A nightmare come true for Salmond

The last thing he wants is a referendum, which he would lose

LAST week's spending review offered some insights into the SNP's priorities. The apparently kamikaze jettisoning of election manifesto commitments, most notoriously on police recruitment and class sizes, betrayed the importance Alex Salmond attaches to the freeze on council tax and the introduction of local income tax.

Anything else must be sacrificed to facilitate this key policy: Salmond is in 'guns before butter' mode. This is his Big Idea. He has calculated that three years free of council tax rises will be popular. Where he has probably miscalculated is in supposing local income tax will also be popular. The SNP may be in the process of creating its own poll tax, the opposition on this occasion being Scotland's middle-class wealth creators.

Salmond's most worrying dilemma lies in the public perception of his administration as no more than the latest hired help. This is both a blessing and a curse. It was beneficial insofar as it lured cautious voters into supporting the SNP: "We hold no truck with separatism, but we think it is time somebody else was drafted in to clear up Labour's mess," kind of thing.

That helped him gain power. On the other hand, his greatest fear is that his party might gain permanent acceptance as alternative managers of the devolution settlement, while the electorate continues to veto independence. That would be lethal, in the long term, for the SNP: separatism is not just its flagship policy - it is its raison d'être. If the nationalists were continually frustrated by the electorate, the eventual consequences would be a collapse of morale and likely fragmentation.

Salmond is well aware of these pitfalls. That is the context in which every measure and utterance of the First Minister and his colleagues must be analysed. Not every apparent gaffe is as ill-considered as it seems. The claim that Scotland should have its own Olympic team (patent nonsense, in light of the Olympics constitution) and the other examples of early Salmond-era gesture politics had a dual purpose.

The secondary intention was to reassure nationalist fundamentalists. The primary purpose was to impress upon the public consciousness the notion that something fundamental had changed; that Scotland has embarked on the long march to independence. It is intangible, impressionistic, but its subliminal effectiveness should not be underestimated. It masks the deflating reality that Salmond commands the support of only 17% of the electorate and holds 47 parliamentary seats out of 129.

The early success of this propagandist imposture was signalled by the lemming stampede of opposition leaders to endorse increased powers for Holyrood. This was Salmond's most brilliant stroke: lacking the voting strength to effect any constitutional change, he yoked his opponents to the plough, so that they are now diligently cutting the furrows that lead to de facto Scottish autonomy, leaving Salmond with little more to do than seize some opportunity to ornament this intrinsically separatist settlement with an anthem and a flag.

Despite that success against his pygmy opponents, Salmond has serious concerns. His biggest headache is the question of a referendum on independence. He does not have the Holyrood votes to secure it, which is just as well since, outside the parliament, he does not have the votes to win it. Since May, support for independence has slumped: down to 23% in last month's survey by the Scottish Centre for Social Research, compared with 30% last year.

This has been a consistent poll trend: support for the SNP rising as support for separatism falls. Last March a Populus poll showed the party surging ahead of Labour, but support for independence plummeting to 27%. Subsequent to the SNP victory, in August a Progressive Scottish Opinion poll showed SNP support up 15%, to 48% against 32% for Labour; but independence down at 31%. The evidence is unambiguous: many people have realised they can have an SNP administration without endorsing separatism.

That is Salmond's nightmare: a repeated mandate to administer, not to demolish, the Union. With these poll findings, the last thing he wants is a referendum, which he would lose. For that reason, notional independence has been postponed until 2017. Salmond has already conceded a referendum defeat would remove independence from the agenda for a generation. The consequences for his party would be terminal. That is why he envisages a referendum around 2010. Salmond's most cherished hope is a Tory victory at the next UK general election. Salmond would then capitalise on the dismay of anti-Tory Scotland, declaiming about a renewed "democratic deficit" and "no return to Thatcherite domination", insisting the only way to annul Tory governance imposed by English voters would be independence.

If the Unionist parties had an iota of political nous, courage and confidence, they would force an independence referendum now. Labour luminaries such as Andy Kerr and Allan Wilson are recent converts to a referendum and there are stirrings among the Tories. Knowing our gutless opposition, however, it is a safe bet they will prefer to appease separatism with ever-increasing devolved powers. Yet Salmond and his party, whose programme would be catastrophic, are ripe for annihilation. The means is there; but the political eunuchs on the opposition benches will timorously refrain from delivering the coup de grâce. Whom the gods wish to destroy...