Thoughts on some of the more colourful 'feedback' about my return to the SNP

Around 70-80% of the feedback to my decision to rejoin the SNP has been positive.  However, it was always inevitable that my stalker from Somerset, and his devoted followers, would have a somewhat different take.  I know some people will always give Campbell a free pass no matter what he says or does, but in all seriousness I do think that thread on Twitter was objectively unacceptable.  I'm not talking about Campbell's own starter tweet, which was simply mockery of me and (uncharacteristically) didn't stray into outright foul-mouthed abuse.  But there are a few dozen replies to that tweet from the Fan Club, and by my reckoning around nine of them are abusive enough to warrant a report to Twitter, and indeed I have reported them to Twitter.  Of course it's a complete and utter waste of time reporting even the most extreme abuse in Musk-era Twitter, but sometimes it feels worth going through the motions simply as a matter of principle and self-respect, and I defy any reasonable person to tell me those tweets shouldn't in theory be removed.  Highlights include "creepy c**t", "pillock", and "dumb arse".  

With relentless reliability, Shannon Donoghue (who along with her partner Chris Cullen was one of the main instigators of my expulsion from the Alba Party) has yet again breached Alba's Code of Conduct by participating in the thread.  But never fear, Shannon fans - she won't be expelled from the party, nor will she be suspended, nor will any disciplinary action be taken against her whatsoever.  Alba doesn't take disciplinary action against the daughter of the Deputy General Secretary when she bullies people, don't be silly, of course it doesn't.  In fact one of the primary functions of the Alba disciplinary machinery is to facilitate and amplify bullying campaigns launched by Shannon and her much-respected extended family.  And it can't be denied that the disciplinary machinery is a veritable Rolls Royce in fulfilling this true purpose.  What happened to me was merely one of several inspiring examples of Shannon's tremendous success in cleansing the party of members who were not quite to her personal taste.

Nine highly abusive tweets out of a few dozen is an extraordinarily high percentage, and when I showed the thread to a few people, one reaction was: "Don't worry, James, that's just the Alba Way". Now, in one sense that's deeply unfair, because it's actually the Wings Way - Campbell's followers are simply following the standard of behaviour that he has set, and in theory Alba is not the Wings Party. I know there are many, many decent Alba members out there who want nothing to do with Campbell or the thuggery he represents and sponsors.  But in another sense it's entirely fair, because the Alba hierarchy have since day one deliberately allowed the boundaries to become blurred between themselves and Wings.  Doubtless that was an act of expediency and they reckoned there was some sort of advantage to it, but it's come at a terrible cost, because it's one of the main causes of Alba's brand becoming more toxic than it ever needed to be or ever should have been.

I've noted before that Campbell is a kind of 'Pied Piper' figure, and that can be seen most clearly in the attitude towards him of a certain subset of Alba members.  They still regard him as a folk hero when in fact they should be furious with him for wrecking their party's chances of ever becoming a credible electoral force. Campbell pushed for Alba's creation (as indeed I did) and went into one of his prolonged huffs during the period when it looked like Alex Salmond had decided against the idea.  But having eventually got what he wanted, did he do what I and so many others did by actually joining the party and getting stuck in and trying to get Alba into fit shape for the future?  No of course he didn't. He refused to join and instead did his Pontius Pilate routine, washing his hands of the party, telling his readers to vote Labour or Tory, while berating other people for failing to make a success of Alba.   And yet somehow his apologists still fail to join the dots and refuse to accept that his calculated withholding of support has been one of the reasons for Alba's failure.

The irony of course is that the Alba leadership lionise him for that lack of support, while those of us who joined and tried to make the party work have in many cases been either expelled or indirectly forced out, and then been demonised as a "wee gang of malcontents".  It's quite telling that Independence Live recently released a highlights video of Alex Salmond, in which many members of the "wee gang of malcontents" featured extremely prominently.  One might almost call it "Alex Salmond's Good Times With The Wee Gang of Malcontents: The Movie" - and Zulfikar didn't even get to direct it.

The root cause of my own expulsion was my push for reform and democratisation of the party on the Constitution Review Group, a body on which I had the dubious pleasure of serving alongside the aforementioned Shannon Donoghue and Chris Cullen.  The pair of them are, let's be blunt, playground bullies and their sole aim on the CRG was to prevent rank-and-file Alba members from having any say whatsoever in the way the party is run - or from even being given any information on the way the party is run.  But of course they were also horrified by the thought that Alba members might find out or guess that they were the ones responsible for thwarting internal party democracy, and that was ultimately the genesis of the malicious disciplinary action taken against me.

Anyone who thinks that I was expelled because the Alba hierarchy genuinely believed that the democratisation proposals I put forward were not in the best interests of the Alba Party must be living on another planet.  Those proposals were admittedly not in the best interests of Chris McEleny, or of Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, or of Corri Wilson, or of Shannon Donoghue, or of Chris Cullen.  But that is not the same thing as the best interests of the Alba Party.

As I pointed out the other day, having been maliciously expelled from the party on a bunch of utterly ludicrous trumped up charges, nobody in Alba could have any legitimate complaints about my subsequent decision to rejoin the SNP.  And yet as that Wings thread on Twitter exemplified, they did have complaints.  In fact they did nothing but complain.  Specifically, they seemed to think they had a right to expect me to still vote Alba on the Holyrood list even after my expulsion, and were furious with me for making a statement of the bleedin' obvious that I will instead be voting for the party I am now a member of.  In absolute seriousness, even if I hadn't rejoined the SNP, who in their right mind would continue voting for a party that has just expelled them?  Would Campbell do it?   Of course he bloody wouldn't.  The sense of entitlement in expecting me to do it is just through the roof.

At some point Alba are going to have to face up to the fact that the appalling way they have been treating their own members is not normal or routine.  It is in fact downright weird and abnormal.  It has directly brought about a state of affairs in which an Alba vote on the list is simply no longer an acceptable option for a large chunk of the most committed independence supporters.  Although I'm one of only a relatively small number who have been expelled from Alba outright, there are any number of others who have been forced out by bullying or ill-treatment.  Only a minority of them have done what I did by rejoining the SNP - but I suspect very few of them will be voting Alba on the list in 2026.  And that's on Alba.  It's not a me issue, it's not an Eva Comrie issue, it's not a Denise Findlay issue, it's not a Jacqueline Bijster issue, it's not an Alan Harris issue.  It's an Alba issue.  Alba could have been a welcoming broad church, uniting the most radical independence supporters behind a successful list vote strategy.  Instead it's chosen to become a narrow, paranoid, autocratic sect - one which now commands far too little support or sympathy to have any realistic chance of winning list seats.  Choices have consequences, I'm afraid.

Incidentally, Campbell's mockery of me for rejoining the SNP follows on from his mockery of me a few weeks ago for raising even the vague possibility of standing as an independent candidate or supporting other pro-indy independent candidates.  As there were only a finite number of options open to me once Alba expelled me (and one of the very few others was throwing in my lot with Peter A Bell), it's hard to escape the conclusion that he would have mocked me no matter what decision I had taken.  And you know what?  That might just possibly mean that his mockery is not coming from the most sincere of places.

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Shannon Donoghue has said "Character is always shown - just give it time", and I actually agree with her about that.  The time has come for Alba members to at long last find out about the actions and words of the people who run their party, so they can make up their own minds - not only about those people's characters, but also about the sustainability of Alba's whole system of autocratic, elite-led internal governance.  I have been persuaded by Shannon's intervention, which I in no way interpret as the victory dance of an immature bully, that my whistleblowing efforts should now aim for maximalist rather than minimalist disclosure of the available material, so that Alba members finally know in as much detail as possible what has hitherto been cynically concealed from them.

Coming up over the next few weeks on Scot Goes Pop's new series 'THE ALBA FILES' -

* 'The Conduct Of Christopher'

* 'Tas Unplugged'

* 'The Inside Track From The Constitution Review Group: Lifestyle Tips From A Straight-Talking Independent Woman'

* The remaining three installments of the story of the sham 'disciplinary' process that led to my expulsion

plus much, much more.  Stay tuned.