Barrhead Boy v Tommy Sheridan: who will win the battle of the egos for control of fringe party "Liberate Scotland" and its dodgy alliance with the far-right "Sovereignty"?

You might remember that Barrhead Boy wrote a furious rant about me a few months ago, simply because he was so angered that I had pointed out the inescapable truth that his "Liberate Scotland" alliance includes a bona fide far-right party.  Sovereignty want to literally ban ALL economic migration, which even in this day and age of MAGA and Reform is an extremist position - as far I can see there are only two countries in the world that actually do it.  The fact that this is fully intended to produce an ethnically "purer" Scottish society is demonstrated by the fact that they also want to introduce a "right of return" for the "Scottish diaspora" - I mean if you genuinely believed a country is "full up" and that immigration is putting too much pressure on public services and infrastructure, you wouldn't exactly be proposing to throw open the door to potentially tens of millions of random Americans who have no connection to Scotland other than a great-great-great grandmother born in Buckie in 1834.

Sovereignty also appear to want a Scottish citizenship based on bloodline (although admittedly they're short on specifics about how that would operate in practice) and want to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.  These are absolutely astounding positions for anyone who imagines themselves to be in the mainstream of the independence movement to find themselves allied with, and I remain of the view that otherwise serious figures like Eva Comrie must have some sort of knot in their thinking which means they somehow just can't see the gravity of the error they're making.  It might all be marginally more understandable if Sovereignty were only a very minor part of the Liberate Scotland alliance, but that's not the case at all - they're one of the three main component parts of it.

Officially, according to the Electoral Commission website, Hazel Lyon is the party leader of Liberate Scotland (Eva Comrie and Allan Petrie are the other registered party officers), but from having spoken to people with inside knowledge a few months back, the overwhelming message was that Barrhead Boy himself was the de facto leader, and that he was calling all the shots - including on the alliance with Sovereignty - from his luxury pad in Barcelona, as a "control-freak autocrat".  In one sense, the foolishness of his decision is not a surprise, because he's on the record with downright dodgy views of his own about stripping voting rights from English people, so to him Sovereignty's policies may not look so abnormal.  But it's the fact that he's managed to coax one or two more sensible people to come along with him for the ride that is so concerning.

Eva Comrie actually joined in with a Twitter pile-on against me at the time of Barrhead Boy's first rant, so I took that opportunity to question her about how she could justify an alliance with Sovereignty and its extremist policies.  I thought it was incredibly telling that all I got back from this usually forthright and articulate politician was vacuous, near-cretinous sloganising about "independence nothing else nothing less" rather than substantive answers to my questions.  To me that suggests that a) Eva knows perfectly well that the alliance with Sovereignty cannot be rationally defended (in which case good luck as soon as you come into contact with professional journalists) and b) she had accepted instructions to only answer in slogans, either from a group collective or from Barrhead Boy himself.  The latter possibility must be taken seriously given what I've heard about his "control-freak" leadership approach.

Today he's gone off on one yet again.  My first reaction was that the following was probably partly or wholly about me, possibly because he was triggered by my video from last night explaining why the dissolution of the Alba Party is good news for the independence movement.  But the more I read it over, the less sure I was, because some of the claims of fact here do not tally up with reality:

"Sadly, after all the optimism of 2021 and the formation of Alba, a steady decline set in as bad actors took hold of the party. I will not go over the events of the Alba National Conference in 2023. Other less scrupulous bloggers – or should that be – blaggers have done that, and they weren’t even involved in the events of that day. All to get what more hits on a website or to satisfy some revenge for being rejected? For sure it was not done for the good of the cause; I was directly involved, and I will not elaborate further on matters apart from saying I and many other independence supporters left the party at that time."

If that is partly about me, he's having a pretty major memory lapse there, because I certainly was "involved in the events that day" - I was present at the conference (and provided photos on this blog) and I was also standing as a candidate in both the nullified office bearers' election and in the delayed election of ordinary NEC members.  Although he also seems to implicitly acknowledge that the person or people he's accusing were candidates, otherwise how can he claim that they were "rejected"?  So it's a very confusing and contradictory rant even by his standards.

What I will say here is that very few people (other than the sycophantic usual suspects) interpreted the bizarre silence Barrhead Boy kept about his reasons for storming out of the Alba Party in 2023 as being motivated by scruples or by discretion or by "what's good for the cause".  The most common interpretation was instead that it was a mixture of petulance and haughtiness - ie. he regarded himself as a cut above the little people who had no right to know what was going on.  When a year later I was finally able to publish some of the details of what had happened around the time of the 2023 conference, many Alba members reacted with immense relief, because it was literally the first time they had even begun to make sense of what had seemed like an utterly inexplicable and almost random sequence of events.  They were conscious of the fact that they had been kept in the dark in a very calculated way by Barrhead Boy and others, who apparently thought they shouldn't know that industrial-scale vote-rigging and bullying had been occurring. (That said, if it was widely known who most of Abdul Majid's voters had voted for with their third preferences after giving their second preferences in bulk to Hamish Vernal, perhaps the reticence from Barcelona would be a tad easier to fathom.)

With absolutely no sense of self-awareness, Barrhead Boy signs off with a familiar refrain:  "We are all on the same side, now unity is what we require for Scotland, not tribal politics."

Without a shadow of doubt he is one of the most divisive pro-independence figures - he does not regard us as "all being on the same side", quite the contrary in fact, he regards the vast majority of the movement as "SNP devolutionists" who he is in a state of all-out war with.  He is hell-bent on splitting the pro-independence vote by putting up candidates, many of them quasi-fascists, against the SNP on the constituency ballot where it has the potential to do the most damage.  And yet he castigates anyone who opposes his project of division as "splitters" or as "damaging unity" - by which he means that they damage his attempts to unite the 5% on the fringes of the movement for a war against the 95% in the mainstream of the movement.

If this spectacle wasn't producing splendid entertainment, I think we'd have a right to be a bit offended by statements of such brazen hypocrisy, frankly.

Incidentally, Tommy Sheridan approvingly retweeted BB's rant, and the rant itself was clearly intended to coax Alba defectors to throw in their lot with Liberate, so it's not hard to guess where this very public display of flirting may be heading.  That being the case, I think it's fair to gently point out that it's unlikely Liberate is anything like big enough to accommodate both of their egos for long.  Tommy Sheridan ultimately wants to control any political project he's part of - even in Alba, I think he was playing a long game and saw himself as Alex Salmond's eventual successor.  I doubt if he'll show anything like as much patience with somebody he'll perceive as a bit of a non-entity.  

Barrhead Boy may think he's cutting a deal with Sheridan, but at best he's paving the way for a Sheridan takeover, or at worst he's triggering the next civil war that will tear Liberate Scotland apart in much the same brutal way that Alba was torn apart.