Meeting of the Parliament 18 November 2014
I add to those of my party my best wishes to the First Minister as he leaves office today. It is traditional at this point to add a few words about how enjoyable retirement is and how pleasant the golf course looks, but seeing that there seems to be absolutely no chance that Alex Salmond is going to retire, I will leave that to one side, for the moment.
It is said that all political careers end in failure—that is, except for Alex Salmond’s. He is the archetypal Teflon don whose career does not appear ever to actually finish. Claims about leading the SNP to 20 seats in 2010—actually, they saw a drop from seven MPs to six—and boasts about taking Glasgow City Council in 2012 and claiming 3 MEPs in the summer of 2014 all died at the ballot box, but still the juggernaut rumbled on.
He is a political Lazarus, railing against a Westminster elite that he has been part of not once, but twice, and to which he could after May return for a third time. No doubt Nicola Sturgeon does not want a back-seat driver directing traffic from the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee here in Holyrood.
However, regardless of whether this is an end or merely a brief pit stop before Mr Salmond’s next lap of the political track, let me today pay tribute to, and pass comment on, the First Minister’s period in office. Let me start by touching on where I began, because if there is one thing that we can all recognise that distinguishes Mr Salmond from many of his contemporaries, it is that quite remarkable longevity. When I was elected Conservative Party leader, he kindly called me to offer his congratulations and quickly said “Excuse me for asking, but how old are you?” When I answered, he quite wistfully replied, “Ah. I was 35 when I first led my party.” What a contribution he has made to that party. To many people for many years he simply was the SNP.
The pressures of leadership are immense. To have served for two decades at the helm and for more than seven years as First Minister is a feat of enormous stamina, willpower and discipline. There are, I believe, very few people who would be capable of it. What has also distinguished him has been the way that he has stuck to his course for all that time. To read Mr Salmond’s maiden speech to the House of Commons in 1987 is to look back to a different era, but there he is, as if it were yesterday—moaning about the Scottish Tories, aiming a low blow at the Labour Party for failing to take us on and banging on about the constitution. If he sometimes appears like a stuck record the truth is that it is because Alex Salmond has stuck to the same tune over such a long period of time that, like an ear worm, the lyrics have been retained in people’s brains.
We on this side of the chamber might not have agreed with him very often, but it is unusual to find a politician who, for nigh on three decades, has relentlessly made the same case over and over again. We would be churlish not to recognise the belief, persistence and stamina that that takes.
However, it is as First Minister today that he is resigning and it is his record as First Minister of Scotland that will, ultimately, decide his legacy. The record is mixed and, for simplicity’s sake, it can be neatly divided into a game of two halves.
In his first term from 2007 to 2011, Mr Salmond’s Government’s minority status ensured that he had to gain consensus and reach out to other parties for support. The fact that sceptical Scottish voters were worried about a nationalist administration meant that Mr Salmond had sometimes to tone things down. Sometimes he appeared to have declawed himself; maybe he counted to twenty every time he was about to say something about independence and focused on mouthing lots of positive, but vague, statements on progress.
Ever the populist, he saw better than any of his predecessors how public funds could be used to win support among key target voters, hence the early decisions to cancel bridge tolls and scrap university tuition fees and prescription charges. We even worked with him on a number of other policies, including the provision of 1,000 extra police officers, a fund to regenerate our town centres and a new drugs strategy for Scotland. There could be no doubt across Scotland that we now had a Government that looked and sounded as if it knew what it was doing, even if we did not much like what that was. The result was that despite not having a parliamentary majority, no party sought to try and bring down the SNP Government during those first four years.
On Thursday, the First Minister joked to my Labour and Liberal colleagues that working with the Conservatives was electoral suicide, despite the small matter of our having defeated him in the recent referendum and despite, also, his knowing that one of the reasons why his Administration gained reputation for competence and stability during those first four years was that he needed, sought and received support from the Scottish Conservatives in order to pass his budgets and keep his Government on the rails. One might say that the First Minister and Annabel Goldie stood shoulder to shoulder to make the Government work. I would not go so far as to say they were better together, but such a close working relationship was no drag on his electoral prospects in 2011.
If that was the first half, we are all too aware of the second. With a remarkable majority, the referendum on independence was agreed, and it is a tribute to both Scottish and UK Governments that it was done with such good faith on both sides. However, some will not judge Mr Salmond’s record from then on quite so kindly. I do not begrudge his devoting the Scottish Government’s time and energy to campaigning for independence; that was his right and his democratic mandate. Rather, in time, I believe that questions might be asked about the way in which Alex Salmond fought that campaign.
Another case could have been made that accepted and acknowledged the upheaval that separating our United Kingdom would have caused. He could have acknowledged that some things would be worse, at least in the short term. Alex Salmond could have used his powerful political and communication skills to have argued, that all that notwithstanding, the goal of a fully sovereign Scotland was worth it.
I am not saying that our own campaign was perfect; indeed, it was not. I am saying that it was the First Minister who had ultimate responsibility for setting out to people the facts about independence; on that crucial task, I am afraid that he came up short.
His decision immediately after the referendum to resign was an honourable one. Many of us here have, however, greatly enjoyed the “Salmond unleashed” that we have seen since: the green ink letters, the radio show phone-ins and the opening of supermarkets out of pique.
We should, however, remember that Mr Salmond said, on the day that he took over as First Minister in May 2007, that
“The Parliament will be one in which the Scottish Government relies on the merits of its legislation, not the might of a parliamentary majority. The Parliament will be about compromise and concession, intelligent debate and mature discussion.”—[Official Report, 16 May 2007; c 24.]
Inevitably, given the passions that were raised by the independence referendum, it has not been easy to maintain those noble ambitions. However, Mr Salmond has led a Government that has often tried to do so, and for that he deserves great credit. I agree with Mr Salmond that this Parliament has become the centre of gravity in Scottish politics. For that, he and his team deserve our regard.
This Parliament’s stature is now recognised by all, and we are all committed here to ensuring that far greater powers and responsibilities are passed to this place. Alex Salmond can leave today in the knowledge that he has taken his party from the fringes to a position of enormous strength.
His leadership has been characterised by a remarkable instinct for the exercise of power, which kept him at the top of his party for two decades, brought him to the top of Scottish political life and made him a dominant politician of this era.
I now find myself in a remarkable position, Presiding Officer. I stand before you today as one of the rarest of breeds: an Opposition leader in the Scottish Parliament who appears to have outlasted Alex Salmond. That is, of course, unless he decides to come back. On the assumption that he will not, I once again extend my best very wishes to him, to Moira and to his wider family.
14:45