Why the only freedom this wonderful country needs is from the ghastly shower running it

ILOVE my country dearly. The older I get, the more Scotland’s treasures sparkle. The further I immerse myself in its history and geography, the more enriching the exercise. The more of my compatriots I meet, the clearer it is to me that we are good people.

There is a ‘but’ – and the events of this week amplify this ‘but’ to a level uncomfortable on the ears. The ‘but’ is much louder than an alarm bell. It is more like the sirens of every emergency vehicle in the land blaring at once.

Here it is: BUT the prospect of an independent Scotland should, at this moment in our nation’s story, leave us utterly terrified.

Earlier this week I watched our First Minister declare that her predecessor did not have a ‘shred of evidence’ for the claims he was making about a conspiracy at the top of her party and its government to bring him down.

All the while, it turns out, her own state machinery was working in the background to shred his evidence and make it disappear.

Within 24 hours, many of the most damaging sections of Alex Salmond’s submission to the committee investigating the handling of harassment claims against him were summarily removed, which meant he was banned from referring to them in the oral evidence he was due to give on Wednesday.

Among the redacted passages was the claim that Nicola Sturgeon had lied to the parliament about when she became aware of the allegations about Mr Salmond. And the reason for the redactions? The identities of the women who complained about Mr Salmond’s behaviour must be protected at all costs.

Substance

You may wonder, as I do, what the allegations concerning Miss Sturgeon’s honesty could have to do with preserving the anonymity of complainants. Either there is substance to Mr Salmond’s claims or there is not. That cannot be tested if he is forbidden from making them.

You may wonder, too, whether the primacy of these women’s anonymity has become an all too convenient fig leaf for the skulduggery which lies behind.

How often have we seen apologists for the Scottish Government attempt to crawl from the morass to the moral high ground by claiming that this inquiry is about women who claim they were harassed in the workplace?

Actually, that is not what the inquiry is about. That was what last year’s criminal trial in the High Court in Edinburgh was about. If convicted on the most serious charges, Mr Salmond would assuredly have gone to jail. He was acquitted on all of them.

No, this inquiry is about the Scottish Government’s handling of the harassment claims against Mr Salmond, whether it was fair and how it came to blow half a million pounds of taxpayers’ cash on a civil court battle with him that it could not possibly win.

And this Government, which tells you that it is ready to run an independent Scotland, has strained every sinew to stop the inquiry getting at the truth.

But the bigger thing to wonder is where all this leaves ordinary members of the Scottish public. By no stretch of the imagination is Alex Salmond one of those. He is a powerful and highly resourceful man. No less importantly, he understands governments, having led one, and is as familiar as anyone with the pressure points in his former party, having led it for 20 years.

If Mr Salmond is not to be given a fair hearing after a court ordeal that could have resulted in imprisonment and career-defining disgrace, what chance have the rest of us if,

God forbid, we find ourselves on a collision course with an imperious state that values self-preservation above all?

In our heart of hearts, we already know the answer. Choose your favourite among the world’s top-heavy state regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries: China, the Soviet Union, Libya, Romania, North Korea, Cuba… the list goes on. All survived on a culture of secrecy, authoritarianism and the conceit of invincibility.

When the boss of a nation’s prosecution service – in our case, Lord Advocate James Wolffe – is also a government minister with a seat in Cabinet, we should already be twitchy. When his staff tell a parliamentary committee which evidence it can hear in an investigation into the government to which he belongs, a chilling sense of Scotland’s direction of travel is afforded.

And when that committee is chaired by a member of the governing party under investigation – in this case Linda Fabiani MSP, who, incidentally, Mr Salmond sacked from a ministerial job back in the day – one wonders if we are trapped in some absurdist political satire.

The biggest laugh of all, of course, is we have a clear exit route from this quickening descent into state domination and we almost certainly will not take it.

Such is the traction gained by the Scottish Government’s core policy – independence – that its survival is all but guaranteed by an electoral cushion which both absorbs and, ultimately, absolves it of its sins.

For years I wondered how Donald Trump got away with it. How could he offend so many, twist the truth so brazenly and still keep Republicans on side? The answer was he promised to make America great again and nothing else mattered.

Promise

Here the promise is to make Scotland independent and, tragically for our country, nothing else seems to matter.

I still love this place but I hate what is happening to it.

As a Scot, I am horrified by what the events of the past week tell us about the land we are living in.

I am mortified by my own comparisons with notorious state regimes around the world and yet find them increasingly inescapable.

I am appalled by the contempt for transparency shown by a government which continues to insist, with no apparent hint of irony, that openness and honesty are its middle names, that it’s those Westminster Government types from yon England who are the shifty ones.

And, yes, I’m bitterly disappointed so many of my own countryfolk keep letting them get away with it just as Republicans let Trump do the same.

I have never wished for independence and would be heart-broken to see my other country, Britain, broken up.

But I don’t deny the theoretical circumstances in which Scotland could take complete charge of its own affairs and avoid catastrophe.

What is manifestly clear, however, is the current Government are the very last people we should have at its helm. The whiff of corruption has become a stink; the suspicion of mendacity has become an open and shut case.

Freedom may be their war cry, but it is freedom from them, a reset and a breath of clean air that the nation sorely needs.

Barring another last-gasp attempt to thwart him, Mr Salmond will take his seat at the committee inquiry today.

He will give no quarter and, if even a few of his claims are true, nor should he.

But, revenge aside, it is hard not to wonder as he returns to Holyrood whether at least a small part of this man, who has done more for the SNP’s cause than anyone alive, recognises the utter folly of having this shower run an independent Scotland.