Alex Salmond's Alba Party is bad for the independence movement and Scotland – Joyce McMillan

If you want to make the gods laugh, tell them your political hopes.

Just a fortnight ago, in this space, I was meditating on the new Scottish Labour leader’s chances, come next month’s Scottish Parliament election, of ousting the Conservatives from their current position as Scotland’s official opposition, and thereby signalling a period when Scottish politics might begin, at least in part, to revolve around a substantial debate about how far Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government is truly delivering on its much vaunted social democratic priorities.

That, though, was a couple of days before the launch of the Alba Party, with the bombshell revelation that it would be led into the election by former First Minister Alex Salmond

Two weeks later, if its website is to be believed, the party is still short of a serious raft of social and economic policies; but what it has, in abundance, is a theory that if supporters of independence vote for the SNP in Scotland’s constituency poll, and for Alba in the party list vote, then the parliament can achieve what Alex Salmond calls a “super-majority” for independence, thereby – by some process not yet fully explained – causing independence to happen much more quickly.

Scotland is therefore now stuck with the likelihood of an election campaign fought almost entirely on constitutional issues, with Alba presenting itself as decisively “more nationalist” than the SNP and the Scottish Greens, and also moving the debate back onto ground preferred by the Tories, as Scotland’s principal party of the Union.

Centre of gravity of Scottish politics

Alex Salmond and his supporters have doubtless convinced themselves that by launching Alba, they are doing the nation a favour, in pushing it towards the goal of independence to which some of them have dedicated their lives; but in this assumption they are wrong, for reasons which should be obvious to any attentive observer of recent Scottish politics.

Independence supporters should give Alex Salmond’s new Alba Party short shrift at the ballot box next month, says Joyce McMillan (Picture: Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images)

The 21st century SNP, after all, is a party carefully constructed by Alex Salmond himself to place itself as close as possible to the centre of gravity of Scottish politics, and to re-frame itself as an outward-looking and inclusive party of European social democracy, far more interested in Scotland’s future than in any nostalgic or essentialist view of the past.

It was Salmond who presided over the final transformation of the SNP from a party of romantics and ideological nationalists who would gather yearly at Bannockburn, to a party of pragmatic gradualists, working steadily through the institutions of devolution to persuade a majority in Scotland that independence represents the most viable and positive way forward.

And the irony is that this strategy of Salmond’s continues even now to work extremely well. In the 2014 independence referendum, the “yes” campaign won 45 per cent of votes, which would have seemed unthinkable a few years earlier; and after 2014, Salmond’s chosen successor, Nicola Sturgeon, continued to deploy the strategy with remarkable success.

A massive spanner in the works

Alba Party leader Alex Salmond has thrown a massive spanner in the works of the independence movement (Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire)

Even after all the recent drama surrounding the Scottish government’s mishandling of complaints about sexual harassment by Alex Salmond as First Minister, the SNP was entering the coming election campaign with support both for independence, and for the party itself, at astonishingly high levels after 14 years in power; and it seemed very likely that the party, with the support of the Greens, would win a small but decent majority that would accurately reflect the views of Scottish voters at this moment.

It is into these remarkable and well-constructed works – works largely of his own devising – that Alex Salmond has now thrown, or tried to throw, a massive spanner.

There are many ways in which Salmond’s recent actions subtly undermine the movement for independence, not least his evidently unrepentant attitude to his own sexual past, which echoes the stance of reactionary male leaders across the West, and attracts ugly forms of “anti-woke” support from some on the social right.

The ‘super-majority’ problem

The most striking flaw in the thinking behind the Alba Party, though, lies in its clearly stated intention to “game” the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system in order to achieve levels of parliamentary support for independence that are not justified by the balance of opinion in the country.

Alex Salmond seems to imagine that the existence of such a “super-majority”, however defined, would make the case for a second independence referendum all but irresistible.

In fact, all it would achieve is to undermine the authority of the Scottish Parliament by making it so clearly unrepresentative of opinion, on this key matter, that both Boris Johnson, and a large dissident section of the Scottish electorate, would have every excuse to ignore the result completely.

The most likely medium-term result of a large Alba presence in the parliament would therefore be threefold; to undermine the carefully fostered image of Scottish nationalism as a progressive and forward-looking movement, to discredit the parliament as a fairly elected voice of the people of Scotland, and therefore to stall the process of persuasion by which many Scottish unionists, post-Brexit, were beginning to turn towards independence as the most reasonable option for Scotland’s future.

It is therefore essential that all of us who want a future independence for Scotland based on wholehearted majority support, and on democratic, inclusive and forward-looking principles, give Alex Salmond’s opportunistic and sometimes blatantly regressive movement short shrift at the ballot box next month.

For if we do not, then our politics, like those of the UK under Boris Johnson, will begin to disappear through the looking glass into the realm where social and economic policy, and true accountability, no longer matter, while real political power leaches away towards those who have never stood in any election, but whose wealth and influence goes ever more unscrutinised, when politics becomes an ego-driven game of flags, rather than a serious debate on how best to improve the lives of the people.

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