Scotland do you really want this arrogant, little man to lead you ?
This was meant to be the day Alex
Salmond showed off his statesmanlike qualities to the world.
But instead of meeting the founding
father of a brave new nation, the world’s media came to his grandly-named
‘international press conference’ to find a peevish man bristling with
indignation over the parochial details of a very inconvenient truth.
For the grandest bank in Scotland had
just announced it would pack up the boardroom and move its HQ to London if
Scots vote for independence next week.
The RBS has been domiciled in Edinburgh since the days of George II. It could hardly be worse if Scottish Widows became Surrey Widows or Nessie suddenly moved ponds to Windermere.
Not so, according to Mr Salmond. The
loss of the RBS would be a footling matter. The real scandal was that the news
had been leaked to the BBC.
And they could only have got it from
one source: ‘scaremongering’ officials at the Treasury. The fact that
market-sensitive information had ended up in the hands of the media, he said,
almost quivering with displeasure, was a matter of ‘extraordinary gravity, as
serious a matter as you can possibly get’.
As journalists argued that RBS’s vote
of no confidence in its motherland was the bigger deal, Mr Salmond was having
none of it, particularly when questioned by BBC political editor Nick Robinson.
Arguing that it involved little more than
the relocation of a ‘brass plaque’, Mr Salmond demanded that the BBC be dragged
before an official investigation and made to blab.
‘Scotland is on the cusp of making
history,’ Mr Salmond went on. ‘The eyes of the world are upon us. And what the
world is seeing is an energised, articulate and peaceful debate.’ The ears of
the world only had to wait five seconds longer before they heard the day’s
first attack on ‘the blatant bullying and intimidation of Westminster
government’.
Pretty much any irksome statistic could
be attributed to ‘scaremongering’, ‘bullying’, public schoolboy politics’ and
so on from That Lot.
Until very recently, international
interest in this debate had not extended much beyond the provincial press in
countries with an ongoing separatist squabble – principally Spain and Quebec.
Yesterday, there were earnest questions
about future Scottish relations with Russia, Brazil and India. Perhaps the trickiest came from a German
television presenter. She asked Mr Salmond to explain in what ways the English
had a different identity from the Scots ‘because our audience don’t see it’.
‘This campaign of ours does not depend on identity,’ he replied.
Out in the streets right now, it seems
to depend on little else.
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