Vocal Voices

It has been around since January but Alex Salmond has just announced that this new party will stand candidates in all regions in the upcoming SGE.

How will this play out? Will it give pro independence parties an unassailable majority? Will it hurt the SNP and prevent it getting a majority? Or will it hurt both and allow the unionists to sneak in and gain some seats?

With only six weeks to go the polls will be all over the place so it will be difficult to read what any result might be. Is there enough time for it to take hold or is the timing just right for it to gain momentum? Fascinating!

Can Salmond personally harness that sort of political support to influence the election result? After all, he's no Nigel Farage ...

I suspect it might give the Tories a few more seats, but nothing like enough to win an election. But there again, the SNP is consistently propped up by the Greens, so if the latter lose some seats, who knows?

Scotland is split pretty badly. Those who were cast on the scrap heap during the Thatcher years will never vote Conservative until the day they die. But they are so incandescently angry with Labour they won't vote for them either. Labour, in Scotland, has been unable to separate the "elite English" label from their Scottish heritage and voters are dead set against them.

Then there are the core SNP voters. They want independence and they don't care what it takes to get it. So they vote SNP.

The main thing to try and work out is how many disaffected Labour voters the Alba party will pick up, taking from the SNP and how many will stick with the SNP no matter what. I suspect those who stick will be core Nationalists.

Referendum votes aside, you can pretty much gauge the support by how well SNP does. They have not made over 50% of the vote since the failed referendum, so that vote for independence is not there. In that case, those who vote SNP as a viable option to the other non viable parties, may choose to vote Alba.

Whatever happens, it's going to be interesting.

Also useful to remember that Scottish elections are hybrid PR. Alba will be going for the list. If you know Scottish elections you know that they will get seats and Salmond will get a position back in the parliament.

That should be extremely awkward for Sturgeon.

It has certainly livened the Scottish elections up that's for sure. Alex Salmond is a wounded beast and his main objective will be to bring down Nicola Sturgeon. It is difficult to know how events will play out but the next few weeks should be interesting. The fact that the Scottish Labour party has got a new leader might make a difference so they could make some headway. It will certainly wipe the smile of Nicola's face - and put the smile back on Boris' face no doubt.

Hmmm, the Scottish Cons and Lab, who nobody will apparently vote for, have 53 seats between them, just 8 fewer than the super popular SNP! The Greens and LibDems cancel each other out, and there are five "others".

Alba has already said it is going for the list, but who will it take seats from? It will be a close call.

It is the list system and the first name on the Alba list will be A. Salmond esq, I'm guessing.
But yes, this will be interesting and could split the vote for the pro-independence parties in the same way that the pro-union vote has been split.

Labour and the Lib Dems I should think. Plus some rather disaffected SNP voters who actually thought our dear Nicola was telling the truth.....

As far as I recall, the list takes from everyone but the smaller you are, the bigger the hit.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... party-alba

This article puts a bit of a different spin on it - the creation of a super-independence movement, with the SNP sweeping the constituency seats and the Alba party collecting the secondary "list" seats - effectively squeezing out the Unionist representation.

Given the fractious relations between Salmond and Sturgeon, I would suggest that is unlikely. A more likely outcome would be the unseating of Sturgeon as the price of getting the support of Alba MSP's.

Salmond didn't set this party up to crown Sturgeon. He set it up to give him a say in parliament. Something Sturgeon would go a Very long way to avoid. In fact she already has, to the point of lying to parliament and getting away with it.

There are only so many Independence votes out there and Salmond himself ran a very successful "bin the list" campaign when he got an overall majority. Something which, with PR, was considered impossible.