By contrast, Ms Hendry is little-known and her chances of winning are zero. So if she takes a non-trivial share of the vote, the only possible effect of that will be to increase the chances of a Tory win in what is an extremely tight SNP-Tory marginal. The SNP won by a margin of just 2.3% in 2021, and in the equivalent Westminster seat the margin was identical in July's general election, in spite of Douglas Ross' very best efforts to hand the seat to the SNP on a plate.
If I can just gently say to Alba members (I was one myself until a few days ago), I know how angry you are with the SNP, and I totally understand that anger because it's very unlikely that independence will be seriously pursued for as long as John Swinney is SNP leader. But there is no scenario in which replacing an SNP constituency MSP with a Tory constituency MSP can help the cause of independence. It can only do harm.
The place to offer a radical pro-independence alternative to the SNP is on the list ballot, where seats can actually be won. Playing silly buggers on the constituency ballot can only detract from that alternative. Remember that Alba was explicitly launched in 2021 as a list-only party, and by going down this new path, the party is simply underscoring how much the original concept has mutated since then. Rather than a cooperative party that wants to work with others to bring about independence, Alba now looks like a harm-the-SNP-for-harm's-sake party, which if anything will put Yes supporters off from backing the party on the list.
For full disclosure, Christina Hendry is a member of Alba's Disciplinary Committee, and although I was only allowed into last week's hearing for a fleeting few minutes, I did see her there (I think she was one of about five or six in attendance), and based on views I've heard her express in the past, I do not have the slightest doubt that she will have been one of the people who voted for my expulsion from the party. But regular readers will know that hasn't affected what I've said above, because I've been consistently saying exactly the same thing since I joined Alba in the spring of 2021 - except in very rare circumstances (such as by-elections where a high-profile candidate is available), the party should avoid first-past-the-post contests and focus entirely on proportional representation elections where there is actually a chance of getting elected.
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"Rather than a cooperative party that wants to work with others to bring about independence"
ReplyDeleteI mean I do understand the annoyance after several olive branches were slapped away and Alba were laughed at and ridiculed for the suggestion that the SNP might entertain the idea of working together.
Why keep offering the hand of friendship to someone who would rather urinate on you than work with you.
Perhaps that's something the Alba leadership themselves should be thinking about, given the insanely high number of members and former members they've trampled all over, and the high levels of resentment they've needlessly generated as a result.
DeleteWhere they should have been a broad church, Alba have turned into a narrow, inward-looking, paranoid sect.
The sad thing is they are what's left of Salmond's legacy. He deserved so much more. We all did.
DeleteInstead, they're the Wings Party that even Stu Campbell can't put his full throated support behind.
I'd rather support Kenny MacAskill, Ash Regan, Neale Harvey & Angus MacNeil than practically anyone in the SNP leadership though.
DeleteThe best people the SNP have like Joanna Cherry, Fergus Ewing etc are essentially on the fringes of the Party who most SNP supporters would probably be overjoyed if they left. That's where we are.
You can't support Hanvey, MacNeil, Regan, etc without also supporting the nutjobs like McEleny who seem to have total control of the party.
DeleteHanvey was awful to the women office bearers. Spreading smears about them
DeleteHe is not a nice man
Ash Regan has made no impact since joining and seems to be very much on side with McEleny
James is right Alba are a toxic cult
Imagine talking about ‘Salmond blood’ it is not Game of Thrones?
Someone should put that in a billboard ad.
Delete"Christina Hendry says she's got Salmond blood in her
Thing is, hen, it's not Game of Thrones"
The SNP are a devolutionist party which is just a subset of Unionist party. They should be opposed everywhere.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Craig, but that's just totally irresponsible Campbellesque destructionism. The current SNP leader may be de facto devolutionist but he will not be the leader forever.
DeleteCraig Murray, are you THE Craig Murray? If so, can you confirm whether or not you are still an ALBA member, bearing in mind you broke the rules by standing for a unionist party?
DeleteIs there any way of knowing that is the real Craig Murray?
DeleteHe's posted here before.
DeleteJames says:- " The current SNP leader may be a de facto devolutionist but he will not be the leader forever. " I agree with that sentence but I suggest the point is how do you get a leader who is NOT a de facto devolutionist. The last three SNP leaders have been de facto devolutionists Sturgeon, Yousaf and Swinney. Who, how and when can this string be broken. It seems to me there is a long line of de factos in the SNP waiting to take their turn. Will we need to support the SNP for 30 years, say, before a REAL independence suporter takes the reins of the SNP? Will it ever happen?
DeleteHe has, aye. But not from Lebanon, as far as I know. Does Blogspot record comments' IP addresses? 😉
DeleteAs for the point he raised: I’m with James on this one. The SNP is the vehicle we have got. The Scottish public has refused to support any alternative. Who are we to tell them they are wrong? Who are we to "burn our ships" and expect the normal, healthy majority of folk who pay little attention to politics to understand our apparent madness?
I think James will rejoin the SNP soon, now Alba's thrown him out, and do what he can to ensure they have the right kind of leadership—the kind that WANTS INDEPENDENCE—in place after Swinney's caretaking is over. I wish him all the best. I don't think it will be an easy task, but I certainly hope it is possible.
I used to have Statcounter, which showed the rough location of each visitor, but I abandoned it long ago, so no, I can't confirm it's definitely Craig. But I think it's probably him.
DeleteA vote for a political party is an endorsement of approval for said Party. If the SNP were to win the election well that would suggest that people must be happy with how John Swinney is doing things, why would they then do anything differently afterwards?
DeleteBut we're essentially being asked to vote for them regardless and simply hope that John Swinney will leave at some undetermined point in the future and then hope again that someone better replaces him... isn't that exactly what was said about Nicola Sturgeon?
Do we have all the time in the world to hope that the SNP eventually gets it's shit together and that it doesn't shoot itself in the foot on other issues in the meantime?
@7:25. Unfortunately, we are not blessed with a position of power.
DeleteYou're quite right about the current state of the SNP, and those were my very reasons for abstaining in the July election. I’m no keener to vote for them in Holyrood, either, when independence isn't just off the table, it's nowhere to be seen.
But what else can we do? No one's voting for Alba or the ISP. They're both dead duds. Peter Bell will do well to score a single percent of the vote, let alone the 5% to keep his deposit. No one, no one at all, is interested in starting all over again with a different party.
That's how we were snookered when the Devolutionists took over the SNP. As long as they control it, we are powerless. If you wanted to engineer the independence movement's downfall, this is how you'd do it.
"Peter Bell will do well to score a single percent of the vote"
DeleteBlimey, you're about ten times more optimistic about his chances than I am!
Oh aye, Bell said he's not running for election, but I don't believe him. It's not a party if it never runs.
Delete@7:36. 1% is achievable by any daftie. Have you ever heard of the Scottish Libertarians? They're Scotland's right of centre Yes party! The leader seems to be local to here as he runs in every election. Reliably comes dead last, even in council by-elections. Even he gets 1% or thereabouts.
DeleteI'm sorry but that is complete and utter tripe. The Scottish Libertarian Party actually took 0.18% of the list vote in 2021. I'd be extremely surprised if Bell even matched that.
DeleteGetting 1% of the vote is bloody hard. Some random guy off the street like Bell isn't going to do it.
But the Claim of Right, the *Treaty* of Union and SALVO!
DeleteYou made me look up the Libertarians electoral record, and you're right: they're down at 0.1%, even in the Colinton by-election in Edinburgh council. I apologise for the decimal error, they're even shiter than I remember!
Did craig Murray not stand for election for a party that is pro Brit nationalist and yet be a member of ALBA. Happy to be corrected.
DeleteHe did indeed.
DeleteCraig is correct.
DeleteDo you think the careerist devolutionists are going to magically become a real independence party if we keep voting them in?
They need competition in our parliament. Competition who can attract Yes votes. Greens aren’t providing that. Has to be Alba.
Longterm winning strategy for Yes is SNP 1, (Alba / Green / ISP / SSP / Whoever) 2. But we aren’t at that position this election. We have no independence supporting parties in our parliament. Time to get one in there.
No, Craig is not correct, for the very reasons James and others have already pointed out. It is not necessary to stupidly stand in the constituencies and stupidly hand marginal seats to the Tories. Competition to the SNP, if competition to the SNP is needed, can and should be provided on the regional list vote only.
DeleteBased on a comment above, leaving aside Alba for a moment: Why have ISP been so poor?
ReplyDeleteThey've been in existence longer than Alba but have barely done anything to get themselves noticed. They've stood in the occasional by-election but beyond that it's mostly just been poor images that looked like they were knocked up in an afternoon on Microsoft Paint being posted on Twitter and going on daft crusades over niche issues nobody cares about like the oath of allegiance. I don't get it.
It's very hard to get noticed. Alba managed it, thanks to Alex Salmond himself. But even then the media attention was slim, and all too negative, given their obsession with his "baggage."
DeleteWhen it comes to ISP (and others), you're talking about breaking into politics from the outside. Without well known faces, whose politics people already know, getting any traction at all is a monumental struggle. Sometimes the right circumstances come along, like a single-issue independent breaking in, such as those Save the Local Hospital campaigns which ran whole councils and got MPs in England. Even they needed media attention, though, and enough local interest to get organised.
Here's a blast from the past for you: anyone remember the SSP? They're a pro-independence party of long standing, which had 6 MSPs at its height. They're still around, too, with their leader Colin Fox a familiar face at every Indy march I've ever been on. They broke into politics via Tommy Sheridan's Stop the Poll Tax campaign, focussed work in Pollok, and Sheridan's star power. Once he was ruined in a sex scandal, they fell out of view and were forgotten. Their downfall doesn't interest me quite like their rise, though. (Not to be confused with RISE (the party) of course, which did no such thing!)
TL;DR: You don't just walk into parliament. You need noticed.
I agree with you James
ReplyDelete"Alba now looks like a harm-the-SNP-for-harm's-sake party, which if anything will put Yes supporters off from backing the party on the list."
ReplyDeleteJames is 100% correct in his assessment of Alba - and outside of the miniscule, completely irrelevant bubble of Alba supporters on here and elsewhere, it is the common perception of most Scots, including most Indy Supporters.
Whether those facts are ever accepted by the more Alba-Diehard contingent, is neither here nor there.
Actually, in the middle of your screed, you did make an interesting point by accident:
DeleteIs this no longer "The Alba Blog"?
How will James survive! Clutch your pearls, folks.
I treasure your anonymous wee assessment of my comment, pal.
DeleteI really do.
Really.
Will you ever accept the fact that the SNP is no longer an independence party?
DeleteNo , cos you’re a britnat
DeleteAnon @ 1034.
DeleteLol.
No.
Who says so?
Anyone remember Jamie Hepburn getting a £100K salary as the 'Minister for Independence' in the Scottish Government?
DeleteThat position has now been abolished as well as the independence papers the SNP were publishing. It's no longer a primary focus or priority.
Yet another anon nobody explodes.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff.
More like this please.
Are you really???
ReplyDeleteIs the Reply button puzzling you again, Davey?
DeleteI take if you missed the anon shite I was replying to, before James (I take it) deleted it?
DeleteTry and keep up, pal.
Ta.
David may well have used the reply button, but I've deleted the comment he was replying to.
DeleteThe few constituencies the Greens have run against the SNP in have delivered more than their fair share of howlers. Ruth Davidson's election in student-heavy Edinburgh Central in 2016 on a miserable 29% of the vote comes to mind, while the Greens took 17% behind the SNP. They cost their allies dearly in July, too, including the Pentagon's favourite Stewart McDonald in Glasgow South where they came third and made all the difference. Fair gave some of us a chuckle that one! But the spoils all go to flag waving Brits.
ReplyDeleteSo aye, everyone has a right to stand. The SNP's inviting Yessers to run against them, the way they are now. But neither side of our movement wins. The seat just goes to the official Brit Nats, instead of the cryptic ones.
Crypto- rather. Not the currency kind, the nudge-wink political one.
DeleteALBA is all over the place tactically-if they know what tactics are?
ReplyDeleteAlba are an irrelevance, as is the ISP, SSP etc etc.
ReplyDeleteIn Umberto Eco’s excellent The Name of the Rose, the Franciscan Order is in theological dispute with more conservative Catholic opponents regarding the poverty of Christ. The Franciscans come up against the Inquisition (but not the Spanish one that no-one expects….), things don’t go all that well. Turns out that some monks on their own side are the Franciscans’ own worst enemies for making the most ludicrous statements & “arguments” supposedly in favour of the Franciscan position but, in fact and due to their excrement value, undermining the more lucid and considered disputation of their leaders.
As a YES movement our way forward is through the SNP, including recruits from Alba our wherever. Rump Alba can then be home to loonies who the SNP is far better off without. It would be good of the same could apply to the Greens too, but that seems unlikely as they remain a viable force.
"As a YES movement our way forward is through the SNP"
DeleteTens of thousands of people obviously disagree with that assessment considering the decline in SNP membership in recent years. The reasons for which have never been addressed...
The large gap between support for the SNP and support for independence itself also suggests the way forward would require multi-party cooperation as well as cooperation with people and organisations with no Party affiliation. Times have changed and the movement today isn't the same movement it was a decade ago, we need to adapt. That Constitutional Convention should have happened in 2021 and it badly needs to happen now.
* or wherever
ReplyDelete