 | 'The test of Mr Salmond's leadership will be whether he has spent the past four years thinking about a new agenda for the SNP and Scotland.' Professor James Mitchell in the Herald, 16 th July 2004. |  |
| 'The test of Mr Salmond's leadership will be whether he has spent the past four years thinking about a new agenda for the SNP and Scotland.' Professor James Mitchell in the Herald, 16 th July 2004. | |
WHEN Alex Salmond applied to be SNP candidate in Banff and Buchan before the 1987 general election, Winnie Ewing reportedly announced her support for him because "he is a winner".
That was only a few years after bruising internal battles which found Mrs Ewing and Mr Salmond on different sides. He went on to win the seat from the Tories and has made it solid SNP territory ever since.
His record during 10 years as leader speaks for itself. He took the SNP from fourth place behind the Tories and Liberal Democrats at the 1987 election to second place by 1999, doubling the party's share of the vote from 14% to 28%. By any standards, that was a remarkable success.
Even more significantly, he finally resolved the key issue that had divided the SNP since its inception, by leading the party into support for devolution in the 1997 referendum campaign.
He trounced the fundamentalists and left them as rebels without a cause: still on the fringe and able to cause trouble, but otherwise an irrelevance. Indeed, the old fundamentalist-gradualist battle is over.
The fundamentalists are unable to muster enough support to field a candidate for the leadership.
On standing down as leader, Mr Salmond could rightly claim that his party was in a better state than when he was first elected. The question now facing the SNP is whether he can provide the same increase in electoral support again.
Past performance is not necessarily an indication of future prospects. The SNP today needs three characteristics in its leader: authority, new ideas and relevance.
Much nonsense has been written about charisma and Mr Salmond's surfeit of this commodity compared with John Swinney. But charisma will not be enough.
Using the authority he enjoys, the new SNP leader will need to convince voters of the relevance of independence. New ideas to distinguish the party from Labour on the traditional left-right agenda are needed.
As Labour has shifted from a statist, centralist agenda to a market-dominated position, the SNP has appeared lost. At times it seems to have felt that it must either follow Labour's move to the right or dress up in old Labour garb, rather than carve out a distinct position of its own.
Curiously, the SNP has a long tradition of support for a decentralist, participatory, non-statist form of politics. Instead of shadowing Labour, it needs to have confidence in itself and reinvigorate its radical tradition to cut out a distinct and relevant role for the party today.
While Labour in London grapples with the relationship between state and market, no parties appear remotely interested in Scotland.
The opportunity for the SNP to say something different is considerable. The test of Mr Salmond's leadership will be whether he has spent the past four years thinking about a new agenda for the SNP and Scotland.
Showing that the SNP's aim of independence will improve everyday lives is the challenge, and no amount of charisma, whatever that is, will be enough if the SNP is not seen to be relevant.
The SNP is in the doldrums, but it remains in a far stronger position than when Mr Salmond was first elected leader. Authority, relevance and new ideas are needed, and that is before it confronts the hostile environment in which it must operate.
Short of some unforeseen catastrophe, Alex Salmond will comfortably win the leadership of his party, but the real challenge awaits him after that.
Relevant new ideas and stamping his authority on the SNP Ð and beyond Ð will determine whether he can take his party to the next level.
Professor James Mitchell is head of the department of government at Strathclyde University.
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