There have been more questions for me in the last couple of threads, although I deleted one of them because it was in a comment full of potentially defamatory allegations about Alba politicians.
If the Alba Party are below 5% support in the polls, would you tell people that voting Alba is a wasted vote, and that they should go back to the SNP?
That might make sense if Alba are on zero or 1% in the polls, but if – in a more plausible scenario – they’re on 3% or 4%, a more viable course of action would be to prevent those votes being wasted by building on them and pushing the party to the 5-6% they would need to take seats across Scotland. The people who have already moved over to Alba are quite passionate, so in most cases asking them to go back to the SNP would not be realistic unless Alba literally had no chance whatever of winning seats.
Would you still support Alba if Stuart Campbell was a candidate?
Yes, I would, not because I’m a huge fan of the guy, but because my objective is independence and I think the Alba party is the best vehicle on the list to achieve that. I presume he would take the same view if I was a candidate. (Spoiler alert: don’t hold your breath.) In practice I don’t see how he can stand, because he’s indicating that he’d like people to vote for Anas Sarwar against Nicola Sturgeon in Glasgow Southside, which is contrary to Alba’s position that everyone should vote SNP on the constituency ballot.
Aren’t the MP defectors to the Alba Party causing harm?
This is a really tricky one, because normally if you support a party that’s just been set up, you’d welcome absolutely every defection to it. But if the Alba experiment is going to work, there has to be limitations on it. The new party can never stand on the Holyrood constituency ballot, and it can never stand for Westminster unless there is some sort of electoral pact with the SNP, which seems unlikely. So MPs who defect have to be sure that they won’t want to stand again for Westminster in 2024 if Scotland isn’t independent by then. The local elections next year are a borderline case – although those will take place under proportional representation, the de facto threshold for getting elected is much higher than on the Holyrood list. So vote-splitting would potentially be more of a problem, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Incidentally, I’ve noticed a peculiar tendency among Alba’s critics to read words and sentences as if they say the polar opposite of what they actually say. So, for example, in my last post I wrote that I had no intention of defending Alex Arthur’s comments about Romanians and the vaccine, and for some reason people seemed to think I meant “I wholeheartedly support Alex Arthur’s comments about Romanians and the vaccine”.
POLL: Not anything scientific, just curiosity to see how my followers are voting on the list.
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 30, 2021
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