Alex salmond

Alex Massie asks why I didn’t mention the Union in my piece in this week’s magazine on what David Cameron’s legacy will be. It is a good question. Indeed, one former Cameron aide told me that he thought that the likely preservation of the Union would be Cameron’s greatest achievement. But the reason I didn’t mention it was because Cameron’s strategy on Scotland has been to keep a relatively low profile. He has, deliberately, not made it his fight. He realised that Alex Salmond wanted to present himself as the opposition to an English Tory Prime Minister who was, in Nationalist-speak, imposing his will on Scotland—and has simply refused to

Politics is at least partially a matter of perspective. The same object can look very different depending upon the angle from which it is viewed. Which brings me to Brother Forsyth’s latest column. I bow to no-one in my admiration for James’s reporting and astute analysis. Nor do I dispute much of what he says in his analysis of David Cameron’s legacy. No, what’s interesting is what isn’t there. The Union. I know. Scots go on and on and on about this stuff. It is true that the Caledonian gene is strong on self-absorption. Nevertheless, I think it can reasonably be considered revealing that this type of column, written by

So, an independent Scotland. Neoliberal nirvana or Scandinavian paradise? True, these are not the only choices available but as a useful shorthand for the size of the state and its optimal take of national revenues it will do for the time being. That is, should taxes rise, fall or remain much as they are at present? What external pressures will hamper Edinburgh’s ability to set its own course, free as the wind? And, for that matter, whose dreams are most likely to be confounded and whose worst fears most liable to be misplaced? That was the subject of an article I wrote for the Scotsman at the weekend. The gist

Always the showman, Alex Salmond did the unexpected today when he announced that the referendum on Scottish independence would be held on Thursday September 18 2014. He knew everyone was expecting it to be in October so he chose something different. He knew, we knew: everyone, it seemed, knew, that the events of 2014 have been so carefully planned in the Nationalist calendar that it seemed impossible for the First Minister to choose another date than October. The 700th anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Bannockburn will take place at the end of June 2014. This bout of Nationalist patriotic outpouring will be followed by the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in

So, it seems some kind of torturous “deal” has been reached in London on how best to regulate the press in the future. If David Cameron’s proposals for a Royal Charter are less reprehensible than the plans favoured by Labour and Liberal Democrats that is not, in the end saying very much. But I suppose even midget mercies are worth welcoming. This is not quite the end of the matter, however. It remains to be seen what impact this deal has on the other jurisdiction in these islands. That press regulation is a devolved matter is, I think, pretty much an accident (it was left off the list of explicitly

The standard assumption about political debates is that the campaign with most to gain in all in favour of them while the candidate presumed to be the front-runner wants nothing to do with them. Franklin Roosevelt refused to debate Wendell Wilkie in 1940, LBJ refused to debate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and, four years later, Richard Nixon (perhaps recalling his experience in 1960) declined to debate Hubert Humphrey. Indeed, you can argue that the modern American practice of Presidential debates might not exist at all but for the weakness of the position in which Gerald Ford found himself in 1976. As matters stand, I suspect there will be some reluctance

Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York state (and father of the present governor) is perhaps these days most famous for his quip that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Sometimes, anyway. Scotland’s independence referendum campaign, at present, doesn’t even rise to the level of William McGonagle’s execrable verse. Most of the prose is stale and hackneyed guff too. This is the subject of my Think Scotland column this week. An argument that should, in theory, be mildly exciting is instead – at least for now – failing to deliver: My sense is that many of the people paying most attention to this campaign are the people most

So we have a question and it is a simple one. Should Scotland be an independent country? There, that wasn’t so difficult was it? It is, after all, the nub of the matter. Granted, one might agree that Scotland should be an independent country but still conclude that being so is a different matter. That might be a metaphysical matter beyond the Electoral Commission’s ken. Nevertheless, it is not an unreasonable question. Some reports seemed keen to spin this as some kind of ‘setback’ for Alex Salmond. Apparently dropping the preamble ‘Do you agree’ – included in the SNP’s favoured wording – is yet another indication the nationalists are on the ropes.

Alex Salmond is back in Bute House, refreshed and chippered by a much-needed holiday. If 2012 was a year in which the Referendum Guns were first deployed it was still, in the end, something of a phoney war. At the risk of exhausting an easily-exhausted electorate, 2013 should see more action. This week’s column at Think Scotland argues that the SNP need to broaden their vision and approach the campaign with a greater sense of generosity than is sometimes seen. At present they depend too heavily – in my view – on the idea that independence is a way to Tory-proof Scotland. That’s a negative, not a positive, case. Moreover

Today’s Think Scotland column takes a gander at the rumpus over an independent Scotland’s accession to the EU. Until recently the SNP promised that said accession would be automatic. Now it’s simply “common-sense”.  This is because Jose Manuel Barroso, the Spanish Iberian agent* at the heart of the EU Commission, has made an awkward intervention. Scotland would, he says, not be an automatic member of the club at all. Intuitively this is obvious just as Scotland would not be an automatic member of the United Nations. It would have to apply. Once it applied it’s application would most probably be accepted. There are few plausible grounds upon which to reject

Europe, so often the rock on which Conservative hopes foundered, is now causing considerable trouble for Alex Salmond. The Scottish First Minister has long campaigned for Scottish separation under the slogan ‘independence in Europe’. Leaving aside his difficulty in justifying the departure from one Union only to become a junior member of another, this has always been a tricky proposal to sell. The main reason for the SNP’s vulnerability has been that no-one has really ever known how Scotland could leave an existing member state and automatically become another one in its own right – not without having to drop all the opt outs and advantages that the UK has squeezed

In the rabid hamster-eating-hamster world of Scottish politics Nicola Sturgeon is a rarity: a politician of obvious competence who’s respected by her peers regardless of their own political allegiances. There are not so many folk at Holyrood of whom that could be said. The Deputy First Minister is not a flashy politician but she’s quietly become almost as important to the SNP as Alex Salmond. This, according to one sagacious owl, makes her one of the ten most interesting politicians in Britain. Hard though it is to imagine this, there are voters immune to the First Minister’s charms. Part of Nicola’s remit is to reach those parts of Scotland that

Even the cheapest, Poundland crystal ball will tell even a blind observer that Europe is pretty soon going to be a pretty hefty problem for almost all of Britain’s political parties. Almost all, I say, because that includes the SNP* whose europhilia is, in some respects, a product of a time that no longer exists. Anyway, the odds of manifesto pledges promising an in-or-out referendum in the next parliament seem to be shortening all the time. I have no idea what this is supposed to achieve since, as best I understand the matter, neither the Conservative nor Labour parties wish Britain to leave the European Union. Asking the question necessarily

So Alex Salmond has achieved the feat of becoming Scotland’s longest serving First Minister. This is a notable achievement. After all, he has avoided the fate of one of his predecessors – resigning in disgrace – and another: being defeated at the ballot box. Salmond has just served as Scotland’s First Minister for 2001 days, or five and half years, just eclipsing the term served by Jack McConnell between 2001 and 2007. But even he would agree that the field to contest this landmark is not a large one. Scotland has only had four first ministers since 1999. The first, Donald Dewar, lasted just a year before his death in 2000. The second,

Philip Hammond is one of those ministers who seems to be held in greater esteem by those inside the Westminster hamlet than those of us who live beyond its boundaries. Westminster’s natives may, of course, be right, but it is striking how often the Secretary of State for Defence prefers to cast his arguments in terms of economics rather than, well, defence. He’s at it again today. Mr Hammond is popping in to the nuclear submarine base at Faslane where he will “announce” that the government is splashing another £350m on the next phase of the mission to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear missiles. For reasons best known to himself, the

For years Scotland has been waiting to see when his luck would run out – well, now it has. Alex Salmond: gambler, tipster, political animal and First Minister now has another moniker: author of the country’s first scomnishambles. Yesterday marked, without doubt, the First Minister’s worst day in office. First, he lost two MSPs. Left-wingers Jean Urquhart and John Finnie announced they were leaving the SNP because of the party’s conversion to Nato. That decision, taken at SNP conference last weekend, has alienated many left-wingers in the party because they see it – rightly – as part of Salmond’s attempts to take the SNP into the moderate, centre ground of Scottish politics. But