“SCOTLAND is a country not a county,” Alex Salmond said in his last post on social media before he died on Saturday.
The news broke of the former first minister's death on Saturday evening after he had given a speech North Macedonia in the morning.
Before his death, the Alba Party leader had been vocal on social media about how Tony Blair had previously compared the Scottish Parliament to an “English Parish Council”.
First Minister John Swinney had met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Edinburgh on Friday as part of the UK Government’s first Council of Nations and Regions – a meeting Salmond disagreed with.
The Alba Party leader said that Swinney’s appearance at the Council of the Nations and Regions meeting carried the perception that Scotland had “a regional status”.
He wrote on the social media site X/formerly Twitter: “Of course the First Minister has the right to insist on bilateral JMC meetings with the Prime Minister. I am not sure in which world that correct business approach includes a convivial group selfie with the political opponent who is freezing Scots pensioners.
“If John or his advisers had read Gordon Brown’s original proposal for this Council, then they would have realised that this wasn’t some ad hoc reset meeting, but part of a plan to pull any independence teeth from devolution.”
He then went on to say: “It is designed to diminish the status of our Parliament and the First Minister.
“Part of becoming independent is about thinking independently, not subserviently. John should have politely declined the meeting with the words ‘Scotland is a country not a county’.”
