Bully-boy politics won’t win our votes
LIKE many people in Scotland, I was rather hoping never to have to hear Alex Salmond’s name again after the conclusion of the recent Holyrood inquiry. Let him fade into obscurity, I thought. Disappear for good from the political landscape, and let us all move on.
Ho ho. The joke, it would appear, is on me. Salmond is back, along with the sort of pathetic, bully-boy politics I thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Alba Party is, of course, itself a joke. A raggle-tag band of SNP outcasts and political misfits, from Kenny MacAskill to Tommy Sheridan, who would have been rejected from the Judean People’s Front for being too one note.
They appear to have no policies or ideas, just some flim-flam about independence and super-majorities and taking to the streets to force a new referendum (can you imagine? In their heads I suspect they’re picturing Braveheart, when the reality is that sad little protest outside the Tunnock’s factory when a handful of people turned up to wave a hand-painted picture of a lion rampant that looked like a crow, with the confusing slogan ‘HEAR ROAR US’ scrawled underneath).
Meanwhile, a Survation poll this week found that Alba is on track to win just 3 per cent of votes on the regional list, which would leave the party without a single seat. LOL, as the kids might say.
The thing is, I’m struggling to find any of this amusing. In fact I might go so far as to say that I’m angry and disappointed.
IWAS never entirely convinced by Salmond’s portrayal of himself as a victim during the inquiry. It was not, for anyone who has seen him in action over years in public life, a natural stance. The one time bully boy-in-chief, the political bruiser, the self-appointed father of the nation, now sitting before us asking not for sympathy, but understanding. Compassion, even. A man who had been terribly wronged, and just wanted to put things right.
I don’t quite buy this ‘poor little me’ stance from a 66-year-old man, about whom his own biographer once said: ‘The fight is the main thing, and beating his opponents to a pulp’.
The man who appeared in an inexplicably dark room to launch his new political party seemed far nearer the mark. Bombastic, excitable, obsessed with independence, the unmistakable glint of revenge in his eye. It is, and always has been, everything I detest about politics. Any thoughts that Salmond may have reflected on the circumstances which have brought him, with Scotland kicking and screaming behind him, to this point, have been airily brushed aside.
During a toe-curling interview with BBC heavyweight Mishal Husain, in which she asked him if it was ‘OK to stroke women’s faces when they’re asleep’, and enquired if he had ‘reflected on the things that you admitted you had done’, he once again dodged an answer.
‘The verdict is in,’ he said. ‘The jury has decided and fair-minded people think that is fair enough.’
It is indeed fair enough. But forgive me, I do feel that if you want people to vote for you, you’ve got to do slightly more than be found not guilty on multiple sexual assault charges. It is, after all, rather a low bar. The truth is, when it comes to gaining votes, Salmond has always had a women problem. They were turned off by his shouty oratory, even when he was First Minister. And that, let us not forget, is when he still had Nicola Sturgeon by his side to soften the blow.
Now, out on a limb with his band of marauders, in trying to reinvent himself once again he has shown us who he truly is.
And I’m not sure many of us ‘fair minded people’ like what we see.
While I am no fan of the SNP, the muscling-in nature of the Alba Party’s manoeuvrings, entirely against the SNP’s wishes, feels like an incredibly dirty move, not least because it’s forced Sturgeon into the sort of political game-playing she professes to hate (see her entirely deliberate off-the-cuff remark this week about how Salmond regularly bets on the horses).
While I cannot claim to speak for them, I’m sure this sort of manipulation of the SNP and its leader will not go down well with a lot of independence supporters.
It speaks badly of the cause and of what an independent Scotland might look like (a basket case run by people who would spend a month arguing about painting furniture while the country went to rack and ruin).
Personally, I can’t wait for this election to be over. But while we are forced to watch the show, I hope that the people of Scotland – in particular its women – will look at the Alba Party and its leader and see them for what they truly are.
They have shown us their true faces. And that, ultimately, will be their undoing.