independence if your state territory contains a powerful enough arms industry to be able to act independently and to operate effective protectionism. Conversely, the lack of economic independence unavoidably produces political dependency: very visible, for example, in 26-county Eire’s relations with the UK between the creation of the Free State in 1922 and EU entry in 1973.

Scotland is currently not a colony of England, but a home territory subsidised (as Wales, the Six Counties and the ‘peripheral’ parts of England also are) out of the proceeds of London-run offshore operations. An independent Scotland in the 21st century would, unavoidably, be a neocolony of someone; most probably of England.

Left?

I said at the outset that Salmond’s career could serve, specifically, as a symbol of the fatuity of left nationalism. My reasons for saying this were partly that - as we have seen over the course of this narrative - Salmond began as a left nationalist in the 79 Group, and in certain respects continued to be a left nationalist down to the point of his taking a job presenting for Russia Today - not actually left, but part of the common delusion of a part of the left that the FSB regime in Russia headed by Vladimir Putin is in some weird way ‘progressive’. But this ‘leftism’ withers away into nothing.

Secondly, Salmond’s career began at the time of the collapse of Jim Sillars’ and others’ 1976 Scottish Labour Party project into the SNP left; and it saw in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s the rise of Scottish Militant Labour, its successors in the Scottish Socialist Alliance and Scottish Socialist Party - and the abrupt fall of the SSP, leaving nothing behind but wreckage. And both Salmond and the SSP display the complete uselessness of leftists relying on capitalist political techniques of media management, rather than steadily criticising the advertising-funded media as an engine of political corruption and building up our own workers’ and party media.

This relates back in turn to the points I have just made about the fact that small-nation independence is illusory and leads merely to functioning as an instrument of some larger state or force; and that breaking up larger states leads to economic regression. By leading to economic regression, it weakens the position of the working class as a class.

The political left is significant (to the extent that it is significant at all) through its connection to the dynamic of the working class as a class tending to organise itself for its collective interests. The imagination of the left that it can jump on nationalist bandwagons is, then, to abandon this core class perspective, and as a result to abandon the reason for its own existence. It is unsurprising that the result should be collapse.

1. Eg. www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/13/alex-salmond-had-huge-political-impact-says-john-swinney-scotland.↩︎

2. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1349165/Scramble-to-lead-SNP-as-Salmond-quits.html.↩︎

3. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-46428570.↩︎

4. There is a brief summary at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Salmond_sexual_harassment_scandal.↩︎

5. Eg, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Scottish_Parliament_election.↩︎

6. Eg, www.france24.com/en/20140919-why-scotland-said-no-independence-scottish-referendum-uk; lordashcroftpolls.com/2014/09/scotland-voted; strathprints.strath.ac.uk/53562/1/CurticeJ_IPPI_2015_How_Scotland_voted_economic_perceptions_in_the_Scottish_independence_referendum.pdf.↩︎

7. scottishhistorysociety.com/the-union-of-1707-the-historical-context; T Devine (ed) ‘The making of the union of 1707: history with a history’, in Scotland and the union 1707-2007 Edinburgh 2008 chapter 2.↩︎

8. K Kautsky, ‘Nationality and internationality’ (1907-08) translated by B Lewis in Critique Vol 37 (2009), pp371-89, Vol 38 (2010), pp143-63. The 1917 texts are Die Befreiung der Nationen and Serbien und Belgien in der Geschichte (Stuttgart 1917).↩︎