This is one of the best tributes we've seen since the announcement of Alex's passing. It was broadcast on Russia Today, a channel which in not available to Scots because, as children, we have to be shielded from insidious propaganda.
Our transcription isn't perfect but we've done our best. If anyone can help us tidy-up some of the more awkward-sounding sentences please do so via comments and we'll amend accordingly.
Thanks.
Rab (Clark)
Host: Let’s cross live now to Afshan Rattansi, he’s the host of the show Going Underground. Afshin, good to see you. Sad sad news coming from Scotland of the death of Alex Salmond. How did you react, I mean, when you heard what were your thoughts?
AR: Sad news from the puppet state of North Macedonia, it seems. Yes, he was a giant of British politics, a household name in a nation of political pygmies. Of course, Scotland seems to produce some of the greatest politicians, I mean, very few in my lifetime apart from Tony Benn, came from England. There is of course George Galloway from Scotland as well. He was someone who really fought for his beliefs all his life. My editor-in-chief of Going Underground brought him to the attention of RT so Going Underground and his show with the former Foreign Minister of Scotland, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheihk, was produced, both in the same studios and then sold to RT. He famously said ‘our internationalism is the driver of our nationalism’. Alex Salmond unlike all these pygmy puppet politicians of Westminster that now exist in Great Britain as a whole, he saw the wider context, not in the context of being slaves to Washington, he of course supported Julian Assange and he wanted Tony Blair on trial for war crimes. For that, in the latter part of his life, he paid for in exceptional - and he knew it - attempts at smearing from the intelligence services, he spoke to me often about how he was deliberately being attacked by the security state in Britain although hel seemed to still believe in democracy even after the failed attempt at a Scottish referendum. And of course the fact that they were attacking him showed that, is Britain democratic? Well, that referendum that he forced through, fair on Scottish independence at all.
Host: You mentioned there he was on your show, Going Underground, I believe at that time you were talking about a book called The Dream Will Never Die. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were talking about?
AR: Well actually, yeah, he was on quite a lot but of course he had his own show on RT and I know that the boss of RT has tweeted now talking about how, what a hero he was politically in the sense that his desire for achieving his political aims against the NATO puppetry that exists in all western European capitals. I think I remember that we disagreed over the legacy of James Connolly, the great Scotsman who would be executed in Ireland for his part in the Easter Rising, he saw Scottish independence as a nonviolent campaign through the SNP and then latterly in the Alba party but of course in the later years, after the war criminal Tony Blair, British politics soon descended into catastrophe and, with the brief blip of Jeremy Corbyn who was destroyed by the Israel lobby and thrown out of his Labour party. Alex Salmond was very Scottish through and through, he knew Scottish institutions, Scottish history in and out and really believed that fighting through parliamentary means he could achieve Scottish independence. Scotland, where all the oil came from to power the British economy from the 1980s, privatised by MrsThatcher and in the lead-up after James Callaghan as part of the neo-liberal consensus to pay welfare payments, use all that oil money from Scotland, he knew all of the injustice of how the Scottish people were treated, the highest rate of drug deaths in the whole of western Europe today, the rates of poverty in Scotland are appalling and he never saw his dream come true. Difficult to see really who can match him in the future because today all those parties in Scotland arguably, let alone south of the border, in England are merely neo-liberal vassals of oligarchs that basically run the country as money is poured into the dictator of Ukraine Zelensky and of course arms are sent and components to commit genocide in West Asia.
Host: Indeed. Mr Salmond’s time at RT was before my time, I don’t really know what kind of show he had, I’m sure some of our viewers right now don’t really know, perhaps they knew of yours, can you tell us a bit about what his show was like, what kind of, you know, guests did he have on, what was his goal really?
AR: He presented it with the former foreign minister of Scotland, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and it was an eclectic show, I’ll tell you that! But clearly, after RT was banned because there is no free media in Britain, in Scotland or in England or Wales or Northern Ireland, he had to shut up shop it wasn’t able to be made any more but it was a very Scottish nationalist show about Scottish culture more often than not but also impinging on the injustices committed from London against the Scottish people. And it’s difficult right now to see a country in such distress and woe, it must have been painful for him to see how the SNP - the party that he did more to improve its chances and its most successful, I mean he held that party together - destroy itself and I’m not sure really what the Alba party the successor will now exist as. So his show on RT showed all of that and of course what that meant was MI6, MI5, specifically, the building next door to RT’s old headquarters near Westminster, were on the watch for him because they believed that it wasn’t the Scottish people that desired independence, that trade unions in Britain did not want strike action for better pay and conditions whether it be the rail union, it was all Russia, everything that was against any kind of stability that the elite that control Britain want must be controlled by Putin and the Kremlin and of course if you were to watch his shows - which you can’t of course because Google the CIA cut-out has deleted all his shows off Youtube - you’d see that what he was merely talking about was the desire for some kind of democratic autonomy for some of the poorest people in western Europe who live in Scotland, whose lives are destroyed by London. If you just look at the property ownership statistics of Scotland I think it’s about five people that own most of the land. These are terrible times for these western European nations and it’s a terrible time for Scotland and it’ll be a worse time for Scotland now knowing that at such a young age Alex Salmond has passed away.
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