First of all, a quick update about one of the points I made in my post yesterday. I mentioned that my faith in the Alba Party’s internal democratic processes took a big knock last month when I put myself forward for a set of internal elections and was not informed of the results, even though I sent a follow-up email to try to find out. Last night and this morning, I spoke to a couple of senior people in the party, and it turns out that I was in fact on the ballot in February, and I was elected to one of the four committees I stood for (the Appeals Committee). It’s not really clear why I wasn’t informed afterwards – it may have been a technical fault, or my email address may have been left off the message by accident, but the important thing is that I now have far more confidence than I did 24 hours ago that Alba members of all shades of opinion still have fair access to the party’s internal democracy. I’m very grateful to the people who helped me resolve the issue.
So I’ll be on the Appeals Committee for the next year, and having put myself forward for that position and been elected, I take the responsibility seriously, and I’m therefore fully committed to Alba. But I would just say this to my own party. Kate Forbes’ mantra was “continuity won’t cut it” and in the current circumstances that applies just as much to Alba as it does to the SNP. I’m not talking about leadership – we’re incredibly fortunate to have someone with the immense experience and abilities of Alex Salmond at the helm and he remains the correct person to take us forward. But in the wake of Humza Yousaf’s narrow victory, which sealed the SNP’s transition to being a de facto devolutionist party, there are swathes of the independence movement crying out for a credible, mainstream, full-bloodedly pro-independence alternative, and we need to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about the changes we would have to make to be the party that genuinely offers that alternative – because, after all, if we don’t do it, it’s likely that nobody at all will.
Jo Grimond famously said to the Liberal Party in the 1950s that they needed to “get on, or get out”. That exhortation could also be fairly applied to the Alba Party at present, because I know many people are painfully aware that if Alba didn’t exist, the party’s members could have been in the SNP voting for Kate Forbes as leader over the last two weeks. The more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’ve become that Alba’s existence didn’t actually swing the balance yesterday – Yousaf’s margin of victory was just over 2000 votes, and apparently Alba has a membership of just under 4000, but we have to bear in mind that by no means all of those people would be SNP members in the absence of Alba, and there would also have been many abstentions and people who didn’t use their second preferences, or people who used their second preferences for Yousaf. (Perverse though it may seem, I know anecdotally of Alba members who would have voted Regan 1, Yousaf 2.) So when you put all of those factors together, the strong likelihood is that Yousaf would still have won narrowly – but the fact that we’re even posing the question points to a key problem. Alba members are a precious resource who can only be doing good in one party at any one time, and if we’re going to justify to ourselves keeping those people away from the good they could be doing inside the SNP, we need to start proving that Alba as a separate party is capable of moving the dial on independence in a way that we have not yet managed.
What could make a difference? There is a ‘silver bullet’ scenario which could transform Alba’s fortunes overnight, and that would be defections of MSPs who cannot see a future in a Yousaf-led SNP, and the subsequent creation of an Alba parliamentary group at Holyrood. The party would then have instant credibility and a good chance of retaining a presence in the Scottish Parliament beyond the 2026 election. But if that doesn’t happen, we’re going to have to do it the hard way by gradually tripling our support from 2% to 6% over the next three years (enough to win multiple list seats), and the path to that begins with cultivating a greater appeal to committed independence supporters. I’ve lost count of the people who have told me over recent months that they’d love to join an alternative to the SNP, but they look at the Alba culture as exhibited on social media and think “that’s just not for me”. I speak as someone who was on Alba’s National Executive as recently as six months ago, but I sometimes look at the Alba culture and see a very closed world that I do not fully understand or identify with, and that only really speaks to itself. Through A Scottish Prism is “the Alba BBC” – everybody watches it, and if you don’t, you’re somehow not “real Alba”. Wings Over Scotland is “the Alba tabloid” – everybody reads it and likes it, and if you don’t, you’re somehow not “real Alba”. Salvo is “the Alba faith”, and if you don’t attend church, you’re somehow not “real Alba”. All of those things may be fine, but they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, and they certainly don’t represent the centre of gravity in the independence movement, let alone in wider indy-supporting Scotland. We need a much more pluralistic landscape if Alba is going to be a party that the average independence supporter would feel comfortable joining tomorrow, or voting for tomorrow.
(Incidentally, I’ve got nothing at all against Salvo, who have plenty of good ideas to offer, but meditating upon the text of the Claim of Right Act 1689 isn’t really my thing, just personally. I tried to read it a few weeks ago and only got as far as the word “papist” in the second sentence. I somehow don’t think it was written with an Irish-ancestry Roman Catholic audience in mind.)
I think we could also entice people away from the SNP by offering them a much more vibrant, participatory internal democracy than exists in their current party. At the moment Alba is very slightly more democratic than the SNP, but that’s an exceedingly low bar and I think we should be aiming a lot higher. None of the current members of the Alba NEC were elected by a vote of the whole membership – the national office bearers were declared elected without a vote because there was only one candidate for each position, and the ordinary NEC members were elected by only the relatively small minority of members who paid for a conference pass. My view is that the case for having the entire ruling body of a party elected by that party’s whole membership is close to unarguable, and I also think in an era of easy and quick online voting there’s a very strong case that every single elected national position should be elected by the whole membership, rather than by a selectorate at National Council.
To put this as delicately as I can, I think we need to find a way to spend a much greater percentage of our time talking about subjects other than the trans issue. I’m as opposed to self-ID legislation as anyone (long-term readers will remember I commissioned a poll in 2021 that showed overwhelming public opposition to the proposed law), but we’ve won that argument comprehensively – so comprehensively, in fact, that even Labour has effectively reversed course, which would have seemed impossible even a few months ago. It now looks almost certain that there will be no self-ID even under a Starmer government. There comes a point where you just have to take yes for an answer and turn your focus to other things.
Above all else, we need to stop being driven by naked revenge against the SNP and certain people within it. If we find ourselves pondering a political intervention on the basis that “it won’t help Alba, it won’t help independence, but it might TURF OUT THOSE SNP TROUGHERS AT WESTMINSTER SO LET’S BLOODY DO IT”, our reasoning is going very badly wrong somewhere. We need to have a laser-like focus on what will actually help bring independence forward – and number one on that list is winning Alba list seats in 2026. Why? Because if there’s a narrow pro-indy majority in Holyrood after 2026, and if Alba are a non-trivial part of that majority (big ifs, I admit), we will have an insane amount of leverage to coax the Scottish Government into a much more radical independence strategy. The option of a unilateral Referendum Bill has been removed by the Supreme Court, but there are plenty of other options that an elected government could pursue.
Last but not least, we need to start talking independence support up rather than down. I’ve pointed this out a number of times recently, but Alba seem to be picking up the awful Wings habit of “celebrating” poor polls for Yes and even exaggerating how bad they are. To me, that speaks to a lack of confidence – it’s as if we see independence as a project currently owned by the SNP and not part-owned by ourselves. We are one of the largest pro-independence parties, like the Greens, and we need to start claiming our stake in good or decent poll showings for Yes. And on that note, here is a video preview of the remaining results from the Scot Goes Pop polling conducted this month…
I’ve got an idea (and it’s only a vague idea at this stage) that when the autumn comes around, I might try to stand for one of the Alba national office bearer positions, because those are the only positions elected by the whole membership. It would not be in any great expectation of actually being elected – the purpose would be simply to try to start a debate among the membership about the ideas I’ve raised above. Or if someone more telegenic decides to take the task on, I’d get behind them instead, but I do think it’s a debate that needs to happen, and sooner rather than later. Maybe that can be my pet project for this year, to try to stop myself spending too much time repetitively blogging about the opinion poll evidence that Yousaf appears to be leading us all to calamity. I think ultimately we’re all going to have to get on with campaigning for independence in our own way, and give the SNP the space to find out for themselves that they’ve selected the wrong leader. And make no mistake, that painful but necessary moment will arrive, even if I can’t predict exactly how or when.
