Alba members have finally been sent the report of the Constitution Review Group - this may be your one and only chance to seize democratic control over your own party, and please pay special attention to the vital need to democratise the Conference Committee in particular

I went to my first SNP branch meeting tonight since rejoining the party, and while no political party will ever be perfect, it was something of a relief to symbolically 'turn the page' on my horrific experience in Alba.  Ironically, while I was sitting in the meeting, it looks like Alba members were at long last being sent the recommendations of the Constitution Review Group, which I was an elected member of until September - a fact that ultimately led to my ejection from Alba due to me pushing 'too hard' for internal democratisation.  So although I no longer have any stake in what happens in Alba, I was obviously very curious tonight to see the document and to discover whether it bore any resemblance to what was agreed at the final meeting of the group before McEleny suspended me out of the blue.  I'm grateful to the Alba member (for obvious reasons I won't name her but she knows who she is!) who sent the document to me.

First thoughts: bravo to Mike Baldry.  He was the one remaining pro-reform member of the group after I was removed, and it looks like he's somehow held the line and kept what was agreed last spring more or less intact.  I should also give some grudging credit to the group's anti-reform chair Hamish Vernal, who doesn't appear to have exploited my removal as an excuse to water the document down.

What that means essentially is that where the group was not unanimous or almost unanimous, both the majority and minority positions have been presented in the document for Alba members to consider and choose between.  So that in theory opens up an opportunity for Alba members, if they wish, to decide that the elected members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), the Conference Committee, the Conduct Committee, the Appeals Committee, and the Finance & Audit Committee, should be directly elected by all party members on a one member, one vote basis - as opposed to the current set-up where only a tiny minority of members get to vote.  There are also options presented (sort of) for the Party Chair to become a de facto elected position by being reserved for one of the two people who finish top of the male and female ballots for Ordinary NEC members, and for an expansion in the number of Ordinary NEC members from eight to twelve, thus allowing for a greater range of voices to be heard.  The leadership will presumably lean extremely hard on the rank-and-file membership to reject those options, and of course one of the paradoxes of so many members having left in disgust is that the people who are still left in the party are disproportionately likely to be leadership cheerleaders.  But go on, Alba members - prove me wrong, and reclaim democratic control of your own party.  It may well be the only chance you'll ever get to do that, and if you don't take it, you may be dooming the party forever (whether the leadership realise that or not).

People who support one member, one vote for NEC elections sometimes used to say to me that they worried it might somehow be 'overkill' to extend that to the other national committees.  If you're one of those people, I really do urge you to think again, because the Conference Committee is in practice far more powerful than the NEC.  Alba members theoretically control the party's policy and strategy via the national conference - but that theory is utterly meaningless if they don't also control the national conference's agenda, and they can only do that if they directly elect the Conference Committee.  Although the Conference Committee is the only national committee I was never a member of, I've heard reports from those who were members, and they all agree that in its current form it's a one-woman Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh dictatorship.  She insists on "consensus decisions", which in practice means the committee is required to agree to whatever she wants without a vote.  

Famously (and to Daniel Jack's displeasure I brought this incident up in the Constitution Review Group), Tasmina responded to a proposal that national conference should consider the introduction of a policy development committee by bellowing "THAT'S A BIG NO FROM ME!!!!", which apparently was supposed to be the end of the matter.  Good luck, Alba members, in trying to democratically control your own party unless you transform the Conference Committee from a Tas dictatorship into a directly-elected body.

The case for the Conduct and Appeals Committees to be elected by one member, one vote is pretty straightforward - it's not fair for any party member to be expelled or suspended unless they've had an opportunity to elect the bodies making that decision.  I suppose I would concede it may not be the end of the world if the Finance & Audit Committee is not directly elected, but in principle I do think it should be.

I'm slightly disturbed by one of the documents that has been distributed along with the main report, which appears to set out proposed revisions of how the Disciplinary Committee should operate.  I'm not totally sure whether that originates from the Constitution Review Group itself or from somewhere else, but amazingly it makes an already bad situation even worse in some respects.  It limits the 'defendant' in any disciplinary case to just five minutes for an oral presentation, and it also limits each committee member to "approximately" just two questions.  As you may remember, I was only permitted to be present at my own disciplinary hearing for twelve minutes, and a big part of the reason for that is the leadership loyalists on the committee had very obviously been instructed not to ask me any questions at all in case it gave me ammunition.  So only one person was interested in asking me questions, and if that person had been restricted to only two questions, I'd have been there for an even shorter period than twelve minutes.

It hardly seemed possible that such an awful disciplinary procedure could be made even worse, but they seem to be managing it somehow.