Scottish historian and TV presenter Neil Oliver returns to the show for the second time to discuss the Alex Salmond inquiry, the scandal surrounding the First Minister, and the ongoing corruption investigation into the Scottish government by the Scottish Parliament.
00:00:47.120Well, in the beginning, the earth cooled.
00:00:51.640And part of it for me, I would say right from the top, you know, you say my country of Scotland,
00:00:56.860And of course, I was born and I live in Scotland, but the whole thing for me is underwritten by the fact that my country is Britain.
00:01:07.220That is and that's not or it never used to be a political statement.
00:01:11.420I was born, well, 54 years ago and just quietly, without any particular reason by osmosis or whatever, absorbed an understanding that I was British, born in Britain.
00:01:24.780And it's very important to me that that situation prevails
00:02:16.700in the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood
00:02:20.600and i am i am confused and dismayed by by a lot of it but but my stance is and always has been
00:02:29.660that i am i am for britain that's that's being british is what i understand about myself
00:02:35.180touche neil uh what we like to do here at trigonometry start the interview by asking
00:02:40.060a slightly insensitive question uh to to get the guests nice and warmed up and so we've managed to
00:02:45.560do that but it seems like uh you guys are having some sort of like live action macbeth reenactment
00:02:51.080in scotland uh so can you tell us more about what's happening there i suspect you're probably
00:02:56.460referring to the um this what is generally known as the alex salmond inquiry which has yes it's
00:03:04.240been uh it's been a shakespearean uh drama uh played out across what feels like years
00:03:10.540and it has, well, you know, it has run its course
00:03:15.580in terms of the Salmond Inquiry has run its course
00:03:19.500but having said that, it remains unclear exactly what it decided.
00:03:26.560The Inquiry's own committee seemed to decide
00:03:30.440that the First Minister had misled Parliament
00:03:35.780But then there's another judgment came in from an independent inquiry that said differently.
00:03:45.880So exactly what has been decided at the end of the months, years of wranglings around what Alex Salmond was first of all alleged to have done, then his name was cleared in court, and then this whole inquiry into the way in which he was investigated by government has run on and on and on.
00:04:04.900It has taken on layers of Byzantine complexity.
00:04:08.700I think anyone outside of Scotland would struggle,
00:04:14.040would struggle to have followed the twists and turns of it.
00:04:18.200You know, you'd really have to be an obsessive.
00:04:20.420You'd really have to be invested in the whole imbroglio to keep up with it.
00:04:27.900And I don't claim to have followed every twist and turn.
00:04:31.140What I take away from it, though, is the extent to which this Scottish government has chosen secrecy over openness.
00:04:42.120There has just been, from the beginning, there were efforts made and a concerted attempt to keep as much as possible under wraps.
00:04:51.600And this from a government that had said all along or said in the past that it was always going to be open,
00:04:56.740all was going to be open with the people of Scotland
00:04:58.880that it had nothing to hide, that everything would be there
00:05:48.320I think she continues to be, I would say, in a fairly unassailable position.
00:06:01.060The Scottish National Party is so strong, has taken such control over so much in Scotland.
00:06:09.280The Crown Office, which is the Scottish equivalent of the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, has been working in concert with the Scottish government.
00:06:19.960Therefore, you cannot say with any confidence, in fact, you can't say at all that there's separation of powers in Scotland.
00:06:27.200One of the principles of Western liberal democracy and governments thereof is that the legislative and the executor and the judiciary are separate from one another.
00:07:26.700I feel that we live in something that's nudging towards a failed state,
00:07:30.840a banana republic where bananas don't grow.
00:07:33.120we'll wait for global warming now then we'll see bananas in scotland uh but but neil you make it
00:07:42.040sound as if scotland is in some kind of political crisis which from the outside no one would you
00:07:48.540know it seems that you know sturgeon has had a very good war in terms of the you know the
00:07:53.180coronavirus is it really that bad up there uh well it depends what side of the line you're standing
00:07:59.220on. I'm sure those who support the Scottish government and those who support the Scottish
00:08:05.360National Party will be very happy with what has happened. But Scotland is absolutely a country
00:08:13.320that's split down the middle. 14 years of the Scottish National Party has seen to that. Scotland
00:08:19.780is a divided place. The Scotland that I grew up in, well, it's unrecognisable now. The atmosphere
00:08:28.300beer is one of bitterness, constant anger, division, clannishness, feelings of being on,
00:08:37.480you know, of two, fundamentally two tribes, you know, being on the barricades, hurling
00:08:41.860whatever ammunition they can at one another. And there's a feeling that that situation just becomes
00:08:48.040ever more, ever more entrenched. You know, you say that Scotland had a good, or the Scottish
00:08:54.340government had a good covid well they didn't the the deaths such as they're being tallied are
00:08:59.820obviously everything's on a smaller scale in scotland we've only got five million of a population
00:09:04.180compared to you know 60 odd million in england or in the rest of the uk so the numbers are always
00:09:09.840smaller but examined proportionally our death tolls have been the same the situation in the
00:09:15.300care homes was desperate more people died proportionally in the care homes in scotland
00:09:20.460than did so in the rest of the UK and when I last looked at the figures and I don't look at them on
00:09:25.360a daily basis but we seemed to be you know one of the worst places in the UK or the worst place in
00:09:32.240the UK in terms of Covid infections or cases or however they're counting and categorising it
00:09:39.780today or this or this morning and so we haven't had a good Covid we've had the same Covid as
00:09:44.760everybody else in the UK because of devolution the First Minister here Nicola Sturgeon has been
00:09:50.560able to plough her own furrow up to a point or to an extent and so there have been different
00:09:56.860dates about when we would open this or close that and you know if you were allowed six people we
00:10:02.120might be allowed eight or you know there's been variations almost just for the sake of variation
00:10:06.320But as a place to be, as a place to live now in 2021, Scotland is a sad and angry and frightened place with, you know, with lots of people full of dismay and apprehension about what the future must hold.
00:10:25.680That broadcast was brought to you by the Scottish Tourist Information Board there,
00:10:29.720Neil. Well done. But it's obviously a difficult time. And you feel very strongly about the
00:10:36.280independence issue. And I actually wanted to ask you, is there anything beyond independence itself
00:10:42.200that underpins that divide? Is there a religious or ethnic or sort of political, like what is the
00:10:50.620divide about? Or is it purely about, do you want Scotland to be independent of the United Kingdom?
00:10:57.240That is the, that's the fracture. That's the fault line, I suppose, along which the country has most
00:11:04.880obviously split. You know, Scotland, like anywhere, I mean, it's not unique to Scotland, but it's a
00:11:11.680place of many tribes, if you like. You know, it's difficult to talk of one Scotland. Historically,
00:11:20.120it was a place of clans, a place of tribes, you know, going back further beyond, before the time
00:11:26.120of the clans. And as you travel through what is a relatively small place, there's a great variety
00:11:32.960in the population of Scotland. The north is very different from the south. The east is very
00:11:37.960different from the west. Yes, there has, of course, courtesy of sectarianism between Catholic and
00:11:43.660Protestant, there's always been a religious element to certain unhappinesses in Scotland.
00:11:50.120But, you know, the people of Orkney and Shetland, for example, have always walked a different road than the rest of Scotland
00:11:58.220The people of the borders are very different from the people in the north-east or in the north-west
00:12:03.820The islands out to the west, the Western Isles, it's a different culture, a different group out there
00:12:09.280You know, there's always been a kind of a Gaelic dominance out in the Western Isles or into the west
00:12:17.160There's always been pockets of Gaelic culture
00:12:19.260So Scotland is an enormously varied place
00:12:23.020Which makes it very difficult when you start talking about One Scotland
00:16:58.580In 2014, or in the run-up to that first, that referendum on the Scottish question, it was clear that were the Scots to favour independence in 2014, it would have taken Scotland out of the European Union.
00:17:17.920So a vote for Scottish independence in 2014 was a vote to leave the EU.
00:17:37.280There's plenty of evidence up front because of Catalonia and the Basques in Spain and France
00:17:43.520that, you know, the idea of allowing a separatist country back into the European Union,
00:17:48.980as far as a country like Spain was concerned, might have been a red rag to a bull.
00:17:52.780But anyway, but the point was the Scottish National Party, the independence campaign was predicated upon if you vote for independence, you're voting to leave the European Union. That's what would have happened. Yeah, at some point down the line, they may or may not have been able to rejoin the EU.
00:18:09.120And at the time they were saying, well, if that's it, that's the way it has to be. So it was effectively a, you know, a skexit. It was Scotland leaving the European Union in 2014. That's what would have happened if Scotland had voted for independence.
00:18:22.220And then 2016, of course, the Brexit referendum in the UK, the decision was taken to leave the European Union. And at that point, at that point only, did the Yes campaign or the Scottish government take up the cudgels based on the fact that Scotland was being, quotes, ripped out of the European Union against its will.
00:18:45.460well, the Scottish government would have ripped Scotland
00:18:47.960out of the European Union against its will
00:19:39.700question, the Scottish independence question, it was guaranteed to cause nothing but hurt and so
00:19:45.000it has done. Neil, you're a historian and actually it just occurred to me that that would be a really
00:19:50.740interesting thing to talk about and I know you're very passionate about Scotland remaining as part
00:19:57.760of the UK but give us a historian sort of neutral observer from a vantage point. The argument
00:20:03.820historically about Scotland being with England or not being, like, what is the history of Scottish
00:20:10.520and English, you know, coexistence, if you like? Oh, my goodness. Let me, I mean, before anybody
00:20:16.840else says it, you know, I'm not, I am not a historian. I'm an archaeologist, and I love
00:20:21.220history. And I've, you know, I've spent, you know, I've spent 20 years, 30 years, you know,
00:20:27.460being fascinated by history. So I speak from that. I'm an enthusiast. I've got an enthusiast's
00:20:33.020perspective rather than i'm not an academic historian i'll make that i'll make that quite
00:20:36.820clear myself um there's been something like a scotland for a thousand years there's been an
00:20:44.240entity understanding itself actually first of all as alba which is hence the you know alex salmon's
00:20:51.100breakaway independence party that he has now um set up in competition to the to the scottish
00:20:55.740national party but for for over a thousand years there's been a geographical entity understanding
00:21:01.800itself as a place Scotland and likewise for England so in the European context these are
00:21:08.340very old countries which sounds like a funny thing to say in a way you think all countries
00:21:12.340are probably the same age but they're not you know there's only been Germany as we as we know
00:21:15.700it today since about 1870 1871 when it was unified in the form that we recognize likewise Italy
00:21:21.480Italy is about the same age and other European countries are the same age or younger still
00:21:26.500So there's a great depth of history for both Scotland and for England. And they co-existed happily and unhappily for even longer than that, ever since the time of the Norman conquest in 1066, which was effectively a kind of a French takeover at the boardroom level of the United Kingdom.
00:21:52.680and thereafter that French, Norman French presence
00:21:57.000began to have an effect not only in England
00:22:20.240who had imported Norman French into, you know, into Scotland to be their allies.
00:22:26.060And in many ways, the wars of independence that ensued between Scotland and England were a fight between rival French families to some extent.
00:22:38.480Edward I, Robert Bruce, there was much more going on than anything that was just straightforwardly traditionally Scottish in inverted commas or English in inverted commas.
00:22:49.320And they came closer in terms of marriage over the years
00:22:56.380In the 16th century, Margaret Tudor, who was Henry VIII's sister
00:25:25.600When I was growing up, when I was in my, oh, where are we now?
00:25:28.760I suppose in my teens, 20s and 30s, traditionally Scotland was a country that was dominated by Labour. Scottish Labour bestrode Scotland like a colossus. And it was always hugely significant in terms of UK elections, the fact that Labour was always able to depend upon this Scottish bloc vote for Labour. It made Scottish Labour very influential in that regard.
00:25:52.860And when devolution came around in the late 1990s, the Labour Party were confident that devolution would entrench their position.
00:26:02.860The Scottish, under Donald Dewar and the rest, they saw no reason to believe that Labour's dominance of Scotland would ever change.
00:26:10.640But the version of proportional representation that they set in place, the devolution settlement, the Scotland Act, was fatally flawed.
00:26:17.800And those flaws have been exposed in more recent times and the way in which the SNP has been able to establish a majority of itself in the Scottish Parliament is a product of the faults that were there in the Scotland Act and in the devolution settlement and in the choice of proportional representation that was made at that time.
00:26:36.900So, sorry to bore you rigid with that.
00:28:23.360and experience a world where we're being invaded by Martians,
00:28:26.900which is still better than being in lockdown.
00:28:29.100Follow the link in the description, and I'll see you there.
00:28:34.960Neil, let me follow up a little bit on that, because I lived in Scotland from about 2000 until about 2008, 2009, something like that. And so I saw the S&P just starting to make its first big waves. And one of the things, look, it's not my fight. It's not for me to decide the future of Scotland, even when I lived there.
00:28:53.300But what I did notice was a sort of strange thing where, and I don't, as I said, I don't have a particular position actually on the independence question. It's not something I know really enough about. But what I did definitely see was this was a time when Tony Blair, who had strong Scottish links, was prime minister. Gordon Brown was a Scottish chancellor of the Exchequer. John Reid was a Scottish home secretary. Many of the great offices of state in the United Kingdom were filled by Scots.
00:29:21.280and and when one scot went he'd often be replaced with another scot and yet at the same time I saw
00:29:27.680this sort of narrative about how Scottish people are underrepresented not being given enough
00:29:34.180influence or power that Scotland is being ignored down south like have you noticed that as well
00:29:40.600or did I just make that up no that was always that's I mean I grew up I grew up through through
00:29:46.600all of that in scotland it was it was always um it was always the case that was being made you know
00:29:52.480through the through the thatcher era and more recently that um that the allegation was always
00:29:58.060made that that scotland would vote one way and and too much of the rest of the uk would vote for
00:30:03.680for a conservative government and so you know so having voted labor you know scots would would end
00:30:09.740up with a with a conservative government or or indeed you know even under you know snp uh holding
00:30:16.220sway in the Scottish government there's still a you know been a for a long time there's been a
00:30:21.460Conservative government in Westminster but I mean at the personal at the personal level I can tell
00:30:27.100you that I have never lived a single day in Scotland under a government that I voted for
00:30:32.560and I'm 54 I've never not one not one day not one day have I lived under a government that I've
00:30:39.420actually voted for so I know for you know for different reasons than maybe that you know that
00:30:44.120mainstream, but I know exactly what it feels like to go to the, you know, to go to the
00:30:49.220polling booth every four or five years and walk away disappointed. I know what that is
00:30:54.400like. But yes, that's always been the case. You know, Scotland has a different political
00:30:59.680heritage. You know, there's a different, you know, there's different aspects of character
00:31:06.160for a lot of Scots. I mean, that is the case. And the devolution settlement was supposed
00:31:12.960to create a situation where whatever parliament was in Holyrood,
00:31:16.240there wouldn't ever be an absolute majority.
00:31:19.060The proportional representation system that we put in place
00:31:22.140was supposed to mitigate against that so that whatever assembly
00:31:26.780came together in Holyrood would always proportionally represent
00:31:30.460the many different facets of Scottish political life.
00:31:36.780But that is not what it actually delivered,
00:31:40.120As has been made plain by the way in which nationalism is coming increasingly to dominate every aspect of Scottish life
00:31:50.460And Scottish nationalism has always been a minority pursuit in Scotland
00:31:55.440And when I was growing up, the SNP was very much a fringe organisation
00:35:32.640But yes, hypothetically, if I was to say something in my house,
00:35:39.120you know, sitting on the couch with my wife and kids,
00:35:42.600I could say something and one of my kids could repeat it outside in the playground at school.
00:35:49.820Well, if they ever go to school again, depending on who overheard what one of my children said I had said.
00:35:59.500Hypothetically, I could go to jail for seven years for something that I said while sitting on the couch watching telly in the privacy of my own home.
00:36:07.980The hate crime bill has been extremely controversial.
00:38:28.860It was shameful that they voted through this flawed, dangerously untidy, sloppy legislation, and we'll see what becomes of it in the years ahead.
00:38:41.680But yes, hypothetically, the danger that it poses to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, is alive and well in Scotland, and we're all worried sick about it.
00:38:54.240Neil, I've gigged many times in Scotland.
00:38:57.060I've gigged in the stand in Glasgow many times.
00:38:59.940I'm going to be honest with you, it's my favourite comedy club in the UK.
00:42:43.240Well, you joke, but actually, Neil, you know, the last time we were able to do Edinburgh as comedians was 2019.
00:42:50.240I took my show to Edinburgh and as part of the show, I made a number of, you know, it was a show about the importance of freedom of expression.
00:42:58.680And so I deliberately went out of my way to show that certain very offensive words can be uttered in a particular context.
00:43:06.520And I would have jokes to support that and to take the audience on a journey from, well, I'm not sure freedom of speech is important, all the way to, well, here's some examples and here's how you go with it.
00:43:18.700But in order to do that, I had to bring up very offensive things and to talk about them comedically.
00:43:24.780Now, I'll be honest with you, if I was doing that show now, I would not come back to the Edinburgh Fringe.
00:45:44.260No, but Neil, it's an interesting moment we're in because I feel like Scotland is not really an exception on this front.
00:45:59.320You have some stuff going on that maybe we don't quite yet.
00:46:03.260But broadly, we seem to be in a very particular moment in history where we are repeating a lot of the mistakes that have been repeated at these peak moments of madness in the past.
00:46:16.980How do you look at it from, you know, obviously an archaeologist, but an enthusiast of history?
00:46:25.180What should we be wary of as societies in the current climate?
00:46:28.460I think, well, it can only be a cumulative, can't it? It must be a cocktail of many elements. I think in no small part, it has to do with the fact that, broadly speaking, since the end of the Second World War, the people of Western Europe, and certainly this archipelago, have broadly lived in peace.
00:46:55.260You know, and that threat has been something that happened elsewhere
00:47:01.260And I suspect with that comes a dangerous complacency
00:47:05.760And we've lived with and we've enjoyed freedoms that are unique
00:47:12.320Not just in the world, but unique in history
00:47:14.840As many people have said, you know, life has been almost intolerable
00:47:20.360For 99% of the human species for 99% of the time
00:47:24.740and what evolved very, very recently in our part of the world