Last week was a long time in politics for my running mate in the Scottish elections, George Galloway. It started with a YouGov poll finding that George is the best known opposition leader in Scotland and the one that voters in several regions think would provide the strongest opposition to the SNP. We used that as the springboard for our Covid ‘Potemkin rallies’, where George announces from his soapbox that he will be ‘holding his nose and voting Tory’ as tactical voting is the only way to defeat the SNP.
If Scottish Tories were grateful for the endorsement of Scotland’s best known left-winger, they had a funny way of showing it. Disquiet in the Tory camp that George is better known than their leader, Douglas Ross, led to aggressive trolling by anonymous Tory accounts seemingly primed with the narrative that All for Unity is a ‘fringe party that won’t win seats and is only going to split the vote’ – a rather implausible accusation given the poll. This canard has been pushed energetically by entitled MSPs who sense, wrongly, All for Unity standing between them and the trough.
If Scottish Tories were grateful for the endorsement of Scotland’s best known left-winger, they had a funny way of showing it
Far from splitting the vote, the clue is in the name. Cross-party All for Unity’s raison d’être is first to translate the silent ant-nationalist majority into victory in as many constituency seats as possible (where we are not standing) through super-charged tactical voting. And secondly to maximise the efficacy of the Unionist vote on the lists. The major parties are handicapped by their list votes being divided by the number of constituency seats already won plus one. The SNP/Green coalition won power, despite a majority of votes being cast for pro-British parties, because the separatist side gamed the system better. All for Unity aims to change that by persuading every pro-UK voter to lend their first vote to the party most likely to defeat the SNP and their second vote to A4U. Critical to the plan is a far more muscular strategy, taking the fight to the SNP with George’s pugnacious oratory calling out their sub-fascist identity politics, wokeism and corruption.
As the SNP’s share of the vote slides in the wake of the Salmond Inquiry, thanks in part to the Spectator’s persistence, we think we can win a pro-UK majority and enable an anti-nationalist administration – ‘a government of national unity’. It’s proving a hard sell to Tories and Labour alike. But no one thought Fianna Fail and Fine Gael’s coalition, that denies Sinn Fein power, would ever be possible either. It relies on All For Unity winning enough seats to leaven the mix and George Galloway, Chairman of Scottish Labour before many current MSPs were born, being able to tell Labour, from a position well to the Left of them, that they must do the right thing and get into bed with the Tories rather than keep the separatists in power.
Depressingly we are currently the only party countenancing victory and both major unionist parties seem keener on battling it out for second and third than coming joint first. And George is an easy target. The low point of the week was a columnist, no doubt egged on by the Scottish Tories, opining that he would rather 129 Humza Yousafs in Parliament than one George Galloway. An odd choice right now, given one’s prohibition of free speech and the other’s blistering defence of it.
There is a blinkered trope that Galloway is beyond the pale because he is socialist, because he has sided with Palestine against Israel, and Baathists against Islamic fundamentalists and the West, and because he has supported a united Ireland. But that is the whole point. He may be the only man in Scotland who can credibly turn ‘soft Nat’ socialists against nationalist faux-socialism, who can appeal to Scotland’s Muslim community, and who can persuade the ‘plastic provos’ in Glasgow that a Scottish Troubles has to be avoided at all costs. The week has ended shockingly with George and his family having to move out of their home after death threats from a nationalist. Proof that if some journalists don’t see All for Unity as a threat to the SNP, the separatists do.
Jamie Blackett is a conservative and leader of All for Unity (the Alliance for Unity)
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