[Robin McAlpine Blog] An orphaned movement

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An orphaned movement

The death of Alex Salmond will have an impact wider and deeper and more fundamental on the cause of independence than I suspect people yet realise. So many words have been written already that I will offer only a few here.

To understand the impact Alex’s death will have you need to look at the dividing line which separates top-tier politicians from the rest. Many of the great politicians successfully ride the currents and travel far and achieve much; what sets the first tier apart is that they change the weather. In my lifetime there have been two British politicians who unequivocally changed the weather, Thatcher and Salmond.

No-one is an all-rounder. I can certainly argue with some of what Alex Salmond did in government and I can of course quibble with some of his strategic decisions. But getting everything right isn’t an option for a senior politician – it’s what you do with what you’ve got that counts. Salmond was not dealt an unbeatable hand.

What he did, peerlessly, was play the hand he was given shrewdly. He had the tools to do it – he was a strong communicator and a very effective story-teller, being sharply intelligent and able to think on his feet, empathetic enough about his interlocutor to treat them with respect but cheeky and confident enough to merge it all into memorable phrases. He had a good brain.

But that wasn’t what made him effective. It was that he had the best nose for politics of our generation. It was the gambler in him, he could sniff a chance and see how it would play out – and he had the confidence and swagger to pull it off. It was taking chances others would have walked away from that created political space that others wouldn’t have had. And he used those spaces effectively when he created them

There is thus a vanishingly small number of politicians of whom you can say that there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. What enabled him to create the ‘after’ was his ability to identify an opportunity and to exploit it with humour, charm and perhaps above all a kind of self-confidence that rubbed of on you. He made Scotland more confident.

There is a lot of the usual guff going around about how he dragged a ‘fringe’ political party into the mainstream. This is silly revisionism; Salmond joined a party which had won 30.4 per cent of the Scottish vote only a few years before and had a membership in the order of 70,000. It wasn’t that he made the SNP safe, it’s that he made the SNP hungry. The public want that ambition from their politicians and they reward the ones that show it.

Salmond is so fundamental to Scottish independence that his absence is bigger than any specific political contribution he was making or would make

But by now you’ve heard all this from people who knew him better than me and I can’t imagine you need any more personal anecdotes or testimonies. It is the impact of Alex’s death that I want to consider, because I think it will prove bigger than you might imagine.

Let me just dispel one notion, that this means we can ‘move on’ from the Salmond/Sturgeon wars. It is impossible to get across how much Alex Salmond was put through over the last ten years of his life. It’s not just that the powers of the state were turned against him, just as painful were the many people who were far too happy to turn their back on him.

It hurt him a lot. He gave an awful lot to an awful lot of people who gave nothing back when he needed it. It seems inconceivable to me that the awful stress and existential dread of the last seven years didn’t contribute to his death.

Rapprochement doesn’t come from one side hounding the leader of another to their grave, it comes after the moment both sides feel like some justice has been done. For Salmond’s supporters (and there are many more than you may think), there feels like no justice. We will not be able to move beyond Salmond; we must move beyond Salmond and Sturgeon.

(It is genuinely insulting to see some of the people who wrote some of the worst things about Alex now write that falling in line behind the people who led the lynch mob is ‘what he would have wanted’. It is not. I suspect he’d have wanted Moira to issue a short list of people who are specifically not invited to the funeral – surely Lady Dorian couldn’t object to that?)

Far from Alex’s death meaning peace will fall on the independence movement, it now means it definitely won’t until those who feel he was done wrong feel some justice has been served. But it isn’t splits that I’m mostly thinking about when I’m thinking about the impact of his death. It’s the psychological hit.

Salmond is so fundamental to Scottish independence that his absence is bigger than any specific political contribution he was making or would make. Let me put it this way; mummy has run away with the milkman and daddy’s dead. We’re still waiting for what feels like innumerable criminal and civil legal actions to bottom out exactly what ‘milkman’ is a metaphor for, but neither of them is coming back.

When we assess Alex Salmond’s legacy we caveat that he was flawed; when we consider Nicola Sturgeon’s flaws, legacy never crops up

It is like being orphaned in very young adulthood. As a movement we sort of knew that we weren’t living in our parents’ house any more, that we had moved out and got our own lives. But, you know, we always knew they were there. And now they’re not there.

One’s will grow in stature in the rear view mirror but is gone for good while the other is shrinking before our eyes. When we assess Alex Salmond’s legacy we caveat that he was flawed; when we consider Nicola Sturgeon’s flaws, legacy never crops up. That is a reality which Alex Salmond’s death has highlighted so starkly.

That is where I think my shock is coming from. I stare dimly into the shadow cast by Salmond’s presence and I struggle to see the next generation. I can barely see it at all in the SNP. That is the sudden reality with which we are faced. That last half a thought that perhaps, at the last minute, when things were at their darkest, one of the great leaders would sweep in and save us?

That half a thought is gone. It really is just us now. I think it is probably the biggest testimony to his achievements that we couldn’t see it until he had left us. Just as the ten year anniversary of the independence referendum shone a light on how little distance we have travelled since, the death of Alex Salmond shines a light on how few new leaders there are for another generation.

In the end, there are two things for which Alex Salmond will have my eternal gratitude. I’m grateful that his sheer dynamic energy made independence feel like a real and vital possibility. And I’m grateful that he made Scotland believe it could stand a bit taller and be a bit more ambitious than it was.

It will take much longer to really work through what all of this means for our future. Salmond’s passing has drawn an entire era to a close, and will leave us wondering what strange new compass it will take to guide us through the era to come.

People often speculate on what someone recently dead would want us all to do. That is often simply seeking to put our own words in the mouth of someone greater than we are, so I won’t pretend to know what Alex Salmond would want us to do now. But I can say with some confidence that he would very much want us to get our fingers out and get on with it, whatever it is.

It is us now that must change the weather in his wake. We have much to live up to.

Source: An orphaned movement