THE ALBA FILES, Part 10: Fresh evidence emerges of Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh fostering a culture of bullying within the Alba Party

There's been a curious phenomenon in the Alba Party as a result of the recent leadership election.  Some people who were previously very critical of Chris McEleny have started to try to rehabilitate him, at least to a limited degree.  My guess is that's because they were (and are) Ash Regan supporters, and McEleny's staunch backing of Regan has led them to instinctively feel they should be defending him.

Those of you who occasionally dip your toes into the scary world that we call the comments section of this blog may have seen that there's been one anonymous commenter in particular, who on the face of it appears to be quite well informed, and who has been pushing back determinedly against the information I was given about McEleny's precise role in the malicious "disciplinary" action that was taken against me last year, in particular my initial unconstitutional removal from my elected position on a party committee.  The commenter has even claimed that McEleny argued against my removal, precisely on the basis that there was nothing in the Alba constitution allowing it to be done, but that others on the NEC left him no choice and effectively instructed him to proceed with an unconstitutional action.

In my view, any quibbles about McEleny's exact role in the choreography of my own eventual expulsion from Alba are missing the point.  When the history of the Alba Party is written, McEleny is not going to come out of it as anything other than a major villain.  During my time as a member of the Disciplinary Committee, I saw with my own eyes his abuse of the disciplinary machinery to thuggishly try to hush up the rigging of the 2023 internal elections.  He lied through his teeth to the committee in claiming that Colin Alexander did not wish to defend himself in person, and insisted upon Mr Alexander's outright expulsion from Alba in pursuit of a personal vendetta after Mr Alexander made a harmless but irreverent joke about him on Twitter.

In a guest post on this blog, Heather McLean outlined in detail the wrathful vengeance McEleny meted out against Alba members in Dundee who had unwittingly displeased him.  Screenshots of the appalling emails he sent to Leanne Tervit are in the public domain, and it's also known that he played a direct role in the 2023 vote-rigging himself, most notably by removing Jacqui Bijster's name from the list of candidates for Ordinary NEC members, even though she had been properly nominated and hadn't chosen to withdraw.

In my own case, it's beyond dispute that McEleny broke the rules at the point at which the initial complaint against me was submitted.  (It was nominally submitted by Hamish Vernal and co-signed by Shannon Donoghue, Chris Cullen and others, but there's very little doubt that the real instigators were Donoghue/Cullen and possibly Corri Wilson and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who were using the irascible Vernal as their front-man.)  The limited documentation I was provided with shows that Vernal submitted the complaint to McEleny and Ahmed-Sheikh on 23rd April 2024, and that Ahmed-Sheikh belatedly acknowledged receipt on 2nd May.  And yet no disciplinary action was instigated until September.  I was kept completely in the dark about the complaint until an email I received from McEleny out of the blue on 9th September.  

By definition, this means McEleny failed to do what the Alba constitution absolutely required him to do, namely to either immediately dismiss the complaint (he had full powers of veto) or to immediately refer it to the Disciplinary Committee.  In my view, it's obvious he should have dismissed the complaint because it was plainly without foundation, but at least if he had immediately passed it on to the Disciplinary Committee he would have been abiding by the rules.  By taking neither course of action he was perhaps taking the coward's way out, because he didn't feel able to make a ruling on the invalid nature of a complaint that was formally submitted by Vernal (who as an elderly former Provost of Aberdeenshire is the closest thing Alba has to a "grandee") and in reality was instigated by the all-powerful Corri Nostra and Ahmed-Sheikh.

Even if it's true, as the anonymous commenter claims, that certain NEC members insisted upon dredging the complaint up again in September and that McEleny spoke out against it, that's not particularly to McEleny's credit because his concern was almost certainly that he knew I had a platform, that I wouldn't go quietly, and that there was plenty I could reveal about the way he had repeatedly abused the disciplinary machinery over the preceding months to pursue vendettas against Colin Alexander, Denise Somerville, Geoff Bush and others.

In any case, I pointed out to the anonymous commenter that the claims they were making about McEleny's actions directly contradicted the information I had received from elsewhere, and that if they were claiming to have definite knowledge, they really ought to clarify whether or not they were on the NEC in September - because only an NEC member who attended the relevant meeting in September could possibly know for sure what had happened.  They then sent me an email in which they stressed they needed to remain anonymous (for reasons I'm sure we can all easily understand) but provided me with a screenshot from the NEC Whatsapp chat group to demonstrate that they were indeed an NEC member at the relevant time.

The screenshot itself is extremely revealing.  I won't publish it here in case it somehow identifies the source (I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do but I can't rule out the possibility that there's some quirk of Whatsapp formatting that I'm unaware of), but it shows Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh saying the following about one of my blogposts - 

"Dear NEC

I post this for your info because he refers to a "current or former" female NEC member (I'm sure he knows which and I'm sure we can decipher).

If he carries on in this vein, I will be asking the General Secretary to write to him and tell him to cease and desist attacks on the NEC and that his blog will also be passed to the Conduct (sic) Committee as an additional piece of evidence in the matter they will be considering in short course.

Thank you"

Initially I didn't think there was anything I didn't already know in that, but I then checked the specific blogpost Ahmed-Sheikh was referring to.  It's this one, in which I first went public about the blatant harassment I had been receiving by Direct Message on Twitter from a former Alba national office bearer, who kept sending me entirely unsolicited and unwanted private messages taunting me that she had inside information from her senior chums (probably Ahmed-Sheikh herself and the Corri Nostra) that a private decision had been taken to stitch up my expulsion from Alba long before a complaint had ever been officially submitted.  I didn't name that person at the time, but I later revealed it was Yvonne Ridley.  It was beyond dispute that the harassment had occurred and that Ridley had sent me the offending messages unprompted, because extraordinarily she proudly published the entire exchange herself.

It is nothing short of astounding (or ought to be) that the chair of a political party can see indisputable evidence that a former party officer bearer has breached the Code of Conduct by bullying and harassing a fellow party member, and react to it not by taking action against the former office bearer, but by instead unleashing the forces of hell on the victim of the bullying - who was apparently required to silently submit to it lest he be accused of "attacks on the NEC".  (Eh?  "Yvonne Ridley" and "the NEC" are rather different concepts - Ridley wasn't even a member of the NEC at the time.)

You may remember that I warned Ahmed-Sheikh during a lengthy email exchange in the spring of 2024 that she was in danger of fostering a culture of bullying within Alba.  How comprehensively correct she proved me only a few months later.  But then, that's exactly what you'd expect Ahmed-Sheikh to do if Yvonne Ridley's boast had been honest all along, ie. if the whole disciplinary process against me was a sham designed to bring about a predetermined outcome privately decided upon by a corrupt Alba elite many months earlier.