Like it or not, independence is unlikely to be won without leading involvement from the "elephant"

As long-term readers of this blog may recall, I was an elected member of the Alba Party's NEC between September 2021 and October 2022.  For most of that year-and-a-bit, I was pretty happy with the party's general direction of travel, both in policy and strategic terms.  However a watershed moment of sorts arrived in the summer of 2022 when Nicola Sturgeon finally announced her strategy for winning independence, which involved asking the Supreme Court to rule if the Scottish Parliament had the power to unilaterally call an independence referendum, and then moving on to using the Westminster general election as a de facto referendum if the Supreme Court ruled the wrong way.

That plan was a lot more radical than I expected, because prior to that Ms Sturgeon had always rubbished the idea of any non-referendum route.  Now, the details of the plan were absolutely not the ones I would have chosen if I had been in charge.  I would have preferred to see the Scottish Parliament go ahead and legislate for a referendum and put the onus on the UK Government to launch a legal challenge if they wished.  I would have preferred to see Ms Sturgeon engineer an early Holyrood election to use as a de facto referendum rather than taking a gamble on the 'away fixture' of a Westminster general election.  But as I said on this blog at the time, we had to be realistic and accept the fact that the Scottish people had selected Ms Sturgeon and the rest of the SNP leadership to be the decision-makers, and therefore they were the ones who were always going to choose the details of any plan, and not anyone else.  What mattered is whether the thrust of the plan was taking us in broadly the correct direction, and if it was, we needed to throw our weight behind it.

I believed - and still believe - that Alba's response should have taken that realistic approach.  By all means spell out where you think the details of the plan are wrong, but make very clear that you're not going to let those quibbles get in the way of fully supporting the central element, namely the use of an election to finally allow the Scottish people to make a decision on independence, and undertaking to do whatever you can to secure a successful outcome.  And, for good measure, claim the announcement of the plan as an astounding triumph for Alba's campaigning to pressurise Ms Sturgeon into reversing course and accepting the wisdom of a de facto referendum.

What Alba actually did was pretty much the complete opposite of that.  From the word go, Ms Sturgeon's announcement was treated as an obvious con-trick, and instead of discussing how we could make the de facto referendum work, all the chatter seemed to be about how we could cause as much damage to the SNP as possible at the general election.  Talk of standing against the SNP across the board in every constituency actually increased rather than decreased, even though a single, unified slate of pro-indy candidates is plainly an absolute must in any de facto referendum fought under first-past-the-post.  And Alba seemed to double down on its determination to help bring about Ms Sturgeon's resignation as First Minister, which history now shows made no sense at all.  When Ms Sturgeon departed, the de facto plan went with her.  Whereas by keeping her in harness, we could have given the SNP no easy way off the hook, and perhaps forced them to reluctantly deliver the goods just for once.

I suspect we came across as angry that Ms Sturgeon had "spoiled" things for us by giving us more or less what we had been demanding all along.  It must have looked like nothing she announced would ever have been good enough for us, we would just have reflexively denounced it anyway.  In a nutshell, we must have looked disingenuous and like bad faith actors.  So not only was the approach unhelpful for the independence cause, it was bad for Alba's own future electoral prospects.

I disagreed with Alba's response and I spoke out about it at some length.  From a personal point of view, the timing couldn't have been much worse, because I suspect what I said may have cost me a handful of crucial votes at the Alba conference in October 2022 and led to me being narrowly voted off the NEC.  But after all these years as a blogger, I just wouldn't know how to stifle an opinion on an important subject or say something I don't believe to be true.

That's why Professor Robertson's comments the other day about this blog having become my "Alba career blog" were so offensive and ludicrously off-beam.  Yes, I stand in Alba internal elections, and I have the same competitive instinct as anyone else and always want to be successful.  But the reality is that if I only cared about that, or even if that was what I mostly cared about, the content of this blog would often have been the complete opposite of what I actually wrote.  A great many Alba conference-goers took the very simple view that the one and only objective was to bring the SNP down and have Alba become the main independence party in the SNP's place. They didn't want to hear an unpalatable message from me about how the world is more complicated and messy than that, and that actually the most effective and quickest method of winning independence may be to help make an SNP plan work, even if that means lots of SNP MPs we may not be crazy about on a personal level being re-elected.  That was the message I delivered just the same, and I suspect I paid the price for it.

After I was voted off the NEC, it seemed to me that things got even worse for a few months.  The antagonism towards the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon just seemed to be off the scale, culminating in a tweet along the lines of "a vote for the SNP is a vote for Jimmy Savile".  That genuinely shocked me.  Senior Alba figures started to give the impression of "celebrating" bad polls for independence, on the basis that it made the SNP look bad, and anything that was bad for the SNP must be good for Alba - thus losing sight of the cardinal rule (which in fairness Alba have since seemed to relearn) that a pro-independence party should only ever be seen to be talking up independence support in the polls, not talking it down.

Once again I spoke out loudly about where I thought my own party was going wrong, and that led just over a year ago to The National doing a double-page spread without my prior knowledge about how I as an "Alba blogger" had been heavily critical of the party's direction and "didn't know what the hell was going on anymore".  This was all deeply uncomfortable. A number of people tried to tell me, effectively, that I wasn't "real Alba" - that the only true Alba position was to want to totally destroy the SNP, no matter how long that took, and that anyone who didn't susbscribe to that view could only ever be marginal in the Alba party.

So I can't help but note the irony that a year later here I am, still at the heart of the Alba party - not as an NEC member but as an elected member of other committees - while a considerable number of the "destroy the SNP and replace it with Alba" diehards have suddenly walked out.  I would never have seen this chain of events coming in a million years, and clearly there must have been a lot going on behind the scenes to lead those people to become so disillusioned so quickly.  They've moved on swiftly to the new "Independents 4 Independence" project, but I think yet another reality check is in order here.  While it's merely an incredibly hard task for Alba to replace the SNP, even in the long term, it's utterly impossible for independent candidates to replace the SNP, so in a strange way by going down this road they've given up on their whole goal - although they may not realise that yet.

By their very nature, independent MPs are ephemeral and leave no party organisational structure behind them when they depart office.  All that happens is that the established parties then come back and fill the gap.  But the other fundamental truth about independent candidates is that they very rarely get elected in the first place.  I think we all know that Eva Comrie is a genuine one-off, and although the odds are heavily against her, it may just about be possible for her to build up a head of steam by campaigning on the Grangemouth issue and through sheer force of personality.  But if what Alf Baird was proposing the other day comes to pass, and if pro-indy independents stand in every Scottish constituency, the likelihood is that the vast majority of them will score a very low vote.  It will be an almighty struggle to even get the media to count those votes as votes for independence - the likelihood is they'll just tot up SNP + Green + Alba and won't even look at the independents.  

So how this is going to help the Yes cause is far from clear.  I worry that people will look back in a few years and only then will they realise the extent to which they lost all perspective.  At this moment of danger for the independence cause, we need to go into the general election as united as possible - not in the sense of liking each other or agreeing with each other about everything, but in the sense of being a cohesive voting bloc in a first-past-the-post election.  Instead most people seem to be perversely focussed on making the independence vote as fragmented as possible - and that of course includes the SNP leadership themselves, with their idiotic decision to expel Angus MacNeil and put up a candidate against him.

The SNP are not, as Somerset's leading Tory blogger put it yesterday, a "dead elephant blocking the road to independence".  They in fact still represent the considerable bulk of the independence movement and it's therefore hard to foresee any circumstances in which independence can be won without the SNP playing a leading role.  Any hard-headed Alba strategy for winning independence should thus be about using electoral success to exert pressure on the SNP to belatedly start playing that leading role.  The only exception to that, the only route to independence without the SNP, might be if Humza Yousaf somehow clings on as leader after a crushing defeat, and then 10-15 SNP MSPs decide their party cannot be won back and strike out on their own.  But right at this moment that looks like a long shot.

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