What the end of Alba means for May’s election and the broader independence movement
Speymouth
Well that’s it. The Alba party has gone and will not be contesting the Holyrood election in May, or indeed any elections in the future. Unlike some, I am not gloating about the party’s demise even though I was never a supporter of it. I kept my thoughts about Alba largely to myself despite coming in for some hideous abuse from some supporters of the party after it was officially unveiled at a chaotic online launch event a few months prior to the last Scottish elections in 2021 when I was almost the only pro-independence political blogger not to throw my limited weight behind Alex Salmond’s venture. Many ordinary and decent independence supporters enthusiastically got behind Alba as they felt let down and betrayed by the leadership of the SNP. They have now been let down and betrayed a second time, by their party leadership which must be a particularly bitter pill to swallow. For them I have nothing but compassion. They invested their time, energy and emotions into a project which turned out to be a dead end.
Sadly a minority of Alba’s new recruits were not decent at all. A couple of Alba supporters – no one who was at all prominent or had any public presence I should point out – attempted to post vile and abusive comments on this blog to express their anger that I had not joined their new party. One said: “I wish you had died instead of your dog”. Another tried to post “Why don’t you fuck off to America with your pervert squeeze and die of aids.”
Yet another, in reference to my refusal to join in the pile on against trans people, tried to comment “I’m not surprised that a pervert like you has no problem with men in women’s frocks.” All this was just a couple of months after I had suffered a life altering massive stroke which left me with life long disabilities and I was still coming to terms with my new reality. Additionally, at this point I was still at huge risk of having another stroke, stroke patients are at very high risk of suffering a second stroke in the first year or so following their stroke. I did in fact suffer another small stroke during this very stressful period, one which thankfully did not compound the disabilities I’d been left by the first stroke, the stress I was under at that time was undoubtedly a contributing factor. I was far more vulnerable than I was prepared to admit to myself.
For the first time in decades I was experiencing the kind of homophobic abuse I encountered in the 1980s and which I had hoped was a thing of the past, the stress this caused undoubtedly contributed to my second stroke. I told no one about it except my husband. I didn’t want my mother to find out, she was having her own health issues at the time, the cancer which would ultimately kill her last year. You may be pleased to know that I am now out of the most dangerous period for a second stroke, my blood pressure and cholesterol are good and I’m confident that I’ll still be mouthing off for years to come. Those who sent me vile messages wishing I would die are unlikely to be happy about that, but all I will say to them, and to them alone, not I must stress to the majority of Alba supporters, is – I’m still here but your party isn’t.
I’m not the only one who came in for nasty verbal abuse, an SNP activist of my acquaintance was told by an Alba supporter – “After Scotland becomes independent traitors like you will be put up against the wall and shot.”
So you can forgive me for not shedding any tears now at Alba’s demise. However it’s important to note that not everyone who joined Alba was so hateful and bitter, such people represented only a small minority. Many joined the party out of frustration at the lack of progress on independence, feeling that the groundswell of support for the SNP in the few years following the independence referendum had been squandered. There’s a lot of truth in that, it’s a feeling I shared, but it needs to be remembered that the SNP’s electoral dominance was not accompanied by a similar dominance of support for independence in opinion polling.
The question now is, what does the end of the Alba party mean for the broader independence movement and the Scottish elections in May. The truth is, at least as far as May’s election is concerned, it probably does not mean much. Alba was not polling at any significant level of support and it failed to come remotely close to winning the votes its supporters excitedly expected in the months after its launch in any of the elections it contested in the five years of its existence.
That lack of electoral success means there is not a huge pool of former Alba voters whose votes will be distributed amongst other pro-independence parties in May. Some of Alba’s supporters have already signalled on social media that they intend to throw their support behind smaller parties which scarcely exist outside of very vocal social media bubbles. Some will return to the SNP, a small minority may even vote Scottish Green, although given that Alba supporters on social media seem to be extremely hostile to the Scottish Greens, that will surely be a only a tiny number.
Some former Alba supporters will not vote, which will have the effect of making it easier for an anti-independence candidate to win, some may switch outright to an anti-independence party, a minority – surely a tiny minority – of Alba’s more socially conservative supporters even seem drawn to Reform UK. Although quite how the cause of Scottish independence can be advanced by supporting a far right English nationalist party is, to put it politely, not entirely clear.
For the broader independence movement the end of the Alba party is a positive development. Some of those who were closely involved with it have complained about a toxic and authoritarian culture of factionalism within the party, amply documented by James Kelly. That is not a vision of what we need or want in an independent Scotland.
We can perhaps hope that the end of Alba will see the beginning of the end of the bitter infighting which has scarred the independence movement over the past few years. Our enemies are not one another, it’s not those who have a different idea of how to achieve independence who need to be brought down, it’s the anti-independence parties and the British media in Scotland who collude in subverting the outcome of Scottish elections whose result displeases them and who continue to thwart Scotland’s right to revisit the independence question even though the Scottish electorate obstinately continue to vote for pro-independence parties. Those are the ones on whom we need to concentrate our energies and attention, and that is precisely what I will continue to do on this blog.
Perhaps now the independence movement can focus on making the case for independence, a case which grows ever stronger for an energy rich Scotland as Trump’s illegal warmongering threatens to plunge the global economy into a new energy crisis. The era aof Sturgeon and Salmond is over. We have work to do, and that work goes on. That said, I won’t be blogging quite so often over the next week or so as we have family coming to visit.
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