Scottish nationalism’s two defining leaders experienced an identical cycle of political boom and bust. Both were originally the objects of the most ardent public dedication; both were subject, at the end of their reigns, to prolonged investigations by a police force they had, in its modern centralised form, created. Alex Salmond, arraigned on two counts of attempted rape, nine of sexual assault, two of indecent assault, was found not guilty of all charges in 2022. Police investigations into Nicola Sturgeon’s period in office, apparently revolving around the use of party funds, continue.
But there is a further, non-criminal, charge against both characters: mendacity. In their defence, it went with the job. The project of Scottish nationalism has always demanded that its leaders lie, or at least obfuscate, or grossly exaggerate. Sturgeon, who resigned (on flimsy grounds) as First Minister of Scotland a year ago today, was even better at that than her mentor. While he has always projected something of a wide-boy public persona, she leant on a reputation for rectitude, control and dedication to a great cause.
Since Sturgeon’s resignation, and his victory in the subsequent leadership contest, Humza Yousaf has attracted the same accusation — only without the period of public popularity his two predecessors enjoyed. And this is inextricable from the movement all three represent: their personal and political calamities are the products of an integral deceit at the heart of the independence project.
This first became glaringly apparent with Salmond’s original tilt at secession in 2014. In his reshaping of the SNP, he used (or abused) his economist’s training to produce a 667-page document which claimed that Scotland, the region with the highest public spending in Britain, could single-handedly accelerate to Scandinavian levels of child and maternal care (without Scandinavian levels of tax). This shaky mound of assertions was then blown apart when, in the following year, the oil price crashed from $110 to $50 a barrel and the independence referendum was spurned by a majority of 55%. Without the economic ballast of the former and democratic will of the latter, Scottish nationalism seemed a dead scheme, buried beneath a pile of half-truths.
Salmond resigned and Sturgeon slipped into his place. She was left with the job of sustaining confidence in the vision of independence when the oil price fall translated into a “black hole” in Scottish revenue and expenditure of £18.6 billion. Had independence won, as the then leader of the Conservative opposition Ruth Davidson pointed out, it would have meant vast cuts to every public service. Faced with a propaganda disaster, the new First Minister resorted to windy rhetoric: “I believe and always will believe that the best way forward is to be in charge of our own resources, so we don’t have to be subject to the kind of cuts coming at us from the UK government, but instead could be masters of our own destiny.”
This response, ignoring facts in favour of faith, was in part the fruit of Sturgeon’s apprenticeship to Salmond. And given her own steely structure of personal commitment — secular, yet infused with a Calvinist rectitude — it was to be Sturgeon’s sword and shield through years of leadership. Thus when, following a Brexit that had the support of only a third of Scottish voters, she thickly underscored what the loss of membership meant to Scotland. Brexit became a way to showcase, as in one March 2021 speech, Scotland’s national if not actual autonomy: “… a country and not a region of a unitary state. Scotland’s position is therefore unique — a country, in a voluntary union, which has been removed from the EU against the will of the majority who live here.”
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