Does the Alba Party's "princess" Shannon Cullen regret her ill-judged association with far-right agitator Craig Houston, now that he's been whipping up racial hatred outside a primary school?

In a way it's ironic that the Alba Party have become so vehemently anti-monarchy, because they certainly believe in the principle of Royal Families within their own ranks.  Famously, Christina Hendry and her family have special status because they are "Of Salmond Blood", while in Ayrshire the Corri Nostra clan of Corri Wilson, her daughter Shannon Cullen (formerly Donoghue) and her son-in-law Chris Cullen are able to lord it over the common folk, in part thanks to their chumminess with the party's de facto leader Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh.  Good luck to any Alba member in getting the normal party rules to apply to any of these people - they act with total immunity and total impunity.

Not long before my enforced departure from the Alba Party, I was subjected to low-grade bullying by both Chris Cullen and Shannon Donoghue as she was still called.  Most of it occurred in person and therefore away from the public eye, but by September 2024 she was emboldened to start making extremely personal public attacks against me on Twitter - a blatant breach of the party's Code of Conduct, which luckily doesn't apply to Alba royalty like Our Shannon.  She probably felt able to do that because she knew by that point that Josh Robertson and "The Squad" had been quietly informed that they would be instructed to expel me before the year was out - whereas I was still oblivious to the fact that any action against me was even in the pipeline.  I was astonished to see that one of the people who piled in behind her while she was publicly bullying me was the notorious far-right podcaster Craig Houston, who spoke to her in distinctly chummy tones as if he regarded her as a personal friend.

That was because she had been a guest on his podcast/YouTube channel three months earlier.  As the mask had so clearly slipped and she was no longer making any secret of her hostility towards me, I felt able to point out on this blog that her decision to take part in that podcast was extraordinarily ill-judged, given that she represents a party that is ostensibly left of centre.  I said that it may be justified to take part in public discussions or debates with far-right individuals as long as the purpose of the exercise is to challenge their views or to offer an alternative, but that wasn't what had happened in this case - the conversation on the podcast had been cosy bordering on intimate, and had been firmly in the service of Houston's own political agenda.

Her decision has aged extremely badly, because Houston has in recent days been at the forefront of despicable protests outside a primary school, which has been targeted because it is hosting English language lessons for adults in an effort to help migrant families integrate into society - something you would think the likes of Houston would thoroughly approve of if their rhetoric was honest.  Instead they are opportunistically seizing on the occasional presence of immigrant adults in the same building as white children, and are using it to whip up racial hatred.

Interesting company that Shannon Cullen, and by extension the Alba Party, has been keeping.  When I was actually an Alba member, I used to think the allegations that the party was right-wing (usually based on the trans issue) were patently absurd, but in retrospect it's not hard to see that some senior Alba figures would actually feel pretty comfortable in Reform UK if the independence issue was set to one side.