I once did a training course on something I didn’t know about. The instructor, a respected industry professional, open with something I never forgot. "You’re all just starting out" she said "and so you’re all sitting there thinking ‘there is a better way to do this’".
"Save yourself some time" she continued, "everyone new at this thinks there is a better way yet 100 years later and it is still done the same way. Stop fighting it and accept that reality."
Let me give you another one; every week or two my email pings and one of you have emailed me with an idea for a new way to do parliamentary democracy. This is always sent in the spirit that our political parties are all rubbish and impossible to support, so an alternative is needed.
I always tell them the same thing; you can imagine a world in which politics works differently but if you try to actually do it you will fail, and there is a reason for it. The reason is simply that every alternative to the broad way we do it is worse than the way we do it.
This takes me to the implosion of Alba and whatever is going on with it’s various splintering bits. I mention this certainly not to gloat at all, but because I did try and warn early on that they were going to fall into the same trap everyone falls into. That’s what happened.
The trap is a simple one; the tantalising belief that there is a way to skip the endless, endlessly-painful business of negotiating a broad policy platform. The proposed solutions always lead in one of two directions. The first is the cul de sac where Alba ended up – the single-issue party.
The theory is that if you all stand on one particular issue you agree on, you can all agree to disagree on other things. That always, always fails. You can see it really clearly – people who shouted at me for talking about policy which had ‘nothing to do with independence’ are now falling out over policy which has nothing to do with independence.
I care very much about housing policy and it is one of the reasons I support independence, but that was ‘for after independence’. I was meant to shut up apparently. But the same people who said that to me then are now furious that colleagues don’t share their exact position on gender recognition. That isn’t for after. Why? Because humans are stupid.
The people shouting at me didn’t care about housing so refused to see why I should care, but they do care very much about self-identification and so refuse to see why anyone would have a different opinion. And this in a nutshell is why single issue parties always fail. No matter how much you tell yourself you can ignore fundamental disagreements with colleagues, you can’t.
If you had to research every single view held by every single potential politician, you’d never get the tea cooked
The second form of trying to replace broad-spectrum policy political parties as a fundamental part of democracy is some variation on different ways to make decisions. So you hear ‘parliaments of independents’ where everyone votes on their conscience all the time, or direct democracy where everyone in the country votes on every decision.
These are really dangerous. The latter is worst of all – try to make people vote that much and they will refuse and then the most committed minorities decide everything. Do it in our media environment and everything becomes a shallow propaganda campaign. And do it enough and it all collapses in on itself. People are perfectly capable of voting for lower taxes and then straight afterwards voting for more public spending.
But the problem with independents is equally bad. At the start of the last political term (elected in 2021), it was very far from clear that gender self-ID (for example) was going to be a major issue. Had someone been researching what independent politician to vote for, chances are they wouldn’t have prioritised ‘views on gender’. And then three years later it all kicks off…
The point is you might not really care about gender ID at all, or you might feel really strongly one way or the other, but what you don’t want is to discover that someone you voted for is consistently voting against something you care about. Yet if you had to research every single view held by every single potential politician, you’d never get the tea cooked.
So how do we solve this? It’s fairly simple really. If you do policy at all you will soon find that the likelihood of believing one thing greatly increases the likelihood of thinking another thing, and that this pattern is consistent. If you support action to tackle climate change then you are much more likely to also support action to reduce economic inequality.
Likewise if you support action to crack down on immigration, you are significantly more likely to support tax cuts. There are clusters of identifiably-similar views that seem to group together consistently because they stem from a similar way of seeing the world. The term for this is ideology.
Great, now get together with other people who share the same ideology. You’ll agree with 95 per cent of what each other think. Cool, now you have a plan, so put it in writing and form a team to try and make it happen. Put that before the public and then they get reasonable degree of predictability on what you would do with power and so a reasonable expectation that they’ll get more or less what they voted for.
‘Please go faster’ is not an ideology, not the basis for governing, and so fundamentally not the basis for a political party
And thus you have political parties. It really is that simple. Political parties are hell, they really are – by their nature they attract sociopaths, spies, evangelists, people who really like the sound of their own voice, people who want jobs they couldn’t get on their own and so on. But they still manage to be miles, miles better than any alternative that has ever been tried.
I have been neutral from the beginning of Alba. I had my doubts, but I also exist to push for a better politics so I will engage with anyone. When Alex Salmond phoned me not a long time before the 2021 election and asked if I could write their manifesto for them in 48 hours based on some scraps of paper they’d pulled together I said yes because influencing manifestos is sort of what I do.
But I warned him two things. The first was simply tactical – I told him he’d got his pitch wrong. Alba’s USP was never ‘supermajority’ because the Greens offered that option. It was always ‘feet to the fire’, pushing urgency on the other two. But it was too late, supermajority was the narrative.
The second was more straightforward; Alba needed to decide on an ideology and it couldn’t be identical to the SNP. You need to be lefter,or righter, greener or oilier, wokier or less woke, more middle class or less middle class – something. The difficulty was that Alba was an uneasy mix of personal supporters of Salmond, the disillusioned SNP old left, stalwarts sick of the erosion of SNP democracy and gender critical women.
That is not an ideology but an accommodation, and while it may give you short term shelter, it offers no long term direction. Alba gradually drifted left (or at least more working class) in some of its rhetoric but right (or at least more oil industry) in some of its policy. All that was really holding it together was a belief in a single issue. And that created another dynamic.
I call it the Vanishing Purity Cult. That is a feature that exists in all political parties and even more in protest and campaign groups. If you have an ideology then you measure people by how they apply it. If you exist to only believe one thing then the only measure you have is how much an individual believes that thing. It becomes a measure of purity of belief. (In parties purity becomes loyalty.)
But if you have three people in the room, two of them will always convince themselves that they believe more than the other person. Now there are two people in the room. If you measure belonging in terms of purity to a single belief, you cannot avoid drifting into cult-like behaviour and when you do, you will shed more and more participants – the Vanishing Purity Cult.
Alba got a hard time. It was treated like a pariah from the off because at the time Scotland’s media class were still High on Sturgeon. It is also a mistake to underestimate how much hatred some of them had for Alex.
But Alba was always going to have this problem. Not thinking the SNP is moving fast enough on independence is clearly a rational view; thinking that forms the basis for a political party is the wrong interpretation of it. ‘Please go faster’ is not an ideology, not the basis for governing, and so fundamentally not the basis for a political party.
Please everyone, stop trying to reinvent an alternative to the wheel because you’ll fail. Mass politics works like it works. You can undoubtedly improve it (I can give you a long list), you can most certainly have political parties better than the ones we have, but you cannot replace the system, you cannot ‘beat the house’, you cannot sidestep the hard, boring stuff.
Believe me, the idea of just sidestepping the politics we have altogether is just as attractive to me as it is to you, but it’s a fantasy. The game is the game; play it well, sit it out or complain, but don’t convince yourself there is another game. There isn’t. This is it folks; make the most of it.