On 6 May, people across Scotland will vote to elect 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). The party that wins the most seats will form the Scottish government.
Former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond announced the creation of a new pro-independence party which will stand in the Scottish Parliament election, seeking to help build a political supermajority for breaking away from the rest of Britain.”I’m announcing the public launch of a new political force: the Alba Party’, Salmond said in Twitter statement. Salmond and current SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon used to be close friends and allies, but they fell out after several women made sexual harassment complaints against him. He was compromised; thus, he became an easy target for Russia’s intelligence influence operations. The same way Moscow used French actor Gérard Depardieu.
Salmond said that Alba will contest the upcoming Scottish elections as a list-only party under his leadership, seeking to build a supermajority for independence in the Scottish Parliament. It was reported that the party had been founded in January this year by former TV producer Laurie Flynn, and was registered by the Electoral Commission on February, 8.
As Alba’s website informs, if the party should get around half of the SNP list vote it would result in 20-25 Alba MSPs. The idea is to secure a Parliamentary ‘supermajority’ for independence ‘in the region of +40, rather than the +5 which was achieved in 2016’.
The Alba party is being created while the UK-Russia relations are taking a turn for the worse. On March 16, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Russia as Britain’s top security challenge. Despite the fact that support of separatist political project development fully reminds Moscow’s tactics that can be observed over the past 7-8 years, one cannot state that the Scottish pro-independence movement is an exclusively Russia’s project. Moscow seeks to support all foreign projects contributing to the weakening and decentralizing the states that the Kremlin sees as opponents.
The Kremlin seeks to embarrass the UK and other NATO key allies. However, the Scottish National Party wanted nothing to do with Putin.
Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland, said he had been hired to host a show on RT, the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda network Russia Today.
The response from his colleagues in the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) was unmistakable surprise and misunderstood.
The SNP didn’t approve Salmond’s actions or Vladimir Putin’s government.
A Westminster Committee was asked whether Alex Salmond would be considered as ‘Russia’s agent’. By adding Salmond to his ranks, Putin has weaponized a big name at the heart of Britain’s political establishment.
Russia has made overtures to the SNP and independence movements elsewhere, including Catalonia in Spain, as it seeks to equate them with the breakaway statelets of eastern Ukraine. In Moscow, a Kremlin-friendly group hosted so called separatist summits with participation of representatives of the statelets in Donetsk and Luhansk (no Scot attended). Putinist politicians sought to compare the 2014 referendum designed to legitimize Russia’s military annexation of Crimea to Scotland’s vote of the same year, when 55% of Scottish voted in favor of remaining a member of the UK.
RT’s signing of Salmond came after its sister outlet Sputnik had opened its UK headquarters in Edinburgh, rather than London. Thus, RT’s enlargement was driven by the situation in Scotland. Some staffers and many contributors at both outlets (RT & Sputnik) have been vocal supporters of Scottish independence rather than the SNP. It is quite the opposite. One Sputnik editor called Nicola Sturgeon, Salmond’s successor as SNP leader and first minister, as a ‘traitor knave’. The insult comes from Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns. It refers to those too cowardly to defend their country from medieval English invasion. A new Alba party criticises Nicola Sturgeon for the absence of Plan B to conduct the second independence referendum. Therefore, Alba’s policy is likely to try to repeat a Catalonia-style action-plan and by using street protests or economic pressure on British government to force London to schedule a new referendum. This hypothesis reflects traditional division within the SNP into nationalist ‘fundamentalists’ (those who believe independence should be the party’s sole campaigning focus) and ‘gradualists’ (those who believe independence will only be won after a long march through the UK’s devolved institutions). Sturgeon is an arch-gradualist. She wants any future independence vote to be legally and democratically water-tight from both a domestic and international perspective.
Alex Salmond is likely to want to drag votes of the first group for Alba, because ‘fundamentalism’ can be seen as the shortest way to independence. Despite the fact that Salmond himself shared Sturgeon’s gradualist instincts, the party fundamentalist wing has grown closer to the ex-SNP leader over the course of his stand-off with Sturgeon Therefore, there are warnings that Salmond’s party backed by the Kremlin will use force and undemocratic actions to gain their goals.
The emergence of a new party could have a huge impact on the debate as a whole, and on the questions posed each day – potentially recasting the whole campaign.
Scottish analysts are not sure what this skirmish says about any long-term Russian objectives for this strategic corner of the North Atlantic. At the same time, they are increasingly certain about where the SNP members see an independent Scotland go; this very direction is far from Putin’s Russia. After all, the SNP has a story to tell of an independent state that is internationalist, committed to both Atlantic defense and the European project.
Thus, the SNP’s distancing itself from Putin’s Russia requires the Kremlin to bet on an alternative project that will be loyal to Russia. Alex Salmond is the best candidate to lead such an alternative project, as he has his own audience among viewers of the Russian propaganda TV channel broadcasting in Scotland.
As the UK left the European Union, the SNP pitch is getting easier to make and contrast with what Scottish nationalists portray as a Brexit retreat to “Little England” isolationism. Domestically, their message has helped nudge support for independence to 50% – and just beyond, at least according to the most recent opinion polls.
However, for some independence opponents Kremlin media interest in Scotland conjures up another view of the SNP: it splits a key Western ally, the UK; it weakens the Western alliance; and that the party’s intentions are the same as Putin’s ones.
Vladimir Putin is constantly meddling in UK politics and did try influence the Scottish independence vote and the Brexit referendum, according to a landmark report on Russia’s interference in Britain. After months of delay the report was finally released at the hands of Downing Street who has immediately rejected the Intelligence and Security Committee’s main call.
The report says that Russia did try to influence the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The committee found out ‘potentially it was the first post-Soviet Russian interference in a Western democratic process’.
There are only a few paragraphs in the 50-page report on Scotland but it cites ‘credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia conduct the Scottish independence referendum influence campaigns in 2014’. The report notes, ‘For example, shortly after the referendum it was widely reported that Russian election observers had suggested that there were irregularities in the elections, and this position was widely pushed by Russian state media. We understand that HMG viewed it as being primarily aimed at discrediting the UK in the eyes of a domestic Russian audience’.
The Russian propaganda was widely and effectively shared in Scotland too. More than 87,000 people signed a petition demanding a re-vote following the electoral fraud allegations. Kevan Jones, a former defence minister, said all the evidence of Russia’s interference was there from the Scottish referendum, ‘Short of a large van outside Downing Street, with a billboard on it saying,’this is what was going on’, what more did the government need? Why was the decision taken not to look at the referendum’.
The committee also found a lot of Russians with ‘very close links’ to Vladimir Putin who were ‘well integrated into the UK business, political and social scene’. The report highlights the role of Russian-state sponsored media organisations Sputnik and Russia Today, but Stewart Hosie said the criticism do not extend to his former colleague Alex Salmond hosting a TV show on the RT station.
Hosie said, ‘There was in the run-up to the EU referendum a preponderance of anti EU pro Brexit pieces on RT and Sputnik. What the report does not do is made any criticism of any individual, programme maker, commentator or presenter’.
Labour’s Ian Murray stated, ‘One thing is absolutely clear: RT is a dangerous propaganda tool of the Putin regime’.
According to the ISC, it was important to find out whether a hostile state deliberately influenced the UK democratic process. As the report confirms, the Kremlin interfered in the Scottish referendum six years ago. The long-awaited review cites ‘credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014’.
SNP factions:
Sturgeon loyalists — Opposition to Nicola Sturgeon within the SNP is diffuse but shallow. The majority of party members and office bearers support Sturgeon, share her vision of Scotland as a liberal, independent nation-state inside the EU, and think the first minister has run Scotland competently throughout her six-and-a-half years at the head of the Holyrood parliament. Having been cleared of breaking the ministerial code by James Hamilton, the future of Sturgeon’s leadership rests on whether she continues to be an election winner — and the perception, among rank-and-file nationalists, that Scotland is making progress towards its independence.
Constitutional fundamentalists — High profile ‘fundamentalists’ within the SNP include senior MPs like Joanna Cherry and Kenny MacAskill. They want Sturgeon to set out an independence roadmap that doesn’t rely on the largesse of Boris Johnson’s Conservative government in London. Among all Sturgeon’s internal critics, they are most likely to have sided with Salmond during the inquiry process. Some Sturgeon supporters have privately mooted kicking hardline fundamentalists out of the SNP — a proposal rejected by Sturgeon’s team.
Left nationalists — The SNP has traditionally cast itself as a social democratic party. However, under the leadership both of Salmond and Sturgeon it has pursued a staunchly centrist economic strategy. The party left wing is centered around the influential ex-MP George Kerevan and the SNP Common Weal Group (CWG), an internal party faction. They argue Sturgeon has failed to live up to her early social democratic promise and has grown far, closer to private sector interests. Left nationalists are critical of Sturgeon’s leadership, but not necessarily aligned with Salmond.
Economic damage is one point. What about disrupting the UK’s military capability? Despite the SNP’s decades-long campaign against Trident, Westminster seems not to apprehend that Scottish independence could unilaterally disarm the UK of its nuclear deterrent. Those defences are currently located at Faslane and Coulport, but an independent SNP government would demand their removal from Scotland. The Scottish government has described a report suggesting the warheads can be disarmed within weeks and the whole system transported out of Scotland in two-to-four years as ‘a welcome indication of how quickly Trident could be removed’.
The report from the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee says ‘Russian state-owned international broadcasters such as RT and Sputnik’ are tools of disinformation and that Britain, having taken ‘its eye off the ball on Russia’, is now having to ‘play catch up’. It adds that the UK is now ‘clearly a target for Russian disinformation’. On the crunch issue of Brexit, the committee said it ‘would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove’ the ‘actual impact’ of any Russian interference. However, the body urged ministers to launch a formal probe similar to the one conducted into the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The report also blasted London’s role in laundering dirty money from Russian oligarchs, describing the city as a ‘laundromat’ for Russians with ‘connections at the highest levels with access to the UK companies and political figures’.
So far, Alex Salmond said that party would field candidates across Scotland on four of the eight regional lists, seeking to enter Holyrood through proportional respresentation.
It had been speculated that Mr.Salmond would seek to contest a seat at the election in May as an independent. However, his decision to front the Alba Party shows a strategy and a plan to overrun SNP, heading the Scottish movement for independence.
Chris McEleny, an SNP councillor in Inverclyde, quitted the Nationalists to stand in the West of Scotland for the Alba Party.
Eva Comrie, a lawyer, will stand in the Mid-Scotland and Fife region. Ms.Comrie was previously a SNP Candidate for this list, but failed to win a seat.
Cynthia Guthrie, CEO of Guthrie Group, businesswoman, will stand in South of Scotland. Thus, Alex Salmond uses SNP’s manpower thereby weakening the party. We have no doubts that several pro-independence parties will split an alliance for Independence, but smaller parties are unlikely to join forces with Alba.
