Word games that risk backlash from voters

NO doubt Alex Salmond is pleased with his latest verbal acrobatics in which he airily dismisses his 2014 pledge that the independence referendum was ‘once in a generation’. Now he claims that was ‘just an estimation’.

It will play well with Nationalist zealots, used by now to senior SNP figures saying one thing to the broader public while – with a stage wink – whispering the opposite to card-carrying separatists.

Nicola Sturgeon was touted as a new kind of politician, one who would not indulge in the low habit of speaking out of both sides of her mouth.

A few short weeks ago, she launched ‘a listening project’ to grasp why the overwhelming majority of Scots rejected the SNP’s separation dream.

Then at the weekend, she gave the lie to the whole exercise with her declaration that independence trumps all other considerations.

Scots can be heaped on the dole (though where the money to fund even that would come from is vague), families impoverished, the country turned into a mendicant pauper at the mercy of international bankers to deliver ‘the dream that shall not die’. So much for listening.

Miss Sturgeon is shorn of her Holyrood majority. Polls show her personal popularity on the wane. Support for independence is stalled, her hoped-for surge after the Brexit vote a myth.

She would do well to reflect that the public take a very dim view of anyone, such as the much-diminished Mr Salmond, who makes a cast-iron pledge and then thinks they can wriggle out of it with a few glib words.