Why Alba shouldn't go beyond a round dozen of candidates

If, like me, you're a member of the Alba Party, you'll have received an email from Alex Salmond today, setting out changes that have occurred to the NEC line-up due to the turbulence of the last couple of days.  Suzanne Blackley has replaced Eva Comrie as Equalities Convener, albeit on an interim basis for now.  As I understand it, Yvonne Ridley officially remains Women's Convener but has stepped back from the role for the time being, with Ash Regan taking over on an informal basis.  People reading the email will probably be left with the impression that Eva Comrie's departure was straightforwardly due to Yvonne Ridley's tweets about the trans issue.  I think it should be borne in mind that there's almost certainly far more to it than that, however it's obviously understandable that the leadership will be keen to play down the significance of her decision.

My bigger concern, actually, is with a different part of the email, where Mr Salmond once again talks up the possibility of Alba standing more than the target number of twelve candidates at the general election.  The subtext is essentially "the more the merrier", as if it's self-evidently a good thing to stand as many candidates as possible if there are no financial or organisational barriers to doing so.  In reality there are other strategic considerations that ought to be taken into account, both in Alba's own best interests and in the best interests of the independence cause.

It's no secret that I think the most sensible thing to have done at the general election would have been to just stand two candidates, ie. the sitting Alba MPs Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill, and concentrate all the available resources on their campaigns.  That would have been the best of all worlds because it would have given the two MPs the best possible chance of either holding their seats or getting respectable results, while avoiding the danger of Alba candidates acting as spoilers in other constituencies and letting in unionist MPs.  The latter would be a bad thing for two separate reasons - a) it's objectively a setback for independence if unionist MPs are unnecessarily elected, and b) any perception among independence supporters that Alba is to blame for that could damage Alba's reputation and undermine the party's chances at the 2026 Holyrood election.  Remember how sharply Ralph Nader's vote dropped between the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections due to the perception among progressives that he was to blame for George W Bush's contested win in Florida.

In a democratic party, you have to accept democratic decisions, even if you think they're badly mistaken.  My preference for standing only two candidates was not the democratic decision made by Alba, which instead opted to stand in at least twelve constituencies.  As I understand it, the significance of the number twelve is that it's the minimum threshold for being given a Party Election Broadcast.  Although that's a desirable thing to have, I don't think three minutes on the TV comes close to outweighing the disadvantages of standing too many candidates.

However, a democratic decision to stand at least twelve candidates in order to get the election broadcast is perfectly consistent with standing just the twelve, banking the broadcast, and not going beyond that.  I really would urge the Alba leadership to see the wisdom of that course of action and not allow the party's intervention in the general election to become a runaway train.  The greater the number of candidates that go forward, the greater the risk of causing inadvertent harm.

It's been suggested that Alba can navigate the risk by selecting the seats it intervenes in with great care to avoid SNP marginals.  But that reminds me of some of the wild claims we used to hear about how it was possible to "vote tactically on the Holyrood list", when in reality that would have depended on the voter having a degree of foreknowledge about the election result that would never realistically be available.  Alba will have to choose which constituencies to target months or at least weeks before polling day, at which point there is bound to still be massive uncertainty about which SNP seats are most likely to be on a knife-edge.  Seats projections from recent opinion polls have varied wildly, with some putting the SNP in the low teens (in which case the "safer" SNP seats are the most likely to be the real marginals), and others putting the SNP in the mid-to-high thirties (in which case it's seats with lower majorities that will be in the balance).  I suppose there's an argument that the seats in which the SNP have the lowest majorities over Labour look like lost causes in any of the scenarios we're seeing at present, so those might be the 'safest' seats for Alba to intervene in.  But even there, an outside chance exists that the SNP might recover enough to bring those seats back into play, and in any case, do Alba really want to give the impression that they're deliberately trying to help "finish off" the most vulnerable SNP MPs?

The original concept of Alba was as a list-only party that Yes voters could back to get the best bang for their buck, safe in the knowledge that no damage was being done to the SNP in first-past-the-post elections.  I'd suggest Alba would be foolish to stray too far from that concept.  The real opportunity for Alba to make gains and change the weather for independence will be on the Holyrood list vote in 2026, and the important thing in the meantime is not to do anything that would imperil that opportunity.

I'm not an absolutist about avoiding first-past-the-post elections - I advocated Alba standing in the Rutherglen by-election as long as Alex Salmond was the candidate, because in that scenario they wouldn't have been spoilers, they could have taken a very significant vote share and generated momentum that might have really got them off the ground.  I also think it's reasonable to say that sitting Alba MPs have every right to defend their seats if they wish to do so.  But if you stand in a large number of first-past-the-post seats where you're likely to get a very small vote share, the effect will probably be counter-productive.

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