The crucial point about Alba 'faking it until it's real' is that eventually it has to become real

I see that Ipsos UK's resident identity politics zealot Mark McGeoghegan has penned an opinion piece for the Herald in which he suggests, rather uncharacteristically, that the Alba Party may well have a future in Scottish politics - but only if they "deal with the Salmond problem", ie. replace Alex Salmond as leader.  Let's be blunt about this: it's intellectual dishonesty on stilts.  McGeoghegan has a visceral loathing of Mr Salmond and the traditional form of civic nationalism and social democracy that he stands for, and is hellbent on seeing him permanently removed from the Scottish political scene - every bit as much as the clique around Nicola Sturgeon was.  McGeoghegan thinks he's playing it smarter than before by trying to convince Alba members that it's in their own rational self-interest to put pressure on Mr Salmond to go, but I'm afraid they aren't daft enough to fall for the ruse.

My own view is close to the polar opposite of the one that McGeoghegan is pretending to hold.  It's perfectly true that Mr Salmond has really poor net approval ratings in the polls (to the limited extent that polling companies still put the matter to the test), and that this would be an insurmountable obstacle if Alba were seriously attempting to win an election outright, or to overhaul the SNP as the main pro-independence force.  But that's not even close to where Alba are at just now, despite the fantasises we occasionally hear on social media.  A good outcome for Alba in 2026 would be to win a handful of list seats and to gain some leverage, which could be done on as little as 5-6% of the national vote.  A bad outcome would be to barely register with the voters and thus essentially cease to exist as an electoral force.  The danger for a party with prospects of that sort is not to be disliked or even distrusted by the public at large.  The danger is to be ignored or forgotten about.  By far the best protection against that fate is to have a heavyweight leader like Alex Salmond, who notwithstanding his poor approval ratings remains recognised as one of the towering figures of Scottish politics over the last three decades.

I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that there may be a way in the future of squaring the circle - ie. of having a new leader who still commands sufficient fascination from the media but lacks Mr Salmond's baggage.  If, for example, Joanna Cherry or Ash Regan were ever to defect to Alba, there would suddenly be viable alternative leaders.  But even with those individuals, it would be a throw of the dice.  There would still be a major risk that Alba would just quietly fade from public attention.  No, Alex Salmond is not the millstone around Alba's neck - he is in fact by far their greatest asset.  And in my view they should be making even bigger use of that asset, by which I mean that they should only stand a candidate in the Rutherglen by-election if that candidate is Alex Salmond himself.

There's clearly a choreography being worked through at the moment, with Alba asking potential candidates for Rutherglen to express their interest while the party awaits Humza Yousaf's inevitable failure to meet a deadline for agreeing a joint "Scotland United" candidate.  I have no idea whether that choreography ends with Alex Salmond eventually emerging as the candidate, or whether the intention is to put forward a little-known candidate "for experience" even though that person would probably only take a negligible vote.  But what I will say is that if it turns out to be the latter, it will achieve nothing.  Indeed it would be the worst of all worlds - it would just lead to Alba being blamed for worsening the scale of the SNP's likely defeat at the hands of Labour.

There are an awful lot of people in Alba who claim to be furious with the SNP for rejecting the "Scotland United" overtures.  For some, that fury may even be genuinely felt, but let me pose the inconvenient question - do you think it would have been harder for the SNP to say no to a joint slate of candidates if Alba had won five list seats at the 2021 Holyrood election?  Or if some of the Alba councillors had been re-elected in 2022?  Or even if Angus MacNeil was planning to bring his sizeable personal vote across to Alba rather than standing as an independent?  Of course it would, because Alba would have been bringing something solid to the table to bargain with.  At the moment, the Alba leadership are essentially trying to 'fake it until its real', a tactic that Alex Salmond is a past master of and that has served him well throughout his career.  But there comes a point where the faking has to stop and the bargaining power Alba are posing as if they already have must become real.

I've tried as much as anyone to play the game of finding the positives in Alba's electoral performances to date - most obviously 8% of the vote in the local elections in Mhairi Hunter's old ward (a feat that was tarnished by the Alba candidate's defection to the SNP just a few days later), and 4% of the vote in the Bellshill by-election, which saw Alba outpoll both the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.  But more than two years after Alba was founded, that's pretty thin material to work with.  Even if the 4% from Bellshill could be replicated more widely, it wouldn't quite win Holyrood list seats and it wouldn't quite save deposits in Westminster contests.

Whereas if Alex Salmond stands in Rutherglen and finishes a strong third, with perhaps 15-20% of the vote, it could lead to a snowball effect in the polls and Alba might finally be onto something with the "Scotland United" proposal.  It's a lot easier to knit a woolly jumper if you've actually got some wool in your hands.  OK, there's always the chance of the tactic backfiring if Alba are seen to play their trump card and get nowhere - but it may actually be better to find out one way or the other, now rather than later.

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