Who will lead scotland's anti-war sentiment

Robin McAlpine

It has been an odd week in Scotland. The death of a political figure of the stature of Alex Salmond is always going to lead to some national introspection. One of the areas which I've not seen discussed is what this might mean for Scotland's foreign policy stance. 

Scotland has a very strong militaristic tradition, but it also has a strong anti-militaristic tradition. These ebb and flow with the scale of our confidence in Britain's foreign policy and our general attitude towards Great Britain, but they have also relied on figures who would make an anti-war stance.

And, like him or loathe him, for his entire tenure Alex Salmond took an anti-war stance. In fact he did this often with political risk. Where it was easy for politicians to oppose the Iraq war given the massive public opposition it faced, it took a much braver politician to come out against the UK's bombing of Kosovo and Serbia.

In calling these an 'unpardonable folly', history has proved Salmond right, it simply did much more damage than it prevented. It was instigating the bombing campaign which forced peacekeepers to withdraw and that led to most of the ethnic cleansing which happened after we got involved. But it remains a controversial position to this day.

There are few wars that the SNP has supported since it was created and that strong anti-war sentiment has always been strong in the party. It has been consistent throughout its history on the need to find peaceful solutions and its membership remains very much of that ongoing mindset.

But are its current leaders even nearly as interested in this subject as its previous leaders? Seismically for the party, the SNP dropped its opposition to Nato membership in the run-up to the independence referendum. Is it now as much a Nato-aligned party as the others and what is this going to mean for Scotland's wider political culture?

Certainly the anti-war message was not one Nicola Sturgeon was particularly known for. She opposed the Iraq war, but there is little evidence that geopolitics played that much of a part in her world view. Sturgeon's positioning on the Ukraine War was of course consistently anti-war, but it was also highly militaristic.

Where in the past the SNP would have opposed the invasion but would also have been likely to oppose uncontrolled escalation, Nicola Sturgeon rather distastefully shared a Tweet that appeared to celebrate how many Russians were being killed. She promoted figures like Alyn Smith and Stewart McDonald who were known for their closeness to the UK foreign policy establishment.

The Labour and SNP foreign policy positions during this period were definitely not the same. Although Labour had drifted to the anti-war left faster than the SNP drifted to the pro-Nato right, Labour was still filled with Blairites and supported the 2018 bombing of Syria which the SNP voted against. But the difference was a lot less stark.

Of course, 18 months on from the invasion of Ukraine the difference between Labour and the SNP couldn't have been clearer. Under Starmer Labour was straining all is sinews to realign itself with the foreign policy establishment and in particular was falling over itself to be pro-Isrealli (a position Starmer holds strongly on a personal basis).

The comparison with Humza Yousaf couldn't be more obvious. He took a really strong position on Gaza and his courage in making that case was admirable. Yet Yousaf had a personal connection and was feeling that war very personally. I have absolutely no doubt that he will hold a consistent anti-war position, but would he have taken the risks the SNP had in the past in saying so?

Risk-taking on foreign policy certainly isn't something you'd associate with John Swinney. He's been solid enough on Gaza without really going any further, but would that apply to another instance when public opinion wasn't so clear? Or, another way to put it, would a John Swinney administration seek to shape public opinion on foreign policy or merely reflect it?

This whole question is one that is forefront in my mind just now, and it isn't really because of Alex Salmond's death, it is because the same question raises its head all over the place. Who will lead us to independence? Why won't governments do anything about climate change? Why does everyone talk about poverty but do so little?

The answer in all these cases is that we haven't had strong enough leadership. Before anyone jumps on me, I very much do not mean 'we lack messiahs'. What I mean is that we must be presented a clear direction and be urged again and again to follow that direction. It can be campaign bodies, or strategies, or the power of ideas, or replicating what others have done.

'Leadership' isn't something only an individual leader does, but moving purposefully in the same direction is something that seldom happens without leadership. If we don't have powerful voices and organisations pushing climate change solutions, we won't find them. If we don't set a path to independence we're unlikely to get there. We need leadership, whether that involves individual leaders or not.

What worries me is that we seem to have reached the end of a generation of people who sought to lead, to change minds, to alter the direction of travel. We now have a generation of politicians who seem more designed to follow than to lead. They watch social media and try not to end up outside the consensus.

But it is the ability to challenge consensus that changes the world, and that we don't have. Those who want to change the consensus don't seem to go into politics like they used to, and those who do go into politics seem more orientated to 'managing the machine' than messing around with it.

It makes me nervous about the future. Strong leaders are either going out of fashion or coming back into fashion according to your view of things. Either way, the peak of strong leaders has passed in the Western world. I'm ambivalent about this, but not as enthusiastic as you might think. Because in business and in war absolutely no-one is questioning the merits of strong leadership.

So we risk drifting into an even more unequal power balance with the war machine and the 'titans of industry' pushing and pushing for more and an era of politics which is minded to challenge them less and less.

Certainly in the independence movement there is a widespread assumption that Scotland would become a kind of Ireland after it becomes independent, fiercely autonomous in its thinking on foreign policy, willing to take a moral stance and unafraid to piss off powerful people. But is that really the case now?

Because if it is, the SNP reversing its policy on Nato is a very unconvincing way to go about persuading me it is. In fact one of the strangest elisions of actions and expectations comes from people in the SNP who believe that there is no contradiction in voting to join Nato through loyalty to the party establishment but then believing that the party can go on to be highly critical of Nato anyway.

The world is not a happy place just now. Be it climate change or war or economic crises or the rise of the far right, we all seem to assume that the current bad things will somehow be counterbalanced by a backlash, that what is wrong now will make us do better in the future. I hope that too.

But if that is to happen then we need a politics that is brave enough to take the public backlash and manufacture it into lasting change. There is no easy, safe or comfortable way to do that. Only a risk-taker can take raw public emotion and turn it into real political change. Alex Salmond was from a different era and there is plenty you can criticise him for, but not the consistency and nerve of his foreign policy stance. It shaped the SNP and Scottish attitudes to world affairs. It still does.

Can that sustain though? If no-one picks up this mantle of challenging war and foreign policy failures bravely and from the front, doing so from a position of strength and power, can we assume that the public will do the job itself? Can we assume that a Scotland unshaped by courageous politics will somehow become courageous on its own? Or are we content with another cowardly nation falling in line behind the powerful?

Scotland remains, will always remain, a contested proposition. Do we have the people willing to stand up and contest our future from an anti-war perspective? Or rather, will it be the people who have any power to do anything about it? I guess time will tell.