Scotland the Brave

Everyone knows that Martin Luther King had a dream. It featured eloquent, high-minded ambitions about little white girls and little black girls playing together in harmony. Alex Salmond has dreams too. In an utterance that should have resulted in immediate committal, he compared Kenny MacAskill to Mahatma Gandhi, and then, with the rhetorical panache of a Scottish Judge Jeffries, told the SNP conference that he wanted to see “Westminster dangling from a Scottish rope”. As visions of the future go, capital punishment is not as appealing as Dr Luther King’s evocation of Christian brotherhood; but, in the event of a hung parliament, Salmond’s dream might be realised.
   
Salmond’s experience of minority government has shown him how he can influence budgets and legislation at Westminster. In the event of a hung parliament, the SNP would challenge the government’s financial resolutions. He told Sky News (link unavailable as yet) that he sees a hung Parliament as an opportunity to promote an exclusively Scottish interest.