Should Scotland be an independent country? (Lord Ashcroft, 26th January – 3rd February 2023)
Yes 44% (-5)
No 56% (+5)
I want to say something from the heart to members of my own party, the Alba Party, in relation to the above numbers. When I went on Twitter this morning, every second tweet I saw was from Alba members, often very, very senior Alba members, seemingly gloating about the Ashcroft poll and claiming it showed Nicola Sturgeon had destroyed the cause of independence or set it back decades. It should be a statement of the obvious that this is not generally the way pro-independence parties behave – for very obvious reasons we normally talk independence up, not down. In this case, independence is not just being talked down, it’s being absolutely pulverised with words, in a way that is manna from heaven for the anti-indy media. And it is categorically not the case that such extreme negativity is the only conclusion that can possibly be warranted from the poll numbers we’re seeing at present. There have been four independence polls in this calendar year to date – three have shown No leads and one has shown a Yes lead. So it’s not even entirely clear at this point that No is necessarily in the lead. Two of the No leads have been within an entirely typical range for the polling firm in question, and this Ashcroft poll is literally the first for an extremely long time that has shown an abnormally high No lead. Rule number one with polling analysis is that if only one poll is showing something unusual, you treat it with caution and scepticism until it’s corroborated by more polls, because it could easily turn out to be an extreme outlier or a rogue poll. We have actually seen a number of polls like this since 2014 and – at least so far – any despair caused by them has proved to be ill-founded.
Lord Ashcroft’s polls have a prior history for being outliers. He conducts them very infrequently and they sometimes show large swings in surprising directions. I gather that he uses a variety of firms to conduct his fieldwork, and if he chops and changes between firms in each successive poll, that could partly explain the oddity of the trends he seems to pick up.
Maybe I’m getting a distorted perspective on Twitter due to the fact that I follow so many Alba people – it may be that people outside the party just aren’t exposed to this barrage of extreme negativity and it thus doesn’t have the destructive effect that I fear. But nevertheless as an Alba member I don’t think it’s irrational for me to care so much about what is going on. I know some Alba-bashers will say that this is simply what Alba has consistently done right from the start in spring 2021, but that is categorically not the case – this relentless talking down of independence support is something completely new. The party seems to have undergone a radical change of direction in recent months and become a Totally Destroy Nicola Sturgeon And The SNP At Any Price Party, which was certainly not the prospectus when I became a member two years ago.
I’m not really sure what the hell is going on, or what the underlying cause of this change is. The NEC elections last October probably did, on balance, move the Executive in a more hardline direction, but the leadership are more than strong enough to resist that having much of an effect on policy and strategy if they want to, so this must be a decision from the top. One thought that occurs to me is that Alba have actually been quite a successful party in one specific and limited way – they’ve proved quite effective at raising funds, as you can see from some of the advertising they’re able to do, for example on the front page of The National. It may well be that the bulk of those funds come from hardline anti-Sturgeon sources, and that it’s been calculated that giving donors what they want to hear is necessary to keep the party in a healthy financial state. But this is potentially leading us into a horrible purgatory where Alba successfully perpetuates itself in an increasingly unelectable state in which it will be incapable of helping the independence cause. I’ve been saying for a very long time that it is absolutely possible for Alba to win list seats in 2026, but ONLY if we tone down the near-homicidal rage against Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, and become once again a party with a positive message about independence. That’s the only way we can convince SNP sympathisers that an Alba list vote is a natural complement to an SNP constituency vote. We’re doing the complete opposite of that at the moment and as a result I’m becoming increasingly pessimistic about our electoral prospects. It’s not too late to turn things around, but there may come a point where it is too late unless we step back and do some much-needed reflecting.
I know some people will earnestly argue that Alba’s current militant message is actually a positive one, because it’s about destroying the SNP and replacing it with Alba, which is the only party capable of delivering independence. Frankly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Replacing the SNP with Alba may not be totally impossible, but from where we’re starting it would be a 20 year project – certainly not remotely consistent with the original Alba message that appealed to me so much, ie. that we wanted independence in the “here and now”, not in some far-distant hypothetical future. I’m also not sure it’s consistent with Alba’s official policy of wanting an October 2023 plebiscite election, because that’s a campaign that would almost certainly be fought under SNP and Sturgeon leadership. If you think the Sturgeon team are such an unmitigated disaster area and that independence will only be possible once they’re totally destroyed, why would you want them to lead a decisive independence campaign in just eight months’ time? Unless I’m missing something, there’s just no joined-up thinking here.
