ALEX Salmond joined the SNP in 1974 at the age of 20. In 1990, after long years of unstinting service, he was awarded leadership of the party, and from then on under his guidance it gradually became a force to be reckoned with in Scottish politics.
In 2007 he reaped due reward by becoming First Minister. Scotland made steady headway towards independence under his long tenure, in fact more progress than any other individual has made before or since, and those with short or convenient memories would do well to remember that.
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2014 was the year when the spoilt brats in London nearly lost their so-called precious Union to a rampant SNP under Salmond, a man they respected and feared in equal measure, and true to their nature they breached every convention in the electoral book and resorted to their usual underhand tactics when things were beginning to look bleak for them, telling lies upon lies and making solemn vows they had no intention of keeping, and it worked. Following the result, more champagne was downed in London than it would take to float the navy’s largest vessel. After all, they were out of the woods, and the Scottish cash would keep on flowing, but for how much longer?
Salmond was tired. It had been a long journey since 1974. Forty years had passed. He had come within an ace of winning Scotland’s liberation and he was exhausted. Membership of his party was burgeoning but he decided to resign as First Minister and so the reign of Nicola Sturgeon got under way, and in 2015 she was joined by a new Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government, courtesy of Westminster.
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It was not long before Leslie Evans started cobbling together a new complaints process ostensibly aimed at current and former ministers in the Scottish Government. In 2020 Salmond accused Evans of serious misconduct by her handling of accusations of sexual misconduct against him. It seemed to some of us at the time that she was like a latter-day Salome who would consider it a feather in her cap if she could deliver Salmond’s head on a plate to her overseers in London. Unfortunately for her, the handling of the claims was deemed by a Scottish judge as unlawful, procedurally unfair and tainted by apparent bias and cost the Scottish Government well in excess of £600,000 in legal expenses.
A jury cleared Salmond of all the charges, and yet his reputation in Scotland had plummeted lower than the unsavoury Boris Johnson’s. So, what about “yesterday’s man”, as someone called him recently? I’d have to counter that by raising a question about yesterday’s woman, who displayed a marked proclivity towards procrastination, the thief of time, in her approach to any thought of another referendum. Indeed, constant delay of referendums was her watchword, and when the gruesome twosome of Truss and Kwarteng got their hands on the reins in 2022 she was in the media morning, noon and night demanding an immediate General Election that would have seen a further delay of four or five years before another referendum could take place while she could relax and get on with important stuff like gender recognition.
She also committed the cardinal sin of approaching an English court on Scotland’s sovereignty and got a response from Lord Reed that England had sovereignty over Scotland, yet any Scottish beak worth his salt would have relied on Lord President Cooper’s observance in 1953 that the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of parliament is a distinctly English principle that has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law. Reed’s response relied on England’s breach of the Treaty of Union, something that will be addressed in due course by the International Court of Justice in The Hague when Salvo gets energised by the Scottish people. And Salmond? He’s still around, breaking new ground.
Bruce Moglia
via email
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