Kenny MacAskill has won the leadership of Alba and just to underscore how cursed that position is, he defeated his rival Ash Regan by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Alba is the party founded by Alex Salmond following an exit from the SNP that wasn’t entirely amicable. (You might have read about it.) When it was launched in 2021, Alba made a splash with a promotional film in which an actor playing Robert the Bruce endorsed the party ahead of that spring’s Scottish parliament elections, the 13th century monarch having taken a surprising interest in the distribution of votes on the Mid Scotland and Fife regional list. Despite winning some defections from the SNP (MacAskill and Regan among them), Alba failed to make an impact with the electorate.
Which is the hurdle MacAskill now faces: if Alba went nowhere under a household name like Salmond, what chance does he stand? This is especially the case when its two most identifiable policies – Scottish independence and protecting women’s single-sex spaces – have sizeable constituencies. To get a seat on a Holyrood regional list you need (roughly speaking) upwards of six per cent of the vote. Alba’s best showing in 2021 was 2.3 per cent in North East Scotland. The three most recent polls put the party on three, four, and 4.5 per cent Scotland-wide.
The difficulty for Alba is that, as currently constituted, it is less of a political party and more of a refuge for pissed off former SNP members. That’s why, four years on from its inception, the party’s two main policies are geared towards addressing discontentment with the SNP’s stances on the same issues. But the salience of the independence question is lower now than at any time in the past decade, in no small part thanks to Nicola Sturgeon inviting the Supreme Court to rule on whether Westminster’s permission is needed for a second referendum and the justices replying, unanimously: Aye, it is.
As for opposition to gender ideology, it’s a marginal subject for most voters, including most women. Yes, I already know what you’re going to type below this piece, and I basically agree with you: sex is immutable, gender is imaginary, protect women’s spaces, get ideology out of the classroom, and no more politics in public bodies. But, like it or not, the immutability of chromosomally determined sex isn’t what they’re talking about at the school gates, down the gym or on the family WhatsApp chat.
If Alba is to defy its critics (waves hello), and prove that it is more than a personal vehicle for a dead man, it needs to make a credible offer to the electorate. Why should you vote for Alba? What will one of their MSPs do that an SNP MSP wouldn’t? Central to the offer must be an independence strategy that is a) credible, b) lawful, and c) meaningfully different from the position advanced by the SNP.
If it’s to be a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI), it would certainly meet consideration c) but neither a) nor b). Hardliners like to point out that the 13 American colonies UDIed from Britain, and fair enough, but they then had to fight a revolutionary war. The British armed forces are in a sorry state these days but I still don’t fancy Scotland’s chances against them. If the strategy is instead something more gradualist, like campaigning for a referendum on expanding Holyrood’s powers to include calling independence plebiscites, that would probably meet considerations a) and b) but not c).
At a bare minimum, a political party needs three Ps: purpose, personalities, and policies. Alba was struggling to meet these requirements even before the death of Alex Salmond, and it seemed to exist mainly as a platform for his grievances against the Scottish Government. No doubt those grievances were sincerely felt, and no doubt his friends and supporters still wish to pursue them, but Alba will have to choose between being the Justice for Alex Salmond campaign and a viable political party. It cannot be both.
There is no reason why a small, relatively successful party cannot be salvaged from all this, something that could in time secure the level of Holyrood representation currently enjoyed by the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. The question is whether Kenny MacAskill is up to this task, or whether Alba is destined to be nothing more than a shrine.
Comments