Thursday, March 6, 2025

Some genuine good news for the independence cause: it seems that Alba will *not* be splitting the Yes vote in constituency seats next year, no matter who wins the leadership election

On Monday night, a commenter on this blog asked for my objective verdict on the STV mini-debate between Ash Regan and Kenny MacAskill for the Alba leadership.  I was planning to write a blogpost giving my thoughts, but that plan was overtaken by other events.  However, one of the things I had been intending to pick up on was that Ash Regan was surprisingly direct in saying she wanted Alba to be a "list-only party" in the Holyrood election next year.  Kenny MacAskill said something very similar, although his language wasn't quite as unambiguous, which arguably left him a get-out clause if he had a change of heart.

Nevertheless I was initially very encouraged by this.  Alba can only do harm if they stand in first-past-the-post constituency seats, because it would split the Yes vote and make it easier for unionist parties to win, and yet until recently there was every indication that was exactly what they planned to do.  In August, I directly heard Chris McEleny suggest that Alba would be standing in at least one constituency seat per electoral region, which would mean a minimum of eight across Scotland.  I know others heard him say exactly the same thing on other occasions.  And famously, Christina Hendry told the newspapers that her much-vaunted "Salmond Blood" gave her the right, Game of Thrones style, to stand in her uncle's former constituency seat in the north-east.  So Monday's debate implied there had been a very welcome change of heart on both sides of the Alba divide.

But I was much less encouraged after I then took a look at Chris McEleny's blog.  (That's the kind of crazy thing I force myself to do sometimes, just so no-one else has to.). There's a post from around a week ago in which he states that he wants Alba to be a "list-only party", but weirdly he then goes on to say - 

"Alba should at most only defend the new seat of the constituency incumbent Alba Party MSP Ash Regan currently holds and potentially at most a small handful of other seats"

Whatever else that might describe, it self-evidently does not describe a "list-only" party.  In fact it suggests that Mr McEleny has an extremely complex relationship with the word "only".  So my heart sank again - I assumed the plan was still to stand in several constituencies, but to dishonestly package that as a "list-only strategy" for window dressing purposes.

However, tonight I had a totally unexpected opportunity to clarify matters.  The National hosted a leadership hustings on YouTube, and viewers were able to submit questions via the live chat.  So I tried my luck and put forward a question asking whether "list-only" meant standing in no constituencies at all, because Mr McEleny's blog suggested otherwise.  I'm very grateful to Hamish Morrison, who was moderating on behalf of The National, for reading the question out, and the answers did actually take us forward.  Ms Regan was extremely specific that she didn't want Alba to stand in any constituencies, including her own.  Mr MacAskill essentially said the same thing, although once again he maybe left himself with just a touch more wiggle room than Ms Regan did.

So that's really good news for all independence supporters, no matter which party you support.  It'll make it easier for the SNP to hold off the Tory / Labour challenge in marginal constituencies and thus increases the chances of retaining the pro-independence majority at Holyrood.

I don't think there's much doubt Ash Regan "won" tonight's hustings.  She's a much more relaxed and fluent speaker than Mr MacAskill and as a result she came across as more sincere - even though on several points I knew perfectly well she was being disingenuous.  But sadly, sounding sincere when you're actually being insincere seems to be an indispensable skill for politicians these days.

I don't think her relatively strong performance will make any concrete difference, though.  All that matters in the Alex Salmond Memorial Party is who has the backing of Alex Salmond's widow and family, and that lucky designated winner is Mr MacAskill.  However, he had a bit of a shocker tonight and there was one point in particular where he totally lost the plot.  The question after mine was asking about the people who had been bullied out of the party and what could be done to bring them back, and Mr MacAskill responded by just flatly denying that anyone at all had been bullied out - which at this stage is a Comical Ali level of denialism given how well-documented the bullying and subsequent resignations have been.  He then went on and on about how awful it was that the question had been anonymously submitted, as if anonymity on the internet is a far more heinous affair than actual bullying and harassment.  

In fact, the question wording was perfectly polite, and I think most people would feel that anonymity is only a problem if somebody hides behind it while being abusive.  My guess is that the questioner simply happens to use a pseudonym for their YouTube account, and therefore wasn't being anonymous just for the purposes of the hustings.  Mr MacAskill making such a song and dance about the questioner's anonymity thus looked like a rather weak and desperate attempt at deflection.  I also got the distinct impression that he may have got the questioner mixed up with me, because he called him or her "an anonymous former party member", whereas in fact they hadn't identified themselves as a former party member.  (Hamish Morrison had introduced my question as being from "former member James Kelly".)

By contrast, Ash Regan did acknowledge that some former members, particularly women, had felt unhappy at the way they had been treated.  The problem is, of course, that her ally Chris McEleny was the guy responsible for a lot of that ill-treatment.

The bottom line is that there is no good outcome to this contest.  A MacAskill win would probably keep Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and Corri Wilson in harness and would maintain the paranoid bunker mentality that the only problem Alba have got is that people keep having the temerity to speak out about their horrific experiences in the party.  But a Regan win would probably mean a senior role for Chris McEleny, who has been the single most baleful influence within Alba.  Ms Regan made clear she would accept Mr McEleny's resignation as General Secretary, but very noticeably didn't rule out appointing him to a different role.

Incidentally, YouTube lets you know how many people are watching at any given time, and it seemed to hover at around 40 or 45.  That's perfectly respectable for a small party's leadership hustings, but the snag was that you could see from the live chat that a lot of viewers were not current Alba members, but disenchanted former members such as Fiona & Neil Sinclair and Leanne Tervit.  Poor old Mr MacAskill and Ms Regan - they slog their guts out trying to win votes, and the only people listening (virtually) are what Zulfikar Sheikh calls "the Wee Gang of Malcontents".  There's some sort of poetic justice in that, I feel.

Posted by James Kelly at 9:53 PM 46 comments

The SNP must ignore the siren voice of Ian Blackford and hold fast to the principle of unilateral nuclear disarmament

When I rejoined the SNP two months ago, I was well aware that I would find myself in a minority in taking a somewhat nuanced stance on the Ukraine war.  Perhaps because of the party's pro-Europeanism, perhaps because of an understandable fellow feeling with a country that has had its sovereignty trampled all over by a larger neighbour, the SNP has taken a stance of almost limitless support for the Ukrainian government in persisting with the war for however long it wishes.  But now that Ian Blackford has used the war as justification to come out in favour of the retention of nuclear weapons, perhaps I could just very gently observe that many SNP members may be waking up for the first time to the trap they have walked into by taking too 'conventional', too 'European mainstream' a position on Ukraine, because that effectively locks you into the logic of that mainstream European view, which ultimately leads back to the conviction that Russia is a very real threat to the continent's security and that nuclear weapons are an indispensable part of any protection against that threat.  If America is no longer willing to 'deter' Russia with nuclear weapons, British and French nuclear weapons will have to fill the gap - or so that mainstream view holds.

I suppose in theory the SNP leadership could follow Ian Blackford in surrendering to that logic, and try to frame support for nuclear weapons as merely a shift from 'unilateral' to 'multilateral' disarmament.  But if they did so, they would alienate an enormous chunk of their party membership and would probably end up losing many of their most committed and experienced activists.  Because we all know that "multilateral disarmament" translates into English as "no disarmament".  When Labour abandoned unilateral disarmament in the late 1980s, they packaged it in exactly the same way as "multilateralism" but in practice since then they have been fully wedded to the indefinite retention of a so-called "minimal nuclear deterrent" regardless of circumstance.

Mr Blackford's comments strongly suggest that he always privately believed in the principle of nuclear deterrence, but went along with the policy of disarmament because he thought it was a luxury Scotland could afford for as long as we were "protected" by the American nuclear umbrella.  But that categorically is not the place that true support for unilateral disarmament comes from.  Unilateralists understand that deterrence simply does not work, and that if you depend upon it to prevent either a conventional invasion or a nuclear attack, you are making as fundamental a mistake as France did with the Maginot Line in the interwar years.  The lengthy list of occasions in the Cold War when a nuclear exchange came within a whisker of occurring strongly suggests that if you tempt fate long enough with "deterrence", eventually your luck will run out, and 90% of the population of the world will be wiped out and human civilisation in any recognisable form will end.  That's not a mistake anyone can learn from.  

In the long run, the only way to save humanity is to opt out of deterrence and actually eliminate the weapons themselves.  The SNP have had this one right all along, and it would be an absolute tragedy if they suddenly lose their way simply because people have fallen in love with the fashionable cause du jour.
Posted by James Kelly at 3:32 AM 90 comments

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Is Donald Trump just a cosplay fascist, or does his threats to conquer Greenland and parts of Panama make him the real thing?

I was just watching a "highlights" video of Donald Trump's speech to Congress (if that's not a contradiction in terms) and I found it genuinely chilling when he said he was going to get his hands on Greenland "one way or another" and JD Vance started chuckling behind him.  It instantly called to mind Goebbels or Goering having a little snigger on the stage of a Nazi rally while Hitler taunted whichever country he had decided to invade next.

In Trump's first term it was always said that he couldn't really be considered a full-blown fascist because he didn't tick enough of the boxes, such as opposition to democracy and territorial expansionism.  The insurrection at the Capitol building obviously called into question the assumption that he wasn't an opponent of democracy, although that incident almost seemed like 'cosplay fascism' because he didn't have the steel to actually see through a proper coup attempt.  And the only vague talk of expansionism in the first term related to buying Greenland - I can't recall any suggestion of an invasion after Denmark said no to the proposal.

The Netanyahu regime in Israel actually fits in with the textbook definition of fascism much more comprehensively - it's militaristic, ethnonationalist, perpetually expansionist, genocidal (which only occurs in the most extreme forms of fascism), and its democratic status is questionable due to the apartheid nature of the state.  So arguably the main relationship of the US to fascism has been an indirect one via its enthusiastic enabling of Israeli fascism.

But that may be changing if the conquest of Greenland is a serious prospect.  Again, the only real question is whether this will prove to be cosplay fascism or the real deal.  The Panama Canal, Gaza and Canada are also apparently on Trump's shopping list for an expanded US empire.  The threats to Canada are generally taken less seriously than the ones against Greenland and Panama, but it strikes me that Greenland is not exactly contiguous with the US - there's a large expanse of Canada in between.  If the strategic location of Greenland makes it so irresistible to Trump, and if the fact that Denmark is a friendly country that already allows US military activity on its territory isn't sufficient for him, it's hard to see why the same logic wouldn't also apply to northern Canada.

Of course there isn't a cat in hell's chance of Canada becoming part of the US, whether Trump realises it or not.  But if that's his ambition, it means he's an expansionist on a Napoleonic scale, just as Hitler was.  The Empire he envisages would be more than double the geographical size of the present-day US (Canada is actually the larger of the two countries) and it would encompass the vast bulk of a whole continent.  That's a fascist prospectus, at the very least.

Posted by James Kelly at 8:08 PM 22 comments

The Alba Party's relentless war against its own members continues despite McEleny's sacking - the NEC sticks two fingers up at the dozens of members who warmly welcomed the popular Leanne Tervit back to the party by crassly decreeing that, actually, she is FORBIDDEN TO REJOIN

I said the other day that Craig Murray was naive for sticking to the article of faith that Alex Salmond must have had very good reasons for stitching up Alba's 2023 internal elections and that those reasons were related to the pursuit of independence.  But in fact I think Craig's naivety went a bit further than that, and we're already starting to see the evidence.  Having revealed for the first time how Mr Salmond pressurised him to give up his slot on the NEC immediately after being elected, he said that he hoped the party would "come together again now and those who left will rejoin", as if he somehow lived in a world where people's reasons for leaving had been resolved or even a world in which people were free to rejoin if they wanted to.  

Despite the vote-rigging, Leanne Tervit was actually elected to the NEC in the notorious 2023 vote with a big mandate, but she stood down afterwards in protest and spoke out about the subversion of democracy the party had just witnessed.  Over the last few days she attempted to rejoin Alba, as apparently Craig assumes people like her are able to just choose to do, as if Alba was a normal political party in which it works like that.  When she announced what she was doing, she was enthusiastically welcomed back by dozens of Alba members - and a measure of her popularity within the party is that one or two people who seem to absolutely hate my guts were among the loudest and warmest in welcoming her.  You might think the strength of that reaction would have given the party leadership some pause for thought if they had any notion of playing silly buggers - but no.  This is the Alba Party, remember, where factional hatred, dictatorialism and petty points of "discipline" trump absolutely every other consideration, including common sense and basic political nous.

Leanne was one of a large number of former Alba members who the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny (aka "that's Mad Dog PRIMUS to you") maliciously certified as having "publicly resigned", which is a form of insta-expulsion that bypasses the normal disciplinary process and effectively leaves the individuals concerned banned from rejoining for life.  The only theoretical way around that is to "apply to the NEC for permission to rejoin", but in practice McEleny tended to either refuse to even pass such applications on to the NEC, or just did his usual trick of pretending not to have received the email containing the application.  It's a minor miracle that Leanne's application even reached the NEC, but the miracle went no further than that - they rejected her application out of hand, and thus stuck two fingers up at the members who had been so happy about her return to the party.  It's a very clear signal that none of the other people who resigned in protest at the 2023 vote-rigging are welcome to rejoin either - so what does Craig have to say to those people now?

There really is no alibi here for the "Alba's leadership aren't as bad as portrayed" brigade or the "it was only one or two bad apples causing the problems" brigade.   McEleny is long gone now but the suffocating authoritarianism continues unabated.  The cultural problems in the Alba elite go a lot deeper and wider than just McEleny, or Tas, or even the Corri Nostra.  The people running the party actually want Alba to continue to be the narrow, inward-looking, paranoid sect that it's become - they are not remotely interested in having the type of broad church membership that Craig takes as read everyone is aspiring to.
You gotta love Brian's deadpan delivery there. 

Incidentally, reliable ol' Shannon Donoghue responded to Leanne's thread with yet another immature outburst on Twitter that once again drove a coach and horses through Alba's social media policy, which expressly forbids the "targeting of individuals". So will Shannon now face disciplinary action? Och, don't be daft. She's in the Corri Nostra, she's the daughter of the General Secretary. The rules are for the oiks. (And if those words are giving you déjà vu, there's a reason for that.)
Posted by James Kelly at 7:59 AM 53 comments

Tuesday, March 4, 2025

New YouGov poll suggests Labour's hopes of a "Falklands moment" for Starmer are so far proving delusional - and the SNP have an 11-point lead in the Scottish subsample

I've been awaiting the first GB poll since the Trump v Zelensky showdown with a degree of trepidation, because that incident has at least temporarily caused the London media to fall back in love with Keir Starmer.  It's been a rare opportunity for a British Prime Minister to pose as a figure of genuine international significance (and of course the same is also true for President Macron in France and Chancellor-designate Merz in Germany).  Labour strategists have been briefing the media about how Starmer has just had a "Falklands moment" that will turn the domestic political situation upside down - that's a bit of a stretch given that any British military intervention is still hypothetical, but nevertheless I did wonder if Labour might get a moderate boost in the polls.  As it turns out, the new YouGov poll shows only a small margin-of-error increase for Labour, which I suspect Starmer's people will be very disappointed with.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 2nd-3rd March 2025):

Labour 26% (+2)
Reform UK 25% (-)
Conservatives 21% (-1)
Liberal Democrats 14% (-2)
Greens 9% (+1)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 32%, Labour 21%, Reform UK 16%, Conservatives 13%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Greens 6%

This breaks the remarkable sequence of four consecutive YouGov polls showing a Reform UK lead.  However, in all of those polls the lead was either one point or two points, so even if public opinion had remained absolutely static, it would have been statistically inevitable that the sequence would be broken before too long due to the margin of error.  My guess is that the increase for Labour may actually be real on this occasion, but it's tiny and the obvious question is "will this be as good as it ever gets for Starmer?"  He can't expect the kind of generous coverage he's received over the last few days to occur very often.

And just as an aside, it's a bit troubling that Starmer's strategists seem to have the mindset that cultivating military confrontation with Russia is a legitimate tactic to improve Labour's domestic popularity.  Russia and the UK are both nuclear powers, albeit with an enormous mismatch in Russia's favour in terms of the number of nukes each country has. It would, I'd suggest, be a bit of a shame if the population of this country was wiped out due to an ill-conceived attempt to bolster Keir Starmer's net ratings in Survation polls.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 in January, and so far the running total stands at £1661, meaning that 24% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
Posted by James Kelly at 8:14 PM 24 comments

Monday, March 3, 2025

The latest betrayal of Alba members is the most shameful - it's game, set and match to Tasmina as the party's unelected Tyrant-Queen gets her way on the retention of the discredited pay-per-vote system - her ruthless and callous tactics to crush all dissent appear to have SUCCEEDED as rumours strongly suggest members will *NOT* be given the option of introducing a democratic one member, one vote system for NEC elections

Although the Alba leadership never admitted that the 2023 internal elections were rigged (quite the reverse, in fact - they maliciously expelled Colin Alexander from the party simply for raising questions about what had happened, and suspended Denise Somerville for supplying evidence of the vote-rigging), Alex Salmond did make a nod to members' concerns by sending out an email immediately afterwards promising that the newly-launched review of the party constitution would be able to consider the possibility of introducing one member, one vote for NEC elections.  At the time, I interpreted that as meaning that the leadership accepted that the pay-per-vote system for electing the NEC had been so thoroughly discredited that it was no longer tenable to even attempt to keep it going.  I assumed that they would never have built up expectations of one member, one vote unless that was actually going to happen.

I was completely wrong about that.  The leadership were in fact totally wedded to the pay-per-vote system, and the reason why can be summed up in three little words - "Tasmina", "Ahmed" and "Sheikh".  Without pay-per-vote, there would be no way of guaranteeing that Tas would continue to top the annual female ballot for the NEC, and it was only by topping the ballot that she could justify her ongoing unelected role as Party Chair.  The constitution review was just a classic "kick it into the long grass by setting up a commission" wheeze, with the intention of dropping all talk of one member, one vote after emotions had cooled a bit.

Whenever I'm asked about Alba these days, the most common question is "so why exactly were you expelled?", to which all I can respond with is "that's a very good question" or "your guess is as good as mine".  But of course there's a big distinction between the 'official' reason, which is impossible to pin down due to the risible vagueness of McEleny's disciplinary referral document, and the 'real' reason, which was almost certainly much more specific.

One plausible interpretation of that 'real' reason is that it was bound up with Tasmina's determination to keep the pay-per-vote scam going at all costs.  The Constitution Review Group set up in early 2024 was 50% appointed, 50% elected, and three of the four elected members were in favour of reform.  Those three were myself, Alan Harris and Mike Baldry. I've outlined in a previous blogpost how Tas menaced Alan, myself and Morgwn Davies with talk of disciplinary action on trumped-up charges in the spring of 2024, before quietly dropping those threats a few weeks later and announcing that she'd destroyed all of the relevant evidence.  Part of the idea was probably to see if one or more of us voluntarily resigned to avoid the hassle and stress of a possible disciplinary process.  Alan Harris did indeed resign from Alba within a day or two of the threats being issued, although I must stress that his stated reasons for leaving had nothing to do with Tasmina's stunt.

Alan's departure reduced the number of reformers on the Constitution Review Group from three to two, exactly as Tas had presumably hoped.  But with the group's chair Hamish Vernal saying he wanted a consensus report, Mike Baldry and I still had some leverage between us. Although the meetings of the group were fractious and unpleasant affairs, we ultimately managed to convince Hamish that on important matters where there was no consensus on the group (such as one member, one vote), Alba members should be allowed to choose between the majority option and the minority option.  That would have allowed members to make a straight choice between one member, one vote, and the status quo of pay-per-vote, at the party conference later this month.

However, after the compromise with Hamish had been agreed, I was of course unceremoniously expelled from the party.  It's reasonable to wonder whether the reason for that, or part of the reason, was to reduce Mike Baldry to a minority of one and make it impossible for him to hold the line on what had already been agreed.

My worst fears on that front seem to have been confirmed.  I'm told there was a marathon five-hour meeting of the Constitution Review Group over the weekend to decide on a final proposed constitutional text to put to conference.  The sheer length of the meeting is a strong indication that what had already been agreed was not being adhered to and that everything was back up for grabs.  It must have been almost impossible for Mike Baldry to keep the minority options in play, not only because he had been whittled down to a minority of one, but also because the anti-reform members of the group include Chris Cullen and his immature fiancée Shannon Donoghue, who are part of the so-called "Corri Nostra" and are thus close allies of Tasmina.

What I'm hearing, and admittedly I'm getting this from a second-hand source but a very confident one, is that the meeting decided that Alba members will no longer be given the option of introducing one member, one vote, and will instead be presented with a fait accompli of the discredited pay-per-vote system being retained indefinitely.  To put it mildly, the optics of this are absolutely catastrophic, coming just 48 hours after Craig Murray provided dramatic new information about how the 2023 NEC elections had been stitched up.  As you'd expect in any tinpot dictatorship, the Alba leadership have not taken the opportunity to tackle the massive problems that have been identified, but have instead doubled down to ensure that the fun of vote-rigging can continue into infinity.

Serious questions have now got to be asked of Hamish Vernal, who promised me to my face that minority options like one member, one vote would be put to the Alba membership, but who then played a role in getting me expelled, and subsequently seems to have cynically used that expulsion as an excuse to block reform totally.  So much for Alba as a "member-led party".  Members don't even get to express a view on whether they want democracy.

As I said only yesterday, without democratisation Alba will wither and perish.  People may be willing to put up with authoritarian tendencies in a large party of power and consequence, but the tolerance levels for the Il Duce principle in a small party are very limited indeed.  Members who find they have no say in the party's direction or how it is run will just keep drifting away, and all you'll be left with is a small number of clapping seals.  A narrow sect of that sort is going to be of no interest or use to the Scottish voting public.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, Shannon Donoghue has yet again breached Alba's social media policy (specifically the part barring the targeting of individuals) with the tweet below.  So will she now face disciplinary action?  Och, don't be silly.  She's in the Corri Nostra, she's the daughter of the General Secretary.  The rules are for the oiks.

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Denise Findlay has a new post on her blog about how Alex Salmond pressurised her to withdraw her candidacy for Organisation Convener in 2023 - you can read it HERE.

Posted by James Kelly at 9:33 PM 85 comments

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Craig Murray's shock revelations about Alex Salmond add to the mountain of evidence that Alba's internal democracy has been a sham from day one

Although I believe this is the first time Denise Findlay has spoken publicly about the pressure Alex Salmond put on her to withdraw from the re-run of the Organisation Convener election, it won't be a surprise to readers of this blog, because I touched on it in my post about the rigging of the 2023 internal elections.  As you'll recall, when the elections were first held in October 2023, Ms Findlay was re-elected as Organisation Convener and Jacqui Bijster was re-elected as Membership Support Convener - but those results were 'unacceptable' to Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who had seemingly given Mr Salmond an ultimatum that the election of both women had to be stopped somehow.  So Mr Salmond stepped in to prevent the results being announced, and then simply nullified the results - which he had absolutely no power under the Alba constitution to do, but he somehow bluffed his way through with a ludicrous cock-and-bull story about a non-existent "black dossier".  He then announced the elections would be re-run in December, but the intention was always to ensure that Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster weren't even candidates second time around, because they undoubtedly would have won again.  So Ms Findlay received a phone call from Mr Salmond putting totally inappropriate pressure on her to stand aside, and exactly the same would have happened to Ms Bijster if she hadn't already long since withdrawn in disgust by then.

What's new to me, though, and I think new to most people, is the revelation that Craig Murray received a similar phone call from Mr Salmond putting pressure on him to step aside after he had already been elected an Ordinary Member of the NEC, and that like Ms Findlay he had reluctantly gone along with the demand.  This is entirely consistent with what I was told in early 2021 about Mr Salmond wanting to model his new party on the Brexit Party with himself in total control, and with no internal democracy.  I believe he had a rethink after reflecting on how bad a look that would be for any left-of-centre party, so he eventually accepted a system of internal elections, but he never intended that to be anything more than window-dressing.  The plan was always to get the people he wanted "elected" by any means necessary, no matter whether fair or foul.  

The 2023 elections were manipulated and distorted from top to bottom.  The sheer scale of the fiddling looks almost comical in retrospect.  The office bearer elections were rigged by the means set out above to overturn the legitimate victories of Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster.  The elections for Ordinary NEC Members were initially rigged by means of the notorious pay-per-vote system (and it was done in such a cack-handed manner that the exact results had to be hushed up to prevent people bursting out laughing at how implausible they were), but it seems even that wasn't enough for Mr Salmond and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who quickly got rid of several of the people who had been elected, with Craig being the most high-profile victim (albeit a semi-voluntary one).

I have to say I think Craig is being astoundingly naive in his repetitions of the article of faith that Mr Salmond must have done what he did for good reasons and in the best interests of the independence cause.  The reality is that we already know with a high degree of confidence that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh's jealousy was the reason for the ousting of Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster, and with all due respect to the Sheikh family (like others, I'm a huge fan of the Great Zulfikar Sheikh), who Tas feels jealousy towards has got absolutely nothing to do with whether or not Scotland becomes an independent country.  I don't know what the reason was in Craig's own case, but I'd be amazed if it turns out to be any more legitimate.  To be blunt, I very much doubt that Mr Salmond told him the truth at the time - I don't think the reason had anything to do with wanting a specific person on the NEC, because if you look at who replaced Craig, there's no real logic for Mr Salmond being so desperate for that to happen.  I think it had much more to do with negative reasons for not wanting Craig on the NEC - and those reasons are more likely to have been Tasmina's rather than Mr Salmond's.

As someone who was elected no fewer than six times to various internal roles within Alba, including once as an Ordinary Member of the NEC, I've thought at some length about how I would have reacted if after being elected I'd received the dread phone call from Mr Salmond telling me to withdraw out of personal loyalty to him, simply because he preferred to have someone else in the role.  I've written many times about how Mr Salmond was my political hero from the age of 16 until very recently, but frankly if he'd done that to me, no matter how much charm he'd deployed, I'm pretty certain I'd have told him to take a running jump.  I'd have said to him that what he was asking was absolutely bloody outrageous, and that he appeared to have no understanding of what democracy is meant to be all about - or no true belief in the concept, at any rate.  It's not supposed to be about one man making de facto appointments (under severe pressure from one woman) and everyone else dutifully rubberstamping them for him.

No wonder I was expelled - it was only ever the truly obedient and subservient who were welcome in the Alba Party.  It's just a pity that wasn't explained to us in 2021, rather than all the endless guff about a "member-led party".  It would have saved so many of us a great deal of stress and upset.  We didn't sign up to be used and dumped like that.  

I say in all seriousness to the decent Alba members who have not yet been expelled or bullied out of the party that they have literally one last chance to save their party from oblivion, and that will be later this month when the issue of constitutional reform comes up at the party conference.  Nothing less than full democratisation and one-member-one-vote will do - and even that won't be enough, you'll need to build in safeguards to ensure transparency and to prevent behind-the-scenes manipulation of elections.  Squander this last opportunity, as the leadership will be pressuring you to do, and I truly believe your party will be finished forever.  It might stumble on indefinitely as a sort of "zombie party" (like the SDP did after 1990, or as the SSP did after 2007) but in electoral terms it will be an irrelevance and the public will forget it even exists.

Posted by James Kelly at 5:17 PM 161 comments

Saturday, March 1, 2025

Starmer's cheerleaders need to make up their minds once and for all whether Trump is friend or foe

When Alba HQ wonderbairn Robert Reid's dad Bob Reid made his prolonged attack on me about my views on Ukraine (although there was little doubt his real agenda was Alba-related), he asked something along the lines of "James, do you not accept that there is such a thing as a just war?"  That was a straw man on stilts, because I hadn't said anything that even remotely implied that there was no such thing as a just war.  I do have pacifist leanings, it's true, but pacifists have always grappled with the logical problem of how they would have dealt with the Nazis, who would have thought it was Christmas if they had only been faced with a display of Gandhian passive resistance, and would have just carried on conquering, enslaving and exterminating people.

Not all aspects of the Allied campaign in the Second World War can be considered just, to put it mildly.  I can't justify the mass slaughter of civilians in Dresden, for example, and I certainly can't justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which constituted acts of genocide.

But to the partial extent that the war against the Nazis was a just war and an unavoidable war, it's instructive to consider how this country actually went about fighting it.  Because to the best of my knowledge, individual men of conscription age always had the option to avoid taking part in direct combat by registering as conscientious objectors and doing non-military work of assistance to the war effort.  It wasn't an easy option by any means due to the likelihood of social opprobrium, but it was there for those brave enough to take it.  I recently discovered that one of my favourite actors, Alfred Burke, who went on to become a household name in the 60s and 70s, was a conscientious objector during the war.  It's heartening that it seemingly didn't affect people's perceptions of him in later life.

Contrast that to the situation in present-day Ukraine, where the right to conscientious objection has been completely abolished.  In practice draft evasion is common, but if you're a male of conscription age and you want to remain within the law, you have no option but to fight and die - and in most cases it really does mean dying, because the casualty rate is insanely high.  That's one of the reasons, one of several, why western progressives are foolish to simplistically view Ukraine as the good guys who should be egged on to fight to the last man.  Even to the extent that Ukraine is a democracy, we ought to be troubled by any notion that democracy is about the majority dictacting to individuals that they have to fight and die, irrespective of their own wishes and beliefs.  That's certainly not liberal democracy, and it's not "freedom" either.

Yes, Russia was the aggressor, and yes, it's a good thing that Ukraine has defied the odds to maintain control over 90% of its sovereign territory.  But it would be nice if there were some people left alive to actually enjoy that hard-won sovereignty, and from that point of view an early negotiated peace settlement would be a highly desirable outcome.  Human life is more important than the sort of 'sovereignty absolutism' that insists every single square inch of Ukrainian territory has to be returned before the killings can cease, or that the perfectly honourable status of neutrality can't even be considered as an acceptable compromise.  Some prices for peace might be too high, but not every price is too high.

All of that said, though, and even though Trump and Vance were posing as peace-makers in their public spat with Zelensky yesterday, my sympathy was entirely with Zelensky.  There was an obvious double-standard in branding Zelensky "disrespectful" when all he was doing was exactly the same thing that Macron and Starmer had done in exactly the same location over the last few days - politely pushing back on a small number of carefully selected points.  It seems that Britain and France still have just about high enough status that Trump feels he has to tolerate some dissent from their leaders, but the same doesn't apply to lower-status countries like Ukraine.  Treating a country and its leader as being of lower value is in itself wildly disrespectful.  Trump would doubtless argue that he gets to do that because of all the money America has poured into Ukraine, but the flipside of the coin is that Ukrainians have been fighting and dying as American proxies in a war against Russia.  OK, that proxy war was being fought on behalf of the former US administration rather than the current one, and the US has every right to elect new leaders and dramatically change course whenever it wishes.  But there is no right to forget decisions taken in the past by the former duly-elected US president and the debts of honour, or at least of courtesy, that are owed as a result.  The human price Ukraine has paid over the last three years far exceeds the monetary price paid by the US.

Vance asked Zelensky a series of questions and Trump refused to let Zelensky answer.  That was disrespectful.  And it was particularly boorish of Vance to attack Zelensky for his alignment with Biden.  If all foreigners are required to show respect to the US because "it's an American world and we run it" as a delightful Fox News contributor put it last night, wasn't respect owed to Biden as US President until last month every bit as much as it's owed to Trump as US President now?  Maybe Vance thinks Zelensky should have played along with the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump remained the 'real' President afterwards.  But if that's the case, why should Zelensky pay respect to Trump now that he's in a constitutionally-illegitimate third term?  Shouldn't Zelensky be paying respect to the sacred US CONSTITUTION above all else, JD?

I was in Glasgow yesterday and my eyes rolled to the heavens when I saw the front page of the Mirror, praising Starmer for fawning all over Trump and supposedly building an alliance with the King of the World.  24 hours later the same cheerleaders are denouncing Trump and urging Starmer and other European leaders to fill the void left by American leadership.  At some point these people are going to have to get the story straight and work out whether Trump is friend or foe.  You can't insist on breaking the bank to build up the military capacity needed to take on Russia without American help, while still demanding that we all genuflect to Trump on the logic that nothing can be achieved without him. 

The state religion of Atlanticism is hard to give up, we know, but for the love of God make up your minds, chaps.

Posted by James Kelly at 9:57 PM 66 comments

Friday, February 28, 2025

Spain had the "Caudillo". Italy had "Il Duce". Is Chris McEleny planning to set himself up as the "Primus" of a new Alba Party (Continuity Salmondite)?

A number of seasoned McEleny Watchers set up a quiet vigil yesterday to try to pinpoint the exact moment that the great man gave in to the inevitable and altered his Twitter profile to acknowledge that he is no longer General Secretary of the Alba Party.  That's now happened, but perhaps more significant than the timing is what he's replaced the old wording with - 

"Chris McEleny.  General Secretary Primus of Alex Salmond’s Alba Party."

"Primus" of course means "first", so this could just be a particularly ungracious way of acknowledging that there is now a second General Secretary and it's not him.  Alternatively, he could be drawing a distinction between what he sees as "Real Alba" or "Salmondite Alba" and the version of the party that he regards as having been overrun by interlopers (you know, interlopers such as Moira Salmond).  Perhaps in some strange, metaphysical, almost 'telepathic' way, he regards himself as *still* the General Secretary of the Alba Party, authentic Alba, Salmond Alba.

Maybe this novel distinction will even become formalised, and an "Alba Party (Continuity Salmondite)" will soon be registered with the Electoral Commission, and with one Christopher McEleny listed as the party's "Primus".  Such fascist-sounding titles are perhaps not quite as outlandish as they sound given the ongoing flirtaton between McEleny's faction and Reform UK.  I know some Alba members were determined to believe yesterday that Sky had stitched up Ash Regan, but actually if you watch the video of her comments in their proper context, it's obvious that they were permeditated, well-rehearsed, and carefully calculated to generate an "I will work with Farage" headline.  The intention seems to be to get Reform voters, or Reform-curious voters, to look at Alba afresh and realise that it's the one party that doesn't sneer at the far right or its values.  If this was Germany, Alba would look very much like the guilty party that has "broken the firewall".

Contrary to the perceptions of some, there are quite a number of old school socialists within Alba, and they are absolutely furious with Ash Regan for what she did yesterday.  But admittedly there are also other Alba members who have some growing sympathy with Donald Trump because of his stance on protecting women's spaces and women's sport, and who see Regan's comments as a welcome recognition that left/right distinctions are becoming less useful.  That cultural divide within the party is arguably unbridgeable - and it occurs to me that Ash Regan can count, that she must know Kenny MacAskill is going to defeat her for the leadership, and that her flirtation with Reform is therefore going to make it hard for her to play a prominent role in a MacAskill-led party.  So why is she doubling down and making the rift even worse?  

I still can't escape the conclusion that she's looking beyond her time in Alba and is preparing the ground for when she and McEleny strike out on their own in some form.

Posted by James Kelly at 1:52 PM 122 comments

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Alba civil war escalates into total carnage as McEleny's suspension is upgraded to an outright SACKING for gross misconduct, with strong hints he will also face EXPULSION from the party - this could mean his desperate attempts to stand for depute leader will count for nothing as his nominations are likely to be NULLIFIED

Scotland's most disgruntled employee is an employee no longer.  "Mad Dog" can now run free in the hills.  One chapter - but sadly only one chapter - in Alba's Reign of Terror is now over.  The statues are being toppled all across Scotland this afternoon.

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

Take me 
To the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
In the wind of CHANGE
Mmmmm

It sounds like the sacking actually occurred a while ago, but the reason the news has broken today is simply that today is the day Sky News ran a story about Alba.  They interviewed Kenny MacAskill, who revealed the sacking and also made clear that McEleny faces potential expulsion from the party.  And as we all know, Alba being Alba, potential expulsion means definite expulsion.  Unless he jumps before he's pushed, McEleny will soon find himself in exactly the same position he put me into on 5th December - sitting in front of the rubberstamp Disciplinary Committee with his fate already predetermined.  You know what they say, Chris - you live by the sword, you die by the sword.  

I will not be the only one of McEleny's many victims who burst out laughing upon reading his squeals of protest to Sky about his dismissal: "Alex Salmond used to always tell me that in a political party rational people need to bump along with each other.  Sadly we have not seen people bumping along with each other."  Anyone would be forgiven for thinking McEleny was not Alba's modern-day Robespierre and that he did not preside over countless malicious expulsions and de facto expulsions with considerable relish.

In case you're wondering whether MacAskill's announcement changes anything, given that McEleny was suspended as General Secretary anyway, it actually does.  If normal practice is followed, McEleny's expulsion will be preceded by a period of suspension from the party itself (he was previously only suspended from his paid employment, not from the party).  That will render him ineligible to stand for depute leader and his nominations will be nullified.  It was obvious something was in the air last night - senior leadership loyalists had seemingly been asked to pass on evidence of McEleny's desperate tactics to get the necessary number of last-gasp nominations (which were actually proving quite effective).  It seems a decision was taken that one or way or another, he simply wasn't going to be allowed to reach the ballot.

I'd suggest it's now almost inevitable that McEleny will lead a mini-exodus of his supporters from the Alba Party - but it will only be a mini-exodus, because as the nominations have proved, he doesn't actually have all that many keen supporters.  But what next?  Will he and his chums abandon independence and throw in their lot with Farage?  Will he set up his own party in the hope Ash Regan will join him in the (highly likely) event that her own leadership bid is unsuccessful?  One thing is for sure - he won't be leaving politics, because he's got his heart set on becoming an MSP.  Apparently he's convinced his family he'll be First Minister one day.  Ahem.

Posted by James Kelly at 12:21 PM 127 comments
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