The "Liberate Scotland" alliance continues to both disintegrate and drift to the far-right - and Barrhead Boy's autocratic leadership looks to be the culprit

The Independence For Scotland party, which until today was one of the three component parts of the Liberate Scotland alliance along with the far-right Sovereignty and "Independents for Independence", has never been noted for being a particularly mainstream organisation or for being in touch with the concerns of the general public.  It's been utterly obsessed, for example, with the tedious and unimportant issue of oaths of allegiance to the monarchy.  So it would be tempting to characterise their decision to abandon Liberate in much the same way I characterised Allan Petrie's identical decision a couple of days ago, ie. "we can excuse fascism but we draw the line at sharing an alliance with people who do not agree with our views about gender recognition certificates".  

But that would perhaps be unfair, because they've actually given specific reasons which are maybe a bit more reasonable.  They've pointed out that until recently Liberate was an equal alliance of three parties/groupings, but was then forced to register as a party in its own right because of a ruling from the Electoral Commission.  It appears that the leadership of the new party then exploited that situation to bypass their partners when making important decisions, such as allowing Tommy Sheridan and Craig Murray to stand under the Liberate banner.  And judging from what Petrie said the other day, that leadership consists basically of the notoriously volatile and short-fused blogger Barrhead Boy, and the maverick former MP for Coatbridge, Phil Boswell (even though ironically neither are among the three officially registered party officers).  That ties in with everything I heard about Liberate in its early days - the message was overwhelmingly that Barrhead Boy was the de facto autocrat of the alliance in much the same way that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh was the de facto autocrat of Alba.

So Liberate is now disintegrating for much the same reason that Alba began to disintegrate in late 2023.  However, the situation is even worse for Liberate, because however malevolent Tasmina was, she did at least have credibility as a seasoned politician and lawyer.  Barrhead Boy setting himself up as the dictator of a "national liberation movement" is faintly comical in comparison, and calls to mind the old saying about history repeating itself as farce.

The other significance of today's development, of course, is that it by definition moves the centre-of-gravity within Liberate even further to the nativist far-right - assuming Sovereignty are remaining inside the tent, that is.