Alex Salmond\u2019s death in North Macedonia from a massive heart attack has led to a period of reflection amongst observers of Scottish politics. Salmond changed Scotland and changed the SNP. His special skill was in making Scottish nationalism about the future. Salmond didn\u2019t want to take our country back, he wanted to move Scotland forward.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The nationalist vision has to be about the future. The Scotland of the present – cut off from the world by Brexit and England\u2019s suffocating self absorption – limits our potential and our development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Salmond helped many Scots understand that there were multiple possibilities outside the UK. The referendum which he successfully negotiated with David Cameron released a three year festival of dreaming, imagining and creating which the country hadn\u2019t experienced for centuries. For many of us who had been in the independence movement for decades this was the moment we had spent lifetimes waiting for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
An old friend once said to me that the difficulty in selling the indy prospectus was that it was hard for many Scots to conceptualise what an independent Scotland might look like. Salmond along with Nicola Sturgeon and the myriad voices raised in favour of sovereignty were able to fill in the gaps. Not a flat two dimensional vision of the future but wild, lively and multi faceted. We thought of ourselves as people who could do and be anything. Unionists want us to be dependent, silent, grateful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most importantly that vision was underpinned by the conviction that Scotland should be an equal with the other nations of the world while being conscious of our size, geography and the limitations they impose. That\u2019s something unionists are unable to do. In their mind Scotland is fixed forever in 1707. Never changing. Always the junior party, always what it once was. Never what it might be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Salmond raised expectations about what a First Minister should be. The notion until then, which survives still in unionist fantasies, was that the First Minister should be a regional underling. Salmond acted like the leader of a modern European country. He was as big as anyone on the European stage. His successors have carried on in similar fashion. Anas Sarwar and other British nationalists imagine a return to the right hand man to Westminster way of doing things but that\u2019s a fantasy. Right now – in spite of the British state\u2019s ongoing psy-ops and the travesty of the so called investigation into the SNP\u2019s finances – it doesn\u2019t seem likely we will ever have a unionist First Minister again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alex Salmond was admired by many but he wasn\u2019t always popular. He was a complex character. Utterly effective in power and ruthless in the pursuit of his goals he could be difficult and sometimes appeared a little unprepared. He was persistently unreliable in terms of support for progressive social policies if he believed there was electoral advantage in equivocating on them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not clear if he really believed Alba would ever achieve anything. Maybe it was a safe place for someone who felt betrayed and let down. Politics was everything for Salmond. He was fearless and clever and paved the way for future leaders. In the long term his dream will be achieved and Scotland will become an independent country once again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He will be remembered as a historical figure, one of the most significant and important people in Scotland\u2019s story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alex Salmond\u2019s death in North Macedonia from a massive heart attack has led to a period of reflection amongst observers of Scottish politics. Salmond changed Scotland and changed the SNP. His special skill was in making Scottish nationalism about the future. Salmond didn\u2019t want to take our country back, he wanted to move Scotland forward.\u00a0 The nationalist vision has to be about the future. The Scotland of the present – cut off from the world by Brexit and England\u2019s suffocating self absorption – limits our potential and our development. Salmond helped many Scots understand that there were multiple possibilities outside the UK. The referendum whichRead More →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[236],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3712,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3711\/revisions\/3712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scotsindependent.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}