Salmond says he would relish fight with anti-SNP alliance in Gordon

ALEX Salmond has said he would welcome a pro-union pact aimed at thwarting his bid to return to Westminster and insisted that if an agreement was struck to field a single anti-nationalist candidate against him “the SNP will beat them as well”.

Peter A Bell's insight:

One thing that Alex Salmond’s candidacy for the Gordon constituency has done is highlight the extent to which politics in Scotland has been transformed by the rise of a popular progressive independence movement. The old Labour/Tory dichotomy, with it’s faux adversarialism and its shallow personality politics is no longer relevant. The British parties in Scotland have ceased to even pretend to be different from each other.

The choice facing the electorate next year, and in 2016, is between progressive Scottish parties - principally the SNP - and reactionary British parties in an explicit alliance against the parties which actually promise to represent the interests of Scotland’s people.

To me, that doesn’t seem like a hard choice at all. Politics is not given to simple truths. Such things seldom arise. But the simple truth in Scottish politics at the moment is that we urgently need to return as many SNP MPs to Westminster as we possibly can in 2015 and ensure that we continue to have an SNP administration at Holyrood after 2016.

The British parties hate the SNP because it stands as a proxy for the social conscience of our nation. Of course the British parties want to eradicate the SNP! It represents a challenge to the cosy neoliberal consensus and a threat to the structures of power and privilege which define the British state. But they also want to crush the SNP because, in doing so, they suppose they will also crush the new spirit of political engagement and activism which is the proud and pleasing legacy of the Yes campaign.

The British establishment desperately wants the people of Scotland back in their box. Voting for the SNP is one of the most powerful ways we have of ensuring that this does not happen.

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