Salmond: We must lead a new Scotland
The Scottish National party (SNP) must lead a “new age of responsibility” for Scotland, leader Alex Salmond said today.
He told the party conference in Aviemore that this year’s general election had awakened in the SNP the desire to win, and urged them to have confidence that they could do this.
The Holyrood elections in 2007 were the first port of call for a party determined to show “we have the competence and credibility to run Scotland and run it well”.
Lifting the Scottish growth rate would be a major tenet of that election campaign, Mr Salmond said, making the economy the “new Celtic tiger, not the Caledonian pussycat”.
And if they did win, the SNP would within the first term of office give the people of Scotland the “opportunity to move forward to independence”.
Opening his keynote speech, Mr Salmond paid tribute to outgoing party president Winnie Erwing, and welcomed her refusal to go to the House of Lords if she were asked.
Yesterday the SNP voted to retain their opposition to the upper house, and their leader today used a criticism of the Lords to launch a damning attack on the prime minister.
Not only was Tony Blair “totally unfit for office” but he had launched a war that was “built on lies” and had “fanned the flames of international terrorism”.
“What we need – and we need it right now – is a strategy and a timetable for withdrawal, not more years of Blair’s blood price,” Mr Salmond said.
Another major issue was control over Scotland’s oil supplies, which the SNP leader said was “filling [Gordon] Brown’s black hole” in the public finances.
“There is as much oil and gas in the waters around Scotland as has been exploited thus far – another 30 plus billion barrels of oil, another £200 billion of revenues,” he said.
“We have a second chance to transform our economic prospects and we must seize it with both hands.”
Mr Salmond then turned his attentions to the “mediocrity” of the Scottish Executive, which had failed to grow the economy to give Scotland a competitive edge.
“Our immediate aim is to rescue the politics of this country from the mediocrity of an executive with, as someone said recently, the attention span of a goldfish,” he said.
When that had been achieved, the party’s attention could be turned to Westminster, where Mr Salmond revealed his ambition to “break the grip of the London parties” over Scotland and aspire to a “new age” of independence, self-determination and self-respect.
