Craig Murray has posted tonight to make two points, albeit one more volubly than the other. Firstly, he very admirably says that the Alba Party (of which both Craig and I are members) must not split the pro-independence vote at a genuine plebiscite election by standing against the SNP. But secondly, he says that if the next UK general election is not a genuine plebiscite election, Alba should challenge the SNP in every single constituency, in order to bring Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP down. With all due respect to Craig, that would be absolutely nuts, for about seven billion different reasons –
* It assumes we have the luxury of throwing away pro-indy seats to the unionist parties because we can somehow easily get them back when we’ve finished tearing ourselves apart as a movement. That’s highly questionable. Westminster elections are away fixtures for pro-indy parties and we’ve been defying gravity by winning a majority of seats in the last three general elections. If Labour get their former heartland seats back, due in part to a split pro-indy vote, the likelihood is they’ll keep them indefinitely. That alone could make the difference between winning independence and not winning it.
* It would send a message to the independence movement, which believe me would be heard loud and clear, that Alba’s “supermajority” messaging in the 2021 Holyrood election was nothing more than a confidence trick. That 2021 campaign would be seen in retrospect as all about Alba’s self-interest rather than about boosting pro-indy representation – because if you actually care about the latter, you obviously don’t launch a destructive campaign in a first-past-the-post election only two or three years later that you know can only have the effect (as Craig freely admits) of reducing pro-indy representation at Westminster. That blatant contradiction would be remembered all too well when the 2026 Holyrood election comes around, and would make it infinitely harder for Alba to win list seats – any remaining goodwill from SNP voters would by then be long gone. The SNP would be able to point to the specific Westminster seats where Alba helped a unionist candidate to win, and would quite understandably never let us forget it. (Put it this way: Ralph Nader’s vote share plummeted between 2000 and 2004 for one very simple reason.)
* Alba would almost certainly be humiliated at a UK general election. It’s hard enough to get a look-in at a Holyrood election, but at Westminster it would be impossible. The vote share could end up being so derisory that many activists might subsequently lose all heart and throw in the towel. That could literally spell the end for the Alba Party. Much more sensible to choose your battles, and it’s under proportional representation systems (ie. local council elections and the Holyrood list) that Alba actually has a chance of prospering and gaining some psychological momentum.
* For the above reason, an Alba intervention at the general election would not actually succeed in bringing Nicola Sturgeon down. She might even be strengthened. The mood music suggests she might resign voluntarily within a few years, but the process would not be hurried along in any way.
* Even if a small party thinks it can reasonably harbour hopes of avoiding humiliation at a general election, it certainly wouldn’t go about attempting the trick by standing in dozens of constituencies and thus spreading its limited resources too thinly. It would do the total opposite and concentrate its fire in the most promising seats (which in Alba’s case would mean the two where it has the incumbent MPs).
* Craig uses the example of Sinn Féin supplanting the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918 to suggest that Alba replacing the SNP as the majority Scottish party at Westminster is perfectly possible. Frankly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We are just so many light-years from the circumstances that made that freakish event possible – where would I even start? We haven’t just had a world war, or military conscription against the popular will, or an armed insurrection at home, or executions of pro-independence leaders by the British state, or a mass expansion of the electoral franchise. In addition, the Alba party leader is far less popular with the public than the current SNP leader – wholly unjustly, as it happens, but we have to live with that reality all the same. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle in a proportional representation election, but it absolutely is an insurmountable hurdle in a first-past-the-post election. No, Alba will not be replacing the SNP as the largest party any time soon. We will not even be getting close to doing that. The reality is that Alba are still battling just for survival into the medium-term, and that battle will not be won with self-destructive pipe-dreams.
In a perverse way, Craig has done us a favour by going public on this, because I know only too well that some people have for months (or longer) been privately gagging to embark on a suicide mission to destroy the SNP at the next general election, no matter what the cost to independence or to the movement or to Alba itself. It’s about time we had an open debate about that, rather than sleepwalking into catastrophe. Some Alba people will justify the idea of splitting the vote in a first-past-the-post election by saying they themselves would vote Tory rather than SNP if there was no Alba candidate. To some extent that’s because of the erosion of women’s sex-based rights under the SNP, and although I can sympathise with the reasons for their strength of feeling, it certainly isn’t suggestive of independence as the number one priority – which it absolutely must be, both in word and deed, if we’re ever to gain any traction with a significant proportion of Yes supporters.
