The inadequacy of the SNP's engagement with serious issues like currency and Europe suggests they suspect the game is up
Maybe it's the effect of spending an evening earlier this week at the Almeida theatre in London at its searing new dramatisation of George Orwell's 1984. But it seems to me that even Orwell has little to teach the Scottish National party leader Alex Salmond about the art of Newspeak.
In Orwell's dystopian novel, you may remember, Newspeak is designed "not to extend but to diminish the range of thought." In its purest, and most egregious form, Newspeak therefore boldly expresses logical impossibilities like "War is peace", "Freedom is slavery" or even "2+2=5."
To be fair, Salmond's response this week to the assaults that have rained down on some of his key independence policies – a currency union with the UK and seamless membership of the EU prominent among them – stopped short of outright Orwellian outrages. Scotland's first minister, after all, is Wee Eck, not Big Brother. And he talks Natspeak not Newspeak.
But that speech of his in Aberdeen on Monday, along with too many of the SNP's other responses to the challenges levelled against their independence plans this month, was a really shoddy job. Having insisted that he believes in positive not negative campaigning, Salmond promptly excoriated attempts "to dictate from on high" by people who do not understand Scotland. Natspeak and Newspeak – political language giving "an appearance of solidity to pure wind", as Orwell called it – have rarely been closer.
Salmond's supporters were delighted, as they always are. But it felt like a reputation destroying performance. For if anyone is guilty of the bluff, bluster and bullying with which Salmond loudly charged his much better argued critics, it is Salmond himself. What's more, I'd be pretty confident that the voters will ultimately see it that way too.
These feel like pivotal days in the argument over Scotland's future. The phoney war of the last two years has disappeared, while the hard pounding of serious political weaponry has abruptly taken its place. Next Monday both the UK and the Scottish cabinets will be taking their messages to Aberdeen. With all the polls suggesting that pocketbook questions will be at the heart of the vote on 18 September, Salmond and the yes campaign have been challenged on three of the biggest of those questions – the currency, Europe and pensions – and thus far they have had little besides huffing and puffing to respond with. It will be interesting to see whether the SNP heads to Aberdeen next week to sneer or to engage.
This is said almost as much in sorrow as in anger, because Salmond has been a formidable figure in modern Scotland and the arguments he has played such a part in unleashing over the years are unquestionably powerful ones. But in each of the three cases – George Osborne's ruling out of a currency union, José Manuel Barroso's warnings that Scotland's place in the EU is not automatic and, most recently, Gordon Brown's return to the fray to caution about the future of Scottish pensions – the SNP response has been the same. First, the problem raised by the critic is airily dismissed and denied; second, an untested solution is confidently asserted; finally, the nationalist attack machine clatters the man not the ball. Doubtless it will be the same when Alistair Darling speaks about UK social solidarity in a speech on Thursday.
Thus, in Natspeak, the huge issue of the currency was dismissed by the SNP simply as a diktat from the Westminster elite, while Osborne was sneered at as a patronising Englishman who knows nothing about Scotland. Ed Balls, who weighed in to support Osborne, was promptly told by Salmond he was reading from the chancellor's script.
Four days later, Barroso's massively important warnings about Scotland and Europe were scorned as undemocratic. And this week Brown's no less serious case about pensions was met by Nicola Sturgeon's insult that the former PM was the last person anyone in Scotland would take lessons from.
I'm no uncritical admirer of Osborne, Balls, Barroso or Brown. Nor am I a kneejerk critic of Salmond or Sturgeon. But I know a serious argument when I hear one, and Osborne and the others have been making serious arguments in the past few days. It is simply mischievous to pretend that they are not dealing with major issues which, if mishandled, could be seriously destructive to ordinary lives, communities and standards of living. Yet, faced with genuine intellectual and political challenges on big subjects, Salmond and his colleagues act like children who scream as loudly as possible in order to avoid listening to a message they do not want to hear.
It is often said, by admirer and critic alike, that Salmond is a man who plays a long game. If that is the case, then what is the long game that has such a reflexive and prominent place for such low-level sneering? To read some commentators, you may think that Salmond has simply tapped in to the Scottish public's view. Maybe that feeling of being talked down to and told off, even bullied, is the feeling that most Scots share this week. Salmond has captured their mood before. So he may do it again.
But a rather more persuasive explanation for the inadequacy of the SNP's engagement with serious issues this week is that it may suspect the game is up. The party has read the steadiness in the polls and realised it is not going to win a referendum that Salmond neither wanted nor expected until his shock landslide in 2011 forced him to hold it.
In that case, the long game may simply be an SNP core vote strategy, designed not to persuade but to maximise the anti-English, anti-British, anti-Tory, anti-neoliberal vote that the nationalists have successfully corralled in the past – and await another day. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
Maybe it's the effect of spending an evening earlier this week at the Almeida theatre in London at its searing new dramatisation of George Orwell's 1984. But it seems to me that even Orwell has little to teach the Scottish National party leader Alex Salmond about the art of Newspeak.
In Orwell's dystopian novel, you may remember, Newspeak is designed "not to extend but to diminish the range of thought." In its purest, and most egregious form, Newspeak therefore boldly expresses logical impossibilities like "War is peace", "Freedom is slavery" or even "2+2=5."
To be fair, Salmond's response this week to the assaults that have rained down on some of his key independence policies – a currency union with the UK and seamless membership of the EU prominent among them – stopped short of outright Orwellian outrages. Scotland's first minister, after all, is Wee Eck, not Big Brother. And he talks Natspeak not Newspeak.
But that speech of his in Aberdeen on Monday, along with too many of the SNP's other responses to the challenges levelled against their independence plans this month, was a really shoddy job. Having insisted that he believes in positive not negative campaigning, Salmond promptly excoriated attempts "to dictate from on high" by people who do not understand Scotland. Natspeak and Newspeak – political language giving "an appearance of solidity to pure wind", as Orwell called it – have rarely been closer.
Salmond's supporters were delighted, as they always are. But it felt like a reputation destroying performance. For if anyone is guilty of the bluff, bluster and bullying with which Salmond loudly charged his much better argued critics, it is Salmond himself. What's more, I'd be pretty confident that the voters will ultimately see it that way too.
These feel like pivotal days in the argument over Scotland's future. The phoney war of the last two years has disappeared, while the hard pounding of serious political weaponry has abruptly taken its place. Next Monday both the UK and the Scottish cabinets will be taking their messages to Aberdeen. With all the polls suggesting that pocketbook questions will be at the heart of the vote on 18 September, Salmond and the yes campaign have been challenged on three of the biggest of those questions – the currency, Europe and pensions – and thus far they have had little besides huffing and puffing to respond with. It will be interesting to see whether the SNP heads to Aberdeen next week to sneer or to engage.
This is said almost as much in sorrow as in anger, because Salmond has been a formidable figure in modern Scotland and the arguments he has played such a part in unleashing over the years are unquestionably powerful ones. But in each of the three cases – George Osborne's ruling out of a currency union, José Manuel Barroso's warnings that Scotland's place in the EU is not automatic and, most recently, Gordon Brown's return to the fray to caution about the future of Scottish pensions – the SNP response has been the same. First, the problem raised by the critic is airily dismissed and denied; second, an untested solution is confidently asserted; finally, the nationalist attack machine clatters the man not the ball. Doubtless it will be the same when Alistair Darling speaks about UK social solidarity in a speech on Thursday.
Thus, in Natspeak, the huge issue of the currency was dismissed by the SNP simply as a diktat from the Westminster elite, while Osborne was sneered at as a patronising Englishman who knows nothing about Scotland. Ed Balls, who weighed in to support Osborne, was promptly told by Salmond he was reading from the chancellor's script.
Four days later, Barroso's massively important warnings about Scotland and Europe were scorned as undemocratic. And this week Brown's no less serious case about pensions was met by Nicola Sturgeon's insult that the former PM was the last person anyone in Scotland would take lessons from.
I'm no uncritical admirer of Osborne, Balls, Barroso or Brown. Nor am I a kneejerk critic of Salmond or Sturgeon. But I know a serious argument when I hear one, and Osborne and the others have been making serious arguments in the past few days. It is simply mischievous to pretend that they are not dealing with major issues which, if mishandled, could be seriously destructive to ordinary lives, communities and standards of living. Yet, faced with genuine intellectual and political challenges on big subjects, Salmond and his colleagues act like children who scream as loudly as possible in order to avoid listening to a message they do not want to hear.
It is often said, by admirer and critic alike, that Salmond is a man who plays a long game. If that is the case, then what is the long game that has such a reflexive and prominent place for such low-level sneering? To read some commentators, you may think that Salmond has simply tapped in to the Scottish public's view. Maybe that feeling of being talked down to and told off, even bullied, is the feeling that most Scots share this week. Salmond has captured their mood before. So he may do it again.
But a rather more persuasive explanation for the inadequacy of the SNP's engagement with serious issues this week is that it may suspect the game is up. The party has read the steadiness in the polls and realised it is not going to win a referendum that Salmond neither wanted nor expected until his shock landslide in 2011 forced him to hold it.
In that case, the long game may simply be an SNP core vote strategy, designed not to persuade but to maximise the anti-English, anti-British, anti-Tory, anti-neoliberal vote that the nationalists have successfully corralled in the past – and await another day. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.