Alex
Salmond: Donald Trump let Scotland down, he’ll let America down
The
independence diehard talks Europe, Cameron and what went wrong on the
golf course near Aberdeen.
By JULES JOHNSTON
4/20/16, 5:33 AM CET
LONDON — A lot has
changed for Alex Salmond since Scotland tried to secure its
independence.
For a quarter
century leading up to the 2014 referendum, he was the face and voice
of the Scottish independence movement, and served as first minister
from 2007 to 2014. Less than a month after Scotland voted to stay in
the U.K., he had been replaced by his second-in-command in the
Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon.
He’s gone, but not
forgotten: Appearing as a witness before a recent session of the U.K.
Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss EU membership and
U.K. foreign policy, Salmond still exudes the kind of charisma that
helps explain how he managed to convince half of Scotland to vote to
break with the rest of Britain.
And he’s as
unafraid of a fight as ever. Salmond’s year began with a war of
words with former friend and U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump,
in which the true-born Scot and the not-so-true-born Scot traded
public insults that started with golf and ended with accusations of
lying and incompetence.
The question now is,
can Salmond bring his powers of persuasion to bear on the Brexit
debate, where the 61-year-old, who did his damnedest to break up the
three-century-old Union, finds himself an unlikely and uncomfortable
ally of David Cameron.
“I find myself,
for the first time in my life, surrounded by Conservatives, an
impossible thing in Scotland,” he tells the room full of
Westminster politicians, who break into laughter.
“You are one of
the only two Conservative friends I have in this place,” he says to
Conservative committee member Daniel Kawczynski. “Who’s the
other?” asks Malcolm Rifkind, another Tory. “Well, you,”
replies Salmond, to more laughter.
The topic being
discussed by the committee is Brexit, with Salmond poised to defend
the “imperfect” European Union that’s “a bit like the
weather; everyone moans about it, but you don’t want to abolish
it.”
Britain’s June 23
referendum on whether to stay in the bloc has blurred parliamentary
lines, with the inherently incompatible SNP and Conservatives on the
same side, but running very separate campaigns.
“The
prime minister’s attitude is ‘the less Europe does, the better”’
— Alex Salmond
“The things he
[Cameron] wants to stop are the things I want to happen,” Salmond
told POLITICO in an interview in London’s Portcullis House, where
MPs have their offices. “I want Europe that works in solidarity on
the refugee crisis.… I want a Europe which pursues infrastructure
to inspire the Continent. The prime minister’s attitude is ‘the
less Europe does, the better.’”
Applying the same
strategy that it used in the eventually unsuccessful Scottish
independence referendum, the SNP favors a positive campaign against
Brexit.
“You can fight a
dull, dispiriting, negative campaign, and you might win it with
that,” Salmond says. “But what you inherit might not be to your
liking.”
Salmond sees
Cameron’s argument as taking Europe and saying “‘I’ve made it
less dreadful due to my superb negotiations’ — it’s not really
the most inspiring case I’ve ever heard.”
Salmond believes the
U.K. will vote to remain in the EU, but he adds: “I think it might
be a damn close run.”
After Alex
Salmond is a
divisive figure in Scottish politics. As part of the SNP breakaway
’79 group, he was briefly expelled from his own party in 1982 for
his part in the group’s fight to set up a “Scottish socialist
republic” with policies well to the left of the traditional SNP.
During the 2014 referendum campaign, half of Scotland backed him to
the hilt, while the “silent majority” hoped he would fail.
He invited
accusations of vanity last November by choosing to attend the
unveiling of his portrait instead of a parliamentary debate on Syria.
“If Alex Salmond was chocolate he would eat himself,” a Scottish
Labour spokesman said at the time.
“He’s paid —
twice over — to be a parliamentarian, not an art critic,” sniped
Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives.
Salmond sees his
role as being a mentor to the surge of Scottish MPs who arrived in
Westminster following the SNP’s landslide success in last year’s
general election, as well as making sure the party has a voice in
London. He argues that it’s good for the party and his successor
Sturgeon that he remains far from Holyrood, the Edinburgh seat of the
Scottish Parliament.
As a former first
minister, anything of importance you say in Edinburgh “gets cast up
to your successor in a way you wouldn’t want.”
He describes
Sturgeon as someone with “all of the ingredients to be a successful
leader: natural ability and a long experience at the center of
power.”
That doesn’t mean,
however, that his own focus has changed — it remains on Scotland,
albeit within a European context.
“Scottish
independence is a much higher priority to me than the European
dimension,” he says.
To this end, Salmond
has no time for those looking for a short cut to another Scottish
independence referendum, such as nationalist extremists who have
suggested a tactical pro-Brexit vote. Their logic is that a British
exit from the EU would make Scottish voters — broadly much more
Europhile than their southern neighbors — much more likely to break
away from the rest of Britain than many of them were in 2014.
“You’re best
letting the cards fall as they will, campaign for what you believe in
and let the cards fall,” says Salmond.
The Donald vs. The
Salmond
The European
dimension isn’t the only thing on Salmond’s mind in his sojourn
south of the border: The U.S. presidential campaign has re-ignited an
old feud related to golf — a Scottish invention for which Salmond
and Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump share a
passion.
The game brought
them together — and drove them apart.
When the
half-Scottish U.S. billionaire, whose impression of Scotland seems to
resemble the picture of a tin of shortbread, announced back in 2006
that he wanted to build a golf resort in Salmond’s native
Aberdeenshire — to be called the Trump International Links —
local politicians and business leaders jumped at the promise of 6,000
new jobs.
They called it “the
second coming of oil,” an answer to their prayers for alternative
sources of income as North Sea reserves were drying up. Salmond was
the first in line to help Trump make his dream a reality.
Now, nearly a decade
on from their initial conversations, Salmond says: “I like… love…
the golf course. I mean, it’s not the greatest golf course in the
world by some distance, but it’s a very fine course. I was happy to
welcome the investment.”
He supported the
development despite environmentalists’ arguments that it would
destroy areas designated of special scientific interest. Arguing that
the gains for the local community outweighed such concerns, Salmond’s
cabinet got the development the green light within a year. It was
only after Trump began trying to derail plans to build a wind farm
near the estate that the relationship soured, though the development
went ahead.
Salmond finds it
difficult to forgive Trump for what he sees as the mogul’s failure
to keep his promises to the local community, including thousands of
new jobs.
“He’s got all
sorts of reasons that this didn’t happen,” said Salmond. “It’s
the fault of the crofter, it’s the fault of the demonstrators, it’s
the fault of me, or the weather. No! It’s Donald’s responsibility
that he didn’t deliver on his commitments.”
The pair make no
effort to hide their mutual dislike, with Trump’s outbursts often
“so comic in their effect that you begin to wonder if he is the
greatest deadpan exponent of the lot,” said Salmond.
Asked if he had a
message for Americans who may be pondering a vote for Trump if he
secures the Republican nomination, the former first minister
responded: “Just as he didn’t deliver on his commitments to
Scotland, in the hopefully fantastical possibility that he might get
near the Oval office, he wouldn’t deliver on his commitments to
America either.”
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