The authors of the "Wee Alba Book" have both now rejected Alba - and Wings is inching ever-closer to an open endorsement of the far-right unionist party Reform UK

My year-and-a-bit on the Alba NEC, which now seems like about five centuries ago, was dominated by the interminable 'Wee Alba Book Tour'.  It got to the point where even McEleny was being a bit sarcastic about it - when talking about the party's future, he started saying things like "we can hardly be doing Wee Alba Book Night 3698 in two years' time".

The Wee Alba Book was always an oddity, because it was written by two people who were never Alba members (or at least not to the best of my knowledge) and in one case who never even supported the party from outside. Officially Robin McAlpine was the author and Stuart Campbell was the editor, although as anyone who has ever had their work edited by Campbell knows, he very much takes the "Robert Holmes as script editor of Doctor Who" approach and rewrites extensively to the point where he is practically co-author and the original author's intention may have been partly or wholly lost.

Perhaps the authorship could be seen as a form of "ghost-writing" in which McAlpine and Campbell were commissioned for their professional skills in order to communicate points and arguments that they didn't necessarily agree with.  Nevertheless it's startling to see both men now publicly repudiating the party.  McAlpine said in a recent blogpost "I amn’t convinced Alba knows what it’s really for itself" (didn't you read the book, Robin?!), and went on to call for the creation of an entirely new party.  Campbell then followed that up with a blogpost agreeing in principle with the call for a new party, but without even mentioning the word Alba - and you can hardly get a more contemptuous rejection of Alba than that.

Campbell's stance towards Alba has been very difficult to follow.  It's an open secret that he knew all along that the 2023 Alba internal elections were rigged, but that he refused to cover or even acknowledge the story (so much for his "fearless investigative journalism"), and that he rejected all guest post submissions on the subject - presumably exactly the same articles that ended up on the Iain Lawson blog instead.  That looked very much like he was consciously protecting the Alba leadership due to personal loyalty to the people involved - and yet where was that loyalty during last year's general election?  He basically told his readers to reject Alba and to vote for unionist parties (especially Labour) instead.

It's been obvious since the election that his attraction to the Trump / MAGA project has steadily increased and that consequently he's been gagging to advocate a vote for MAGA's de facto sister party Reform UK.  But that obviously poses something of an image problem for him, given that Reform are not only a unionist party but also on the far-right of the political spectrum.  So he's embarked on a long-term process of softening up his readers for the unpalatable messaging to come - and of course we've seen this pattern several times in the past as he prepared the ground for his initial rejection of the SNP and of the mainstream independence movement.  

His first pro-Reform gambit was to try to convince his readers that Farage might deliver an independence referendum as Prime Minister - and bizarrely he refused to give up on that barmy idea even after Reform themselves shot it down in flames with a withering comment about Wings itself.  To be clear, there is no way on God's earth that Farage will be proposing an independence referendum.  The real question about Reform's constitutional policy is whether or not they want to completely abolish the Scottish Parliament and reimpose direct rule from London.  

It looks from the new blogpost as if Campbell has now come up with another wheeze.  His support for McAlpine's idea of a new party is not what it seems, because he mainly emphasises the practical barriers and how murderously difficult it will be and how long it will all take.  The post closes with the sentence "the only thing we know for certain is what the first step is: burying the SNP", which is when you realise what the previous twenty-four paragraphs of waffle were really all about.  I suspect Campbell's line next May will be: "OK, there's a half-formed long-term plan for a new political force to bring about independence, but it's much too difficult to implement immediately, so just for now, just as a provisional tactical first step, you need to vote Reform UK on the list and Labour / Tory / Lib Dem on the constituency ballot".  We'll now probably have to suffer at least a couple of dozen transitional posts between now and then as he tries to indirectly implant this bastardised "logic" in readers' minds without them noticing that he's slowly steering them towards a predetermined outcome.

As other people have noted, it wouldn't surprise me if Campbell did an Alec Douglas-Home in an actual independence referendum by telling his readers to vote No on the logic that "it's the wrong type of independence" and you need to vote No if you want to get the right sort.

Oh, and one other point: Campbell carefully smuggles in a "tell me you support the genocide in Gaza without telling me you support the genocide in Gaza" moment midway through the post - 

"I could name a bunch of other people I also like and respect and whose commitment to independence I don’t doubt for a moment, but where we’d really struggle to be in the same party for one reason or another. (If that party were to take a stance on Gaza, for example, then the vastly principled and honourable Craig Murray and I couldn’t both be signed up to its manifesto.)"

Oh really?  Well, as Craig Murray opposes the mass slaughter in Gaza, I can only assume that means you're an enthusiast for it, Stew.

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I was asked on the previous thread whether there are any good candidates for Alba's NEC Ordinary Member elections, which will take place over the coming days (and remember it's the notorious pay-per-vote system, so you'll only be able to vote if you've purchased a conference pass, although I believe it's still possible to purchase one - and you don't need to attend conference in person to cast your vote because it's an online ballot).  I'll copy and paste my reply below, with a couple of amendments, in case anyone is interested - 

Yes, there are some good people in there. This is not an exhaustive list, but I'd certainly be voting for Deborah McAlpine and Maggie Chetty on the female ballot (Judith Reid and Fiona Campbell have also been mentioned to me as decent people), and on the male ballot I'd be voting for Mike Baldry and Morgwn Davies. Mike was the only reformer left on the Constitution Review Group after my expulsion. It'll no longer be possible to vote for Frank Anderson because he's already an office bearer. The unreconstructed lefty in me still has some sympathy for Tommy Sheridan, but his closeness to the leadership worries me. And Angus MacNeil is impossible to dislike, although what his exact relationship with the likes of Tas is, I'm not sure.

As it's a preferential system, I'd also be voting tactically by ranking everyone else ahead of the worst candidates of all. The worst of the worst are: Chris Cullen, John Caddis, Daniel Jack, Iain Cameron, Yvonne Ridley, Shannon Donoghue, Christina Hendry, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and possibly Debbie Ewen and Robert Slavin.