George Kerevan reflects on the life and legacy of Scottish politician Alex Salmond

The death of Alex Salmond, just shy of his 70^th birthday, is not just a political shock but marks the definitive end of an era in Scottish politics. To say this may sound trite but it is merely to recognise that the constitutional history of Scotland will now forever be divided between ‘before’ Salmond and ‘after’ Salmond. What will history make of the man?

Salmond began his political career in the 1970s at a time when Scotland was in ferment. The end of the long, post-war international boom coincided with the collapse of Scotland’s traditional heavy industries, precipitating deindustrialisation and recession. This was compounded by rampant inflation following the 1973 Yom-Kippur War and the ensuing massive industrial unrest. The political result was the resurgence of significant popular Home Rule and Independence currents for the first time since the First World War, as the British ruling class and its agents (including the Labour Government) failed to find a way out of the crisis.

Alex Salmond embodied and personified these developments. Yet he combined this implicit threat to British capitalist institutions with his own unique version of Bonapartist populism. His was a personalised politics that – in the end – always placated the conservative elements of Scottish bourgeois and petty bourgeois society.  

The result was a political style which involved using the mass independence movement that emerged in the early 2000s to extract political and economic concessions from the ruling order – then retreating before the weight of Scottish and British bourgeois and (certainly north of the border) petty bourgeois opinion. Alex Salmond came closer than anyone to breaking up the archaic British state in the post-war period. But his failure to succeed in this goal – given the latent possibility in 2014 of a popular, anti-UK majority – has much to do with his own style of politics.

Central to Salmond’s attempt to balance the classes was his conscious project to use his personal “magnetism” (as he saw it) to win the support of – and manipulate – various layers of Scottish, British and even international society, in order to achieve his aims. These included the Royal Bank of Scotland (of which Salmond was a onetime oil specialist), the small business sector (The Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland was for a time a virtual SNP front), the Catholic Church (whose hierarchy Salmond courted assiduously), the Scottish trades unions, David Cameron, Donald Trump (who outwitted Salmond) and even the Spanish Government.

I remember being carpeted by Alex when we were both SNP MPs. He was furious that I had launched an All-Party Group in support of the Catalan independence struggle. Alex was concerned that this would prejudice his discrete negotiations with the Spanish Prime Minister not to veto Scotland’s joining the EU. Frankly, this suggested to me that Salmond had delusions regarding his negotiating skills.

Yet in saying this, it is important to grasp that the various institutions and classes in Scotland and the UK were in turmoil. Salmond’s success as a politician – effectively securing a popular victory in the1997 devolution referendum, winning an outright SNP majority in the 2011 Holyrood election, thereby actually pressuring David Cameron to conceding an independence vote – was the result of manipulating these very real tectonic plates. In that sense, he personified the political age.

Salmond’s weakness lay in his inability – his conscious failure – to unleash the popular indy movement against the British state. The SNP members – at least before the mass influx that followed the 2014 referendum – adored Salmond. In turn he courted them, ensuring that the party was highly democratic and responsive to the base. To see Salmond in operation at SNP conferences was a lesson in populist politics.

But in the end, Salmond started to believe in his own prowess as “the leader”. This created a political model that was hijacked by the considerably less able Nicola Sturgeon (and her shadowy spouse Peter Murrell) who effectively Stalinised the SNP machinery, turning the members into automatons. It is no accident that when Salmond formed the Alba Party in 2021, most of the pre-2014 activists quit the SNP to join him.

Salmond’s ability to court the SNP membership, especially in its pre-devolution days, allowed him to outmanoeuvre the party’s traditional petty bourgeois leadership and eventually gain control himself. In this he rode the wave of former and disillusioned Labour Party members gravitating to the SNP and shifting its focus from cultural to economic struggle against the British state. Salmond himself was never a Labour Party member, but he was impacted by the 1968 revolutionary movement and was for a brief time in the late Seventies associated with the International Marxist Group (which is where I first met him).

But Salmond was never particularly ideological or intellectual in the manner of Tom Nairn or Stephen Maxwell. And his lack of working class consciousness probably underpinned his historic rupture with ex-Labourite Jim Sillars and the equally charismatic Margo MacDonald. Indeed, an SNP led by Sillar’s and MacDonald would have been to the left of Salmond.

Salmond’s ideological eclecticism led to a marked shift in the late 1990s towards neoliberalism and the championing of an Irish-type low tax vision for independent Scotland. In truth, Salmond’s attachment to low taxes was skin deep. It was a policy designed to prove Scotland would prosper economically if detached from the UK. Of course, the subsequent history of the Irish model suggests it was a deeply flawed model. It also exposed Salmond’s penchant for populist rhetoric rather than putting forward a serious policy agenda for reindustrialisation post-independence, or for democratising Scottish society.

Indeed, this lack of policy orientation led to serious internal arguments and saw various Salmond associates break with him over the years, including his one-time aide-de-camp Michael Russell. But evolving a policy suite would have inevitable meant confronting sections of the Scottish bourgeoisie, especially the banks and oil companies. This was never in Salmond’s political repertoire.

The passing of Alex Salmond will have repercussions. Obviously, it leaves his Alba Party – essentially his own creation – in a crisis. Salmond was planning to use Alba to re-enter Holyrood at the 2026 elections with a view to either joining a coalition (real or tacit) with the SNP to block the return of a Labour administration; or to seize the leadership of the nationalist opposition, if the Unionists returned to government in the Scottish Parliament. Just how realistic Salmond’s new project was we will never know. Leadership of Alba will probably now fall to Ash Regan, Alba’s sole MSP. But whether Regan has the capacity or charisma to lead a fresh assault on Holyrood is a mute question. This leaves Alba’s tiny membership in a quandary.

Also with Salmond’s death, his various legal actions against the SNP Government will fall. Had he succeeded in these, the impact might have been serious – financially and in reputation. Meanwhile, the calamitous first 100 days of the Starmer administration have served to blunt Labour’s revival in Scotland. Unfortunately, John Swinney – once Salmond’s political factotum – is not the figure to lead a counterattack.

Alex Salmond was a veritable ‘big beast’ in British politics. It is too crude to dismiss him as ‘selling out’ the national struggle. His nearest equivalent might be John Stewart Parnell, the Irish constitutional nationalist in the 19^th century. Like Parnell, Salmond was deeply flawed and was felled by scandal. And like Parnell, Salmond was a brilliant operator, a magnetic personality and comfortable in his project to dismantle the United Kingdom. Salmond and Parnell were also brilliant parliamentarians, and it is possible that the alure and theatre of Westminster led both to believe they could accomplish independence through manipulating the status quo. The Irish independence struggle eventually gave a lie to that conceit.

But Salmond and Parnell are proof that radical change – the end of the British state – cannot be done from within that state. History is not made by great men or women, but by mass political action.

Reposted from Conter