Torn

After some time thinking about it, I have settled on voting SNP/SNP next month. My gut feeling, based on the polling that has been done, is that the Alba party won't win any seats in my region, which means that a vote for them would probably be wasted (and while a list vote for the SNP will also probably be wasted, it does make that outright SNP majority marginally more likely).

Given some of the candidates that the Alba party are standing, and some of the stuff that has come out from that party, a significant part of me actually doesn't want them to get many, if any seats. There's more than a hint of nastiness in some quarters.

However...

There's also a part of me that absolutely does want the Alba party to win at least a couple of seats and, crucially, to do well enough to have a platform to build from - with a view to establishing themselves as another legitimate party.

The reason for that is very little to do with Alba specifically, and much more about what it says. Our democracy is fairly heavily weighted against the smaller parties, and even moreso against independent candidates. That means that in order to be represented you effectively need to align yourself with one of the existing parties. But the reality is that there are a fair number of people who end up politically homeless - they find that they simply can't align with any of the existing parties for one reason or another or, worse, they find that all the existing parties agree on some topic with which they disagree.

Faced with that reality, it really needs to be possible to either stand as an independent or to start your own party, and have some chance of success - if there are enough like-minded people who agree with you then you can build something over time.

The problem is that we have seen, time and again, a lot of these micro-parties pop up, contest one election, get nowhere, and fold. The system is just weighted so heavily against micro-parties that they're basically done.

So now we have Alex Salmond trying much the same thing - he's set up his own micro-party, which a significant minority (2-3%) agrees with. And so we come to the big test: is it possible for him, with all of his star power and his backers, and with Wings Over Scotland behind him to set up his own party and build something.

Or is this just another micro-party that the system dooms to failure? If he can't make it work, that essentially means that nobody can make it work... and it means that a voter gets to choose from five parties (that are, frankly, pretty close on most issues), or they don't get representation. And that's really not right.

So...

The upshot is that while I won't be voting Alba (as above), and while I don't particularly care for some of what I've heard from them, I do want them to get at least a couple of seats. And, more importantly, I want them to endure to contest the next General Election and beyond.