"Alba insiders" tell The Sun that the leadership election was rigged: yup, that'll be Disgruntled Employee (aka Mad Dog) again

Now I'm not saying all of the leaks from "Alba insiders" to the unionist press over the last few months have necessarily come from "Mad Dog" - it's just that all of the quotes have sounded exactly like him speaking, they've all served his own selfish purpose, and it's hard to see who else would have done it.  The latest one fits that template yet again - here's the anonymous quote in The Sun that we're all obliged to pretend might have come from *absolutely anyone*...

"There are questions as to whether the whole vote was rigged.  Four returning officers were used in an election that lasted as many weeks with only one remaining at the end.  It must be the first leadership election in history that only half of a membership voted in and hundreds if not thousands of members at the start of the year didn’t get to vote in.”

Is it plausible that the election was rigged?  Yes.  Everyone knows at this stage that the 2023 Alba internal elections were shamelessly rigged, and if it can happen once it can certainly happen again.  However, McEleny's own fingerprints were all over the fiddling of the 2023 elections - as General Secretary he gave Alex Salmond the green light to unconstitutionally nullify the victories of Denise Findlay and Jacqui Bijster in the Organisation Convener and Membership Support Convener elections respectively (because Tyrannical Tas wanted them gone at all costs).  The elections were then re-run without Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster as candidates.  McEleny also cynically removed Ms Bijster's name from the list of candidates for Ordinary Members of the NEC, even though she had been properly nominated and had not chosen to withdraw from the race.

So it was to be hoped that now McEleny has been sacked as General Secretary, something that should really have happened months or years ago, the conduct and integrity of internal elections would improve markedly.  And indeed, I've been asking around, and the anecdotal accounts of irregularities are much smaller in number this time.  There are just a handful of reports of people not receiving their online link to the ballot, plus one report of someone receiving a ballot even though she is no longer an Alba member.  So no obvious sign of the industrial-scale vote-rigging that we saw under McEleny's guiding hand in 2023.

He's also on pretty weak ground in suggesting the low turnout is somehow in itself indicative of rigging.  I'd suggest a 50% turnout is in fact all too plausible and it demonstrates that Alba's claimed member numbers are effectively a mirage.  If you can't even be bothered taking a few seconds out of your day to vote for the next party leader, there's clearly zero chance of you turning up to LACU meetings or campaigning sessions.  A very large chunk of the Alba membership is therefore totally inactive and dormant.  And that's happened on McEleny's own watch, remember.

Perhaps the most important point is this.  At the start of last year, McEleny reacted furiously to the accurate claims that the 2023 elections were rigged.  Posing as a tinpot Central American dictator, he described anyone who told the truth about those elections as "enemies of the party" and set about abusing the disciplinary procedure to purge them, with the eager assistance of the disgraceful Disciplinary Committee chair Josh Robertson.  Simply for writing a guest post on the Iain Lawson blog raising some polite and legitimate questions, Colin Alexander was expelled outright.  Denise Somerville was supposedly only "suspended for six months", but in the long run that turned out to be a de facto expulsion.

If McEleny believed back then that simply pointing out that rigged elections were rigged was somehow inconsistent with the duties of Alba membership, then let's be blunt: he lives by the sword and he dies by the sword.  On the standard that he himself has set down, running to the unionist press with a cry of vote-rigging, when the evidence is actually much weaker this time, must by definition be an expulsion offence.  It's an extraordinary thing to do when he knows he is already likely to be facing disciplinary action.

*. *. *

Shannon has been speaking butterfly language to the caterpillar people again - 

Profound, Shannon, profound.  You're the modern-day Sartre.  And it's good to know that you're only motivated by independence, because some have suggested that you were nepotistically employed by your mum when she was an MP, and there have also been a few whispers about a certain fondness for champagne.