Is Alex Salmond feasting on the misery of an SNP that, having hit its high watermark, is now having to work hard to hold onto its Westminster seats? Not at all, according to the Alba leader, who told Andrew Neil on Times Radio today that he was in fact trying to help the cause of his former party by going after pro-independence voters who would otherwise have stayed at home. In so doing, of course, he was not-so-subtly suggesting that the SNP aren’t giving voters a reason to turn out at all.
There’s 20 per cent of people who are either going to stay at home or going to vote for a unionist party. Our appeal is to this 20 per cent, if you like the disaffected independence supporters who don’t see anyone in this election saying vote, put your cross in the box for independence, make your vote count, so our appeal is to motivate that independence vote as opposed to splitting it.
Salmond added that he was trying to give people who wouldn’t turn out to vote ‘something worth voting for again’.
The reason these people don’t have anything to vote for is because the SNP has allowed independence to fall down the list of priorities, he suggested. He wants to be part of the creation of a pro-independence majority in Scotland. That might be easier to measure in terms of the number of votes either party gets than the number of seats.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that the SNP didn’t make independence its main pitch in 2015 when it won its landslide in Scotland. Then, the message was ‘A Stronger Voice for Scotland’, with a picture of Nicola Sturgeon next to it. Now, the party is still putting independence on its leaflets: the one from my local candidate Martyn Day starts by talking about the cost of living crisis, before saying: ‘With the full powers of independence, we could do even more to help. Independence is not an end in itself. It’s about taking control of our future, to deliver a better life for everyone in Scotland.’ So Salmond is basically criticising the party for talking about anything other than independence, despite this strategy paying off in the past.
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