Salmond was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that.
But as Nicola Sturgeon woke up and saw the ghost of Alex
Salmond, she wondered how it could be. The last she had heard he was still
alive.
But it wasn’t so much a vision of a future when Salmond
was no more as a vision of a present that might have been.
Salmond was president. He had won the independence
referendum in 2014. Now in an alternative Christmas of 2021 all of Scotland had
the chance to view “Scotland’s Future” as its present.
The women who had accused Salmond of sexual assault
and attempted rape never accused him of anything after the SNP’s triumph of
September 2014. Nicola Sturgeon’s response to the MeToo movement was not to start
an investigation into past misdeeds by former First Ministers but rather to
continue to ignore whatever she saw and heard.
She like everyone else in the SNP had heard rumours of
unwanted attention in the back of cars and the tendency to arrive unexpectedly in a lady’s bedroom as indeed this ghost, if it was a ghost, was
demonstrating. But the cause had been more important. Winning the referendum
and independence was worth whatever Salmond’s moral failings so long as he was
useful. When he ceased to be useful, he could be discarded into jail if only
the jury had followed the plan.
She saw the alternative Scotland she had helped
create. Negotiations with the former UK had dragged on longer than expected and
had been much tougher. The former UK set out to punish Scotland for leaving and
the EU keen to discourage separation agreed with this tactic. Scotland ended up
neither in the UK nor the EU.
The promised riches that independence would bring did
not materialise. Scotland had to pay tariffs to trade with both the EU and the former
UK and found that former UK consumers were less than keen to buy Scottish goods
and services. Taxes in Scotland rose and public spending fell.
When the Covid pandemic struck in 2020 Scotland was unofficially
using the pound which meant that it didn’t have a central bank that could print
money, nor could it borrow from the markets at a reasonable rate. Instead, it
had to borrow from the IMF just like Montenegro which likewise was using
someone else’s currency (in this case the Euro) unofficially.
There was no furlough in Scotland during the pandemic
and no support for businesses. We had to work even if it meant catching Covid
and so rates of infection and death were higher in Scotland. This meant that the
former UK closed the border with Scotland and English people in Hazmat suits
patrolled it. This had the unfortunate consequence of making it difficult for
produce to arrive in Scottish supermarkets as we continued to rely on English
ports, English roads and English lorry drivers to take it here. Still, we made
do with root vegetables which now at least had exclusively Scottish names.
The next night the ghost of SNP past arrived and
Sturgeon saw Dreghorn in the 1970s. She was watching Scotland play the
Netherlands in 1978. There was good humour and we laughed at ourselves as we
went out of the World Cup. But there was pride too at going out so bravely.
There was no talk of Scottish independence. Even the Sturgeon family kept their
views a bit under wraps as they would be gently mocked by the neighbours who
had come round to watch the match. Everyone except the Sturgeon’s felt both
Scottish and British. They had pride in the team and their Scottishness, but it
didn’t mean they thought themselves so very different from anyone else in
Britain. Scotland was not divided politically and we hardly thought of
constitutional change at all.
When the ghost of SNP present appeared, he showed
Sturgeon the Scotland she had helped create. He showed her a room in a Glasgow tenement
where a young woman was shooting up heroin as her baby cried itself to sleep
hungry and in dirty nappies. She was taken across the sea to islands which had
lost their ferry lifeline so that now a journey that had once been routine was a
matter of careful planning. She was taken to a school where the standard of
education was far lower than she had enjoyed in Dreghorn. She saw a little girl
who might have been her and might too have had the opportunity to study to
become a lawyer, but already the little girl was beginning to lose interest. The
ghost of SNP present pointed out what Sturgeon had neglected during the years of
being in charge of Scotland.
When the ghost of SNP yet to come appeared Sturgeon saw
a grave with her name on it. She did not know how far in the future she was
seeing, but it seemed rather neglected. She saw how disliked she was by those
who had opposed Scottish independence. Even her former supporters had tired of her
continual pretending that next year there would be a referendum.
She is granted the ability to look back on her whole
life and to see what she has achieved. She sees a Scotland that is worse than
when she became First Minister, perhaps worse than when she was born.
Desperate now Sturgeon asks the ghost of SNP yet to
come
“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or
are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
She is assured that the future is not yet determined
and that she can change.
Nicola Sturgeon wakes up and looks at the pile of
novels that has been carefully designed to appeal to focus groups. She sees it
as a metaphor for everything else that is fake in her life. She sees the
carefully constructed image. The hidden inner circle of the SNP playing with
independence supporters as if they were puppets. She admits that however much
she would like Scottish independence, we cannot afford it right now and that it
would harm the standard of living of ordinary Scots to attempt it anytime soon
after the pandemic.
Sturgeon tells the Scottish Parliament that the SNP
while seeing independence as a long-term goal, will focus instead on the Scottish
economy, reducing the deficit and healing the division both within Scotland and
the UK generally so that we all work together to make a better future for
everyone.
Freed from anxiety about imminent secession the
Scottish economy improves to the extent that we actually could afford
independence, but by that point we accept that being Scottish has been the same
as being British for many centuries and see no need for separation to express
our Scottishness.
