It's worth reiterating that Alba did not directly cost the SNP any seats at all at the general election. There was a huge element of luck in that, because Labour came close to winning both Dundee Central and Aberdeen North, and any very narrow SNP losses in those seats would have been blamed on Alba's intervention. But it didn't happen and ultimately that's what counts. I know some people have tried to lump the Alba and Green interventions together and look at the combined effect, but that's stretching it a bit - Alba and the Greens were pretty obviously not acting in concert, and if Alba hadn't stood there would still have been Green candidates. Moreover, the composition of the Green vote is likely to be very different from Alba's, and it's far from clear it would have predominantly gone to the SNP if the Greens hadn't stood. The case for the Greens having cost the SNP a seat is perhaps most plausible in Dumfries and Galloway, because Green voters might have switched to the best anti-Tory option in the absence of a Green, but even there the gap between Tory and SNP was 2.1%, meaning the vast majority of the Greens' 2.7% vote would have had to go to the SNP to swing the balance. In practice a significant minority would have gone to Labour or other parties.
There's the wider question of whether Alba may have cost the SNP seats indirectly due to depriving the SNP of some of their best and most experienced and committed former activists. That's harder to pin down, but my guess is that if activists were disillusioned enough with the SNP to defect to Alba, in 80% of cases they would have been disillusioned enough to withdraw their active support for the SNP even in the absence of Alba.
So Alba can at least move forward without being burdened with much of the blame for the loss of so many pro-independence MPs. But nevertheless the party still has to grapple with its purpose in life in the wake of a third successive electoral failure. If some commentators are to believed, it doesn't even have one. This is what
Robin McAlpine has said -
"The Alba failure in this election is pretty startling. I think this is personified by the fact that the only politician who has taken a high-profile interest in saving the Grangemouth refinery (Kenny McAskill) got beaten in that seat by Eva Comrie, someone who resigned from Alba and stood as an independent. It is now hard to see Alba having any future. I don’t know what the cause is – the public perception of Alex Salmond, the public perception of the party, the fact that it is now the leading climate change denial party in Scotland – but it doesn’t look to me like the party is dying, it looks to be electorally dead."
That can't be dismissed totally out of hand, because Robin McAlpine is of course the author of the Wee Alba Book. I'm not sure on what basis he agreed to do that - perhaps he just saw it as a professional commission, but it's unlikely that he would have taken it on unless he had at least partial sympathy with the Alba cause.
First question: does a party have value if it is "electorally dead"? Probably not. OK, there's an argument that it could function as a glorified pressure group, one that carries more bite by being able to deprive the SNP of a small number of votes. But it's unlikely that's going to shift the dial on independence, so mere continued existence isn't going to cut it for Alba. They would have to actually prove McAlpine and others wrong by winning list seats in 2026.
Second question: can Alba win list seats? Nobody could honestly say that's impossible, because small parties have won list seats out of nowhere before, sometimes with very low shares of the national vote. However, Alba do not benefit in the way that, for example, the SSP did in 1999 with geographic concentration of their vote. Alba's vote seems to be very evenly and thinly spread, and that could very well mean that they'll need something in the region of 5% or 6% of the national vote to win any seats at all. That looks challenging. So far, every time Alba have had contact with the electorate, they've tended to come away with 1.5% to 2% of the vote with a reasonable amount of consistency. What is going to change that unless Alba itself changes?
The good news is that Alba can choose to change. There's no law against it. But I think it's going to have to happen - continuity won't cut it, as the saying goes, and that's now true for Alba every bit as much as it is for the SNP. I'm not going to break a taboo by saying there should be a change of leadership, because I genuinely don't know whether that would help or hinder. Yes, Alex Salmond carries a lot of baggage as far as the public is concerned, but he also gets the party noticed and brings a lot of credibility to the table as a former First Minister. It's possible media coverage of Alba would disappear overnight with a different leader. If Joanna Cherry came across it might be worth taking the risk, but even though she has much less to lose now, the mood music suggests she will not be coming across.
The gap in the electoral market that Alba is trying to colonise seems to be narrower than it initially banked on, which makes it all the more important that as much as possible of the radical, impatient end of the independence movement is united under the same banner. Alba has not given the impression of understanding that in recent months, and instead only seems to want a very niche part of the radical end of the movement. As I've noted a few times, there's been a creeping authoritarianism from the leadership of the "my way or the highway" variety. The problem with a narrow sect is that however total your control over it is, it's not going to get you elected to public office.
I've made no secret of the fact that I've been dismayed by some of what I've seen on the inside of Alba - at times it's been authoritarian politics and machine politics and clique politics at its very worst. Now, I'm not naive - although I never held any elected internal position when I was in the SNP, it was an open secret that much the same sort of stuff went on there. But the difference is that in a party of power it might be felt worth tolerating some of the ugliness. There really is no rationale for tolerating it in a much smaller party without power or without the prospect of power. Alba has to be able to offer an internal culture of democracy and open debate that is clearly superior to the SNP - otherwise, to be blunt, it can't offer anything at all, except to people who just happen to already agree with every word the leadership says.
But even if Alba can improve its culture and become more welcoming, it's probably burnt its bridges with a significant number of people who have already left the party. That may mean that if the radical end of the movement is going to put up a united front at the Holyrood election, there will have to be a loose, multi-polar electoral alliance of which Alba is only one component part. That would also address some of the 'brand' issues that Alba suffers from.
I know the leadership probably don't want to hear that, but they really need to start taking the idea seriously, because it's their best shot of becoming MSPs and actually doing something about independence. Carrying on as before and ending up with 2% of the list vote in 2026 will achieve the square root of nothing.
