Alba chaos: Is there anyone fighting for independence?

Say what you will about the Alba Party, they’re always speedy with their comms.

Bright and early on Thursday morning, the inboxes of journalists across Scotland chimed with the news that Highland councillor Karl Rosie had defected from the SNP to join Alex Salmond’s party citing a ‘lack of action’ by his former party on independence.

It’s no surprise that Alba were keen to get the news out there that they’d secured their second councillor and fifth elected member – all of whom defected from the SNP and were not elected under the Alba banner – given that they’ve had something of a chaotic week of their own.

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Councillor joins Alba criticising SNP 'lack of action' on independence

Earlier this week two of the party’s founding members quit following a post on X/Twitter by the party’s women’s convener in which she said “a trans woman is a woman assigned male at birth”, something anathema to the party which has gender criticism as a “cardinal aspect” of policy according to Mr Salmond.

It’s at this point it’s probably fair to ask whether the parties most associated with the independence movement have rather taken their eye off the ball with a general election – one once mooted as a ‘de facto referendum’, lest we forget – on the horizon.

An oft-repeated cry from the unionist side about the SNP is that the party is too focused on breaking up the union which, given its entire raison d’etre is Scottish nationalism, seems a little obtuse. If you’re complaining about the party looking to turn the travails of Westminster into arguments for independence, you may as well rail against the Hamburglar for relentlessly trying to pinch Big Macs. The clue’s in the name.

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On the independence side the charge, as levied by Mr Rosie, is that there has been a lack of action in achieving said goal, with the SNP more focused on enjoying the trappings of power at Holyrood and influence at Westminster than on actually securing independence.

That, and perhaps the ego of Mr Salmond, appears to be the rationale for the existence of Alba, that it would be to the independence movement what Vladimir Lenin called a vanguard party, capturing the zeal of the populace and delivering the (peaceful, in this case) revolution. At the moment they seem more like a chocolate fireguard party.

The third part of the equation are the Scottish Greens, whose presence in government has caused ructions within the SNP itself and who stand firmly on the opposite side to Alba when it comes to gender recognition reform.

And yet, opinion polling consistently shows support for independence between 45% and 50% (depending on who is asking the question and whether undecideds are included) despite what would appear to be serious divisions either between or inside the three main parties advocating for separation.

At the risk of things getting a bit People’s Front of Judea, is there a case to be made for a new party? Admittedly, this has not been historically successful. Alba have never managed to return an elected representative of their own, while RISE, the Scottish left alliance, managed 10,000 votes in 129 seats in 2016.

Still, it’s easy to forget that the independence movement has historically not been of one mind. Mr Salmond may have successfully rebranded the SNP as a left-of-centre, social-democratic party – in handy opposition to the austerity-wielding coalition government and a Labour Party besmirched by the Iraq War – but he and his 79 Group were booted out of the party in 1982 by more socially conservative members. Current membership is, research tells us, around 60% male and about 70% over 50 – despite the voting age being lowered for the referendum and Holyrood elections.

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We saw in the party leadership contest that there was a fairly big division between what we might term the Nicola Sturgeon wing of the party and that represented by Kate Forbes – more socially conservative, economically more to the right. If the SNP are struggling to reconcile those two things internally, the wider Yes movement faces an even bigger challenge if it wants to carry both the socialist left and the dyed-in-the-wool nationalists to independence.

Given the defections and resignations flying as we approach what is certain to be a huge Labour majority at Westminster, it’s not quite clear what the next steps are for what might be termed ‘the movement’, even if the end goal remains the same. None of the independence parties looks remotely capable of delivering the objective they share.