From the Herald on New Year’s Day –
“Mr Harvie rejected outright the suggestion that a pro-independence majority vote in the election should be read as a mandate to hold a legal independence referendum.
He said it would be a mandate for independence itself, not another vote.
He told the paper: ‘If we are left with a de-facto referendum as the only option, that is in place of the referendum that we ought to have, that we deserve to have, that we have a right to have, it’s not about triggering another one, it’s about answering the question.'”
That’s extremely heartening to hear from the co-leader of one of the two pro-independence parties that make up the Scottish Government. It should really be a statement of the obvious – an election can only be classed as a de facto independence referendum if an outright mandate for independence is being sought, rather than a mandate to hold a referendum. But nevertheless Angus Robertson, Mhairi Hunter and Toni Giugliano have all publicly taken the opposite view at some point over the last few months – and in Ms Hunter’s case that caused particular concern, given that we always tend to assume she’s speaking as Nicola Sturgeon’s representative on Earth. Hopefully Mr Harvie’s intervention may indicate that’s not necessarily the case.
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Yesterday, the Alba Party released the result from another of the questions they commissioned as part of the recent multi-client Panelbase poll. I’ll be totally honest and say I’m somewhat confused by the wording of the press release they’ve put out – it’s far from clear what the exact nature of the poll question was, and that being the case it’s hard to make full sense of the result. However, my best guess is that respondents were asked which party they thought gives the highest priority to independence, and they were only allowed to select one option. Among Yes supporters only, the results were:
SNP 75%
Alba 14%
Greens 3%
That’s in line with what you would intuitively expect. Most people know that the Greens are pro-independence, but they also know the Greens give the highest priority to the climate emergency and to cracking down on free speech on the gender identity issue. By contrast, both the SNP and Alba were specifically set up to win independence, so they were bound to come out ahead of the Greens on this particular question.
The title of the press release suggests that Alba are on course to overtake the Liberal Democrats in Holyrood list polling this year. There’s nothing in the Panelbase poll that would actually support that claim (or not on the results we’ve seen so far anyway), although in fairness the press release doesn’t directly state that the claim is based on the results of the poll – it’s just presented as a belief that Alba themselves hold. To consistently overtake the Lib Dems on the list, they would probably need to get into high single digits, and in my own view that’s unlikely to happen until there is a change in the way that Alba’s offer is presented to voters. At the moment evidence from both polls and local by-election results strongly suggests that Alba are flatlining at a level of support at which they would be highly unlikely to win list seats. There’s still three-and-a-bit years until the 2026 Holyrood election to turn things around, but as regular readers know, I think that would entail Alba adopting a relentlessly positive pitch about greater urgency on independence, distancing themselves from the ethno-nationalists who want to restrict voting rights for English people in Scotland, and also toning down the rage directed against the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon. If anything, based on what I’ve seen from a number of senior Alba people on social media in recent weeks, the opposite seems to be happening and the public face of Alba just seems to be becoming ever more angry and militant. For example, there was a suggestion on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that continuing to vote for the SNP after the passing of the GRR Bill was somehow the equivalent of voting for Jimmy Savile.
I remain a member of the Alba Party and during this year I’ll continue to make the case for a change of direction (and certainly a change of tone) before it’s too late. Remember that if Alba lose both their Westminster seats at the general election, they’ll have no remaining elected representation at all, and there’s a big danger they could start to look like an irrelevance or a failed experiment unless by that stage they can already point to genuine progress in the polls. So time is very much of the essence.
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