John Cameron
It’s a gas
The football manager who
had ‘no comment’ to make
– even about the weather
Joyce Gunn Cairns
A portrait of A L Kennedy
The survivors
Bob Smith has been taking a look at the minority of MSPs who are not members of the SNP. He starts with what is left of the Labour Party:
Jackie Baillie:
the only politician to achieve a swing from the SNP to Labour. How did she do it?
Ken Macintosh:
held on to posh Eastwood with considerable ease. How did he do it?
Malcolm Chisholm:
the party’s sole surviver in Edinburgh. How did he do it?
Sarah Boyack: seasoned campaigner, but only got through on the list
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The opposition
could be lured
into a minefield
Alf Young
You can hear Statesman Salmond now, bemoaning London’s intransigence, chiding the anti-independence majority here that Scotland’s full potential will never be realised unless they seize the day and say yes.
In the immediate aftermath of his comprehensive election victory, Salmond demanded even greater borrowing powers, control of Crown Estate revenues and the ability to set corporation tax rates. Yesterday he added control of excise duties on alcohol, responsibility for broadcasting and greater ministerial representation from Scotland at EU forums in Brussels. He may not stop there.
In keeping with his earlier admission that the SNP has ‘no monopoly of wisdom’ in what is best for Scotland, our first minister is explicitly inviting the traumatised unionist opposition parties at Holyrood to join him in pushing for concessions that some of them have argued for in the past. That presents them all with an acute dilemma.
Already there are voices in all of them seeking electoral redemption north of the border through finding more distinctively Scottish voices of their own. But if they start developing those voices by joining the first minister in pushing for greater Scotland Bill powers they run the risk of helping him realise his dream of turning the SNP back into the national party of Scotland, enhancing his leverage with Westminster while compounding their own marginalised status. If they don’t play ball he can portray them all as unionist lackeys who have learned nothing from their recent defeat.
He’s got the parliamentary majority to push hard for these concessions on his own. What if the Westminster coalition fails to deliver? Or the Scotland Bill collapses? You can hear Statesman Salmond now, bemoaning London’s intransigence, chiding the anti-independence majority here that Scotland’s full potential will never be realised unless they seize the day and say yes.
He will, however, be trying to sell that message against the backdrop of an as-yet-anaemic recovery from recession, livings standards under pressure and the cuts to come. Some of the pledges that helped win the SNP outright victory – like the five-year council tax freeze – must mean a harsher spending squeeze elsewhere. And later this year, as the new Scottish government draws up its 2012 budget, responsibility for those cuts can no longer be portrayed as the price of minority government. With an outright majority, the choices made will be the SNP’s and the SNP’s alone.
How then to secure a popular endorsement for independence in, say, 2014 or 2015? The strategy appears to be underway already, a significant reassessment of what the independence of states amounts to in our inter-dependent world. ‘Independence Lite’, Jim Sillars has called it. As one of the so-called SNP fundamentalists who has criticised the first minister in the past for parking the independence question at election times, Sillars is now prepared to compromise on the ‘full enchilada’ by seeing Scotland entering a confederal relationship with England, which might even extend to us leasing the Trident base on the Clyde to our southern neighbours as a way of keeping ‘London’s veto seat on the UN Security Council’.
Neither Alex Salmond nor Nicola Sturgeon has voiced such a heresy so far. But there’s been plenty of talk of sharing the pound sterling (and presumably the Bank of England’s monetary policy) until the time is right to join the euro; the UK social security and pensions system (although Whitehall might baulk at one day paying those in euros); the Queen; and non-Trident defence capabilities.
Yesterday the first minister did talk about partnership and mutual respect and of his dearest wish ‘to see Scotland and England stand together as equals’. That’s a very long way from what Chris Harvie was telling the Scottish Review last week – that Scotland’s rational partnership is no longer with London and the rest of the UK but with Norway and Germany.
Let’s hope they have worked out what it all means by the time they ask the rest of us to vote on it.
Alf Young is an award-winning journalist who writes regularly for the Scottish Review
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