Kenny MacAskill has won the leadership of Alba and just to underscore how cursed that position is, he defeated his rival Ash Regan by 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Alba is the party founded by Alex Salmond following an exit from the SNP that wasn’t entirely amicable. (You might have read about it.) When it was launched in 2021, Alba made a splash with a promotional film in which an actor playing Robert the Bruce endorsed the party ahead of that spring’s Scottish parliament elections, the 13th century monarch having taken a surprising interest in the distribution of votes on the Mid Scotland and Fife regional list. Despite winning some defections from the SNP (MacAskill and Regan among them), Alba failed to make an impact with the electorate.
Which is the hurdle MacAskill now faces: if Alba went nowhere under a household name like Salmond, what chance does he stand? This is especially the case when its two most identifiable policies – Scottish independence and protecting women’s single-sex spaces – have sizeable constituencies.
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