At this time last year, I received a friendly rap over the knuckles from Alex Salmond for accidentally revealing who had been elected to the Alba NEC before a public announcement was made. (And it was a genuine accident – I thought the results email had been sent out to the whole Alba membership, whereas in fact it had only been sent to the candidates.) This time, I’m not totally sure whether a public announcement has been made yet, but hopefully I’m not revealing any state secrets if I simply say that I personally haven’t been re-elected, as long as I don’t mention anyone else’s results. I’d like to warmly congratulate the eight people who have made the cut, and to wish them a successful year ahead. I’d also like to thank the people who elected me twelve months ago and gave me the opportunity to experience the political world from a totally different perspective over the last year – it’s been fascinating, and a genuine honour.
In terms of the meaning of my result this time, I think there are three possible interpretations, and there may be a bit of truth in all three. Firstly, the new people who are coming on to the NEC are highly regarded – I don’t know them personally, but I’ve heard Alba members speak very warmly of them. So it may simply be that I’ve lost out due to a positive vote for high-quality candidates. Secondly, I wasn’t able to attend conference this year, because I live with a vulnerable person and still have to take the Covid risk seriously – 95% of the world (including, frankly, the Alba Party) may be pretending we live in a ‘post-pandemic era’, but I and many others can’t afford to do that for the time being, and judging from the ONS infection estimates I won’t be able to for quite some time to come. I do have a sneaking suspicion that not being there in person was a significant disadvantage, because there were one or two other candidates who I believe also weren’t at conference and who didn’t poll anything like as strongly as I expected them to. And thirdly, there’s no getting away from the fact that I’ve been troubled by one or two aspects of Alba’s direction of travel over the last few months, and in speaking up about that I was bound to lessen my chances of re-election. I said to a family member in July or August that I felt like I was practically campaigning to not be elected, because I was saying a lot of things that many Alba conference delegates (the true core of the party who get to elect the NEC) might not want to hear. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be re-elected – I very much did. But my first loyalty is to the cause of independence, and I just wouldn’t have been able to look myself in the mirror if I’d kept my head down for personal advantage and not said the things that I knew needed to be said. If you win election by saying things you don’t believe, and then use your election to rubberstamp things you don’t believe in, it’s a completely futile exercise.
My departure from the NEC is a natural crossroads for me. I’ve thought quite a bit in recent weeks about what I would do in this scenario, without actually coming to any firm conclusions. On the one hand I’ve enjoyed being part of Alba’s internal structures and I’m half-tempted to maybe stand for one or two of the other committees, or to become more involved at LACU level. But on the other hand this may be a very obvious opportunity for me to become a truly independent pro-independence blogger once again – because, with the best will in the world, I’ve had to self-censor to at least some extent as an NEC member. Or I could try to have my cake and eat it by speaking more freely while also remaining active in Alba. But an additional complication is that speaking freely as an independent blogger implies the continuation of this blog, and I’m not sure that’s actually a sustainable option anymore.
It probably hasn’t gone unnoticed that until recently I was blitzing the blog with details of the ongoing fundraiser to see if I could make it work. There have been a number of very generous donations in recent weeks, but it’s been a trickle not a flood, and as of this moment I can’t really see a way of carrying on as I have been for many years – ie. treating this blog as the equivalent of a very time-consuming part-time job. One or two people have suggested moving to Patreon to give myself a more reliable income, but my strong suspicion is that it wouldn’t work there either. Scot Goes Pop actually still has extremely healthy readership numbers – as even Stuart Campbell himself has conceded, it remains one of the six most-read pro-indy blogs in Scotland, roughly on a par with Barrhead Boy, and at least vaguely in the same ballpark as the likes of Bella Caledonia and Wee Ginger Dug. The problem is probably more to do with the cost of living crisis, with donations to blogs now being a luxury that people very understandably just can’t afford.
And sadly, I have my own personalised cost of living crisis too. One of my main sources of income (which had nothing to do with writing or politics) came to a complete stop in 2020 because of the Covid problem, while I’ve also almost certainly been punished for switching to Alba by a lack of external writing commissions over the last year or so – they haven’t completely dried up, but they’ve been much, much thinner on the ground than in previous years, and that makes the blogging life even less viable. The bottom line is that I now have a straight choice: to double down and go into absolute overdrive trying to make the blog financially sustainable, or to pack it in and find something completely different to do. And, to be clear, I haven’t forgotten that I’ve fundraised for another Scot Goes Pop opinion poll and raised a significant amount towards that – by hook or by crook I’ll get it done eventually, and even if I stop blogging I’ll come back especially for that, as soon as I figure out a way of bridging the shortfall of funds. Please just be patient, because it may take a little while yet – and rest assured that anything I haven’t used from the general fundraiser will also go towards the poll.
Whatever decisions I make, though, I do have one red line. I’m not going to censor myself on one particularly important point, and if that turns out to be incompatible with an involvement in Alba’s internal structures, then I’ll be sad about that but I’ll just have to live with it. I really am becoming extremely concerned that in one specific way, Alba are in danger of drifting much too far from their original stated purpose. Whatever my scepticism about the ‘supermajority’ concept, Alba were nevertheless presenting the electorate with an honest proposition in May 2021, because it’s perfectly possible for a party with significant support on the Holyrood list ballot to gain seats without doing any harm to overall pro-independence representation in the Scottish Parliament. That was the contract Alba were offering to voters – they weren’t trying to destroy or damage the SNP, they were instead trying to augment pro-indy representation and make it more pluricentric. But implicit in such a contract is that you don’t, for the most part, stand in first-past-the-post elections, because it’s impossible to do that without harming the SNP and thus risking a reduction in pro-indy seats. Even Stuart Campbell recognised that truth – when challenged, he was adamant that if his proposed Wings party came into being, it would be a list-only outfit and would never stand against the SNP under first-past-the-post. (Whether he would have stuck to that is another matter, but the fact that he felt the need to give the assurance is telling.)
Whereas now, expectations that Alba will be challenging the SNP across the board at the next Westminster general election, even if that election is a plebiscite election, have been deliberately allowed to build sky-high. I’m not breaking any confidentiality rules in saying what I’m about to say, because what I’ve heard in private has not cleared the mists for me any more than what I’ve heard in public. I simply haven’t been able to fathom what the objective is in allowing those expectations to run so far out of control – do Alba actually intend to stand lots of candidates at the general election? If so, that’s a suicide mission, both for the party and for the independence movement. Or is it a bluff that is merely intended to win some leverage? If so, that may not be quite so irresponsible, but it’s still a strategic mistake in my view, because a) it’s poisoning relationships with the rest of the independence movement who view it as a petulant threat to burn the house down as an act of revenge, and b) there’s no leverage to be gained from it anyway, because we as Alba don’t currently have enough to bring to the table. If we’d taken 6% of the vote in the Holyrood election or in the local elections this year, it would be a different story, but as it is the SNP are likely to calculate that they can afford to just try to bulldoze their way through if Alba stand in their way. There’s also the problem that many Alba members are likely to quickly become disillusioned if the threat of taking on the SNP at Westminster turns out to be a bluff – a danger that could have been very easily averted by being upfront and consistent that Alba intended to stick with its original contract with voters by only standing in elections conducted under proportional representation voting systems (with the possible exceptions of the two Alba-held seats at Westminster, which of course are in a special category).
I don’t feel politically homeless, but a combination of my despair over the course charted by the SNP, and my misgivings over Alba’s attitude to a potential plebiscite election held under first-past-the-post, mean that my home is a bit harder to locate at the moment. If I was still in the SNP I’d be on the radical wing of the party to such an extent that I’d be practically hanging out of the windows. Whereas in Alba I’m firmly on the moderate wing, and I do find that to be the more comfortable option because – as the recent conference has demonstrated – Alba allow far more scope for open debate and dissent than the SNP currently do. However, almost every political party has a rule stating that members can’t express support for candidates standing in direct opposition to the party in an election. I really, fervently hope that Alba do not put members like me in an impossible position by launching a widescale intervention at the next general election, because as a blogger I cannot in good conscience advise pro-indy voters to take a course of action that I know perfectly well would make independence less likely.
For now I’m going to take a break from blogging to try it on for size, and to give myself a chance to reflect. (Sturgeonite word, I know, but in this case I mean it sincerely.) I may be back very, very soon, or I may be gone for a prolonged period. If the latter, though, I do have one last request to make of Scot Goes Pop readers. If the Express don’t correct the lie in their article about Panelbase putting No on 52% (it’s actually 51%), could people please report them to the press regulator IPSO? It’s high time we took a proper and sustained stand against outright lies in the unionist media’s coverage of Scottish independence polling.
