The horrors of the Alba dystopia continue as Christina Hendry seemingly bullies a former party member with threats of legal action if a perfectly legitimate tweet is not deleted

In addition to the people who were officially expelled from the Alba Party during the McEleny Purges last year (myself, Geoff Bush and Colin Alexander are the ones I know about, but there may have been others), there was a significantly larger number of others who McEleny bypassed the disciplinary machinery to effectively expel for life by personal diktat.  He was able to do this due to a loophole in the party constitution (albeit almost certainly an intentional loophole) which allows people to be permanently excluded from the party without any form of disciplinary process if the General Secretary simply certifies them as having "publicly resigned from the party", even if in some cases they haven't submitted any sort of resignation at all.  The only safeguard of any sort is that the NEC has to ratify the General Secretary's certification, but I know from personal experience as a former NEC member myself that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh always made sure that happened on the nod and without any discussion.  The whole process took no more than a minute or two.

One of the many victims of this Kafkaesque practice was Ashley Miller, the former Treasurer of Alba's Dundee LACU.  Regular readers of this blog will already know her story from former NEC member Heather McLean's guest post in mid-January about McEleny's maniacal vendetta against the entire Dundee LACU and anyone associated with its leadership.

"I found out that our Treasurer Ashley Miller who had ran the social media accounts since the inception of Alba had wrongly been reported to Twitter for impersonation.  There was a tweet Chris had taken exception to, but rather than contact Ashley and ask her to remove the tweet he heavy-handedly reported her to Twitter.  Ashley was embarrassed and had her reputation traduced and she felt she had no alternative other than to resign.  In an act of vicious nastiness McEleny deemed Ashley to be a public resignation, meaning she cannot rejoin Alba without a vote of the NEC."

It turns out that Alba's sinister persecution of Ashley Miller for her activity on Twitter is continuing to this day, even though she hasn't been a party member for a long time.  If you read between the lines of what she posted only a few hours ago, it seems pretty obvious that she's been threatened with legal action by Christina Hendry - ie. Alex Salmond's niece, Robert Reid's girlfriend, member of Alba's NEC and Disciplinary Committee, and indeed one of the four members of the Disciplinary Committee who voted for my own expulsion on McEleny's ridiculously vague trumped-up charges.

If you're naive enough to assume that Ms Hendry must have had a very good reason to threaten legal action, you'd be wrong.  Her aim is apparently to bully Ms Miller into deleting a single non-abusive tweet, the full text of which is as follows - 

"oh you mean the unprofessional inappropriate relationship.  When you take on the role of being responsible for the youth group there should be red lines that you don't cross.  No matter what organisation the youth group belongs to."

My reading of that is Christina Hendry must be in charge of Alba Youth (I wouldn't know due to my own age bracket!) and Ms Miller is saying she shouldn't have entered into a relationship with Robert Reid, a fellow member of Alba Youth, without resigning from that position first.  Now, I can certainly see why a comment like that would make extremely uncomfortable reading for Ms Hendry, but there's nothing illegitimate about it - the relationship between Mr Reid and Ms Hendry is in the public domain and has been deliberately put there by both of them, and therefore Ms Miller's opinion about the matter must be regarded as fair comment, regardless of whether you happen to agree with her or not.

Once again it speaks incredibly powerfully to the toxic authoritarian culture within Alba, and perhaps also to the political culture Ms Hendry has been immersed in for longer than Alba has even existed, that the first instinct when a member of the party elite sees a tweet they dislike is not to rely on their skills of persuasion to put the alternative point of view, but instead to make the tweet and the person who posted it vanish by instigating either expulsion proceedings or legal proceedings.

One of my most uncomfortable experiences as a member of Alba was listening to Christina Hendry's quietly menacing line of questioning when she was grilling Geoff Bush at a Disciplinary Committee hearing, just minutes before voting to expel him for the heinous crime of having given an inoffensive interview to The National in which he advocated for cooperation with other pro-indy parties and independent candidates.  The gist of her questions was "if you had your time again, would you give that interview again, or would you keep your trap shut?"  The threat was unspoken but obvious - she would only let Mr Bush stay in the party if he prostrated himself before her and promised to be a good boy in future and to not exercise his right to free speech in a way that she disapproved of.  To his immense credit, Mr Bush just gave her a relaxed smile and confirmed that he would say the same things again.

Ms Hendry had on several occasions in Disciplinary Committee meetings expounded her view that Alba is a sort of secret society in which rank-and-file members have absolutely no right to express personal opinions that differ from the leadership line unless they do so strictly behind closed doors.  Chris Cullen, also part of the Alba elite due to his place within the so-called "Corri Nostra", took a very similar attitude.

McEleny's recent "seek help" Twitter rant against me followed the bog-standard playbook of his hero Campbell by implying I was mentally ill (ironically his own nickname is "Mad Dog McEleny" and he has an alcohol problem that directly led to him being put on trial for threatening behaviour in 2023). He also falsely accused me of "harassing" three categories of people within the Alba Party - "family members, private citizens & young women".  But if you deconstruct which actual individuals he was referring to as being within those three categories, it comes to a grand total of two people.  "Family members" and "private citizens" seems to refer to Bob Reid, dad of Robert Reid, who I don't know from Adam but who decided to carry on his son's campaign of harassment against me by tracking me down and attacking my views on Ukraine at some length.  (My own so-called "harassment of Bob Reid" consisted of my rather robust public response to his unprovoked attack.)  And "young women" seems to refer solely to Christina Hendry herself - I literally can't think of a single other person McEleny could possibly be getting at.  Alba isn't exactly full of young women these days.

So who exactly is this vulnerable shrinking violet that seemingly must be protected from brutes like me? She's the person who thinks she has a God-given right to stand in the Banffshire and Buchan Coast constituency next year due to being "of Salmond blood".  (As an anonymous commenter on this blog memorably put it, "this isny Game of Thrones".)  She's the person who tells Alba members to essentially "shut up or else" - and has no compunction about expelling them if they don't shut up.  And she's now the person who apparently threatens former members of the party with legal action simply for expressing legitimate, non-abusive views on social media.

Sorry, Chris, but you're going to have to find a much more promising candidate to portray as a "victim".

*  *  *

Meanwhile, the Alba internal elections are shaping up to be another wretched affair.  McEleny is really, really struggling to get enough nominations to reach the ballot for depute leader - he's miles short with only a few days to go, and in desperation has taken to direct messaging individual Alba members on Twitter and Whatsapp to beg them to nominate him.  He isn't even bothering to pretend he'd be a good candidate - he's arguing he should be on the ballot just for the sake of having a contest.  In reality, many Alba members would probably much prefer a coronation to the acute embarrassment of having a disgraced former General Secretary, who is still suspended for gross misconduct, run for the party's second highest office.

The Mad Dog tactics of Mad Dog may even prove effective if he's persistent enough, but at what cost?  I gather the leadership elite, which no longer regards McEleny as one of their own, is collecting evidence of what he's been doing, perhaps with a view to using it against him in future disciplinary action.

There had been some optimism that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, regarded by many as an even bigger problem for the party than McEleny, might sit these elections out, but it seems she's dashed those hopes by belatedly entering the mix.  That probably means she'll stay on as the appointed Party Chair, and the Tas Tyranny will continue for yet another year.

There are apparently three times as many male candidates for the NEC as female candidates.  Because each gender gets four slots apiece, that means the immature Shannon Donoghue now has a 50/50 chance of getting on the party's ruling body simply by being on the ballot.

And Donoghue's partner Chris Cullen also looks like the favourite to become the new Local Government Convener.  That will be another terrible step backwards for the party, given the views he expressed on the Constitution Review Group about how Alba members should be treated with extreme distrust and should not be given the right to make decisions or even to be given substantive information about what goes on in the party.