Scotland's first minister knows his own country, he is oddly out of date about the English

BAGEHOT is in Edinburgh. Yesterday afternoon I interviewed Alex Salmond, first minister of the devolved Scottish government and generator of a hundred headlines this week, as the man who wants to break up Britain.

My report for the newspaper is here. With apologies for a very long post, I thought some readers of this blog might like a fuller account of what the first minister said.

Mr Salmond, who led his pro-independence Scottish National Party to a thumping victory in the 2011 Scottish elections, is preceded by quite a reputation nowadays.

"The most talented politician in the British Isles," I was told by an academic, as I made some last-minute calls about the implications of Mr Salmond's declaration, earlier this week, that Scotland would hold a vote on independence in 2014. "A brilliant demagogue...slippery... a total opportunist," one of his political rivals assured me. Over coffee in London last week, a senior Labour politician urged me, with surprising passion, not to suspend my critical faculties when meeting Mr Salmond. Don't be lulled into thinking you are in a foreign country, and so cannot understand what he is up to. Ask him your toughest questions, urged the Labour grandee.

I met the first minister at his official residence, Bute House, an Adam mansion in Edinburgh's New Town. It was my first time inside, and—perhaps appropriately—the setting felt at once foreign and familiar. Charlotte Square, on which Bute House sits, strongly reminded me of Dublin. Inside, however, the look is of 10 Downing Street redux, down to the smartly-uniformed officers opening the glossy black front door, the slightly austere Georgian hall and the stern portraits of previous first ministers marching up the main staircase.

And Mr Salmond? A panda-like figure, round of form and face, he bustled into the room flanked by aides and his chief economic adviser. He seemed charming, combative, self-deprecating and swelled with pride, all at the same time. And that was just the first minute. He had just come from opening a new headquarters for Barclays Wealth and been mobbed by television crews, he joked. Had something just happened?

In his day, Mr Salmond has had some pretty harsh things to say about the British state and its economic treatment of Scotland. A fierce left-winger in his youth, before a more recent conversion to talk of Nordic, business-friendly social democracy, he once called the use of North Sea oil revenues by the British government "probably the greatest act of international larceny since the Spanish stole the Inca gold". He referred to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration in Westminster as a "government of occupation", on the grounds that Scots voted by a large majority against the Tories, and Mrs Thatcher in particular.

The British state is "fundamentally unattractive", he declared in 1988, when he was an effective gadfly in the House of Commons in London. Britain, he said, was unpleasant in its views towards foreigners and depressing in terms of the breakdown of social cohesion. As an idea, Britain was "declining and out of date".

Now, as head of a devolved Scottish government, hosting The Economist inhis Georgian drawing room (open fire, elegant sofas, fine plasterwork) he was on his most conciliatory form. Once Scotland gained its independence, its ancient friendship with the English would be "re-invigorated", he declared. Quoting a boyhood friend of his family from Linlinthgow, the town of his birth, he said that Scotland yearned to be a good neighbour, not a surly tenant. For too long, he sorrowed, a number of Scots had blamed everything that went wrong on perfidious Albion, in something of a culture of grievance. Surly, he said again, as if pondering the term. That is a good way of putting it.

Well hang on, I asked. What about him? What about the widespread charge that he specialises in policies designed to provoke grievances on both sides of the border? Take his policy of offering free university tuition to Scottish and European students, while charging English, Welsh and Northern Irish students thousands of pounds in fees. What about his recent demand for extra money for Scotland, to compensate his people for spending on the Olympics in London? His political opponents are convinced that his plan is to boost Scottish pride north of the border while provoking English rage south of it, I noted. He earnestly denied it, shaking his large head at the extraordinary nature of the charge.

With a referendum behind him, the government in London would find him a very reasonable negotiator, he said, with few red lines. Asked about sensitive issues, from Scotland's future currency to the fate of Britain's nuclear deterrent (currently based in Scotland), he combined soothing, friendly noises with a continuous, relentless flow of facts, figures and debating points. It felt a bit like interviewing a teddy bear driving a bulldozer. The tone was sweet reason itself. But there was no stopping him.

Mr Salmond had prepared a great slew of facts and figures, setting out why Scotland was in better economic shape than the wider United Kingdom. His government's chief economist sat on a sofa nearby, to provide further detail if needed. Mr Salmond was keen to share this good news. He argued that, if you include revenues from North Sea oil and gas, Scotland ran a current budget surplus in four of the last five years while the United Kingdom was in deficit each and every of those years. Include a geographical share of oil, goes another of his statistics, and Scotland's population share of UK net debt in 2009-10 is 46.3%, compared to 52.9% of GDP for the whole of the UK.

I fear I did not pursue these numbers very far. This appeared to disappoint Mr Salmond's entourage, who ended up just giving me all their figures afterwards in a briefing note. The chief economist slipped from the room, halfway through the interview.

The thing is, all the claims and counter-claims about whether Britain subsidises Scotland or vice versa are essentially questions of politics, not economics. Mr Salmond says 90% of North Sea oil and gas revenues belong to Scotland, relying on one interpretation of the maritime border that suits him. His opponents say that England has a claim to between a quarter and a third of the North Sea oil and gas fields, relying on different maps.

The Liberal Democrat cabinet minister for Scotland in the British government, Michael Moore, last year produced tables that are every bit as stern and important-looking as Mr Salmond's. But these show different deficit and surplus numbers for the same period. Mr Moore argues that Scotland has run deficits for years, even if North Sea revenues are counted. Indeed, he says: "If you had allocated every single penny of oil and gas revenues to Scotland over the past 30 years - a figure of £156 billion - then you would still fall £41 billion short of what both governments have actually invested in Scotland."

Still the numbers come. Mr Salmond told Channel 4 News last night that Scotland would take 8% of Britain's national debt, in line with its share of the wider British population, but would not take on any of the bad debts associated with the failed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), the Edinburgh-based bank which at one point grew to 250 times the size of the Scottish economy (with Mr Salmond enthusiastically egging RBS on in its disastrous plan to buy ABN-Amro, the Dutch bank). The British Treasury collected tax revenues from RBS and failed to regulate it properly, Mr Salmond explained, prompting Channel 4 News to headline its report "Salmond: you keep Scots bank debt, we'll keep the oil money".

Talk to English Tory MPs in London, and they grumble loudly about Scotland being subsidised to the hilt by Britain. In Stirling, on my way to visit the site of the Battle of Bannockburn yesterday morning, a local ranted at me that Scotland was sick of paying for Britain, and should seek its independence, just like Ireland and, um, Wales.

Whose numbers are right? I have no idea.

The bottom line, surely, is that an independent Scotland's future solvency cannot be separated from the negotiations that would follow a referendum vote for a split. Some broad arguments can be made about the merits of being a small country with a large banking sector, but when it comes to divvying up public debts, pensions liabilities, gold reserves and the like, everything would be up for grabs.

That being so, I decided to spend my hour with the first minister trying to pin him down on his political plans for that fight. I had only partial success, but did come away with a few, tentative observations about Mr Salmond.

1. Though he has devoted his life to Scottish politics (unlike the big beasts of the Scottish Labour Party, who still mostly flee to London to try their luck on the British national stage), Mr Salmond is strikingly keen to measure himself against other front-rank British politicians.

He talked, a lot, about George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer and chief electoral strategist of the Conservative Party, who is reportedly leading the tactical charge against Mr Salmond's referendum. Sometimes, this was to attack Mr Osborne as a foreign Tory interfering in Scottish politics. At other times, he boasted that "my old friend Mr Osborne" is "rather impressed" with policy innovations dreamed up by the Scottish government, such as the Scottish Futures Trust, (a clever wheeze for paying for public works). Mr Salmond is "not sure" Tory MPs would like to know that Mr Osborne was looking at SNP ideas, he added, grinning prettily.

Mr Osborne's tactical skills came up, again, in discussions of the independence referendum, and the row that now looms between Edinburgh and Westminster over when to hold such a vote, how to run it and, vitally, what question to put on the ballot paper (the British government wants a straight, yes-or-no, question about independence, Mr Salmond has dropped hints about adding on a second, fall-back option offering much deeper devolution, leaving only defence and foreign policy in British hands).

Unbidden, Mr Salmond drew a comparison with last year's Britain-wide referendum on whether to change the voting system used at Westminster general elections, during which the Conservatives soundly defeated their Liberal Democrat coalition partners. That's a complicated tale, but in essence the Tories opposed adopting the Alternative Vote (AV), while the Lib Dems campaigned in favour. The No camp backed by the Conservatives ran a pretty tough campaign, including personal attacks on the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

The Conservatives "were very successful at kippering the Lib Dems," Mr Salmond ventured. "I'm not Nick Clegg."

Asked to expand on this, the first minister argued that the Liberal Democrats had been "desperate" to change the voting system to their dream of full proportional representation (PR). Somehow, Mr Osborne "stitched up" his Lib Dem colleagues in government and managed to get them to agree to a referendum on something that wasn't PR, so the Lib Dems' own enthusiasm fell away. Then the Tories further undermined the case for change with ruthless campaigning.

He tried to look all shocked at the ruthlessness of Mr Osborne. But if I had to guess, I'd say he likes the articles popping up in the press this week, portraying the independence fight as a contest between two great political strategists, Salmond v Osborne.

2. When cornered on a hard question about Scotland, Mr Salmond likes to go global, and throw around all manner of obscure and clever foreign analogies. These do not always withstand close scrutiny.

For instance, a big important question about Scottish independence concerns the new country's currency. Mr Salmond used to want to join the euro as soon as possible. He has gone a bit quiet about this (funnily enough). So at least for a while, his new Scotland would use the pound. That inspires alarm in some quarters, as people wonder if it is really wise to reproduce, via a new currency union of Scotland and England, the same wizard-wheeze that lies at the heart of the euro-crisis, namely a monetary union without a political and fiscal union over the top. I put this to Mr Salmond.

Oh not at all, he said. The fundamental problem of the euro is about uniting wildly diverging economies, with very different levels of competitiveness: countries like Greece and Germany. Scotland and England are very similar, even if (twinkle, twinkle) Scotland is more competitive by some measures.

Hmm, I said. Are we not now living in a world that has learned a bitter lesson from the euro crisis, so that bond traders are much less likely to take things like sovereign creditworthiness on trust, and are much more sceptical about breezy assurances that economies are jolly similar?

Ah, the euro is just a bad comparison, he continued. A better analogy is Belgium and Luxembourg, and their currency union before the euro.

Hmm, I thought (for I am a sad geek of an ex-foreign correspondent who once covered the Luxembourg referendum on the ill-fated EU constitution, and interviewed various Luxembourgeois about their views of currency union, who told me how humiliating it had been in the days when the Luxembourg franc was basically the Belgian franc in drag and Luxembourg had no monetary independence at all). Hmm, I said, expressing some of that out loud, are you sure Scots would accept such limited monetary independence?

Mr Salmond was off, dancing and diving, explaining how much more credit-worthy Scotland would be, how modest its stocks of debt, and how restrained its borrowing. Well, hang on, I said, in this suspicious new world, assurances of fiscal rigour are out of fashion. Over in euro-land, people want binding debt brakes written into constitutions, and deficit rules policed by supranational judges. Would an independent Scotland accept legally binding debt and deficit rules as the price of sharing sterling?

"I'm in favour of a stability pact," Mr Salmond said. What does that mean, I asked. Binding rules? The first minister was off again, explaining how an England-Scotland monetary union was not like the euro, and how the great advantage of holding a referendum meant that after a clear vote, Scotland and England would be negotiating in an atmosphere of goodwill. Pushed one last time, he delivered the gnomic pledge: "We'd negotiate a stability pact appropriate for the circumstances."

Another big, tricky question is what to do about defence policy in the event of a break-up. Would Scotland leave NATO, I asked? Ah, replied Mr Salmond happily. SNP policy is that Scotland would not be in the command structures of NATO. That means it would be like Sweden or Ireland.

Well hang on, I found myself saying again. Sweden and Ireland are not members of NATO. They're members of Partnership for Peace, said Mr Salmond. Yes, but that means they are not members of NATO, I said. (It was that kind of interview).

To be fair, once we had stopped roving round the map looking for analogies, he was forthcoming about his plans for an independent Scotland's military posture. He drew my attention to the recent strategic defence review conducted by the British government to manage deep spending cuts. This, he said, would leave Scotland home to a rapid deployment force of between 8,000 and 12,000 troops, a single air base and a single naval base. That's the sort of scale of armed forces an independent Scotland would have, he explained, with the big difference that the Scottish public did not want weapons of mass destruction in Scotland (a reference to Britain's submarine-based nuclear deterrent, Trident, which currently operates out of the deep, discreet waters of a Scottish loch).

We are not going to be unreasonable about it, we are not going to say Trident must leave the day after independence, he went on. But it would have to leave.

What about American submarines and warships carrying nuclear weapons, would they still be welcome in Scottish waters? I don't envisage a boycott on visiting forces, of the sort that New Zealand had, he replied.

Would Scottish forces go to war with the armed forces of the continuity British government? We'd have sent them to Iraq in 1991 if asked to join the international coalition, he replied. We wouldn't have sent them to Iraq in 2003, to participate in an illegal war. Scottish warplanes could have taken part in the 2011 raids over Libya, because that air campaign had legal backing from the UN.

Would Scottish citizens now serving in the British armed forces have to leave? Not at all, said Mr Salmond. There are all manner of foreigners serving in the British armed forces, from Irish or Commonwealth troops to the Gurkhas.

We've done a lot of thinking about these things, Mr Salmond told me. We are not wanting to be upsetting or awkward. On the contrary, there will be lots of positives. Look at the relationship between Ireland and Britain, and how it has been enhanced by mutual respect. He checked himself. Scotland is not Ireland, he said carefully. Scotland was never an oppressed country.

But in general, went his message, the friendship between Scotland and England will be given new life by Scottish independence.

That leads me to observation 3, which seems to me to be a real point of vulnerability for Mr Salmond.

3. I think Alex Salmond is out of date when it comes to English nationalism, and the changing nature of Britishness as a form of identity.

I think his views of Britishness are a bit stuck in the 1980s, when he first sat in the House of Commons in Westminster. Back then, it is true that far-right fringe groups such as the National Front had aggressively adopted Britishness as their identity. Their slogans included: "There ain't no black in the Union Jack". As late as 1999, according to David Torrance, Alex Salmond's biographer, the SNP leader could be heard telling the BBC that Britishness had been claimed as an identity by thugs and racists, while Englishness was an "aristocratic, almost mediaeval concept."

If you stick to that view of the world, then promoting friendship between the good, honest folk of Scotland and the plain, decent people of England must look like a progressive act, liberating two ancient cultures from the moth-eaten baggage of imperialist, nostalgic, exhausted, embittered Britishness.

I have a hunch that is how Mr Salmond sees it. He has always been very careful to distance himself from the angrier forms of nationalism, and stress the idea of Scottish independence as an outward-looking, internationalist cause.

With that in mind, I asked him about the dramatic rise in anti-Scottish sentiment on the right of the Tory Party. Doesn't it worry you, I asked, that your strongest supporters at Westminster are the very people you most dislike: nationalist, Eurosceptic English Conservative MPs? There is a striking overlap between the MPs who want to quit the EU and those who want to kick out what they consider to be scrounging, subsidised Scotland.

I told him about the young Tory MP I knew from the 2010 intake, who confided to me that during the long slog of seeking a safe seat, the loudest cheer he earned at a selection meeting came when he was asked if he thought the Scots should be allowed a vote on independence. He had replied, blimpishly, that he wanted to know when the English might be allowed to vote on whether the Scots could stay. The cheers lifted the roof, apparently.

I would never judge the plain people of England by some views heard by foolish Tory backbenchers, Mr Salmond replied airily, adding that this was not too modern a phenomenon, either. In the House of Commons in the 1980s, he said he heard plenty about Scotland that if said about another country would be "deemed quite unacceptable".

But it is precisely that same breed of Tory MPs who are the loudest advocates in London of granting Scotland its independence, I insisted.

His face darkened. Do they mean it? he snapped, utterly unwilling to concede the point. They do not, he said. "They want to hold Scotland fast."

They don't, I retorted. They really want to kick you out. (It was that kind of interview).

Mr Salmond remembered his calm and soothing manners. Just as I have great faith in Scotland's hidden powers, he breathed, I have great faith in the English people to forge an English identity.

But it's more complicated nowadays, I suggested. Britishness is now the country's multi-cultural, inclusive identity. People talk about being British Muslims, or British Asians, in a way that they would never talk about being English Asian. Englishness is becoming mixed up with tribal grievance. If you see a St George's flag flying outside a council house in England, it is often a sign of protest and complaint. The union flag is not used by the far-right now, they use the English flag, I suggested.

What about Billy Bragg, retorted Mr Salmond, naming a left-wing singer and activist whose work explores the history of English political radicalism and popular protest?

What about the English Defence League, I said, naming a nasty far-right group that has made headlines in recent years?

Mr Salmond paused briefly before saying: people should reclaim their flag, and do it as quickly as possible.

Later, he returned to the theme. You say Britishness is a less tribal identity, he said. But isn't one of the great successes of modern Scottish identity that it is non-exclusive? People can be Pakistani Scots. Mr Salmond quoted a famous line from a Thatcher-era cabinet minister, Norman Tebbit, who asserted that immigrants could not consider themselves British as long as they supported a foreign team at cricket. No Scot would be asked to pass a Norman Tebbit cricket test, Mr Salmond said firmly.

For a nimble man who has changed his political arguments at dizzying speed over the years, whenever circumstances required it, I think Mr Salmond is a bit stuck on this one. His sense of Scottishness as a generous, open-hearted, authentic identity seems partly defined as a rejection of a closed, pinched Britishness that carries a powerful 1980s whiff.

Mr Salmond knows his Scottish politics, better perhaps than any other front-rank politician in his country right now. But I think his understanding of Britishness, and Englishness, is oddly out of tune with the present.

Perhaps this does not matter. He only needs to win the votes of Scots in 2014 to win his referendum. But English opinion seems to matter to him. Later this month he is coming to London to deliver a Hugo Young lecture on how an independent Scotland may prove a stirring example for England. I wonder if he will be surprised by who cheers his message, and who is cast down by it.