الخميس، 21 نوفمبر 2019

Alex Salmond

Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond (/ˈsæmənd/; born 31 December 1954) is a Scottish politician who served as the First Minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014. He was the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) for over twenty years, having served for two terms, firstly from 1990 to 2000 and subsequently from 2004 to 2014. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Banff and Buchan between 1987 and 2010, when he stood down to focus on his other roles, and then for Gordon from 2015 to 2017, when he lost his seat to Scottish Conservative candidate Colin Clark.[2] During the 2015–2017 parliament, he was the SNP International Affairs and Europe spokesperson in the House of Commons.

From 1987 to 2010, Salmond served as MP for Banff and Buchan. Following the establishment of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999, Salmond also served as the Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Banff and Buchan from 1999 to 2001, while continuing to serve as that constituency's MP. Salmond served as the Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Gordon from 2007 to 2011, and for Aberdeenshire East from 2011 to 2016.

Salmond resigned as SNP leader in 2000 and did not seek re-election to the Scottish Parliament. He did however retain his Westminster seat in the 2001 general election. Salmond was once again elected SNP leader in 2004 and the following year held his Banff and Buchan seat in the 2005 general election. In 2006 he announced his intention to contest Gordon in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. Salmond defeated the incumbent MSP and the SNP emerged as the largest single party. After the SNP secured confidence and supply support from the Scottish Green Party, Salmond was voted First Minister by the Scottish Parliament on 16 May 2007. During his first term, he headed a minority Scottish Government. At the 2011 Scottish Parliament election the SNP won with an overall majority, a feat previously thought almost impossible under the additional member system used in elections for the Scottish Parliament.

Politically, Salmond is one of the foremost proponents of Scottish independence, repeatedly calling for a referendum on the issue.[3] Salmond has campaigned on global warming and in government has committed Scotland to legislation on emission reduction and the generation of renewable energy. The day after the 2014 independence referendum, at which a majority of Scottish voters chose to remain part of the United Kingdom, Salmond announced his intention not to stand for re-election as leader of the SNP at the SNP National Conference in November, and to resign as First Minister thereafter.[4][5] He was succeeded as SNP leader by his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, as she was the only candidate to stand for the leadership election. He submitted his resignation as First Minister on 18 November, and was succeeded by Sturgeon the following day.[6]

In August 2018, Salmond resigned from the party after allegations of sexual misconduct.[7] In January 2019, he was arrested and charged with 14 offences, including multiple counts of attempted rape and sexual assault
Early life and career
Salmond was born in his parents' home at 101 Preston Road, Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland, on 31 December 1954.[9][10] He is the second of four children born to Robert Fyfe Findlay Salmond (1921–2017), and Mary Stewart Salmond (née Milne; 1922–2003), both of whom were civil servants.[11] Robert Salmond, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War,[12] had originally worked as an electrician, and his family had been resident in Linlithgow since the mid-18th century.[13] Alex Salmond's middle names come from his family's tradition of naming their children after the local Church of Scotland minister, in this case the Reverend Gilbert Elliot Anderson of St Ninian's Craigmailen Parish Church in Linlinthgow.[14][15] He remains a member of the Church of Scotland.[16]

Salmond attended the local Linlithgow Academy from 1966 to 1972. He studied at Edinburgh College of Commerce from 1972 to 1973, gaining an HNC in Business Studies,[17] and was then accepted by the University of St Andrews, where he studied Economics and Medieval History. During his time at St Andrews, Salmond lived in Andrew Melville Hall.[18] He was elected as vice-president (education) of the Students' Representative Council in 1977 and was also nominated to join St Andrews Community Council that year.[19] Salmond graduated with a 2:2 Joint Honours MA in Economics and Medieval History in May 1978.[19][20]

In 1978, he entered the Government Economic Service as an assistant economist in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland, part of the now defunct Scottish Office. Two years later he joined the staff of the Royal Bank of Scotland, where he worked for seven years, initially as an assistant economist. In 1982 he was appointed oil economist, and from 1984 he worked as a bank economist as well as continuing to hold the position of oil economist.[20] While with the Royal Bank, he wrote and broadcast extensively for both domestic and international outlets. He also contributed regularly to oil and energy conferences. In 1983, Salmond created a "Royal Bank/BBC oil index" that is still used.

Political career
Early career in politics
Salmond became active in the SNP when he joined the Federation of Student Nationalists at the University of St Andrews in 1973. His conversion is generally credited to his then girlfriend, Debbie Horton, an English student from London, who was secretary of the St Andrews University Labour club. After an argument in December 1973, she told him: "If you feel like that, go and join the bloody SNP". The next day Salmond did.[19] The following day he and a friend attended the sparsely populated AGM of the university branch of the Federation of Student Nationalists. Being the only two fully paid-up members of the SNP at the university, they were duly elected president and treasurer.[19] Although a left-winger at the time he joined, Salmond had considerable doubts as to whether or not the Labour Government would legislate for a devolved Scottish Assembly.

Salmond started his political life as a committed left-winger inside the SNP and was a leading member of the socialist republican organisation within it, the 79 Group. He was, along with other group leaders, suspended from membership of the SNP when the 79 Group was banned within the larger party. In 1981, he married Moira French McGlashan,[21] then a senior civil servant with the Scottish Office.

Following the SNP's National Council narrowly voting to uphold the expulsion, Salmond and the others were allowed back into the party a month later, and in 1985 he was elected as the SNP's Vice Convener for Publicity. In 1987 he stood for Parliament in Banff and Buchan and defeated the incumbent Conservative MP, Albert McQuarrie. Later that year Salmond became Senior Vice Convener (Depute Leader) of the SNP. He was at this time still viewed as being firmly on the left of the party and had become a key ally of Jim Sillars, who joined him in the House of Commons when he won a by-election for the seat of Glasgow Govan in 1988. Salmond served as a member of the House of Commons Energy Select Committee from 1987 to 1992.

First tenure as SNP leader
When Gordon Wilson stood down as SNP leader in 1990, Salmond decided to contest the leadership. His only opponent was Margaret Ewing, whom Sillars decided to support. This caused considerable consternation amongst the SNP left as the two main left leaders were opposing each other in the contest. Salmond went on to win the leadership election by 486 votes to Ewing's 146.[22]

His first test as leader was the general election in 1992, with the SNP having high hopes of making an electoral breakthrough. Whilst considerably increasing its share of the vote, it failed to win a large number of seats. Sillars lost his, causing him to describe the Scottish people as '90-minute patriots'. This comment ended the political friendship between Salmond and Sillars, and Sillars would soon become a vocal critic of Salmond's style of leadership.

The SNP increased its number of MPs from four to six in the 1997 general election, which saw a landslide victory for the Labour Party. After election, Labour legislated for a devolved Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. Although still committed to a fully independent Scotland, Salmond signed the SNP up to supporting the campaign for devolution, and, along with Scottish Labour leader Donald Dewar and Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Jim Wallace, played an active part in securing the victory for devolution in the Scotland referendum of 1997. Many hardline fundamentalists in the SNP objected to committing the party to devolution, as it was short of full political Scottish independence.[citation needed]

Salmond's first spell as leader was characterised by a moderation of his earlier left-wing views and by his firmly placing the SNP into a gradualist, but still pro-independence, strategy. Salmond was one of the few politicians in the UK to oppose the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.[23] He was opposed to the conflict because it was not authorised by a United Nations Security Council resolution, which was a controversial subject at the time. Despite this, Salmond was heavily criticised in the media for describing Tony Blair's decision to intervene militarily as an "unpardonable folly"
Several years as party leader earned Salmond an unusually high profile for an SNP politician in the London-based media. In 1998, Salmond won the Spectator Award for Political Strategist of the Year. Following an appearance on the entertainment programme Call My Bluff, Salmond used one of the 'bluff' cards that are used as props in the show in the run-up to the first elections to the Scottish Parliament. To counter his frustration at having to sit in silence through what he claimed was an inappropriately political speech by Tony Blair at a charity lunch, he held up the bluff card as the Prime Minister began querying Scotland's economic prospects should independence occur.[25] Throughout his time in politics, Salmond has maintained his interest in horse racing, writing a weekly column for The Scotsman and appearing a number of times on Channel 4's The Morning Line. During the election campaign, Salmond was photographed feeding a young supporter a Solero ice cream during an event at Stirling University, creating a photograph that would become iconic.[26][27][28]

Resignation as leader and subsequent return
Salmond was elected to the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and was one of its highest-profile members. He stood down as SNP leader in 2000, facing internal criticism after a series of high-profile fall-outs with party members,[29] and was replaced by his preferred successor John Swinney, who defeated Alex Neil for the post. He left the Scottish Parliament in 2001 to lead the SNP group in the House of Commons.

During the prolonged parliamentary debates in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq he voiced strong opposition to the UK's participation. In the aftermath of the war, he lent support to the attempt of Adam Price, a Plaid Cymru MP, to impeach Tony Blair over the Iraq issue. Salmond has gone further than many anti-war politicians in claiming that Blair's statements on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were consciously intended to deceive the public.[30] He has also claimed that Blair had made a pact with George W. Bush "to go to war come what may".[30]

After the June 2004 European Parliament elections, which were perceived as a "disaster" for the SNP, pressure mounted on Swinney to resign as leader. Swinney announced his resignation on 22 June 2004 to become Convener of the Scottish Parliament's European and External Relations Committee.

On 15 July 2004, Salmond said that he would be a candidate in the forthcoming election for the leadership of the SNP.[31] This came as a surprise because he had previously declared that he would definitely not be a leadership candidate.[31] In the postal ballot of all members he went on to receive over 75% of the votes cast, placing him well ahead of his nearest rival Roseanna Cunningham. As he was not an MSP at the time, his depute, Nicola Sturgeon, took over as leader of the SNP group at Holyrood.[32] Although he was re-elected in the 2005 general election, he made clear his intention to return to the Scottish Parliament at the 2007 Scottish parliamentary election in an attempt to win power for the first time.[32]

In that election, Salmond stood as a candidate for the Gordon constituency, which had been represented since 1999 by the Liberal Democrat Nora Radcliffe.[33] Salmond won the seat with 41% of the vote, and a majority of 2,062, returning to the Scottish Parliament after six years' absence. In the election the SNP emerged as the largest party, winning 47 seats to Labour's 46.

First Minister of Scotland
Having won more seats than any other party in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election, the SNP initially approached the Scottish Liberal Democrats to form a coalition, but they declined to take part in negotiations.[34] This left the SNP without any possibility to form a coalition with an overall majority. Ultimately, the Scottish Green Party agreed to vote in an SNP minority government in return for concessions on climate policy and naming a Green to chair a committee.[35]

First term
With the support of the Greens, Salmond was elected by the Scottish Parliament as First Minister on 16 May 2007,[36] and was sworn in on 17 May after receiving the Royal Warrant from the Queen and taking the official oath of allegiance before judges at the Court of Session.[37] Salmond became the first nationalist politician to hold the office of First Minister. He gave the post of Deputy First Minister to Sturgeon.

Under section 45(7) of the Scotland Act 1998 he became Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland at the same time.[38] He was appointed to the British Privy Council four weeks later.[39]

Salmond reduced the size of the Cabinet from nine members to six, and said he would seek to govern on a "policy by policy" basis.[36] In order to concentrate on his new role as First Minister, Salmond stood down as the SNP group leader at Westminster and was replaced by Angus Robertson.[40] The Guardian reported in November 2007 that Salmond believed Scotland would be independent within "the next decade".[41]

In November 2007, Salmond received The Spectator's Parliamentarian of the Year award for his "brilliant campaign" and "extraordinary victory" in the Scottish Parliament elections, thereby ending eight years of Labour rule.[42]

A newspaper investigation in 2009 revealed that Salmond had claimed as expenses from the UK parliament "up to £400 per month in food without producing receipts, even after becoming First Minister and spending little time at Westminster".[43] In the same year, he stated that he would repay more than £700 that he had received in moving expenses when he left a London flat in 2007.[44]

A white paper for an independence referendum, setting out four possible options ranging from no change to full independence, was published by the Scottish Government on 30 November 2009. A draft bill for public consultation was published on 25 February 2010, setting out a two-question yes/no referendum, proposing further devolution or full independence. The SNP failed to obtain support from other parties and withdrew the draft bill.

UK general election debates

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