The wheeze behind the creation of the Alba Party was simple enough on paper. You could create a “supermajority” of independence supporting MSPs by convincing SNP voters to give their list vote to another pro-independence party instead. In 2016, Nicola Sturgeon won 953,587 list votes and, because of how the d’Hondt system works, got just four MSPs from it. The logic was that those “wasted” SNP votes could be redirected to game the system.
It never worked. Not even close. Alba’s candidates won a total of 44,913 votes at the 2021 election, just 1.66% of the regional vote. A year later, at the local elections, they failed to return a single councillor. And that was when the party had both Alex Salmond in charge and cash in the bank. Now it has neither.
The problem was always that SNP voters quite liked the SNP. They did not want to vote for a breakaway led by a man who, whatever his political talents, carried enormous personal baggage. Salmond’s death in October 2024 removed the one figure whose name alone could attract attention, if not votes.
Kenny MacAskill, who replaced Salmond as leader, has now told members the party is in a “perilous financial state” and unlikely to field candidates at May’s Holyrood election. He attributes the crisis to alleged fraud under police investigation, but the rot goes deeper than that. There have been allegations of internal vote rigging. Questions about how money was spent and who on the ruling NEC looked the other way rather than act.
Four senior figures, including Tommy Sheridan, Angus MacNeil, Christina Hendry, and Suzanne Blackley, have offered a transition team to keep Alba alive for the election. Their intervention reads less as a rescue plan and more as a vote of no confidence in MacAskill’s leadership. He is not keen to hand over the reins, certainly not without a plan to tackle the financial crisis first.
The honest assessment is that Alba was always a vehicle for one man’s ambitions, and when that man departed, the purpose departed with him. A political party that cannot stand for election, cannot file accounts with the Electoral Commission, and whose members are at each other’s throats over leadership and money is a political party in name only. The question is not whether Alba can survive. It is whether there is any good reason why it should.
