The leader of the dominant Scottish National Party (SNP) for two decades, Scotland’s first minister for seven years, and leader of the campaign for independence in 2014, Alex Salmond was the distinguished political figure of his generation.
The longtime SNP leader was despised in his own lifetime by some in Westminster circles, and even more in Scotland’s own decaying Unionist establishment. After his death this Saturday, aged sixty-nine, it is telling of the bitter final chapters of Salmond’s career that the most heated arguments over his legacy are now fought out within the nationalist movement that he did so much to create.
Even that claim — that Alex Salmond was the peerless architect of modern Scottish nationalism and, therefore, devolution-era Scotland — could stoke controversy. But it is hard to refute by the record.
The scale and shock of the events around 2014 — Scotland’s analogue to disruptions like Brexit, Trumpism, and the Jeremy Corbyn/Bernie Sanders–style populist left — have warped our view of Scottish political history. In the first years after the millennium, independence remained a marginal cause. In the hundreds of years since the Act of Union in 1707, the cause of a separate Scottish nation-state had stubbornly refused to cohere. Even after the mass franchise was won, secessionism languished, and a Unionist nationalism in Scotland ran through periods of Liberal, Tory, and Labour dominance. Though the SNP formed in the 1930s from a small intellectual milieu, it became a notable force only in the 1970s, as the post-WWII economic and social consensus began to break down.
It was in 1973, even as crisis shook the “golden age” of capitalism, that Salmond — an upwardly mobile son of civil servants —…
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Auteur: David Jamieson
