Alex Salmond: 45 years at the heart of the SNP

When he terminated his 45-year membership of the party on Wednesday, it was a seismic shock to the SNP, the independence movement generally and the body politic in its entirety.

His defiant “I’ll be back” statement can be believed, because anyone who knows about Salmond’s history with the SNP is all too aware of how he possesses that most enviable quality – bouncebackability.

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All his adult life, apart from one brief period in exile, Salmond has been a member of the SNP, and in that time he has led the party for 20 years, seven of them as First Minister. More importantly, Salmond has defined the SNP – it was he and the loyal friends and colleagues that he gathered about him who framed the continuing social democratic philosophy of a party that was once perhaps not too unfairly known as the Tartan Tories.

It was Salmond and co who embraced the gradualist approach to gaining independence, and it was they who campaigned hard for devolution when previous leaderships disdained what they considered to be a less than pure approach to gaining independence.

It was Salmond’s leadership that, above all, made the SNP electable in a country that had long been in thrall to the two party system – in 1955, a majority of Scots voters plumped for the Conservatives before Labour began its long hegemony.

The history of the SNP over the last four decades is therefore very much the story of Alex Salmond.

A brief look at his early life shows that Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond was born in Linlithgow on Hogmanay 1954, the son of Robert and Mary Salmond.

He was educated Linlithgow Academy before going on to St Andrew’s University, from where he graduated with a joint honours MA in Economics and History.

It was while he was at St Andrews that Salmond became politically active in the sense that in 1973, he joined the Federation of Student Nationalists, the student wing of the SNP that should not be confused with Young Scots for Independence.

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The story of how he joined the SNP is true – a Labour-supporting girlfriend from London had heard him complaining about Labour so said to him, “If that’s how you feel why don’t you join the SNP?” He did so the next day, one of a handful in the Federation at St Andrews, and he also took roles in the University’s student organisations.

Though his mother was a Tory voter and his father a Labour man – they later changed allegiances – Salmond’s pro-independence political leanings had been formed in his early teens.

They were reinforced by his study at St Andrews of Scottish history – a subject on which he is expert and which he still researches to this day, and I am proud to know that he and Mrs Moira Salmond are regular readers of Back In The Day each Tuesday in The National.

His first job was in the Government Economic Service as an Assistant Economist in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland. It was there that he met his future wife Moira McGlashan – she was his boss.

In 1980, he joined the Royal Bank of Scotland as an Assistant Economist before being appointed Oil Economist in 1982 and Royal Bank Economist in 1985.

By that time, Salmond had already made a major political impact within the SNP, which had seen 11 MPs elected in October 1974, with the party gaining 30 per cent of the popular vote under leader William Wolfe who encouraged Salmond to put himself forward within the SNP.

Prior to the 1979 devolution referendum that was won by the Yes side but beaten by the infamous 40% rule, Salmond and other mainly young SNP members had campaigned for a Yes vote while many mainly older traditionalists in the party either voted No or abstained because it did not deliver independence. There were no clear divisions within the SNP, but all the Yes efforts were rendered useless by that hateful 40% rule.

A week after the vote, Margo MacDonald, effectively the deputy leader of the party, argued at the SNP National Council that as the working class had voted Yes, and the middle class mainly voted No, the party should be more left-leaning. Her audience was not unanimously convinced.

Some 30 party members joined her in forming what became the 79 Group, with Salmond appointed as a spokesman alongside Margo MacDonald.

It was the first time that the general public really became aware of a man who was already being described as a rising star of the SNP.

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THE 79 Group proved very controversial as it campaigned within the party for radical changes in policies. One discussion paper written by Salmond summed up their view that internal party elections did not always bring candidates of merit to the fore, a view which did not endear him to some office-bearers.

The 79 Group itself, while very much of the left, disagreed over matters such as its advocacy of a republic rather than monarchy, but it also advocated a policy of civil disobedience to protest against Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous economic policies.

Salmond defended that stance vigorously. In a letter to The Scotsman he wrote: “Only a party willing to call for civil disobedience, primarily through organised labour, will be able to effectively back a democratic Scottish majority for a parliament.”

The Group was on a collision course with the leadership of the party, especially its leader Gordon Wilson who came to the 1982 conference at Ayr determined to stamp out any internal associations or membership of external groupings, such as the Scottish Socialist Society.

The 79ers memorably walked out of the Dam Park conference hall in Ayr on a hot summer’s afternoon. Some of these young bloods Kenny MacAskill, Stewart Stevenson, Roseanna Cunningham and Alex Salmond went on to fight their corner to stay in the SNP while a 21-year old Ian Blackford resigned and joined the Labour Party – though not for long.

The 79 Group was banned and Margo Macdonald and others left the SNP in protest. Seven of the ringleaders including Salmond were expelled from the party and that should have been that for him. But instead he came back even stronger.

With intellectuals such as Owen Dudley-Edwards and Stephen Maxwell on their side and with younger members of the SNP overwhelmingly in support, a peace was brokered after a dramatic personal plea to the SNP National Council by Salmond. The young firebrand and his colleagues were allowed back in time to fight the 1983 election.

Slowly but surely, and with Thatcherism proving so awful for Scotland, the SNP began to change, moving slowly leftwards, with Salmond a driving force in that process. In 1985, Salmond was elected the party’s vice-convener for publicity – he is as adept at this pursuit as ever – and then won a quite remarkable victory in his first attempt to gain a seat in Parliament, defeating the Conservative Albert MacQuarrie in Banff and Buchan in the 1987 General Election, before becoming deputy leader of the SNP.

When Gordon Wilson announced his intention to stand down as leader in 1990, Salmond was not the original favourite to succeed him but he did so comfortably in a contest with Margaret Ewing, daughter-in-law of Madame Ecosse, Winnie Ewing.

BY now a convinced gradualist in his approach to independence, as leader Salmond led the SNP to making gains in votes, if not seats, in the 1992 General Election, but in his first term as leader he did three main things which changed the SNP for ever – he made it a pro-European party, he introduced policies that were in the mainstream of European social democratic thinking, and he convinced the party to back devolution in the 1997 referendum, working alongside Donald Dewar and Jim Wallace and memorably persuading party member Sir Sean Connery to join the Yes campaign.

That referendum came after the 1997 General Election in which he led the SNP to double its number of seats at Westminster to six.

The party was now established as Scotland’s second largest, and that status was confirmed in the first Holyrood elections when it became the official opposition to the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition with 35 MSPs and Salmond as Leader of the Opposition.

In 1999, he provoked massive controversy over his pronounced opposition to the use of British forces to bomb Serbia, but there were other reasons for disputes within the party that saw the former allies like Margo MacDonald protesting against Salmond’s leadership.

Having been leader for 10 years – the same length of term as Gordon Wilson – he resigned in 2000 and was replaced by John Swinney, before Salmond left Holyrood for Westminster a year later and became the SNP group leader in the House of Commons, being a very prominent critic of Tony Blair and the Iraq War.

When Swinney resigned as leader in 2004, Salmond at first stated strongly that he would not be a candidate for the leadership but later changed his mind and stood in the contest, winning an overwhelming victory with Nicola Sturgeon as the successful candidate for deputy leader – she thus became leader of the opposition at Holyrood as Salmond was still an MP.

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The SNP’s victory in the 2007 Holyrood elections saw Salmond re-elected as an MSP in Gordon and duly becoming First Minister, the first SNP leader to also become the country’s leader. The Salmond-Sturgeon team worked increasingly well and after four years in minority government, in 2011 he led the party to one of the most astonishing results in Scottish electoral history.

The Scotland Bill which brought in devolution had been specifically designed to make sure that, with proportional representation, no single party could win an overall majority at Holyrood, yet with Salmond at his campaigning best, the SNP achieved the “impossible” feat. That in turn meant Salmond could initiate the independence referendum that he had long dreamed of.

By now the longest-serving First Minister in the short history of the restored Parliament, Salmond led the Yes campaign to narrow defeat, and on the following day, September 19, 2014, Salmond resigned both as First Minister and SNP leader – a sacrifice that meant the party could move on without soul-searching and recriminations.

In the 2015 General Election, in yet another comeback, Salmond easily won the Gordon seat and returned to the House of Commons, becoming foreign affairs spokesman in the team led by Angus Robertson. Both men lost their seats in last year’s General Election and for the first time since 1987, Salmond was not in an elected office.

He did not have any office in either Parliament or indeed the SNP when he announced his resignation from the party on Wednesday.

Looking back over 45 years in the party, Salmond said: “I truly love the SNP and the wider independence movement in Scotland. They have been the defining commitment of my life.”

He is currently facing the fight of his life for his reputation, and all the skills he has gained over the last 45 years in the SNP will not be available to the party until that fight is won, if indeed it is won.

No matter what you think of him personally, or about the current issue, for any supporter of Scottish independence that is a sad eventuality.