THE Scottish Highlands are renowned for their bleak beauty; less well known is the area's tradition of radical, even revolutionary, politics. In the 1880s, for example, popular uprisings against landowners so alarmed local civil authorities that they appealed for military help to put them down. Now, radicalism is welling up again in the shape of a challenge to the whole way that politics is usually conducted.

A new political party, the Highlands and Islands Alliance, was set up about a year ago to contest this May's elections to the Scottish Parliament. It intends to champion local issues which might otherwise be lost in a parliamentary agenda dominated by the concerns of urban lowlanders. So far, so normal. Yet in its methods the Alliance is not a conventional political party at all.

For a start, the Alliance will not fight any of the eight constituency seats in the region. It aims only to win one or more of the seven Highlands and Islands regional seats which are also up for grabs in the elections. These seats, for which people will cast a second vote alongside their choice of a constituency representative, will be allocated to parties according to how many votes they get in the regional section of the ballot. In theory, someone who stands only in the regional ballot can be elected with as little as 6% of the vote.

In its organisation, the Alliance is less a party than a network of about 280 people active in various local causes. It says that any representatives it sends to Edinburgh will not toe collectively agreed lines like members of other parties. “If you as an MP are asked by your party to vote one way, but the people you represent ask you to vote the other way, you usually do what the party tells you,” says Bryan Beattie, an independent member of Highland Council.

Instead, the Alliance plans to operate what it calls “community democracy”. Its representatives will consult directly with voters by e-mail and the Internet and vote accordingly. Not only does it cut out the party middleman, says Mr Beattie, it is the only feasible way of staying in touch with 325,000 voters scattered across an area the size of Belgium.

The four established parties profess to be unconcerned about this new rival. Even so, both the Scottish National Party and the Labour Party have been putting more emphasis than before on issues close to Highland hearts, such as land reform. This, reckons the Alliance, reflects local efforts in pushing such issues into national politics. For instance, activists in Assynt, an area in Sutherland, forced the sale of a large estate to local crofters through an ingenious use of the law on crofting which was introduced after the 1880s unrest. Another example is the government's ending of nuclear-waste reprocessing at Dounreay, Caithness, says Lorraine Mann, an Alliance member who waged a long campaign to bring about precisely that.

The new party has one more trick with which to irritate the establishment. It thinks that there is nothing to prevent it putting up two people who promise to share a single seat in the Scottish Parliament. Although at first hearing it sounds ludicrous, the Alliance argues that it is an eminently sensible way for representatives to stay in close contact with constituents living far from Edinburgh.

The government disagrees. But according to Peter Hunter, a member of the Alliance as well as a specialist in employment law, the onus is on the government to say why seats cannot be shared. The law, he says, does not specifically rule it out, and recent decisions by industrial tribunals imply that parliamentarians' jobs are covered by European employment legislation.

The government has yet to produce any good arguments. Mr Hunter thinks that, if a job-share candidature is ruled invalid, the government risks losing a court case and having to re-run the regional election in the Highlands. And the lesson from last century's agitation is that Highlanders tend not to give up until they get their way.