IT certainly came as an unhappy coincidence when last week, after I publicly declared my support for the new pro-independence party, Alba, there was a surprising sequel.

At certain points in the subsequent 24 hours there seemed to be something of a stampede by notable personalities to fall in behind Alex Salmond’s brave experiment. There even seemed to be enough of us to have a good rammy over the question whether we should refer to ourselves in the plural as na h-Albannaich, the men (or, as today’s usage demands, the persons) of Alba.

Hopes at first seemed high. One immediate recruit was former MP George Kerevan, who spoke also for a couple of colleagues: “We have now concluded that our attempts both at winning the SNP to genuine radical, anti-market policies and in democratising the party’s internal life have been thwarted.”

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So they were joining Alba, but in the end there turned out to be fewer of us than hoped, as the new day dawned and we emerged blinking into its sunlight. The hours slipped away and an opinion poll was run by the Dundee Courier, which found only 3% of Scottish voters ready to declare for Alba and show themselves in true blue, if mutinous, colours.

By the time the Sunday National came out, Nicola Sturgeon was sounding a confident note in the exclusive interview she gave to the paper. From her point of view, a mass movement against her had failed to appear. She sounded a warning to those still trying to rally one: “It is essential we take the right path to independence.”

We didn’t really need to ask for a definition of this rightness because we have always known it – a poll called under Section 30 of the Scotland Act 1998 which requires the prior consent of two governments, one in Edinburgh and one in London. She did not need to add that the Alba revolt had strengthened her conviction and ability to hold out along this right path.

Results like those presented in The Courier have, of course, always to be treated with caution. The figures must come from a necessarily small sample of the electorate and may be subject to horrific margins of error. I did not help things myself by screwing up such data as we could gather and saying that, per head of population, Scotland had more victims of coronavirus than England had, when actually the reverse is true.

Luckily for me, I enjoy a following of sceptical readers eager to gloat if I fall into error and prompt to point it out. At least they have to admit it doesn’t happen often. In the same column, for example, I showed how both Sturgeon and Salmond were, in their different ways, misreading the Scottish economy and how to rescue it.

The pair have long been at loggerheads, so their disagreements have hardened in ways a trifle trite if not hard to grasp. Fixed opinions make the chores of political leadership easier but exert little influence on the real economy or anything else. Public debate in Scotland is still too often carried on by means of slogans rather than observation and analysis.

This strikes me especially in the case of bizarre accusations from some of na h-Albannaich that Nicola is a right-wing neoliberal. I would accept that description applied to myself, and indeed I’m proud of it. But there are few politicians I disagree more with than Nicola in general doctrinal matters. I believe she is a socialist, though she does not make a habit of describing herself as such. All the same, she advocates high public expenditure, nationalisation and the political direction of private investment. Those are socialist policies.

Let’s look at them one by one. The SNP have favoured high public expenditure for as long as I can remember, and have been quite good at securing it from governments in London wary of being mean to Scots.

THAT has been especially true when Scots manned the central government. In Gordon Brown’s recent writings, we find him boasting constantly of the expenditure projects he initiated as prime minister, and on a global scale at that. While they may not always have been specifically for Scotland, it is hard to believe Scotland could have been left out of them through some oversight of his.

After 2010, the UK did have austerity, always resisted by the SNP. But the policies were not sustained in the long term because they were unsustainable. The period of Tory government from 2010, first in coalition with the LibDems and then without, saw at UK level determined efforts to cut the budget deficit in line with the efforts of previous governments. But since Boris Johnson came to power we have a Prime Minister who can scarcely conceive of what austerity might mean. On the contrary, austerity has been thrown into reverse, and now we happily leave it to future generations to repay the enormous debts we run up. Though this is precisely the policy the SNP had recommended, it seems unable to recognise as much now.

Nicola takes no interest in these abstract financial notions anyway, but she pricks up her ears at practical projects that in her innocent estimation may actually serve the people. At least, I cannot think of any better reason why she has been assembling an opportunistic programme of nationalisation, explicitly as a corrective to the evils of capitalism.

This idea had otherwise vanished from among the options that most western governments regarded as feasible. Socialism and nationalisation belong to each other because they always fail together.

At least with a more amenable attitude in the Scottish Government, you would think worthy projects of nationalisation might come flocking along. But this is not so. Up to now, none of those proposed has got anywhere near fruition – neither the Ferguson shipyard at Port Glasgow, nor at Burntisland the BiFab suppliers to the North Sea oil sector, nor at Prestwick Airport as a transport hub for the west of Scotland.

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The plans for all have been flops, and it remains to be seen whether we can do better with nationalised Scottish railways.

I catalogue these details just to show how utterly ridiculous it is to describe Nicola Sturgeon’s government as one of the right. It is of the left, if perhaps not as deeply of the left as some of those who have joined Alba.

We should also note that they do not hold the same views as Alex Salmond, the actual leader of the new party. I think he will treat rebels in this new party much as he always treated rebels in his old party.

Over the years it has sometimes appeared difficult to define Salmond’s politics in terms of left and right. We should simply say that he is in favour of Scotland, and supports what is good for Scotland as it appears to him at any given point.

He has been wrong some of the time, but mostly he has been right in elevating his nation to be capable and worthy of independence. We only need to wait till May 6 to see if that is right this time too.