As expected, Alba's kangaroo court has upheld my expulsion - so now that I no longer owe any loyalty to the party and can at last speak freely, it's time to consider where it all went so wrong for Alba

As this process has been a blatant stitch-up from beginning to end, it won't surprise anyone to hear that my appeal against expulsion has been rejected, and that the Alba Party is now permanently and irrevocably part of my past.  As I've said all along, I do not intend to be left politically homeless, and I will hopefully be able to announce my new political home in the very near future.

It scarcely seems possible, but if anything my treatment at the hands of the Appeals Committee last night was even more contemptuous than my treatment by the Disciplinary Committee on 5th December.  The Disciplinary Committee allowed me to attend the hearing for just twelve minutes, but I think last night it was more like nine or ten minutes before I was told to leave.  There's a very straightforward reason for that: it was absolutely blindingly obvious that the leadership loyalists on both committees were under strict instructions to ask me no questions at all, presumably to avoid giving me any ammunition.  I'm not letting my imagination run away with me there - when I was a member of the Disciplinary Committee, I sat through enough meetings with Christina Hendry to know that she had any number of menacing and inappropriate questions to ask Geoff Bush (for example) when she was in the middle of expelling him for no good reason, but mysteriously she went all bashful in my case and didn't say a single word until after I left the meeting.  Jackie Reid and Geraldine Harron took the same approach, as did John Caddis and a couple of others last night.

After the sheep incident yesterday I found myself unexpectedly short of time, so I spent two hours under considerable stress writing a little speech.  You really do come away feeling you've been treated like dirt when you go to all that trouble, and then read out the speech knowing full well that only one person is actually listening to you, and all the others are just sitting there with bored expressions waiting to follow the instructions they've been given. The whole outcome was 100% predetermined months ago, just as Yvonne Ridley boasted was the case long before I was even suspended.

Incidentally, the meeting yesterday was almost postponed at the last minute.  Corri Wilson wrote to me at around 5pm saying that the convener of the Appeals Committee wasn't available, and giving me a choice of either postponing or going ahead with a temporary chair appointed by the NEC.  I chose the latter option because McEleny has been mucking me around for months on end, and I wanted the process over with once and for all.  But several people I spoke to felt I was making the wrong decision and that I was "walking into a Tasmina / Corri trap". They felt it was a stunt to replace a convener who is known to be relatively fair-minded with a temporary chair from within the clique that was hellbent on expelling me.  I didn't know who that person would be until the meeting actually started, but it turned out to be Debbie Ewen.  When I mentioned that name after the meeting was over, the reaction was: "Sorry James, but you're toast.  Debbie takes her orders direct from the Corri Nostra."  Make of that what you will, but my own sense of the arithmetic is that I would have lost the vote no matter who the chair had been.  From the body language, three people were unremittingly hostile, and I would imagine I lost the vote 3-1, or possibly 4-1 if Ewen herself took part.

When I and others joined Alba in 2021, many people taunted us about how we were going to live to regret it.  I was extremely confident that wasn't true, and that even if Alba ultimately failed I would have no regrets about joining, because the party had been set up for the right reasons and with the very best of intentions.  With the benefit of hindsight, I'd have to concede I was completely wrong about that.  If I'd had any idea of the authoritarian freak show I was walking into, or of the toxic culture of bullying that I would be caught up in, I'd never have touched Alba with a bargepole. Having realised I'd made that mistake (and I'd certainly fully woken up to the situation by around a year ago), I felt the best thing to do was work from within to try to get the party onto the right track.  You might remember that I wrote a blogpost saying it's a bad idea to invoke Katy Perry by constantly changing political parties "like a girl changes clothes".  But now that the decision has been taken for me, it's something of a relief, and I'm quite happy to hold my hands up and admit that it was a big, big mistake to join Alba.  I sincerely apologise to anyone who was influenced by me and ended up joining Alba themselves, and I hope anyone in that situation understands that I was genuinely unaware of the true nature of the party.

Essentially Alba is a private club run for the exclusive convenience of a few dozen people belonging to a few closely connected families and friends.  It's tarted up to look like a party with internal democratic structures accessible to all members, but that's just window dressing.  If anyone from outside the ruling elite tries to use the democratic structures to push for change, they'll hit a brick wall, and if they push too hard, they'll swiftly find themselves suspended or expelled.  

How did such a grotesque situation come about?  In the months leading up to Alba's creation, Alex Salmond phoned me a number of times.  He was obviously courting the pro-indy New Media in case he wanted to get a new party off the ground quickly (although he clearly decided subsequently that the New Media was of no value to him after all, because Alba ended up alienating almost all of the main bloggers apart from Wings - and even Wings generally tells readers to vote unionist rather than Alba).  However in none of those phone calls did Mr Salmond actually share his plans, and I didn't feel it was my place to ask him to.  But luckily I was in touch with someone who did know his thinking.  

It was suggested to me at one point that he intended to model the new party after the Brexit Party, ie. with "registered supporters" rather than members to ensure he retained total control.  I assumed that plan had been ditched when I saw the Alba constitution was on paper a little more democratic than the SNP's, but in retrospect the registered supporters model is exactly what Alba ended up with - it's just that those people were called "members" and there was a big pretence that they had a say in how the party was run.  The best evidence that it was a pretence is the blatant rigging of the October 2023 internal elections. When the "wrong" people won, Mr Salmond simply voided the results (which he had no constitutional power to do) and ordered the elections to be re-run, and then put intense and wholly inappropriate pressure on the "wrong" winners to stand aside, which they duly did.  He justified this extraordinary action by standing up at conference and brandishing a "dossier" supposedly containing evidence that his family had been targeted during the elections and that there had been a plot to sabotage conference.  None of that was true.  I have been told by no fewer than three different people, all of whom I trust, that Mr Salmond later openly admitted to someone that no dossier had ever existed and that the whole thing was a gigantic bluff to justify the unjustifiable.  The rigging of those elections would have been one of the biggest scandals in modern Scottish political history if it hadn't been for the fact that journalists see Alba as a total irrelevance and just weren't paying any attention.

Something else I was told by my source in early 2021 is that Mr Salmond wasn't sure whether a new party was going to be possible due to the difficulties of securing funding. It looks like an awful lot of deals were done in the final weeks before the party was launched, and those deals ended up forging the shape of Alba's ruling elite.  That explains the really odd line-up of parliamentary candidates last July.  It possibly explains the special status that everyone knows certain individuals enjoy within the party.  Several people in the know have told me that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh regards Alba as "her" party in a very literal sense, and that being party chair was non-negotiable for her. That could well be why it's proved impossible to persuade the leadership to accept one member, one vote for NEC elections - the thinking is that Ahmed-Sheikh needs to finish top of the NEC ballot to justify her appointed position as chair, and of course the only way to guarantee that any particular candidate tops the poll is by retaining the downright weird "pay per vote" system that is in place at present.

As far as Yvonne Ridley's special protected status is concerned, that apparently is not to do with money but instead the foreign media contacts she brings to the table.  She apparently opened a lot of doors for Salmond and Ahmed-Sheikh, which was regarded as invaluable, and therefore pretty much anyone will be sacrificed if they displease Ridley.  An Alba member once called her an "Islamist" and McEleny went completely nuts - I've seen the email exchange.

Now that I no longer owe any loyalty to the Alba party, I want to help Alba members make up their own minds about the state of their own party by putting as much information as is realistically possible into the public domain, so I'll be running a series of articles loosely called "THE ALBA FILES". (Before anyone panics, it's only a name.)  I'm going to start with the text of the defence document I submitted to the Disciplinary Committee in the run-up to the December hearing.  So check back later if you'd like to read that.  In the meantime, I'll leave you with an anonymous comment that was left on this blog the other day, and that I think is bang on the money - 

"If anything good has come of your membership of Alba, James, it's this: for years, I thought a lot of Alba High Command left the SNP because they could no longer stomach the authoritarian pivot by SNP leadership.

As your time in the party has shown, it turns out they actually left not because they disagreed with the authoritarian direction of the SNP, but because they were not the ones in charge of that authoritarian direction.

And I include Tasmina, McEleny, and Salmond himself in that. A bunch of self-absorbed, temper-tantruming egoists whose anti-authoritarian 'principles' turn out to have been a bunch of self-serving rubbish.

Aside from MacAskill, the whole upper echelons of the party reek of authoritarian overreach and self-interest. The SNP writ-small, if you will."