Will Michelle Ballantyne be included in the TV leaders' debates?

Five years ago, BBC Scotland included David Coburn of UKIP in their TV leaders' debate for the Holyrood election (with predictably comic results), but STV did not.  The BBC's logic was that UKIP had performed sufficiently well in one of the four tiers of electoral representation, ie. Coburn's own success in being elected to the European Parliament.  On the face of it, the same logic applies to Reform UK now, because in its previous guise as the Brexit Party, it won one Scottish seat in the 2019 European election.  But this is almost a philosophical point: as Scottish representation in the European Parliament has now been abolished, and as the Brexit Party itself agitated for that to happen, shouldn't the Euro result be set aside when deciding how much airtime is warranted for each party?  I'd suggest that maybe yes, it should be.  But if it isn't, we'll have the 'interesting' spectacle of Michelle Ballantyne squaring up against Nicola Sturgeon, Douglas Ross (or Ruth Davidson if Ross is conveniently required to run the line at another vital Cove Rangers v Montrose fixture), #WinningWithWillie Rennie, and probably Anas Sarwar.

And I think that would actually be quite a good outcome for us, because the more exposure Reform UK gets, the more likely they are to take votes off the Tories.  I'm not for a moment suggesting that the SNP are immune to losing votes in that direction (Ballantyne will presumably be punting the anti-lockdown message, which finds support in some strange places), but I think it's fair to say that the Tories would be the net losers.

The other outside possibility is that Alex Salmond might be involved in the debates, if he decides to stand.  I know people are arguing that any chance of him setting up a new party have already been timed out, but there are still options open to him, such as joining forces with one of the small pro-indy parties already registered with the Electoral Commission.  If, for the sake of argument, a Salmond party burst onto the scene in a blaze of publicity and shot to 10% in the polls, would the BBC or STV give him a spot in the debates? Their normal instinct would be to find any reason to avoid having an extra pro-indy voice, but in this case I wonder if they might be just be tempted by the box office potential of Sturgeon v Salmond.

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FWIW, I think he totally squandered an opportunity to be a substantial electoral force in Scottish politics. He had the base, he had the cash, he had the ear of, how shall we put this, a certain senior figure in the movement. And he blew it.

— Kenny Farquharson (@KennyFarq) February 18, 2021

The above is practically the quintessential Kenny "Devo or Death" Farquharson tweet, in the sense that it's wrong in almost every respect.  A Wings party would not have been a major electoral force - it most likely would have attracted somewhere between 0.1% and 2% of the list vote, which wouldn't have been enough to win any seats, but might have been enough to do real damage to the pro-indy cause by taking votes away from larger parties.

But neither is it true to say that Mr Campbell "blew it".  He had the capacity to set up a new party, but he freely chose not to.  I suspect Kenny is trying to get a narrative going that "Stuart Campbell blew his chances by being beastly to my mate Neil Mackay" - well, that's about as well-founded as his legendary prediction that Kezia Dugdale would be the next First Minister.  (There's still hope, Kenny! Ian Smart says she's an SNP sleeper agent, so maybe she'll make a comeback that way!)

The interesting question now is which fringe party Wings is planning to back in the election.  We can safely assume he'll be openly hostile to the SNP, which presumably means he'll be supporting either ISP or AFI.  My guess is he'll plump for ISP, if only because they share his preoccupation with the trans issue.