• Home
• UK Politics
• World Politics
• Policy
• Media
• Lifestyle
• Sport
• Contributors
• Topics

Salmond Promises Queen Will Remain Scottish Monarch

The SNP may have won elections, but it doesn't seem to be winning the Independence argument. Alex Salmond has also dumped the SNP's policy of having a referendum on the future of the monarchy, reveals David Torrance

By David Torrance

4 Jul 2011, 19:27

Will she or won’t she? The answer to that question – would the Queen remain head of state in an independent Scotland – is now unequivocally ‘yes’. Not because the Scottish National Party (SNP) voted for it, but because Alex Salmond, party leader and First Minister of Scotland, says so.

Last week, during the Royal opening of the fourth Scottish Parliament, Salmond boldly told Her Majesty: Don’t worry, you’ll still be head of state when (not ‘if’, Alex doesn’t do hypotheticals) we become independent. It took me to remind everyone via my blog that SNP policy has actually, since 1997, been to hold a referendum during the first term of an ‘independent parliament’ on the question of ‘whether or not to retain the monarch as head of State for Scotland’.

Now the First Minister has never liked this policy, and indeed argued against it when it was debated at the 1997 SNP conference, so now he’s simply dumped it, subsuming it within plans for an independence referendum to be held in 2014 or 2015. Now that big prize is finally within sight, the last thing Salmond wants is a damaging internal row over the monarchy. Junior minister ‘Republican’ Roseanna Cunningham, meanwhile, maintains a diplomatic silence, for it was she who championed the old policy in the first place.

Ten, certainly twenty, years ago there would have been an almighty row over such a U-turn, these days newspapers search in vein for voices critical of the SNP leadership. Alex has won two elections, appears to be the rationale of the Nationalist grass roots, he can do whatever he wants.

This, I suspect, is only the beginning. For years ‘independence’ was little more than a slogan with scant need for definition; now the all-important referendum is in sight, it won’t just be its policy on the monarchy the SNP has to clarify, but a whole range of other areas too, not least NATO, terms of European Union membership, nuclear weapons, and so on.

But it goes much deeper than that. The self-declared ‘National Party of Scotland’ will have to return to first principles and actually articulate the argument for independence, rather than just tidying up constitutional loose ends. Curiously, a lot of Nationalists appear to have forgotten what this is. I have a favourite party trick: whenever I meet a friendly Nationalist at a social gathering I ask them to give me three compelling arguments for independence. Most struggle beyond just one, and even then quickly retreat into vague statements about national identity.

This vagueness goes beyond activists. Over the last few months, John Swinney (a former party leader) and Nicola Sturgeon (a future party leader) have been questioned closely during television interviews about what independence would mean and both have struggled. I can’t help feeling the SNP are in danger of confusing electoral success with having won the argument.