It’s endlessly frustrating when constitutional division works to reproduce the status quo. All the more galling when the benefits accrue to such a dubious bunch. Clearly, we need some mechanism to break the vicious cycle.
Alba Party
Five years on from the Brexit vote, everything has been leading to this moment of truth for independence. But that mood of certainty is giving way to frustration and self-doubt. Whisper it, but the Yes bloc is experiencing an identity crisis.
Source Direct: A Yes Slump?
For the aspirational politico, fretting over Alba has convenient side-effects, giving the aura of a moral high ground without damaging your prospects among those with real power. True progressives should treat all such risk-free stances with a dose of scepticism.
Source Direct Election Profile: the Alba Party
It’s one poll, and (sometimes performative) panicked politics leads would-be critics to uncritically back the people in charge. For these reasons, too many leftists position themselves somewhere between cheerleader for and conscience of centrist governments.
Source Direct: Don’t Panic!
“When a party offers voters nothing but its leader’s personality, and all the baggage that comes with it, then it is by that factor it will live or die.”
Sean Bell: No matter what Alex Salmond claims, Alba is a personality project
For me, the true danger of Alba is that it could amount to nothing. And, in establishing itself, it will have emptied the SNP of many of its most eloquent internal opponents, including Kenny MacAskill and, in all likelihood, many others to come.
Source Direct: Blackmail, Derangement and Pied Pipers
Leftists may view Alba as a break from Sturgeon’s dreary post-neoliberalism; nationalists as a break from Sturgeon’s constitutional coquetry; unionists as (an ironic) break on SNP government. Will this add up to a serious vote? It’s late in the day, but theoretically, yes it could.