Alba....Alaba...Ali Baba...Alex Salmond's Fairy Tale

[Stavros]

The historical record is not kind to parties that seek to challenge an established hegemony such as we have in the UK. The irony is that the SNP itself began as a fringe outfit that struggled for relevance, until its victory in a bye-election in Hamilton on the 2nd day of November, 1967. Fun fact, either on that day when it was released or shortly thereafter I bought Cream's Disraeli Gears, so though I remember the SNP's victory as a news item, my focus at the time was on the music.

And to add to the above, it took the SNP decades to estabish itself as a party of relevance capable of breaking the Conservatve/Labour hegemony in Scotland, much as the Labour Party, founded in 1900 did not become a relevant party in the UK until the 1920s. The point is that since then, breakaway parties have failed, mostly because of the leadershp as well as a lack of sufficient appeal to the electorate.

The unusual case of UKIP is shot through with the fact that when Farage took over the leaderhsp from Alan Sked, he changed the trajectory of UKIP which had been to challenge the UK's membership of the EU within the UK, and took the party into the heart of the EU itself, in the process monetizing its prospects through the EU Parliament gravy train into whose generous trough Farage stuck his snout as deep as it would go. But, the man's abysmal management of the party and the fact that any nutcase and neo-Nazi could join it meant UKIP under Farage was constantly having to discipline, punish or expel candidates and members, so that when Farage gave up the leadership the party fell apart in bitter arguments and rivalries.

The only breakaway party to rival UKIP was the SDP that was formed from ex-Labour MPs when their party voted to leave the EU as a matter of policy in 1981. Unlike UKIP, the SDP had too many leaders, and a poor organisation that meant a lot of the candidates they had emerged from nowhere with no experience of front line poltics. Because the Labour Party did not fall apart -and under the leadership of Neil Kinnock and John Smith purged the party of Militant and changed its policies, it was no surprise the SDP fell apart within years, though at the time the two Essex boys (Ivor Crewe and Anthony King) declared an age of party 'dealignment' which never happened -in England and Wales- but which has happened in Scotland, a trend that had begun years before.

The flaw in Alba is thus all to obvious -it is Alex Salmond's vehicle, a blade chibbed at the face of a Scottish political machine that has spit him out, with a sense of grievance and entitlement that suggests it will not last long. On that basis, one has to appreciate the success of the SNP, which had been organizing well in the years before Ewing's victory in 1967 and thus had developed a substantial campaining machine with a message that was been fundamental to Scottish politics long before that- and through devolution has transformed it, with Salmond in recent years being a particularly effective leader.

That the SNP has received such a wide spread of support in Scotland seems to open the door for other parties, but it is in fact something difficult to achieve, as the Green Party has discovered in England. And in Germany, where the Greeen Party has had its most important victories in Europe, they seem unable to double their vote, becoming a perennial small, if influential party only capable of achieving junior status in a coalition.

In the US, Trump realised after his first tug at the Presidency failed, that he needed a ready-made organization and thus decided the Republican Party was it, in the process, and even after his defeat in 2020 undermining the prospects for any third force to challenge the existing hegemony. Why our systems seem to function best with limited choices has a complex explanation that is rooted in social movements that existed before the parties came into existence, or which changed in response to a changing environment, as happened with the Democrats in the 1920s. Thus, there was talk of a break-up of Labour in the Corbyn years, but the breakaway party Change UK flopped almost as soon as it started, and there seems to be no alternative, even as Keir Starmer struggles to re-establish Labour as a coherent alternative to the Conservatives.

The fate of the SNP now rests on its record in government rather than the pathetic antics of an embittered Baron who has been evicted from his castle. But as a party the SNP is here to stay.

https://www.snp.org/50-years-on-from...ction-victory/