If he truly believes that, he's descending into a world of fantasy. He's talking about a party, let's not forget, which over the last couple of years has had one of the highest per capita rates of Mafia-style backstabbing and bloodletting of any political party in western Europe. And there are two very recent events that are more than a tad difficult to square with the "collegiate and harmonious" line -
* As I mentioned the other day, there are strong indications that a very senior member of Alba, possibly even one "of Salmond blood", tried to get the police involved in her bitter vendetta against an NEC colleague who resigned from the party after being relentlessly bullied. This incident apparently happened only around a month ago.
* The Electoral Commission website still shows that Alba's Nominating Officer, ie. the only individual who is ultimately responsible for approving Alba election candidates, is none other than Chris McEleny - the man expelled from Alba two months ago. It's hard to think of a less "collegiate and harmonious" state of affairs than to have an expellee in such a pivotal position. And under the rules, it's almost impossible to get rid of him unless he voluntarily resigns, which apparently he has refused to do. This is an almost unprecedented situation in British political history - I say "almost" because something similar happened to George Galloway's former party Respect. (By a strange coincidence, Alba's delightful Yvonne Ridley was heavily embroiled in that Respect clusterbourach - if you do a Google search, you'll even find a newspaper article from the time which tries to determine whether or not she was technically the Respect leader.)
I also get the impression that these two episodes are not entirely unrelated. Although the story about the police came to me in garbled form, the implication seemed to be that it had something to do with the Alba leadership's panic over the McEleny situation, which made me think I may have been on the right track in wondering whether they're concerned that they may have to nominally re-register the party under a new name, as the only viable way of getting round the roadblock of McEleny insisting on remaining as Nominating Officer.
MacAskill's comments were made in response to a Herald interview with McEleny a week ago, which I hadn't previously seen. It contains this extraordinary statement -
"You can't stay a big tent and a broad church but kick out people when they disagree with you."
Are we to take this as some sort of Damascene conversion, Chris? Or as some sort of long-overdue apology to myself, Denise Somerville, Geoff Bush, Sean Davis and Colin Alexander, all of whom you expelled from Alba (or de facto expelled) for fatuous non-reasons last year? There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repenteth, etc, etc.
McEleny also blasts MacAskill for turning Alba into a "1970s tribute act", which seems at least in part to be code for "he's taking too principled a stance on Gaza". I don't know if it's Stew's influence, but McEleny does seem to be increasingly flirting with the dark side on Gaza - see for example his ghastly retweet from a few weeks ago which mocked Greta Thunberg for caring too much about the issue, and did so from a firmly right-wing American, genocide-apologist perspective.
McEleny justifies all of this by saying Alba should be concentrating on bread-and-butter issues that matter to voters, but then bizarrely in the next breath he starts banging on like a true ideologue about the vital importance of Ash Regan's "Unbuyable" bill on prostitution law, which is not relevant to the lives of the vast majority of voters and which polling shows is an extremely low priority for them (and indeed polling also shows that voters oppose the principles of the bill in any case).
All of this reminds me that I received another press release from the National Ugly Mugs campaign a few days ago that identified a comment from the Scottish Government's Siobhian Brown which expressed scepticism about the wisdom of Regan's bill. If the SNP leadership aren't going to lend support to the bill, it's obviously far less likely to pass. The SNP are in principle sympathetic to the Nordic Model, but it makes perfect sense that if there's ever going to be legislation, they'd want to draw it up themselves, rather than allow Alba's only MSP to railroad it through in a half-baked form.
The Herald have once again drawn attention to Regan's now-notorious literalistic misunderstanding of the term "prostitution being driven underground". I hadn't seen the full quote before, and it truly is a thing of beauty -
"If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would the punters get to them?"
Hopefully somebody will ask Regan if she wants to put clear blue water between herself and the SNP, just to see if she starts looking into the cost of a dinghy.
Reading between the lines of the McEleny interview, it's obvious that his expulsion from Alba has been upheld by the Appeals Committee (assuming he even put in an appeal at all). Given the time limits imposed by Alba's rules, the process must be over by now.
Last but not least, we have MacAskill's delusional claim that Alba could win between eight and sixteen list seats next year. Eight seats would mean they'd have to treble their 2% list vote share in last week's Ipsos poll. They'd have to multiply it by six to get to sixteen seats. Let's get real, Kenny - it's not going to happen. Alba remain firmly on course for zero seats.
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That the Alba project has failed completely after only a few years is thoroughly depressing.
ReplyDeleteThe party that we hoped would at least become a thorn in the side of the SNP, forcing them to concentrate on independence, never really got off the launchpad (not a real one, they were never going to the moon, Ash).
All those snide put downs by the likes of Wishart about Alba being a 'pop up indy party polling at 1%' etc have proved to be true and, if anything, is likely to have strengthened the SNP's own high opinion of itself. Their monopoly of the Yes movement reinforced, they are even less likely to adopt the change in focus many of us are calling for.
Total agreement with you. It's a real shame because the SNP need reminded why they exist, although most people understand that in government the SNP also need to show competence and care for the population. A conundrum that needs fixed.
DeleteIf you look at some of the people attracted to Alba membership in its early days, there is a similarity to the types attracted to Reform.
Deletehow long should indy people keep supporting the SNP for?
ReplyDeleteanother 10 years of doing sodall, 20, 30.
at what point do you realise that with them, nothing will be done, for they do not care; indy nationalism is as hollow as labour socialism