HUMILIATED!
Salmond’s ‘ragtag’ Alba Party fails to win a single seat
ALEX Salmond was dealt a humiliating blow yesterday as his new pro-independence Alba Party failed to win any seats in the Holyrood election.
The former First Minister and SNP leader had launched the party six weeks ago with the aim of building a ‘super-majority for independence’ of around 90 seats at the Scottish parliament and promised to hold his former party’s feet to the fire on the issue.
He had hoped to see his candidates – dubbed a ragtag collection of supporters – elected as MSPs in each of Scotland’s eight electoral regions.
He planned to encourage independence supporters dissatisfied with Nicola Sturgeon’s lack of progress on Indyref 2 to give their second vote to Alba.
Yesterday he described his party’s performance as ‘creditable’ and insisted that Alba’s future was ‘secure’, even though it was outpolled in two constituencies by the little-known Scottish Family Party.
Congratulating Ms Sturgeon ‘on her victory’, he warned that it was
‘It was wrong for him to seek election again’
now her ‘responsibility to carry forward the independence argument’ and ‘answer the questions of how you proceed with obduracy from Westminster’.
But he could not resist criticising his former protégée, adding that he felt Ms Sturgeon had ‘lost her nerve’ on independence and ‘had never recovered it’, before adding that many of the SNP leadership were ‘among the most graceless people I’ve ever come across’.
Mr Salmond, 66, who topped his party’s North East Scotland regional list, attended Aberdeen’s P&J Live/ Teca venue on Friday to watch the count but he was nowhere to be seen last night as the final results were tallied.
Earlier he had warned that supporters of the pro-UK parties had been ‘smart’ in tactical voting but that ‘the SNP, unfortunately, are sending their troops over the top and are piling up perhaps even a million list votes, which will elect nobody’.
He added: ‘We warned of the danger of piling up SNP list votes and achieving nothing, getting nobody returned and allowing Unionists, Labour and Tory to sneak in the back door.’
Mr Salmond said he was aware that the SNP had been ‘a little bit nervous, sending people letters saying if they are associated with Alba they might be disciplined by the SNP’.
He went on: ‘I put that down to the over-enthusiasm of some people who have just joined the SNP and are perhaps not aware of the politeness with which the SNP normally conducts its operations.’ Speaking about the votes Alba had received, he said: ‘I’ve obviously looked at the ballot boxes at the count and they’ve given us some very good ones – Aberdeenshire had over 10 per cent in a couple of the ballot boxes.
‘But in some of the big ballot boxes, I think we ended up over 3 per cent in Aberdeenshire East, the same in Banff and Buchan, a bit more actually, which I’m pleased with because these are our best results in Scotland.
‘That doesn’t get you a seat. You need 4.5 per cent, maybe 5 per cent, to get a seat. But, nonetheless, it’s a creditable performance for a party which has just celebrated its sixth birthday – in other words, we are six weeks old.’
It was a worse picture for the party elsewhere with Alba candidates, including the SNP’s former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, receiving only a tiny share of the regional vote.
Last night, a disappointed Mr MacAskill – who was the Nationalist MP for East Lothian until he quit the SNP two months ago to stand for Alba on the Lothian list – said it seemed to have been ‘an election too soon’ for his new party.
Yesterday, Chris McEleny, who topped the Alba candidate list in the West Scotland region, said the party had attracted an estimated 50,000 votes from the electorate across Scotland and had put ‘fire in the belly’ of the independence movement. He said: ‘We put across a positive message and I am confident we will see Alba rising.’
Last night, however, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross said Mr Salmond should consider leaving frontline politics.
Mr Ross said: ‘He should never have come back. I said he was a totally unsuitable person to seek elected office again.
‘He claims – as he has – that he’s been cleared by court cases etc but he accepted his own behaviour fell well below the standard expected of someone in elected office.
‘I think it was wrong for him to seek election again and the people of the North East have been very clear that they don’t want him.’