Thoughts on John Swinney's declaration, and Alba's controversial vote yesterday

John Swinney has finally declared, and as I said yesterday, he was always going to have to address the suspicion that he'd be an interim leader.  He's now said that he would lead the SNP through both the general election and Holyrood election, although that still leaves open the question of how far beyond the Holyrood election he would go.

We now wait to see if Kate Forbes will take him on or has done a deal with him.  I hope she takes him on, but if she's done a deal I hope she's settled for nothing less than a dual role as Deputy First Minister and a senior Cabinet brief, most likely Finance Secretary again.  If she ends up in a middle-ranking position, she'll have sold herself way short.

Meanwhile, I'll address my own party Alba's controversial decision to vote to bring down the SNP government yesterday.  It was obvious from Chris McEleny's explanation that he knew this was dangerous territory, because he was at pains to play down the importance of the vote, dismissing it as "performative" and "irrelevant".  In which case, my question is: why get sucked in at all?  Why not abstain?  In that way you avoid a backlash while still demonstrating to the SNP that they won't get support in return for nothing.

I wonder if the Alba leadership overestimate the extent to which independence-supporting voters have kept up to speed with the evolution of the party's culture.  It might be assumed that it's obvious to everyone that Alba is a militantly anti-SNP party and voting down the SNP government will thus be seen as just the sort of thing Alba does.  I'm not sure that's the case at all.   I think this will be a defining moment for many people in their perceptions of what sort of party Alba is, and they might be confused and dismayed by what they've just seen.  They might remember the calls for people to vote Alba in 2021 to build a 'pro-independence supermajority', and if so they may wonder how voting with unionist parties to try to topple a pro-independence government is consistent with that prospectus.

I know there's a feeling within Alba that many people are dissatisfied with the SNP while remaining strongly in favour of independence, and that if you could just convince them that there's a credible pro-independence option that is as critical of the SNP as they are, their votes might just go to Alba rather than Labour.  But realistically Alba's best chance of winning seats in 2026 is to persuade SNP constituency voters to back Alba on the list, and that'll be a lot harder if SNP supporters feel that Alba just want to frustrate or topple an SNP government, rather than work with it to deliver independence.  That doesn't mean they want Alba to be an SNP fan club, but it does mean they'd expect constructive opposition on specific policies rather than outright hostility to the very existence of an SNP government.

So, with the best will in the world, I do think a tactical mis-step was made yesterday.  But it's done now, and we'll just have to see how it plays out.