Obviously this site will be making no comment on the criminal allegations now facing Alex Salmond for legal reasons. But amidst a frenzy of gleefully lascivious coverage in the Scottish media (the Daily Record in particular can barely contain its delight), there’s another thread of punditry that does need addressed.
Because it is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks.
The court case, should one ever take place – under Scots law the mere fact of the police bringing charges by no means actually makes that a certainty, it’s the Procurator Fiscal who decides whether to go ahead with a prosecution – will indeed decide the guilt or innocence of Alex Salmond. But that’s all it will do.
Even normally-sensible analysts like Stephen Bush of the New Statesman have suggested that the case “makes it harder for Sturgeon to decide the timing of the next Scottish referendum based on her instinct on what maximises the chances of success, and increases the chances that she will have to call for another one at a moment not of her own choosing”. But it’s difficult to see how.
We speak to a lot of people in the independence movement, the SNP and the Scottish and UK media scenes in private, and among them there’s a wide range of opinion on Salmond and the allegations. But what we haven’t had a single person say to us is that the charges will make the slightest difference to their belief in independence or their determination to campaign in any new referendum.
The case for independence is unchanged by whether or not one person may have committed a crime or crimes. The merits of Scotland choosing its own governments and making its own decisions are entirely un-impacted by whether Alex Salmond is innocent or guilty of these or any other accusations.
The UK didn’t lose the right to be independent when its Prime Minister condemned it – on the basis of what were already widely known to be lies – to the disastrous and almost certainly criminal war in Iraq, costing hundreds of thousands of people their lives. The USA didn’t meekly come back and ask to be a British colony again when its sitting President was forced to stand down in disgrace.
On a practical level, the former First Minister has been a peripheral figure in politics since losing his seat in the 2017 UK general election, a member of no parliament. Even before these allegations arose last year, it was highly unlikely that the SNP would have given him a prominent official role in any second indyref.
(His opinions would have course have drawn plenty of attention in the media, but then Jim Sillars gets in the papers all the time and we trust nobody would suggest that if he were to be arrested for some alleged crime, anybody would be seriously claiming that it would affect the timing or viability of the next referendum.)
The key factor in the urgency and justification of a second indyref is the shambles of Brexit, in which five and a half million Scots stand to be dragged catastrophically out of the EU despite having voted overwhelmingly to stay in it. The democratic mandate of the Scottish Parliament to demand one runs until 2021. The fortunes of Alex Salmond are of no consequence in these regards whatever.
The Scottish press asserts on a regular basis that some essentially minor event or other has destroyed the prospects of independence for the next five or 10 or 50 years, and everyone sighs and rolls their eyes and gets back to reading the football reports. They’ve cried wolf more times than anyone can count, and nobody we’ve encountered on the Yes side is listening to them any more.
Independence is bigger than one man, bigger than one woman, and bigger than the SNP. Nothing about these events will change our minds or our desire to fight on until the objective is achieved. If the braying, sneering, dying Scottish media is so foolish as to imagine otherwise, it’s in for a nasty shock.
