YES ALLIANCE? FORGET IT. For all the honourable intentions & the initial spark of genius it might have appeared to be, a Yes Alliance isn’t going to happen. And it really isn’t. Sure there are great Facebook pages & hundreds of other groups all over Scotland purporting to favour a Yes Alliance scenario, but politically the idea is finished now. As we have the word ‘Alliance’ in our name we’ve had plenty of misguided interest coming our way & we’ve had to point out that we exist to promote all pro-indy groups, the word Alliance genuinely meaning Allies to a common cause, for Scotland, for more powers & eventually independence. We think the route to this is by promoting established & developing groups & parties who will work together here and there to achieve it, and central to our focus is creating public debates to hear all these views. So no we are not proposing a unified Yes Alliance politically, we promote all groups equally, individually, putting forward their own unique ideas. So now that’s out of the way. The problem with the whole idea is even those in the Yes camp who promote the idea don’t know how it’ll actually work. We’re in a huge period of change and we had to get all the party conferences out the way, then there was leadership elections in the SNP & of course the Smith Commission has taken the focus recently. Not only that, Salmond standing down, the new cabinet & Nicola Sturgeon becoming FM, and the SNP have been putting their programme of government together. The timing of all this made it difficult for any serious discussion of a Yes Alliance & its getting pretty tight considering candidate selections. Talks would have taken a lot of time & the small matter of what the manifesto was going to be & what these Yes Alliance candidates would actually do when they got to Westminster also raises lots of questions. The biggest flaw in any Yes Alliance idea is the presumption it would win. The notion that all the Yes voters would go for it ignores the big chunk of pro Yes Labour voters who would probably stick to voting for Labour in May to keep the Tories out (Yes, yes we know that’s nonsense, but it will happen!) And it forgets that the SNP have a 20%+ voting base of No voters, this must be reiterated because the SNP really do have a sizable chunk of voters who will never vote Labour or Tory & are relatively pro union. The SNP clearly can reach a broader electorate than a Yes Alliance. The so called 45% doesn’t exist, there were soft Yes’s who will go to Labour & soft No’s who will go to the SNP. Then there’s the No voting Greens & the assertion by Yes Alliance supporters that the Greens should lend their vote to the SNP on a constituency by constituency basis. The Greens may stand more of a chance in Edinburgh, the borders & the South East than the SNP but the SNP are not going to hold back just in case the Greens might win there. And likewise. If I joined the Green party or the SSP I’m pretty sure I’m going to vote for them. And especially on the back of the polls, the monumental rise in SNP membership, and already how many times have you heard Nicola Sturgeon say ‘lend us your vote’ its clear the SNP have no intention whatsoever of a Yes Alliance, or holding back to let the Greens have a go. Where’s the proof? Well that happened some weeks ago when the party changed the rules to allow recent members or the best most talented people in the area to run as an SNP candidate. The SNP know as we’ve highlighted that they have broad appeal in the pro-indy movement but crucially beyond the Yes Bubble & that is why, it is they who are essentially the Yes Alliance now, all be it in name. They have opened the doors to potentially non-traditional SNP people standing for them. This has problems too, if these people are elected, are we sure they’re going to fall into line, follow the party whip & agree on policy. Probably not. Sure not everyone agrees on all the party policies, I have an issue with the SNP approach to constitutional Monarchy & would have liked to have seen in the White Paper an elected Senate or elected not appointed upper chamber proposed above Holyrood but its something I’m willing to put aside for the rest of the policies I do agree on. But could it come to pass that a new influx of SNP members & MP’s actually begin to dominate & outnumber the traditional party & change it for the worse…..or better? Or as I’ve encountered plenty of times already you do find people who have joined the SNP, SSP & the Greens on the back of the Yes campaign who don’t have a clue what the policies of the parties are. Take the pondering over SNP position on Fracking for example. People have now left the party because of it, but the SNP is against Fracking just not in the same way as the Greens are & this is where confusion starts. People need to take more into account when joining a party than one single issue. And that was always the criticism of the SNP, that it was a single issue party, independence. It isn’t for me, they are the party of government, for Scotland, for social justice, for Business & they are clearly centre left & the Tartan Tories lexicon was quite some time ago. Ultimately it’s for the parties to persuade us to vote for them, the SNP have talked the Alliance talk & continually roll out the idea of keeping the Yes movement together (what they really mean is vote SNP!!) but as we all know in first past the post, it’s tough & Labour command some epic majorities so the SNP are the only serious choice to win these seats. So it’s a bit of a no brainer for most. And the ‘split the vote’ talk is nonsense, the Green & SSP vote will increase but it won’t impact that much on the SNP, what they need to do is win the Labour voting swing who also vote for them at Holyrood but shy away when it comes to Westminster. And the newly free Lib Dem voter who will never vote Labour. That is why Yes Alliance is dead in the water. Overconfidence may be the SNP’s biggest weakness or its greatest asset, as either way Labour are looking pretty scared!
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 10:29:28 +0000
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