The Scottish National party’s away day for MPs, MSPs and MEPs is an annual fixture of the political calendar. But Friday’s joint parliamentary meeting, to be held at Napier University in Edinburgh, is certain to be dominated by one topic.
Alex Salmond’s dramatic resignation from the SNP, the party he led across three decades, turning it into a powerful electoral force and coming close to delivering a yes vote to independence in 2014, is the latest shockwave to hit Scotland’s governing party.
A week after the former first minister launched an unprecedented judicial review of the Scottish government’s handling of two sexual misconduct complaints made against him, it is hard to avoid talk of a major split within the party as well as potentially seismic repercussions for the pro-independence movement itself.
Observers of every stripe acknowledge Salmond’s continuing capacity to direct the news agenda with his usual hyperbolic flourish, but many also express deep regret that the discussion has already moved so far from where it began: two women’s allegations that he sexually harassed them while he was first minister, complaints that have now been referred to the police.
In his resignation statement, which Salmond released alongside a crowdfunding appeal to support his legal action, he said he was “conscious that if the party felt forced into suspending me it would cause substantial internal division”.
Beyond the retweeting of either Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon’s statements on the matter, it is notable how quiet SNP MPs and MSPs – well known for their embrace of social media – have been since the allegations emerged.
But the fact that a man with his evident resources was still able to reach his £50,000 target within hours of launching the appeal is evidence of the loyalty Salmond commands, among senior figures but also rank and file party members and across the wider yes movement – and of how speedily he can mobilise it.
Sturgeon may contemplate this as she prepares to update Holyrood on her position regarding a second independence referendum this autumn – something Salmond has taken a less gradualist position on.
On their public reticence, SNP parliamentarians will say privately that there is a collective willingness not to stoke the fire of speculation while investigations and legal action are ongoing. This is helped by a pragmatic recognition that the party has achieved much more in recent years as a broadly unified party, as well as the personal esteem that Sturgeon is held in. But there are also those who underline the serious disquiet among some colleagues at what they consider to be a lack of due process in the handling of sexual harassment complaints – including those which led to the resignation from the party of the former minister Mark McDonald in March – and a culture of leaking to the media.
Affection for Salmond is by no means universal, but he is frequently characterised as a “rough diamond” or a “street fighter”, even by those who insist he should not be above the law.
And there are those who insist that the spotlight must return to women. One prominent Scottish feminist, Claire Heuchan, questioned on Thursday how many people donating money to Salmond’s fighting fund had thought about how it would affect women who have been sexually assaulted, or how it might discourage women from coming forward in the future. Others noted that Salmond’s hashtag #forfairness appeared to imply that those bringing the complaints were somehow being underhand. Questions about the professional links of the husband of Leslie Evans, the country’s most senior civil servant, whose handling of the allegations Salmond is challenging, have left many women shaking their heads in despair about the progress of gender equality in Scottish public life.
A consideration of the wider impact on female voters may well be crucial to the longer-term health of the independence movement. Throughout the Scottish independence campaign, much time was spent analysing why many women were unconvinced by the yes message, and how best to win them over.
Groups such as Women for Independence heard from women who said they were turned off by a largely male-dominated debate. As the national coordinator Margaret Young told the Guardian this year: “What we found was not that women were risk-averse but that they didn’t believe there would be any change with independence because it would still be about people, mainly men, shouting and point-scoring whether in the newspaper, on television or on social media.”
