"You do not have to arrive at the destination, however, to enjoy the journey."

You get the feeling that Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times, is not a great fan of The Tartanissimo, or at least his personality; the summary of the first page of this article would probably read something along the lines of "Mr Salmond is a smug, conceited populist who has achieved nothing in real terms (other than upsetting the English) during the first year of his premiership.”

But as Stephen implicitly admits, there is an impressive Machiavellian cunning also at work there; Salmond senses that presently there isn't a majority of Scots wanting Scottish independence- if there was, then Wendy’s initial offer of a snap referendum last week would have been gratefully grabbed.

That being the case, the first theory in the article goes, let's get the English to deliver it for us, “enrage” them enough, so that they (with the help of the power-hungry, non-principled prostitute "pragmatic" wing of the Conservative party) "push Scotland out of the Union - or at least behave so badly that the Scots see no alternative".

Which is fine as a short-term tactic, but if the resulting fire and the fury prevents a full and uninhibited debate on the objective costs of separation, then, inevitably, the Scottish electorate will, at some point after independence, turn on Alex when those full economic, political and social costs start being realized. And, as mentioned before, Salmond is nothing if not a calculating and personally intensely ambitious politician.

Following on from that premise, then Stephens' second theory makes more sense to me.

Without the Nasty Brit Establishment as a scapegoat to continually blame (not to mention its central funding), then the SNP would actually have to produce real policies to ensure any newly independent state would remain a viable entity and, thinking about it further, once their raison d'etre was achieved, what actually would be the point of a SNP? More pertinently, even with a pissed off England, Salmond knows there "is scant prospect of independence." But taking a leaf out of the Quebecois and Catalunyan separatist handbook, that inconvenient fact needn't stop him from grabbing even more power from the centre, without suffering the economic and political consequences of total and complete separation.

So, in a reverse of Scottish Unionism's present policy, ie "fighting independence by requesting more independence"; the SNP would be "fighting Unionism by keeping the Union in place". The personal benefit to Mr Salmond, given the state of the opposition, is that he'd probably be PM for life, without the attendant and bothersome responsibilities that position normally entails.
Sound feasible?

You do not have to arrive at the destination, however, to enjoy the journey.

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