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But now to our referendum tale. Ours is but a new chapter – albeit a crucial one – in a much older story. Scotland is one of Europe’s oldest nations.
In the late twelfth century, when Balian was busy defending the Holy City, Scotland had already been united as a kingdom for 300 years, with Picts and Scots forced together under the threat of Viking incursions. Richard Coeur de Lion never did manage to win back Jerusalem, but his crusade gave William the Lion of Scotland an excellent opportunity to be released from the feudal impositions Henry II had enforced upon him and therefore Scotland. He was able to fly his Royal Standard (the Lion Rampant) with additional pride.
The next affirmation of Scottish independence was somewhat bloodier but the outcome was the same. Robert de Brus did not seal Scottish independence by the storming of Linlithgow castle in 1313, or on the field of Bannockburn in the following year on midsummer’s day, or even in the Arbroath Declaration of six years later, but at the Treaty of Northampton with England in 1328. However, Bannockburn was still one of history’s decisive battles. It both preserved and shaped the nation.
The recognition of Scottish independence at Northampton did not finish the matter, and an uneasy relationship between Scotland and England was the norm for the next 300 years – border warfare tempered by the occasional dynastic nuptial. From a Scottish perspective, for many years, union with the auld ally of France looked more likely than union with the auld enemy of England.
And when crown unity did come in 1603 it was through a Scottish king, James VI, becoming King of England. But Scotland remained an independent nation and it would be another century before the Union of the Parliaments.
When that happened, in 1707, Scotland had a collective history of statehood, stretching back for the best part of a millennium: three times the period that has elapsed since.
Scottish dissatisfaction with the government in London has ebbed and flowed since the Treaty of Union. There have been periods when support for the union was in the ascendancy. However, it is also true that every movement for radical change in Scotland, from Jacobite to Jacobin, from crofting Liberals to the early Labour movement, was overlaid with Scottish nationalism.
Even those famous Scots who are often regarded as pillars of the established order have displayed a sneaking sympathy for the nationalist cause. On the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament are inscribed the words that Walter Scott put into the mouth of Mrs Howden in Heart of Midlothian:
‘When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o’ our ain, we could aye peeble them wi’ stanes when they werena gude bairns – But naebody’s nails can reach the length o’ Lunnon.’
The immediate aftermath of the Second World War was a high point of Britishness, which had a bearing on my own upbringing. My late mother, Mary, patriotic Scot though she was, would probably never have countenanced Scottish independence if her son had not become inveigled into the national movement. She was from a middle-class background and her views had been bolstered by the war: the Churchill pride.
My father, Robert, however, thinks rather differently. When I was a young MP, and didn’t know better, I got into a spot of family bother. I made public the contrast between my mother’s and father’s views, revealing the capital punishment remedy my dad said was appropriate for Churchill’s treatment of the miners.
‘Salmond’s father wanted to hang Churchill’ screamed the newspaper headline. I phoned Dad to apologise.
‘Did I teach you naethin?’ said Faither reprovingly. ‘Hingin was owr guid for thon man!’
The skilled working class like my father – from Robert Burns to the 1820 martyrs, and from Keir Hardie to the early trade union movement – have always been open to the great call of home rule.
James Maxton, the Clydesider MP, speaking in Glasgow in the 1920s in support of a Home Rule Bill (and for a Scottish socialist commonwealth), declared that ‘with Scottish brains and courage … we could do more in five years in a Scottish Parliament than would be produced by twenty-five or thirty years’ heart-breaking working in the British House of Commons.’
So it wasn’t a great leap of faith for my dad to move politically from Labour to SNP in the 1960s. Nor was it for the many others who followed suit in the 1970s, forcing the issue of devolution onto the UK agenda.
The failed referendum of 1979 and the election of Margaret Thatcher seemed at first to have reversed the trend, but in reality it accelerated the underlying shift towards home rule.
A great deal of Scottish identity has been preserved for 300 years through the strength of institutions – Scottish churches, Scots law, Scottish education – and now the myriad of third-sector pressure groups that interact with that institutional identity.
Ironically, Margaret Thatcher’s brand of Conservatism set about dismantling many of the key symbols of Britishness. So British Airways became BA, British Petroleum became BP, and British Rail became lots of things.
But Thatcher inadvertently managed rather more than that. A quarter of a century ago she swept into the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and, in an infamous address, exposed the crass materialism of her creed. This was too much for the elders and brethren – and far too much for a Churchill Tory like my mother, who never voted Conservative again.
Margaret Thatcher had combined her visit to the General Assembly with an equally ill-fated visit to the Scottish Cup final, where she managed to unite Dundee United and Celtic fans in an ingenious and very effective joint red card protest.
Shortly thereafter, on 16 June 1988, Hansard records a brash young SNP member from Aberdeenshire, fresh from being restored to the House after expulsion for intervening in the Budget in protest against the poll tax, taunting the Prime Minister about what he described as her ‘epistle to the Caledonians’:
Will the Prime Minister demonstrate her extensive knowledge of Scottish affairs by reminding the House of the names of the Moderator of the General Assembly, which she addressed, and the captain of Celtic, to whom she presented the cup?
Margaret Thatcher had given Scottish nationalism a new political dynamic and accelerated the long-term decline of the Conservative Party in Scotland, where it now commands a mere one-third of its popular support of the 1950s.
Other factors were undercutting support for the union. The Scottish economy had been underperforming the UK average for much of the twentieth century. The reasons were deep and complex but one key factor was the export of human capital. Often it was the best people, the people with get up and go, who got up and went.
When I was a lad, thanks to my grandfather’s grounding, I knew that Scots had invented lots of things. He proudly showed me the plaque to David Waldie, born in Linlithgow and pioneer of chloroform, on the wall of the Four Marys pub. He told me that he had worked on the discovery with James Simpson of nearby Bathgate.
I soon discovered that, even beyond Linlithgow and Bathgate, Scotland seemed to have invented just about everything worth inventing – television, telephone, tarmacadam, teleprompter, etc. – and they are just a few examples beginning with the letter ‘t’!
It took me some time further to realise that Scotland’s creative grandeur is not just down to natural ingenuity but springs from our most important invention of all: long before the Treaty of Union, Scotland legislated for compulsory universal elementary education at parish level. Indeed if we look at the list of great Scottish inventors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries almost all of them were people of humble origins, because almost all people had received an education. Few flowers in Scotland were born to blush unseen.
In no other society on earth, with the possible exception of Prussia, which embarked on this mission two centuries after Scotland, would such ‘lads of pairts’ have had the educational grounding to advance in business, science and medicine.
From the most developed education system in the world sprang the Scottish Enlightenment and out of the Enlightenment came the scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs who established Scotland as the pre-eminent industrial economy of the world by the end of the nineteenth century.
For most of the last hundred years Scotland was still producing the scientists and innovators but, by and large, they weren’t staying in the country. Scotland started to export its human capital to a ruinous degree.
However, towards the end of the twentieth century things started to change.
In the 1980s, when I was working as an economist, I used to do a party trick during lectures by asking the class to write down the six top industrialists or business people in the country. The names provided were invariably a familiar litany of minor aristocrats, most of whom were running their companies less well than their fathers or grandfathers.
But by the end of the century there had been a significant shift. The most highly regarded business people in the country were no longer those who turned silver spoons into base metal but working-class Scots who had either built their own businesses or run companies on their own merits.
Thus the likes of Brian Souter, Jim McColl, Tom Hunter, Tom Farmer, Martin Gilbert, Roy McGregor and David Murray became the best-known entrepreneurs in the land. What’s more, these people were popular and were often deeply influenced by the philosophy and philanthropy of another great Scot, Andrew Carnegie.
They were also generally sympathetic to either independence or at least home rule, and none of them rated the traditional unionist business organisations like the CBI. This directly affected Scottish politics.
In the 1979 referendum people in Scotland still listened to the CBI. By 1997 they were ignoring them. By 2014 they were laughing at them.
At the same time Scotland’s economic performance improved. The country now has lower unemployment and, even more crucially, higher employment than the UK average. Indeed outside the south-east of England, Scotland now has the best-performing economy in the country.
Furthermore the second half of the century brought a revival in the arts in Scotland, which gathered pace through the millennium. From crime novels to Turner prizes to chart-topping groups, Scottish art forms flourished as the country moved through the self-government gear box. The balance of opinion in this burgeoning artistic community also favoured radical change or independence.
Against that background the movement towards home rule was irresistible. I committed the SNP to campaign with Labour to secure a double YES vote in the referendum of September 1997. The political price that the late Donald Dewar agreed to pay for securing a united campaign was his explicit agreement that Scotland could progress to independence if the people so willed. Labour, it should be said, made that offer confident that the introduction of proportional representation for the Scottish Parliament would be an insurance policy against any such eventuality.
After a successful referendum campaign, the Scottish Parliament was, in the words from the chair of its most experienced member, Winnie Ewing, ‘hereby reconvened’ in 1999. The ‘recess’ had lasted a mere 292 years!
In the elections of that year the SNP gained more parliamentarians in a single day than in the previous seventy-year history of the party, became the official opposition, and shifted the centre of gravity of Scottish politics irreversibly from Westminster to Scotland.
After a setback in 2003, the SNP, under its new and combined leadership team of Nicola Sturgeon and me, narrowly won the election of 2007, and in the process inflicted on the Labour Party its first defeat in a major Scottish election since 1955.
There followed four years of minority government with a plurality of one seat. This government was to face the challenge of the greatest squeeze on public spending since the Second World War.
However, thanks to the parliamentary skill of the business convener Bruce Crawford and the magician-type qualities of the Finance Secretary John Swinney, the minority government survived to prosper. In 2011 the SNP achieved what had, until then, been thought impossible: an absolute majority in a proportional system specifically designed to prevent that from happening.
This made a referendum on independence, a key manifesto pledge of the SNP, inevitable. In the first term of office the three unionist parties had held the line against the referendum apart from a brief period in 2008 when Wendy Alexander, as Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, had unexpectedly proposed a referendum herself.
Unfortunately for Wendy, among those most surprised by this development was Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and the drama thus ended with her resignation. This was ostensibly for a minor infraction of donation declarations but in reality it was because of a complete removal of her political credibility by a London leadership team, which included her own brother Douglas, who gave her no support whatsoever.
This episode was a classic example of Labour in Scotland being treated as a London ‘branch office’, in the phrase of Johann Lamont (two Labour leaders after Wendy) in her spectacular resignation eruption of October 2014.
If the election result made a referendum certain, it did not define how exactly such a referendum should be structured. That was to be the subject of delicate negotiation between Downing Street and the Scottish government.
I had previously proposed to David Cameron, after his own election in 2010, that he should spring a political surprise and implement radical devolution for Scotland, often described in the shorthand title of ‘devo max’. This initiative got short shrift from the Prime Minister.
Why this was the case I cannot be certain. It would have been popular with his Liberal allies and allowed Cameron to propose a statesmanlike solution to the West Lothian question,* (#ulink_aef43e73-ce73-5003-aaea-b0ce58c7350c) and one effectively on his own terms.
The best explanation for Tory intransigence lies in the bowels of Westminster history and deep in the entrails of the Conservative interest. From Dublin to Delhi, Westminster governments have a dreadful record of conceding much too little and much too late to restless nations. In the case of Scotland the Tory attitude is further complicated by a proprietorial instinct. Regardless of their near total wipeout in Scottish democratic politics they regard our country as part of their demesne.
David Cameron stands in a long line of Tory prime ministers close to landed interests in Scotland. The Prime Minister’s holiday retreat, the Tarbert Estate on the island of Jura, is popularly believed to be owned by Mr Cameron’s stepfather-in-law, William Astor. In fact, it is owned by Ginge Manor Estates Ltd, a company registered in the Bahamas. The name tells the family story – Ginge Manor is William Astor’s stately home in Oxfordshire.
This interest extends to the very top of the civil service. Many people were perplexed by the apparent willingness of the Head of the Treasury, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, to abandon any vestige of civil service impartiality during the referendum campaign. Some people assume that he was forced into it by a scheming and highly political Chancellor. I doubt that.
Just after the election of 2011, I had a meeting with George Osborne and Sir Nicholas in the Treasury. Normally at these sorts of meetings there is an element of political sparring between the politicians while the civil servants stay suitably inscrutable. This meeting was different. Osborne was full of bonhomie while Macpherson radiated hostility.
I have no means of looking into the soul of the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury but my guess is that a background reason for his intense level of politicisation may well lie in his family’s extensive land interests in Scotland.
Whether that is his motivation or not, there is now no doubting his politicisation. In an unwise series of admissions to the inaugural meeting of the Strand Group* (#ulink_7f5d5e9f-f26b-5658-b7f1-d9e655880901) on 19 January 2015 Macpherson wallowed in his new-found role as a politician. He defended his decision publicly to oppose independence for Scotland. He said that in such an ‘extreme’ case as the referendum, in which ‘people are seeking to destroy the fabric of the state’ and to ‘impugn its territorial integrity’, the normal rules of civil service impartiality did not apply.
It is interesting to speculate how far Macpherson’s rant could change the relationship between civil servants and politicians if others succumb to this pernicious nonsense. In the past his logic could have led officials to take action against any politician or indeed government ‘destroying the fabric of the state’ by, say, accession to the European Union, or ‘impugning’ its financial integrity by, say, attempting to join the Euro. In the future being ‘extreme’ in Macpherson’s judgement could be, say, advocating the non-renewal of the Trident submarine fleet.
The solution to Macpherson’s dilemma is obvious. He shouldn’t wait for his inevitable seat in the House of Lords. He clearly needs to take his own manifesto to the people directly, by standing for election in the west coast of Scotland, perhaps in Plockton, Wester Ross, near his family estate. His father (a splendid chap by every local account) can give him bed and board while he campaigns to his heart’s content, explaining to the natives what is good for us. At any rate Sir Nicholas should give up now the pretence of being a civil servant.
Macpherson was allowed to get away with it by a subservient House of Commons, united across the parties in their mutual loathing of Scottish independence. Only the independent-minded veteran Labour MP Paul Flynn saw and challenged this behaviour, recognising, for example, the dangerous precedent created by the extraordinary publishing of Macpherson’s ‘advice’ to the Chancellor on sterling. Unfortunately, real Members of Parliament like Flynn are in short supply now in the Palace of Westminster.
In any case, and for whatever reason, Cameron rejected out of hand the idea of a démarche on devo max in 2010.
After the SNP landslide in the Scottish elections of 2011, I made another attempt to revive the devo max argument by means of a third question on the ballot paper, creating a choice between independence, radical devolution and the status quo. Three-way constitutional referendums are not unknown. Indeed the Cabinet Office itself organised one in Newfoundland in 1948.
This has been interpreted by some commentators and many opponents as indicating a lack of enthusiasm for independence on my part. How little do these people know me or my background.
I believe in Scottish independence. My mandate was to hold a referendum with independence on the ballot paper. I have always thought that it is possible to win such a vote. However, as I remarked to the Welsh politician Dafydd Wigley during the referendum campaign, a punter who places an each-way bet still wants his horse to win the race.
Cameron was having none of the three-way referendum. Buoyed by private polling and political advice which indicated a potential YES vote at around a maximum of 30 per cent, he was intent on a shoot-out between YES and NO with no intervening option. Given what was to transpire in the campaign with the last-minute ‘vow’ to Scotland of ‘home rule’, ‘devo to the max’ or ‘near federalism’, there is a certain irony in recalling his hard line of 2011/12.
Cameron’s position was entirely consistent with the traditional Tory attitude in conceding the absolute minimum to Scotland. At the same time, the new Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, fought an internal leadership election arguing that there should be a ‘line in the sand’ against any further devolution proposals.
An agreement with Westminster was necessary to put the referendum beyond legal challenge and, more than that, to have the aftermath of the ballot navigated in a positive manner. The central difficulty that Scottish nationalism has faced throughout its democratic history has not been persuading people that it should happen, but that it could happen.
Therefore, Cameron made his red line in negotiations the requirement for a single question in the belief that NO would score a comfortable victory. My key objective was to secure an agreement which established independence as a consented process after which it could not – and never again – be argued that there is no means by which Scotland can achieve independence.
In contrast to that absolute strategic objective the tactical consideration of having devo max on the ballot paper was very much of secondary importance. There has been some debate as to whether this was a real position of mine or merely a negotiating posture. The truth is it was both.
Initially, in the aftermath of the 2011 election, I had hoped that we could gain substantial traction across the range of civic organisations who favoured devo max. Many of these were grouped around the Devo Plus campaign led by the economically liberal financier Ben Thomson, but there were others active in much of the third sector and the Scottish Trade Union Congress. It was clearly not credible for the SNP government to simultaneously bring forward into a referendum campaign two propositions: independence and devo max. The latter would have had to be the result of genuine work by a substantial body of opinion outside of government and also be radically different from the insipid offering of the unionist parties at the time.
However, a fully fledged proposition for devo max proved not to be possible, and in 2012 I had to come to terms with that reality. I led a Scottish Cabinet discussion on the issue.
On the whole, at least in my second period as SNP leader, since 2004, I have had little difficulty in securing consensus behind my strategy for progress towards independence. It was not always like that. In the days when the SNP were far distant from the independence objective, occasional outbreaks of ideological purity were often a comfortable substitute for progress.
In the 1990s acres of newsprint and many SNP Conference motions were devoted to attempting to interpret every single nuance of my attitude to supporting devolution as a staging post on the way to independence. Eventually I put the matter to the decision of the SNP National Council and successfully committed the party to campaigning YES/YES in the two-question referendum of 1997.
As the Party became increasingly capable of winning, then confidence grew in the likely success of my gradualist strategy. Despite this, by early 2012 I was perplexing some of my colleagues with my continuing support for a third question on the ballot paper. Even Michael Russell, the Education Secretary, who was the joint architect of my step-by-step approach towards independence, contributed powerfully to the discussion, suggesting that it was time to embrace a YES/NO referendum. After I heard them out around the Cabinet table I sprang a surprise by saying: ‘Fine, let’s do that. YES/NO it is then.’
I then confided to my colleagues that we should maintain our public pursuit of the third option, since it would put us in a strong position to negotiate the timing, the framing of the referendum question and votes for sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds – all crucial matters under the control of the Scottish Parliament. I knew that the UK government would concede much else in their anxiety to record a ‘victory’ in their red line.
In other words, my support for devo max on the ballot paper was not initially a negotiating posture, but when it eventually became one it was highly successful.
The Edinburgh Agreement between the Scottish and United Kingdom governments was duly negotiated. The most important clause, and the one that received the most entrenched opposition from the UK negotiators, was the very last one, clause thirty:
Co-operation
30. The United Kingdom and Scottish Governments are committed, through the Memorandum of Understanding between them and others, to working together on matters of mutual interest and to the principles of good communication and mutual respect. The two governments have reached this agreement in that spirit. They look forward to a referendum that is legal and fair producing a decisive and respected outcome. The two governments are committed to continue to work together constructively in the light of the outcome, whatever it is, in the best interests of the people of Scotland and of the rest of the United Kingdom.
And so when David Cameron came to St Andrew’s House on 15 October 2012 with his Secretary of State Michael Moore to conclude the Edinburgh Agreement with Nicola and me, he signed a deal which both sides believed had fulfilled their key objectives. That is, of course, the best sort of deal. They had the YES/NO choice which they believed they would win comfortably. We had a referendum legislated for by the Scottish Parliament and consented by Westminster, establishing for all time a process by which Scotland could become independent.
My remarks at the press conference were designed to move the YES campaign into ultra-positive mode:
Today’s historic signing of the Edinburgh Agreement marks the start of the campaign to fulfil that ambition [of independence]. It will be a campaign during which we will present our positive, ambitious vision for a flourishing, fairer, progressive, independent Scotland – a vision I am confident will win the argument and deliver a YES vote in autumn 2014.
The Edinburgh Agreement allowed for the referendum to be held up to the end of 2014. The proper parliamentary process meant that a year to eighteen months was the necessary preparation time, but basically this left a choice available for the referendum to take place at any point in 2014.
My decision was to go later rather than sooner. It was what I had committed myself to in the election campaign. In addition we were behind in the polls – perhaps not by as much as the Tories believed, but still well behind.
We needed the time to gear up a campaign to take us from the low 30s to over 50 per cent, a seemingly daunting task. However, we also knew from our private polling that the total potential YES support was up to 60 per cent (‘potential’ means the number of people who said they were prepared to vote for independence under certain circumstances).
But away from all the pomp and poignancy of the historic day, there were a couple of moments when I believe the Cameron mask slipped a little. Signs that suggested his absolute confidence of late 2011 was faltering and that his vaunted attachment to Scotland was based on precious little of substance.
I had asked for some private time with Cameron immediately before and after the signing of the Agreement.
Beforehand this was no more than making sure that the television shots of our entrance into my office looked natural. I confess to having arranged the room so that the all-yellow map of the 2011 Scottish election results was immediately behind my seat. I even moved in the Permanent Secretary’s table for us to sit around. In the way these things work in the civil service, it is a rather more impressive piece of furniture than the First Minister’s table! Cameron and I went in together to join our teams and I showed him my John Bellany painting which adorned the First Ministerial room in St Andrew’s House. I mentioned to him that the painting was of Macduff Harbour and pointed out that it was pretty close to where his grandfather had founded a school in Huntly.
‘Ah!’ breezed the Prime Minister. ‘I’ve never actually been there.’
Given the important business to hand, I suppressed my surprise that someone should be so rootless as to never have thought of visiting a place presumably of importance to their family origins. However, of more political significance was the conversation that took place after the Agreement had been signed and the others had left.
The Prime Minister asked me when we were intending to hold the poll. I said the autumn of 2014.
He replied: ‘But that won’t allow enough time before the …’ and then stopped himself.
I took the half-finished sentence to mean that it wouldn’t allow time to negotiate independence before the UK election of May 2015. In other words, he wasn’t so absolutely confident that he hadn’t considered the political implications of a YES vote on Westminster parliamentary arithmetic.
Westminster underrated the importance of the timing of the referendum. Everyone likes to be noticed and 2014 was set to be a huge year for Scotland when we could bask in the international spotlight.
Cameron had a blind spot on this. He believed the centenary of the Great War in 2014 would be of more significance in reminding Scots of the glory of the union.
This attitude betrayed a huge misunderstanding of the Scottish psyche. As a martial nation Scots tend to revere soldiers but oppose conflict. We have no time for politicians who believe, like Cameron, that the anniversary of the bloody carnage of the First World War should be celebrated ‘like the Diamond Jubilee’.
There were more spilled guts than shared glory in the Great War.
Cameron thus overrated the impact of war and underrated the impact of peaceful endeavour. In 2014 Scotland would host the Commonwealth Games, the Ryder Cup, even the MTV awards. It was also the Year of Homecoming.* (#ulink_328417dc-2cbc-5952-8d42-2f39cae14777) Into this heady mix there would come a referendum on self-determination.
Once the date was set the challenge was how to create a campaign that would increase support by the 20 percentage points required to win.
One thing was certain. If we fought a conventional campaign then we would conventionally lose. It was Churchill who said of Austen Chamberlain: ‘He always played the game and he always lost.’ We had to ensure that we did not just play the game.
