"There's nothing you can do, so DO SOMETHING!"

There have been two articles in The National over the last couple of days about the future of the Alba Party, one by George Kerevan, and the other by Gerry Hassan.  Both men express scepticism, although each is coming from a very different place - George Kerevan is an actual member of Alba (or at least he was the last time I checked), while Hassan has been irrationally indignant at the party's very existence from the outset last year.  One point of view will thus be regarded as having far more credibility than the other, and quite rightly so.  Hassan's piece is full of half-truths, distortions and preposterous debating tactics.  He repeatedly claims that Alba took just 0.7% of the vote last week and gives the impression that this represents a decline from the 1.7% they took at the Holyrood election last year - while completely failing at any point, naturally, to clarify that Alba only actually stood in one-third of wards and therefore only one-third of the electorate had the opportunity to vote for them, in contrast to the Holyrood election in which 100% of the electorate had the Alba option on their ballot paper.  As if that isn't brazen enough, Hassan then adds the cherry on the cake by wheeling out as an 'expert option' the unhinged anti-Alba rant from the other day penned by the partisan Green party member who runs Ballot Box Scotland - the very man responsible for starting the misleading "0.7%" narrative in the first place, and whose utterly blatant vendetta against Alba is presumably rooted mainly in the identity politics zealotry of his own party.

The most incoherent point Hassan makes is that the fate of Alba "seems to be beyond" that of the two small parties that have previously made a breakthrough in modern Scottish politics, namely the Greens and the SSP.  The Greens got a very healthy 35 seats in this election, he notes. But that's an odd thing to say, and it proves the complete opposite of what he thinks it proves, because Alba's electoral performance so far is in fact pretty similar to what the Greens managed during the long number of years before they gained any critical mass.  If memory serves me right, the Greens didn't have a single elected representative anywhere in Scotland until they won a Highland Regional Council seat in 1990 - and yet they had existed in one form or another since the 1970s.  If the Greens could repeatedly get a very modest share of the vote and yet live to fight another day, why can't Alba? If the Greens could eventually move up into a different league and actually start winning representation, why shouldn't Alba?  The point literally makes no sense.

Hassan goes on to compare Alba instead to Jim Sillars' Scottish Labour Party of the 1970s and Tommy Sheridan's Solidarity, on the basis that it's built around the charisma of a single individual.  Again, there's an obvious contradiction here, because the SSP - which Hassan has classed as an example of a successful smaller party - also depended heavily on the charisma of Tommy Sheridan.  But even leaving that quibble aside, I'm not sure the comparison is as unflattering as Hassan believes, because the Scottish Labour Party was a serious endeavour - it succeeded in getting local councillors elected (under first-past-the-post, no less!), and Sillars himself came pretty close to being re-elected as MP for South Ayrshire in the 1979 general election.  Probably the reason the party eventually ceased to exist is that the ground it stood on was colonised by larger parties - Labour embraced devolution, while the SNP moved to the left.  Alba could yet be crowded out in an equivalent way if the SNP rediscovers its sense of urgency on independence and at least becomes somewhat more tolerant of gender critical feminist views - but at the moment there's precious little sign of that.

As for George Kerevan's piece, although it can't be dismissed as agenda-driven in the same way as Hassan's, it's still rather exasperating because it implores Alba members to do something drastic to change the party's trajectory, but doesn't make any concrete suggestions other than ones George thinks aren't actually viable.  You can't make Joanna Cherry leader, he says, because she'll never leave the SNP.  You can't find a new leader from among Alba's current ranks, he says, because there's supposedly nobody with sufficient appeal to younger voters.  And yet he insists that there's a massive problem that has to be addressed.  Is the subtext that Alba should just throw in the towel? If so, where would the members go?  Back to the SNP?  Would they even be allowed to re-join?  And even if they were, what would it achieve?

One thing I would say is that if we eventually get to a position where the SNP clearly renege on their promise of a 2023 referendum, and if there is consequently a large new wave of SNP parliamentarians and councillors who want to find a new political home, I don't think those people would find Alba inflexible or unimaginative if they have any genuine concerns about Alba that cause them to hesitate about making a straight switch to the party in its current form. There are all sorts of potential ways of squaring the circle, such as (to give just one example) loose pro-indy electoral alliances in which Alba could be a participant.  But let's cross that bridge when we come to it.  In the meantime, Alba is filling a crucial gap, and frankly if it didn't exist we'd have to invent it.