Regular readers can hardly have failed to spot that I've been unhappy with the Alba Party's direction of travel in recent months. I can actually pinpoint the exact moment that my concerns kicked in - it was just after Nicola Sturgeon announced the plan to go to the Supreme Court and then hold a de facto referendum on independence if the ruling went the wrong way. Prior to that, my only concern about Alba's approach had been the talk about possibly standing a few candidates at the 2024 Westminster election, which due to the first-past-the-post voting system would have split the pro-independence vote. That would not only have harmed the independence campaign, but it could also have seriously damaged Alba's reputation if any unionist MPs had been elected as a direct result. Beyond that, I was reasonably satisfied with our tactics - there was certainly nothing wrong with harrying the SNP leadership on independence strategy when they were ludicrously promising a 2023 referendum that they had made no preparations for and probably had no means to deliver.
But then suddenly, everything changed, and Nicola Sturgeon offered a credible way forward. The details weren't perfect, and they weren't the ones I would have chosen - I would have passed a Referendum Bill first and then let the UK Government be the ones to refer the issue to the Supreme Court, and I would have used an early Holyrood election as the de facto referendum, rather than next year's Westminster election. But nevertheless, there needed to be some recognition of the fact that no-one has a monopoly on wisdom as far as strategy is concerned, and that the leadership are the leadership and they get to make the final call on those points. The important thing was that we finally had a route-map towards independence within a reasonable timescale. I would have expected Alba to react positively to that news and claim it as a triumph for our own campaigning. I would have expected us to warn that we would still hold the SNP's feet to the fire if there was any sign of backtracking, but otherwise to get wholeheartedly behind this golden opportunity to win our country's independence.
Instead, we did pretty much the opposite. The message from senior Alba people on social media was about the Sturgeon plan being a sham, and about how we should sabotage it by directly standing candidates against the SNP in every single constituency in the plebiscite election, and about using the supposedly inevitable failure of the Sturgeon plan as an opportunity for Alba to pick up disaffected SNP votes at the 2026 Holyrood election. Preoccupying ourselves with the possibility of winning a handful of Alba list seats in 2026 when we could be winning independence itself in the intervening period seemed to me to be a bizarre failure to see the bigger picture. I couldn't understand why all of us had joined Alba in 2021 with a view to pressurising the SNP leadership into proper action on holding an independence vote if we were going to automatically dismiss absolutely any proper action the SNP leadership were pressurised into taking as a sham or a stunt. If our worldview really was that cynical, what was the point in us even having bothered? Weirdly, the closer the SNP got to holding a vote on independence, the angrier we seemed to get at them. It was as if we didn't really want what we had said we wanted, and that the real agenda was something else. Again, that seemingly destructive attitude not only harmed the independence cause, it also severely harmed Alba's reputation, because it looked as if we were not - and never had been - acting in good faith.
However, Nicola Sturgeon has now resigned, totally unexpectedly - and it has to be said some Alba people bear at least a little of the responsibility for any consequences that flow from that, given how hellbent they've been on bringing her down at all costs. We now find ourselves in a totally new situation where the person who has been wrongly referred to (including admittedly by myself) as the "continuity candidate" offers anything but continuity. He's not hiding his plans in any way - he would rip up Sturgeon's planned de facto referendum, and replace it with...nothing. For the first time in its history, the SNP would no longer be actively trying to win independence. It would remain nominally committed to independence as a long-term "aspiration", but in the absence of any route-map to the goal, that would be an utterly meaningless form of words. It would be roughly analogous to the Chinese Communist Party remaining nominally committed to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "moving beyond the primary stage of socialism" in about one hundred years' time. Although Yousaf has not specified a timescale of one hundred years, or the quarter of a century that would take us to Stewart McDonald's target date of 2050, he's made no secret whatever of the fact that he regards independence as being many, many years away. Worse still, because he's being so open during the leadership campaign about scrapping any attempt to win independence in the foreseeable future, he would actually have a cast-iron mandate from the SNP membership for his "do nothing indefinitely" agenda. Many of his supporters are probably genuine pro-indy folk who are so preoccupied by issues like the GRR and equal marriage that they haven't properly registered what they are about to endorse with their vote. A Yousaf triumph would, in short, be an unmitigated disaster for the independence cause, because it would mark the end of the SNP's long and proud history as a meaningfully pro-independence party.
What it reminds me of in certain respects is the story of recent years in Quebec, where the pro-independence governments of the past have been replaced by a supposedly "nationalist" government that is nominally neutral on the question of whether Quebec should remain part of Canada or become a sovereign state. Crucially, it is totally opposed to holding any further referendum on independence, and of course if you close off any means of actually winning independence, the question of whether you're officially in favour of independence or not becomes somewhat academic. That's the grim future Yousaf holds in store for Scotland. Of course he'll persevere with the fiction that he wants the SNP to build support for independence to such a high level that the UK Government won't be able to ignore it, but that's just a tactic to absolve himself of the blame for the fact that no progress is going to be made under his leadership. At the end of each year, when independence is no closer, he'll say that's because independence campaigners haven't succeeded in pushing Yes support high enough. When asked how he knows it's not high enough, he'll say it obviously isn't because if it had been the UK Government would have buckled by now. "No use looking at me, guys, if you want independence you'll just have to go out and pound the streets even harder." Not only is it an endlessly circular argument, it's an endlessly renewable excuse.
It shouldn't go without note that on the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union, Nicola Sturgeon announced that a second independence referendum was "highly likely". In every SNP manifesto since then, that referendum has been promised. A Yousaf win would mark a definitive dead end for that process, and a voluntary running up of the flag of surrender. The logic of his position is inescapably that Brexit was never a justification for independence or for a referendum, that Scotland being dragged out of the EU against its will is in fact wholly tolerable for an indefinite period, that no referendum should ever have been promised, that no mandate for a referendum should ever have been sought, that no mandate received for a referendum should be taken remotely seriously and certainly shouldn't be honoured, and indeed that even the 2014 referendum on independence shouldn't have been held because there was no sustained supermajority for Yes in the polls at the time.
Pretty much everything that Alba definitely shouldn't have been doing over the last few months would suddenly become entirely reasonable and justified from the date that Yousaf becomes leader. If the SNP are no longer trying to win independence, it's hard to see much point in avoiding splitting the pro-indy vote in first-past-the-post elections. I suppose there would still be an argument that the SNP leader is not the SNP itself, and there might be a post-Yousaf future in which the party would eventually revert to what it has been until now, and that maintaining a pro-indy majority at Westminster would thus be important to keep the flame burning until Yousaf is deposed. But on the other hand, the worse Yousaf does in elections, the earlier he's likely to be deposed, so it's a finely-balanced argument.
Although there would be nothing much left to lose for Alba or another pro-indy party in embarking on a potentially decades-long project to replace a Yousaf-led SNP, that's not a challenge I would relish, because the need for doing that would be a sign that we - collectively as a movement - have utterly failed. This disaster needs to be averted. Let's not get to the point where we're scratching our heads about how we can possibly reverse it, let's make sure it never happens in the first place. SNP members need to wake up to the danger and stop Yousaf. It's now or never.
Humza timetable for indy:
— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 26, 2023
2024: Kickstart the campaign
2029: Rev up the campaign
2035: Fire up the campaign
2041: Revive the campaign
2049: Would definitely have been a referendum but a war/pandemic/blizzard intervened
2050: Roadshow to listen to ideas for the long path ahead
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