It's balmy oop north

It is one week since the Scottish National Party learned that they had gained an absolute majority under a system devised to prevent exactly that scenario. Some socialist and Marxist historians may pooh-pooh history as ‘the biographies of great men’ but Alex Salmond has lead his party almost to the sunlit uplands of independence and I would express severe doubt over whether anyone in his party could have achieved anything similar. He is, simply, the most charismatic and competent British politician of his generation
Yet he has had to risk his health to rescue his party. He relinquished the top spot on the advice of his doctors but had to step back up to the plate, when the SNP were dead in the water under John Swinney’s tenure. For the SNP to achieve their ultimate goal, Salmond has to stay at the helm. There is no-one else.
This was made clear in the interview Nicola Sturgeon MSP had with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight on Wednesday. Either she was obsessed with a referendum on independence that she was rendered inoperative to answer any other question or she was a really poor communicator. I’m guessing it was a 60/40 split respectively. In ten minutes she must have mentioned “the Scottish people will decide the best interests of Scotland” at least twenty times, contriving at one point to say it three times in the space of a single sentence. Paxman must have been in mellow mood, handing her enough rope to hang herself rather than pressing home that she wasn’t answering his questions. Again and again, he asked for specifics in different parts of policy - domestic and international – and while she occasionally broke from her trance to offer a modicum of detail, she always concluded that she couldn’t really say anything because it was “for the Scottish people to decide the best interests of Scotland.” It was unbelievably wooden and stilted. Modern voters aren’t interested in such Pinnochio politics; they just find it laughable.
There is, Westminster’s Scottish Affairs committee (Labour chaired and with a single SNP MP among its 11 members) concluded in a recent report, “a strong element of both a grievance and a dependency culture in Scottish politics.” I still remember a debate about four or five years ago, when the novelist Ian Rankin said that many Scots were quite chippy and one Scottish Nationalist piped up, querying that was anything wrong to being chippy. It is this tendency that Salmond seeks to suppress, giving the impression that he runs a party that is forward-looking, not seeking to blame anyone else. The Liberal Democrat collapse helped immensely, but their erstwhile voters chose the SNP as their home because of Salmond’s sure hand at conveying modernity and sense. All in all though, Scottish independence is still more popular in England than north of the border.