Alex Salmond says 2014 independence referendum came so close to not happening

Presiding over the independence referendum and leading the Yes campaign to a result that saw it come just five percentage points short of victory means that Alex Salmond’s tenure as First Minister stands out as the most dramatic and turbulent period of devolution.

Almost a self-styled polarising ‘Marmite’ figure, in that people either love him or hate him, Salmond will always have his place in history as the politician who ended Labour hegemony in Scotland, who ushered in the era of SNP rule and won an overall majority in a parliament specifically designed to prevent such an outcome.

Salmond is also, for the moment at least, the longest-serving First Minister in the history of the Scottish Parliament.

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But it’s the three-and-a-half year epic run-up to the independence referendum, when the SNP leader played centre stage in what seemed like a series of endless dramatic flashpoints involving the Scottish and UK Governments about the consequences of an independence vote, that stand out as the most notable years of devolution, regardless of the view one takes on the national question.

And yet it all came so close to never happening, or at least in the way it eventually played out, says the man who played a pivotal role in almost bringing an end to the centuries-old Union.

“It could have upset our game plan,” Salmond’s says of a move that he admits had the potential to derail the SNP’s Holy Grail of a winnable independence referendum.

There’s already been a book charting the inside, almost official, story of the campaign for independence from Salmond, ‘The Dream Shall Never Die’, published just six months after the referendum in diary form.

But in the calm after the storm and as the second anniversary of the referendum approaches, with Salmond now having left the Scottish Parliament for a second time, is there perhaps more of a tale to tell about what stands out as one of the most tumultuous political episodes in postwar Britain?

It’s when sitting in his MPs office at Westminster, to which Salmond was elected in May 2015 after a five year-hiatus from the Commons, that we get the ‘what if?’ view of the former First Minister and how history came so close to taking a different course.   

Fresh from Westminster’s weekly Prime Minister’s question time and a Commons adjournment debate on the EU, Salmond looks consumed by his current battles with Tory Eurosceptics, but at the same time, speaks as if he had just left the Holyrood chamber following a clash with the then Labour opposition over the Scottish independence referendum machinations.   

“It would have seized the initiative from us” and “It’s not obvious what we would have done”, Salmond says of how the SNP’s ‘gradualist’ strategy for holding a winnable independence referendum was almost sunk.

But what and who was it that almost put the kibosh on Salmond’s long game?

The political graveyards are littered with fallen Labour leaders and former cabinet ministers who were politically duffed-up by Salmond in what probably stand out as some of the most brutal exchanges in the life of the Scottish Parliament.

It’s Wendy Alexander, whose short lived and troubled tenure as Scottish Labour leader almost wrecked the SNP’s grand plan and long game strategy, Salmond surprisingly admits.
When asked which of his opponents caused him the most problems and how, Salmond, says: “Wendy on the referendum timing.”

Salmond says of the woman who took over as leader of her party in the wake of Labour losing power to the SNP back in 2007, “Wendy Alexander was a politician of considerable intellect”, when asked about the toughest challenges he faced from opposition politicians in the Scottish Parliament.

“She was very brave and she was very talented,” he says of a figure who loomed large in the early days of the Scottish Parliament as arguably one of Labour’s most able ministers when the party held power as the senior partner in the Lab-Lib Dem coalition in what was then the fledgling Scottish Executive.    

Despite lasting less than a year as Labour leader, Salmond says it was Alexander’s tactic of conceding the SNP demand of an independence referendum in her famous “bring it on” intervention that could have seen the parliament take a different course in the last eight years.

“It was the first time the opposition had done something that could have upset our game plan,” Salmond says, admitting that the SNP Government would have been ill-prepared for a vote on independence just a year after coming to power.

Salmond continues that it was Alexander’s “instinct on the referendum” in calling the SNP’s bluff that left his administration and its famously slick spin machine in a quandary as to how to handle such a development.   

“What would we have done, boycott such a vote? Salmond says, shaking his head, knowing that the SNP would never have been able to sell opposing a democratic vote to its supporters. 

“We would have come up with something, but it’s not obvious what we would have done,” Salmond adds, again offering a rare glimpse into one of the few times when the normally unflappable SNP Government’s inner circle of Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney, and its coterie of astute advisers appeared to be in a genuine state of flux.    

True, the SNP Government was popular enough at this stage and after just a year in power was still enjoying a honeymoon period against the backdrop of policies such as free NHS prescriptions and free university tuition, outflanking Labour on the left at both Holyrood and Westminster.

Meanwhile, Scottish Labour was still reeling from its 2007 defeat, with Alexander struggling to match Salmond at First Minister’s Questions and facing the always difficult task of any party that loses power of getting it back into shape as a potential alternative government. 

But with independence supported by no more than about a third of the electorate, a swift referendum held with a Labour Government led by a Scot, Gordon Brown, at Westminster did not offer the ripest of conditions for a Nationalist victory, Salmond suggests.

“It would have seized the initiative from us,” accepting that the SNP had not built up enough of a head of steam for independence, a position that would change with the election of David

Cameron as the Prime Minister of a Tory-led coalition government at Westminster and the SNP’s own re-election in 2011.

“It was unexpected,” Salmond says of Alexander’s calling out of the SNP on an early referendum, which the former First Minister admits when talking about his later negotiations with Cameron as only winnable if the Scottish Government took control of the timing of the vote, as well as the wording that appeared on the referendum ballot paper.

We may get more details of the turmoil that gripped the SNP Government in summer 2008, albeit for a short time, when Salmond finally publishes his full memoirs.

“But it fell apart,” Salmond says, the look on his face still showing signs of the relief he must have felt, when the Prime Minister of the day, Gordon Brown, effectively ruled out a referendum, saying he was “unpersuaded” of the case for one.

Brown overruling the party’s leader in Scotland was of course a total gift to the SNP over suggestions Labour’s Westminster leadership was treating the party in Scotland as what Johann Lamont some years later would describe as a “branch office”.

Alexander’s departure weeks later, after being censored by a Holyrood committee for failing to register a donation to her leadership campaign the summer before, spelled the end of any further pressure for an early referendum, something that had it led to a No vote would have weakened the SNP Government and made a second vote on leaving the UK any time soon pretty untenable.

Salmond shrugs his shoulders when reflecting on what was an early scare for the SNP with the prospect of a referendum, presided over by a minority government with no mandate for such a vote and where the UK Government would have been able to dictate the terms and timing, depriving the nationalists of a lengthy run-up to the campaign that would do so much to assist the Yes side in 2014.

“If you want to win a referendum you need to control the timing and the question,” Salmond says when talking about the critical need to go to the electorate at a time most favourable to the government calling such a vote.

But it’s about his protracted negotiations with the UK Government and David Cameron in particular on reaching the ‘Edinburgh Agreement’ for the holding of a legal referendum that he’s talking about this time rather than Alexander’s intervention.  

Memories of Salmond’s talks with Cameron and the then Lib Dem Scottish Secretary, Michael Moore, have been largely eclipsed by the later dramatic happening of the referendum campaign.

But in the 18 months after the SNP’s landslide win at the 2011 election, which made an independence referendum inevitable, there were real tensions at play over the terms of how the vote would be conducted and whether it would be legally binding.

It’s clear that Salmond does not rate Cameron as a ‘negotiator’ when he dismisses the Tory leader as little more than a “marketing man” who he believes he comprehensively outfoxed during the referendum talks.

“Negotiations and talks with Cameron were the funniest,” Salmond says of his face-to-face meetings with the PM, in scenes that sound like something straight from the acclaimed satirical political TV comedy The Thick of It or to go back further still, Yes Minister.   

“Negotiating with him, it was clear that he had this belief I was going to try to pull a fast one,” Salmond continues. 

“He was deeply suspicious all the time,” Salmond says, this time chuckling lightly as he unbuttons his tie and places his feet on an office chair in his office at a complex for MPs, just a stone’s throw away from the House of Commons. 

Perhaps it’s coming fresh from a Commons clash with Cameron in June 2016 that makes Salmond feel especially pleased with himself about what he considers was a triumph over the PM a few years back.

“We encouraged this belief that I wanted three questions on the ballot paper,” Salmond says of what had been the SNP Government’s position that it had been open to the idea of a referendum that included the option of ‘devo max’ as well as independence and the status quo.   

“By being obsessed with the single question, I was able to get him to concede the timing and the wording of the question put to voters,” Salmond says, suggesting he was able to get his own way by playing a form of high stakes bluff with the PM back in late 2012, when the Edinburgh Agreement was signed.

Speaking just over a week before the EU referendum, Salmond believes Cameron has been outgunned by Eurosceptics, who he says he failed to take on in debate such as with former London mayor Boris Johnson. 

“Cameron has lost control of the referendum.

“His biggest mistake is not taking on Boris Johnson head to head. Boris’s lack of attention to detail would have exposed him.”

But Salmond’s disdain for Cameron is clearly not confined to the way the PM has handled the EU issue and comes from his time standing in opposition to the Tory leader during the run-up to the independence referendum. 

Salmond says: “He’s never had to face adversity in his political life. 

“He’s faced personal adversity incidentally and he deserves credit and respect for that.

“But he’s had a silver spoon in his mouth throughout his political life and without his little helpers is a diminished politician.

“Cameron’s had all these people to do his political bidding.

“He’s a marketing man.”

However, Salmond is somewhat less scathing of Gordon Brown, the man who would occupy 10 Downing Street for much of Salmond’s first term in power.

Salmond says: “He had been a very considerable political force in the Labour government and was the anchor of New Labour.

“But by the time he was Prime Minister, he was not at his best.”

But it’s again Salmond’s early years in power that he marks out as being decisive in the maturing of the Scottish Parliament.

The rebranding of the Scottish Executive, as it had been known during the first eight years of devolution under Labour-Lib Dem rule, as the Scottish Government by the newly elected SNP was a decisive moment, Salmond says, in the devolution story.   

He says: “In 2007 with the election of the SNP there was more ambition. That’s what the Scottish people wanted and we supplied that.  
 “We had to demonstrate that we were the government of Scotland. Now everybody accepts that it is the Scottish Government.

“It was a gesture that showed we had confidence. It was a symbol of better things to come and the voters endorsed this at the 2011 election.”

However, it’s the abolition of tuition fees soon after the SNP came to power that Salmond says is the high watermark of the legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament, a move he claims significantly increased access to higher education.    

“Restoring free education was the most important because access to education is at the heart of the Scottish tradition. 
“Access to education is deeply embedded in Scottish society.”

With the SNP now so dominant in Scottish politics, it’s easy to forget just what a close call its initial victory over Labour was in May 2007 when, after taking one more seat than Jack McConnell’s party, Salmond audaciously proclaimed himself as First Minister after a helicopter landing on the lawn at Edinburgh’s Prestonfield House Hotel.  

But for Salmond, even if McConnell had managed to cling on as First Minister, Labour was on its way out, with the SNP set to take devolution to the next stage.

He says: “If it hadn’t come in 2007, it would have in 2011. Labour was on the way down.

“If Jack McConnell had got 47 seats to our 46, his term as First Minister still wouldn’t have been overextended. 

“As soon as the Scottish Parliament was established, the election of the SNP and independence were going to happen at some stage.

“At some stage it was going to happen. It was a question of the timescale and in that sense independence was inevitable.”

But after Salmond’s surprising claim that it was Wendy Alexander, now long since gone from Holyrood, who almost changed history, it’s striking to hear a man so well known for his pugnacious debating style ready to praise figures from other parties, particularly Labour, who he believes played a positive role in the story of the parliament.    

There are fulsome mentions for Scotland’s inaugural First Minister, Donald Dewar, Labour veteran backbencher Malcolm Chisholm and the later former finance minister, Tom McCabe.    
“Donald Dewar, a considerable politician,” Salmond says.

He adds: “On the backbenches, I’d say Malcolm Chisholm. 

“He was a very dedicated MSP and in 2011 held his seat, the only Labour MSP to do so for a constituency seat in Edinburgh in that election.

“He held his seat against the trend. Malcolm was well regarded.

“Tom McCabe was a very good and dependable politician and if you did a deal with him it stuck.

“He was a sensible fellow.”

“For the Tories, I’d say the Baroness. Annabel Goldie was always good to debate with. It was fun and I miss our exchanges.

“Of course, there’s Margo MacDonald and her enormous spirit.”

However, as he brings his reflection on the devolution story to a close, Salmond reserves most praise for the Scottish Parliament’s second Presiding Officer, George Reid, who he says saved it from a Westminster-style expenses scandal.   

Salmond said: “The parliament as a new body had a fairly rough period and some clumsy mistakes were made.

“My view is that George Reid deserves an enormous amount of credit. 

“He was an outstanding Presiding Officer who established workable procedures and steered the parliament away from an expenses scandal that affected Westminster.

“There has been no significant expenses scandal since George Reid presided over the introduction of a simple and transparent expenses system for the Scottish Parliament.”