Training | 2009.10.21
Braveheart it ain't. Salmond's army like the taste of office | Martin Kettle
Most Scots don\'t share the goal of independence – and the SNP won\'t risk throwing away power on a battle it is likely to lose
Two challenges will together shape David Cameron\'s putative premiership , it is often said. The first, self-evidently, is the economy. The second, less obviously but now increasingly cited, will be Scotland. Well, the Guardian has been giving away free fairytales to readers this week. This latter, in my view, is another one.
Vince Cable is one of the latest to ring the alarm bells. Imagine, the Lib Dem deputy leader says, a 2010 election in which the Conservatives sweep to an overall majority at Westminster but with only one or two Tory seats in Scotland. Think of the indignation that Scotland\'s opportunist first minister, Alex Salmond , will be able to whip up against a government with no mandate in Scotland. Within a couple of years, says Cable, there will be a constitutional crisis which could end in Scotland leaving the union.
Yes and no. Some parts of this scenario, one concedes immediately, are extremely likely. The Tories are flatlining in the Scottish polls. Ipsos-Mori at the end of August put them on 17%, so their chances of improving on the 16% they polled in Scotland in 2005, when they won a single Commons seat, look poor. So Cameron will indeed have no distinct Scottish mandate. He may be forced to choose a Scottish secretary for his cabinet from the Lords – perhaps even Michael Forsyth .
Salmond will naturally make hay of all this. If his SNP makes big gains next spring he will use the result to try to lever the Scottish parliament into approving the separation referendum bill he is due to unveil on St Andrew\'s Day. If he gets his bill, Salmond will then pose as the voice of Scotland and – with Labour and the Lib Dems each prospectively in post-general election disarray – will ask the electorate for another mandate to negotiate separation. Armed with the people\'s endorsement, Salmond will leave Cameron and his overwhelmingly English Tory party with no alternative but to sign away the union.
Here, though, we are already deep into the territory of ifs and maybes. The SNP may make general election gains, though if it falls short of Salmond\'s target of 20 seats (it currently has seven), he himself will have a dented mandate. More important, Salmond may not get his bill through the Holyrood parliament, where he can only count on 50 of the 129 MSPs. Even if he improbably manages to conjure a majority at Holyrood, Scots seem set on voting against independence: an ICM poll in June put support, fairly typically, on 38%. And while Salmond threatens retribution in the 2011 Scottish elections against parties which vote against a referendum, his bark may be worse than his bite. Only one Scot in six rates independence or devolution among the most important questions facing their country, and most of them vote SNP anyway.
So there is already enough here to justify considerable caution. The political situation in Scotland is prevalent with possibilities, Salmond told me this week in his characteristically optimistic way on the eve of his Inverness party conference . But he knows as well as anyone that those possibilities are volatile. The end of the union is far from the only outcome.
No one should underestimate Salmond. A political leader whose popularity has barely been dented by the collapse of Scottish banks whose wealth was supposed to underpin his entire economic strategy, is a leader with Houdini-like talents. And a man who has successfully deflected public outrage against the freeing of the Lockerbie bomber on to the hapless Gordon Brown, is a man whose fleet-footed talents should be respected. But don\'t overestimate him either. Salmond does not lead a Teflon tartan army.
One large and inconvenient reality stands between the SNP and its goal. That is that a majority of Scots still oppose independence. In Inverness yesterday, Salmond boasted that the same people who said there would never be a Scottish parliament and that there would never be an SNP government were now also saying there will never be an independent Scotland. But Salmond knows he cannot risk what he himself admits is a once-in-a-generation battle over independence on open political ground yet, because he would lose it.
That is why he constantly frames the political agenda in terms of short-term objectives rather than the long-term goal. The current short-term aim is to boost the number of SNP MPs in London in 2010; after that it will shift to getting his bill through Holyrood. Salmond graphically admits he wants a Westminster parliament next spring that is "hung by a Scottish rope" – though this is a tacit admission that he prefers a Tory government, a hard sell in a country where the mere mention of Margaret Thatcher still provokes anger.
Salmond casts himself as the Scottish Parnell. The Irish home-rulers, though, were clear what they wanted from their power. The SNP, by contrast, seems surprisingly flexible and even fuzzy. It wants an independent Scotland – but with the Queen as the head of state, with the pound as the national currency, with Scottish diplomats sharing British embassies, and with a set of special relationships, including dual nationality and an absence of border posts with the nation to their south. Just this week, the SNP\'s Angus Robertson said he favoured allowing British troops to maintain their (non-nuclear) bases in an independent Scotland while Scottish cadets would go on training at Sandhurst.
You can view Robertson\'s approach indulgently and positively, treating it as a sensible, moderate, open-to-ideas 21st- century redefinition of independence – independence-lite is the vogue phrase – a not-so- distant cousin of some kind of federalism of the isles, and not a million miles distant from the existing devolution settlement with some added powers. Or you can see it as Labour sees it, as snake-in-the-grass deception by politicians with a hermetically sealed way of looking at the world, designed to lull the gullible into believing the SNP can offer them independence without either pain or a price tag, a way of softening up the voters for a referendum that would otherwise be defeated.
Either way, Braveheart it is not. The truth, I think, is that the SNP has found office to its taste. The voters have found the SNP to their taste too, especially when judged against the alternative. But the voters like the SNP as a minority government and show little evidence, especially post-recession, of wanting an independent Scotland. One day the terms of that deal will change. For the moment, Salmond and Cameron will have to navigate muddier waters than they or their more fanatical followers might prefer.
All nationalists are patriots, but not all patriots are nationalists, says Scottish secretary Jim Murphy. That\'s surely the reality, unless Salmond improbably turns it all round. "We\'ve got what it takes," is the SNP\'s slogan in Inverness this week – except for the votes, that is.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]raveheart-it-aint-salmond-army
