Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Alba members have finally been sent the report of the Constitution Review Group - this may be your one and only chance to seize democratic control over your own party, and please pay special attention to the vital need to democratise the Conference Committee in particular

I went to my first SNP branch meeting tonight since rejoining the party, and while no political party will ever be perfect, it was something of a relief to symbolically 'turn the page' on my horrific experience in Alba.  Ironically, while I was sitting in the meeting, it looks like Alba members were at long last being sent the recommendations of the Constitution Review Group, which I was an elected member of until September - a fact that ultimately led to my ejection from Alba due to me pushing 'too hard' for internal democratisation.  So although I no longer have any stake in what happens in Alba, I was obviously very curious tonight to see the document and to discover whether it bore any resemblance to what was agreed at the final meeting of the group before McEleny suspended me out of the blue.  I'm grateful to the Alba member (for obvious reasons I won't name her but she knows who she is!) who sent the document to me.

First thoughts: bravo to Mike Baldry.  He was the one remaining pro-reform member of the group after I was removed, and it looks like he's somehow held the line and kept what was agreed last spring more or less intact.  I should also give some grudging credit to the group's anti-reform chair Hamish Vernal, who doesn't appear to have exploited my removal as an excuse to water the document down.

What that means essentially is that where the group was not unanimous or almost unanimous, both the majority and minority positions have been presented in the document for Alba members to consider and choose between.  So that in theory opens up an opportunity for Alba members, if they wish, to decide that the elected members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), the Conference Committee, the Conduct Committee, the Appeals Committee, and the Finance & Audit Committee, should be directly elected by all party members on a one member, one vote basis - as opposed to the current set-up where only a tiny minority of members get to vote.  There are also options presented (sort of) for the Party Chair to become a de facto elected position by being reserved for one of the two people who finish top of the male and female ballots for Ordinary NEC members, and for an expansion in the number of Ordinary NEC members from eight to twelve, thus allowing for a greater range of voices to be heard.  The leadership will presumably lean extremely hard on the rank-and-file membership to reject those options, and of course one of the paradoxes of so many members having left in disgust is that the people who are still left in the party are disproportionately likely to be leadership cheerleaders.  But go on, Alba members - prove me wrong, and reclaim democratic control of your own party.  It may well be the only chance you'll ever get to do that, and if you don't take it, you may be dooming the party forever (whether the leadership realise that or not).

People who support one member, one vote for NEC elections sometimes used to say to me that they worried it might somehow be 'overkill' to extend that to the other national committees.  If you're one of those people, I really do urge you to think again, because the Conference Committee is in practice far more powerful than the NEC.  Alba members theoretically control the party's policy and strategy via the national conference - but that theory is utterly meaningless if they don't also control the national conference's agenda, and they can only do that if they directly elect the Conference Committee.  Although the Conference Committee is the only national committee I was never a member of, I've heard reports from those who were members, and they all agree that in its current form it's a one-woman Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh dictatorship.  She insists on "consensus decisions", which in practice means the committee is required to agree to whatever she wants without a vote.  

Famously (and to Daniel Jack's displeasure I brought this incident up in the Constitution Review Group), Tasmina responded to a proposal that national conference should consider the introduction of a policy development committee by bellowing "THAT'S A BIG NO FROM ME!!!!", which apparently was supposed to be the end of the matter.  Good luck, Alba members, in trying to democratically control your own party unless you transform the Conference Committee from a Tas dictatorship into a directly-elected body.

The case for the Conduct and Appeals Committees to be elected by one member, one vote is pretty straightforward - it's not fair for any party member to be expelled or suspended unless they've had an opportunity to elect the bodies making that decision.  I suppose I would concede it may not be the end of the world if the Finance & Audit Committee is not directly elected, but in principle I do think it should be.

I'm slightly disturbed by one of the documents that has been distributed along with the main report, which appears to set out proposed revisions of how the Disciplinary Committee should operate.  I'm not totally sure whether that originates from the Constitution Review Group itself or from somewhere else, but amazingly it makes an already bad situation even worse in some respects.  It limits the 'defendant' in any disciplinary case to just five minutes for an oral presentation, and it also limits each committee member to "approximately" just two questions.  As you may remember, I was only permitted to be present at my own disciplinary hearing for twelve minutes, and a big part of the reason for that is the leadership loyalists on the committee had very obviously been instructed not to ask me any questions at all in case it gave me ammunition.  So only one person was interested in asking me questions, and if that person had been restricted to only two questions, I'd have been there for an even shorter period than twelve minutes.

It hardly seemed possible that such an awful disciplinary procedure could be made even worse, but they seem to be managing it somehow.

Monday, February 10, 2025

After McEleny's firing, Alba's biggest remaining problem is spelt T-A-S - so is there *any* way Alba members can use the internal elections to depose the party's unelected Queen?

Among the large number of people, some of them quite senior, who have been bullied out of the Alba Party, there is a difference of view over whether the party's most baleful influence has been Chris McEleny or Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh - but if anything the majority view is that "Tas" is the worse of the two.  "She's poison, that one" said a former NEC member to me a few months ago.  Most of the harm Ahmed-Sheikh causes is largely unseen, but all of the indications are that she was the driving force behind the party leadership's sudden and inexplicable vendetta against the likes of Jacqui Bijster, Eva Comrie and Denise Findlay - which ultimately led to the rigging of the 2023 internal elections.  She also seems to have been a major roadblock, perhaps the biggest one of the lot, to constitutional and democratic reform of the party.

A few months ago, I made a passing criticism of Ahmed-Sheikh on this blog, and someone messaged me afterwards to say "that's it, James, now you've mentioned Tas by name, you're guaranteed to be expelled".  I've no idea whether that really was the trigger for my expulsion, but as I recently outlined, I do have direct experience of a separate incident in early 2024 when Tas maliciously launched a half-hearted "disciplinary investigation" into myself, Alan Harris and Morgwn Davies as a distraction technique to save McEleny's skin.  At a meeting of the Disciplinary Committee, the three of us had all raised points of order related to the discovery that McEleny had told us the direct lie that the person he was trying to get expelled from the party did not wish to attend the hearing.  Tas creatively reframed our legitimate and politely-expressed points of order as "possible misogynistic bullying of the committee chair" (Marjorie Ellis Thompson) and informed us that there would be a one-person investigation into the matter, with herself as the one person, naturally.

I'm going to reveal a lot more details about the lengthy email exchange between myself and Tas in a future installment of "THE ALBA FILES", but what I'll tell you for now is that I pointed out to her that the recording of the meeting would confirm I had shown no aggression towards Marjorie whatsoever, but that Marjorie had expressed some aggression towards me in trying to shout down my points of order and to protect McEleny and his deputy Corri Wilson.  I said that if Tas was hellbent on launching an investigation into something everyone on the committee knew hadn't happened, she wasn't really leaving me with much option but to protect myself by submitting a complaint about what really did happen.  So I told her I reluctantly wished to lodge a formal complaint against Marjorie for bullying directed against myself, Alan and Morgwn.

The reply from Tas was extraordinary.  She told me she wouldn't be considering my complaint in a formal way because it was impossible for women to bully men.  Not just that it was less likely to happen, but that it was literally impossible.  My guess is that her response would have been more than enough to get Alba into a great deal of legal difficulty about direct discrimination on the grounds of sex/gender if I or anyone else had decided to pursue the matter.

So if the antics of Tas are a major part of "the problem" for Alba, can members use the forthcoming internal elections - which were effectively launched today with a lengthy email - to find "the solution"?  It's certainly not going to be easy, because her position as Party Chair is appointed, not elected - a state of affairs that did not come about by chance.  However, counsels of despair are no use to anyone, so here are some ideas that might be worth trying.

1) Ideally there needs to be a third candidate for leader, ie. someone who isn't Kenny MacAskill or Ash Regan.  As things stand, MacAskill is the lesser of two evils because he would get rid of McEleny once and for all, but it looks almost certain he would retain Tas as Chair or in some other senior role.  The so-called "Corri Nostra" are all backing MacAskill, and it seems highly unlikely they would be doing that unless their ally Tas had received firm assurances.  It's going to be incredibly difficult to get a third candidate onto the ballot paper, but it might be a game-changer if it happened, because it could widen the debate to cover the question of whether there needs to be a change of Party Chair.

2) If Tas failed for the first time to top the female ballot for Ordinary Members of the NEC, that would at least make a psychological difference and weaken her position.  Again, it's going to be murderously hard to achieve that because Ordinary Members are elected on a pay-per-vote basis, and Tas has wealthy backers (one of whom is herself, of course).  But if you're an Alba member, all you can do is try your best - buy your own vote by purchasing a conference pass, and then rank Tas bottom of all the female candidates.  When I argued on the Constitution Review Group that the Party Chair should be directly elected in some form, Daniel Jack insisted (as he'd probably been told to insist) that it was unnecessary because Tas had topped the NEC ballot and it was therefore only natural that she was appointed as Chair.  I immediately jumped on that and suggested if he felt that way, we should write into the constitution that whoever receives the most votes in the NEC election should automatically be offered the position of Chair.  You should have seen the look on his face - he realised he'd just walked into a trap of his own making.  Tas clearly has no intention of risking her position being directly elected in any form, even if the voting system is relatively easy to manipulate or subvert.

3) Get some independent-minded people onto the NEC so at least Tas will face challenges and questioning if she remains in harness. Morgwn Davies leaps out as the sort of person desperately needed on the NEC - if he sees something wrong happening, he'll call it out.  He won't be cowed by Tas or by anyone else.

WINGS-WATCH: In a poll run by Wings himself, almost two-thirds of Wings readers say Wings is no longer an independence website. It's now a 'gender stuff' site.

A comment on the previous thread: 

"O/T. Judging by his most recent blog Campbell really has lost the plot. The frothers are in overdrive. Grrr grr."

So, with a degree of trepidation, I donned my trusty Wings-Watch cloak and took a look.

The post is about Nicola Sturgeon and is entitled "The End of the Reich", which probably tells you all you need to know, or as much as you'd ever wish to know.  Early on, we're treated to the results of a Twitter poll Campbell ran, asking his readers whether they think Nicola Sturgeon or Donald Trump has done more for women.  96% say Trump, 4% say Sturgeon.  With wonderfully delusional pomposity, Campbell then poses the question - 

"Is the above how she imagined her feminist legacy, do you think, readers?"

What, that in a totally unscientific, self-selecting poll mainly consisting of readers of the rabidly anti-Sturgeon, pro-Trump website Wings Over Scotland, it would turn out that readers of the rabidly anti-Sturgeon, pro-Trump website Wings Over Scotland prefer Trump to her?  Yes, I think that's broadly what she would have anticipated.  This is one she'll have very much seen coming, Stew.

Actually of far more interest is another totally unscientific, self-selecting poll Campbell ran on Twitter a few days ago, because the one thing Wings readers can be considered an authority on is what type of site Wings now is.  They were asked what content they come to Wings for, and this is what they said - 

Gender Stuff 48.8%
Independence Stuff 37.6%
Other 13.6%

So in a poll of his own readers, almost two-thirds said that Wings is not an independence site.  He can't quibble about that, and neither can anyone else.  The one-third expecting to find independence-related material on Wings these days can only be described as 'statistical optimists'.

Wings used to be an independence site, but no longer is.  Unionists demanded in 2014 that Yes campaigners "move on", and Campbell took that advice.  He reached the fork in the road depicted in the famous Chris Cairns cartoon with one sign pointing to "INDEPENDENCE" and another pointing to "OTHER STUFF", and he wandered jauntily down the "OTHER STUFF" road.

Fortunately, most of the independence movement took a very different decision.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

Blue Sky Thinking

Over the last few weeks, several people have encouraged me to set up a Bluesky account and to promote my blogposts there.  My view is that Twitter (I refuse to call it "X") remains much more important than Bluesky and I'd be foolish to abandon it - but on the other hand there's no getting away from the fact that a lot of left-of-centre people have moved across to Bluesky, and therefore the engagement rate for people like me on Twitter isn't what it used to be even a couple of years ago.  So I may be missing a trick by not having a presence on both sites.

I can't say I'm filled with enthusiasm at the thought of duplicating posts on two sites, but what I've done for the time being is set up a Bluesky account so people can follow me if they wish.  If I get to, say, 100 followers, I may start promoting my blogposts there.

So if you're on Bluesky, you can follow me HERE.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 a couple of weeks ago, and so far the running total stands at £1281, meaning that 19% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Labour slump to new post-election low in Opinium poll - plus Alba civil war intensifies as Ash Regan blasts the MacAskill leadership as a "vacuum" that has led to "chaos" and "drift"

In a sense, this weekend's Opinium poll has bucked the trend of a Reform UK bandwagon, because it shows Reform down a point on two weeks ago.  However, that's statistically insignificant, and Reform are still at a higher level than in all but one of Opinium's previous polls.  Where the recent trend is clearly continuing is in the ongoing slippage of Labour, who have dropped to a post-election low of 27% with Opinium, and remain only one point ahead of Reform.  Bear in mind that Opinium have been pretty much the most Labour-friendly pollster in recent times, so 27% is worse for Labour in an Opinium poll than it would be in a poll from another firm.

GB-wide voting intentions (Opinium, 5th-7th February 2025):

Labour 27% (-1)
Reform UK 26% (-1)
Conservatives 22% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 11% (-)
Greens 8% (-)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

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Anecdotally, I've heard that Ash Regan's interview with LBC went down very poorly with rank-and-file Alba Party members, probably because it was seen as disloyalty to the MacAskill leadership and perhaps also to the Salmond family.  However, she's doubled down now by posting a TikTok video with the same message - she starts by describing the MacAskill leadership (although she doesn't mention him by name) as a "vacuum" which is causing "drift" and "chaos".  If consistency is maintained, that presumably ought to lead to her referral to the Disciplinary Committee for possible expulsion from the party, because her ally McEleny has over the last year been using any sort of minor criticism of the leadership as an all-purpose excuse to pretend "injury" has been caused to the party and to get people expelled.  Rather brazenly, though, in the very next breath Ms Regan says she wants to become leader so she can "restore discipline".  The subtext seems to be "lots and lots of discipline, please, but not for me or Chris, obviously".

And the question must surely be asked - after a year of the McEleny Purges, and in the context of the party leader and the General Secretary currently both using the disciplinary machinery to try to get each other expelled, just how much more "discipline" can the Alba Party actually take?  What it really needs now, surely, is a good deal less "discipline", and the introduction of normal, mature politics whereby people resolve their policy and strategy differences by debating each other and then a vote being held.  Quaint, I know, but I do believe the concept of democracy has some real potential if it's ever given a chance.

It's also worth noting that Ms Regan keeps using the soundbite "Scotland needs a real independence party not a sideshow" but without specifying that the party in question necessarily has to be Alba.  That's arguably consistent with my theory that she and McEleny have a Plan B up their sleeve of launching a new party if MacAskill wins the leadership election.

Friday, February 7, 2025

SNP open up massive lead in new MRP poll - while Reform hit yet another new all-time high in GB-wide survey

I was initially puzzled by the poll reported on the front page of The National today, but it turns out that it's the Scottish component of a GB-wide MRP poll.  The full sample size of the poll across Britain was just over 5000, which may mean the Scottish sample was around 500, which would be about half the size of the typical sample for a full-scale Scottish poll.  But MRP polls don't always have evenly spread samples, so it may not be as simple as that.  I'll see if I can find out more when I have more time.

The poll is billed as having been conducted by "PLMR / Electoral Calculus".  PLMR is some sort of communications outfit and is not a member of the British Polling Council.  Electoral Calculus is a member of the BPC, but I'm not aware of it having the capacity to carry out its own polling fieldwork, so it would be interesting to know how the fieldwork was sourced.

The vote intention percentages are fairly typical of what we've become used to recently, albeit with Reform's surge reaching the point where they are now closer than ever before to overtaking Labour in Scotland (unless you count the inaccurate numbers from the recent Find Out Now poll that were reported by the Herald).

Scottish voting intentions for the next UK general election:

SNP 31%
Labour 18%
Reform UK 17%
Conservatives 12%
Liberal Democrats 8%
Greens 4%

Incidentally, when I checked to see whether PLMR are in the BPC, I noticed that John Curtice is no longer BPC President - the changeover occurred a year ago, but I hadn't previously spotted that.  He's been replaced by Jane Green.  I'm wondering if that might be part of the explanation of how wires got crossed with the Find Out Now poll and Professor Curtice ended up doing a seats projection based on the wrong percentages.  Maybe he doesn't have quite such ready access to data tables now that he no longer heads the BPC.

Elsewhere, as you may have seen yesterday, Find Out Now have Reform UK reaching yet another GB-wide all-time high across all polling firms...

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 5th February 2025):

Reform UK 29% (+2)
Labour 25% (+2)
Conservatives 18% (-3)
Liberal Democrats 13% (+2)
Greens 10% (-)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Is this the tipping point I've long talked about, where right-wing voters move decisively to Reform and Tory support just melts away?  Not necessarily - a new Techne poll also shows Reform at a high watermark and in a joint lead with Labour, but with the Tories clinging on just two points behind.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 a couple of weeks ago, and so far the running total stands at £1251, meaning that 18% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Cos tonight is the night when 1 becomes 2 - has Ash Regan crossed the Rubicon with her resignation and made it inevitable that Alba will split into two separate parties?

Ash Regan, the Alba Party's sole remaining parliamentarian, has given an extraordinary interview in which she reveals that she stepped down from the party's NEC a month ago (despite apparently never having actually attended any NEC meetings!) in protest at the original week-long suspension of Chris McEleny.  Short of announcing their engagement, it's hard to see how Regan and McEleny could make it much clearer that they are mutual allies of each other - any lingering suspicion that McEleny's support for Regan is a one-way thing has been well and truly dispelled.

I heard someone make an interesting point in response to the interview.  They recalled that the action McEleny took against me was initially explained (albeit in extremely vague terms) by a claim that I had breached party confidentiality in a blogpost, although it was never explained what the confidential information was supposed to be or in what form I had disclosed it.  And yet Regan has very explicitly in her interview breached the confidentiality of NEC decisions, and arguably also breached the terms of the party's social media policy by severely criticising the current leadership.  So if consistency is to be maintained, disciplinary action would have to be taken against Regan.  Probably consistency will not be maintained, although who knows - given that the General Secretary is currently taking disciplinary action against the acting party leader, and the acting party leader is currently taking disciplinary action against the General Secretary, anything must be considered possible.  Perhaps every single member of Alba will be expelled, and that's how the party will end.

But it's starting to look like the party will cease to exist in its current form anyway.  The best recent precedent I can think of for such irreconcilable differences opening up within a party is the SDP (Social Democratic Party) in 1987-88, when a narrow majority of members wanted to merge with the Liberals and a substantial minority wanted to remain an independent force.  The SDP leader David Owen actually proposed that there should be an amicable separation, with the party agreeing to divide itself in two and split its resources proportionately.  The pro-merger majority rejected that proposal, but Owen partly got his way anyway - as soon as the merger went through, he simply reconstituted the SDP with the same name, the same logo, himself as leader, and with three of the party's five MPs.  There was also, of course, the UKIP-Brexit Party split in 2018.

I wonder if Ash Regan's resignation is setting in train a similar non-amicable parting of the ways for Alba.  If, as I expect, she loses the leadership election, we might see a new party being set up with herself as leader and McEleny as deputy.  It might attract a significant number of current Alba members due to Regan's feminist credentials.  It sort of half makes sense if you think about it, because it would resolve McEleny's dilemma that we discussed last night - how does he still stand for a Holyrood list seat if he's burned his bridges with Alba?  A new party might be the only way he can do it without renouncing independence and throwing in his lot with Farage.  The new party would even start with a modicum of credibility due to having a serving MSP in Regan, although I doubt that would get them very far.  Alba's current chances of winning seats are slim, but Alba divided in two would surely have no chance.

Alba only have two other elected representatives - the local councillors Chris "Lieutenant Columbo" Cullen in Ayrshire and Karl Rosie in the Highlands.  Cullen is part of the so-called "Corri Nostra" which is backing Kenny MacAskill, so he would undoubtedly stick with official Alba in the event of a split. I've no idea which way Rosie would jump.

THE ALBA FILES, Part 8: The examples of gross misconduct that should *really* be on Chris McEleny's charge sheet

It's no secret that I think Kenny MacAskill's decision to remove Chris McEleny from his role as Alba's General Secretary is long overdue, but I do think he's gone wrong in the precise way he's chosen to do it.  McEleny was a party employee and therefore, as I understand it, MacAskill and the NEC had the power to simply sack him, and that's what should have happened.  There was no need to use the party's disciplinary machinery to remove him, and in going down that road Mr MacAskill has perpetuated the Alba Party's deepest-rooted problem - the intentional use of disciplinary action as a weapon to completely snuff out legitimate internal debate within the party about strategy and policy.

Someone on the previous thread compared the power-struggle and bloodletting in Alba since Alex Salmond died in October to The Death Of Stalin.  Obviously that analogy has its limits, because when Beria was removed from power a few months after Stalin's death, he was ambushed at a Politburo meeting and was eventually shot.  But the point is that in the Soviet Union, politics had become terrifyingly tangled up with the criminal justice system and in particular with judicial execution.  If you spoke out against the leader's policy or displeased him in some other way, he wouldn't just sack you, he would have you shot or tortured.  Khrushchev actually thought it was a sign that the country had matured when he was removed from power in a coup without being shot - he was allowed to retire and live out his days peacefully with a pension.

There has been no equivalent maturing process within the Alba Party yet, because the disciplinary process is being weaponised to the max by all sides in the leadership contest.  When Kenny MacAskill implied on social media that the Ash Regan camp was flirting with fascism by aping Reform UK rhetoric, McEleny didn't respond with a spirited verbal or written counter-argument, as would happen in a normal, mature political party.  He instead framed Mr MacAskill's words as "bullying and harassment" and tried to suspend him.  Mr MacAskill has now retaliated by framing McEleny's original allegedly quasi-fascist remarks about asylum seekers as "gross misconduct" and suspended him. That simply perpetutates the problem, because it means that the free and frank exchange of views within Alba will always be impossible.  Members will always know that diverging from the ruling faction's policy views in even the smallest way will potentially be a suspension or expulsion offence.

Don't get me wrong, though - I do believe McEleny is guilty of gross misconduct, but not in the form that appears on the charge sheet.  I think he should have been sacked, and then entirely separately from that, disciplinary action could have been considered against him at a later stage - but not for the expression of his political views about asylum seekers.  His real misconduct was in his abuse of powers in the treatment of party members.  The three worst examples I know of are - 

* He dishonestly certified numerous party members as having "publicly resigned from the party", therefore effectively expelling them without any disciplinary hearing or due process whatsoever.

* He unilaterally removed Jacqui Bijster from the list of candidates for the 2023 election of Ordinary Members of the NEC, which she was properly nominated for.  This was a blatant case of election-rigging, and he justified it by pretending to 'misunderstand' her message withdrawing from the Membership Support Convener election, but not from the NEC Ordinary Member election.

* He instructed his deputy Corri Wilson to lie to the Disciplinary Committee (whether she actually knew it was a lie is unclear) by stating that Colin Alexander had expressed no wish to use his constitutional right to attend his disciplinary hearing.  Colin was not granted his wish to attend but the majority of members of the committee expelled him from the party anyway (acting as they always did as a rubberstamp for McEleny's wishes), even though they were fully aware of McEleny's lie by that point.

In the run-up to the hearing, Colin contacted me out of the blue to explain that he had told McEleny he wanted to attend but that McEleny was pulling his usual stunt of ignoring the emails.  I presume the reason Colin contacted me in particular was because I had announced on this blog a few weeks earlier that I had been newly elected to the Disciplinary Committee, and therefore I was the only committee member that he knew of or knew how to contact.  I had no idea how to proceed.  I thought it would be a mistake to reply to Colin because that might be used by others as an excuse to disbar me from participating in the hearing.  So instead I just bided my time and waited to see if the situation was resolved.  

But when the hearing took place, Corri Wilson flatly announced that Colin had expressed no wish to attend.  So that left me with no choice - I told the committee that I knew for a fact that wasn't true.  Corri doubled down and insisted there were no emails from Colin expressing a wish to attend, and I said "oh there were, and I've seen the emails".  Fortunately I was backed up by Alan Harris, who pointed out that it was extremely obvious from the disciplinary referral document that there were emails missing from the correspondence between Colin and McEleny.  I said that it was clear to me that "the General Secretary is playing games here".

Marjorie Ellis Thompson, who had just been directly appointed chair of the committee by the Alba leadership, listened intently to what I had said.  But instead of engaging with the actual content of my comments, she then launched into an extraordinarily aggressive attempt to tone-police me.  She said that I had to be careful about the way I was expressing myself because it might upset Corri, who was a member of staff.  I pointed out that I was not attacking Corri, but that Corri was acting on the General Secretary's instructions, and the General Secretary had clearly instructed her to tell us things that simply were not true.  It wasn't a trivial matter, because McEleny had explicitly stated that he wanted us to expel Colin.  Therefore the points I had made were perfectly legitimate, and Marjorie shouldn't have tried to rule them out of order.  

I don't want to be too critical of Marjorie, though, because my gut feeling is that she had been put in an impossible position by the leadership which had appointed her.  I suspect she wanted to act fairly and properly as the chair but had seemingly received strict instructions that Corri Wilson and Chris McEleny had to be protected and defended at all costs.

From memory, Alan, myself and Morgwn Davies all argued that the case against Colin should be dismissed, or at the very least that his suspension should be lifted pending a re-run of the hearing, because clearly McEleny's lie hadn't been Colin's fault.  But Josh Robertson, Chris "Lieutenant Columbo" Cullen and Marjorie (who I believe made use of her casting vote) blocked that proposal.  I was particularly suspicious about Josh Robertson's stated reasoning for insisting that the case had to go forward to a re-run hearing.  I wondered if he had been tipped the wink about a "Plan B" if McEleny's lie was brought to light - and sure enough by the time the re-run hearing took place, Marjorie had resigned from the committee altogether and Josh had magically replaced her as chair.  And Josh, I'm afraid, had absolutely none of Marjorie's scruples about acting as a rubberstamp for McEleny's wishes. 

Now, you might think that if the General Secretary had been caught red-handed lying to the Disciplinary Committee in an attempt to get a party member expelled due to a personal vendetta, the first thing the Party Chair would do is launch an inquiry into the General Secretary's misconduct.  But oh no.  This is the Alba Party, remember.  Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh instead sent us all a menacing email informing us that any questioning of the General Secretary's good faith was totally unacceptable - seemingly irrespective of how overwhelming the evidence was that he had acted in bad faith.  She also reframed the points of order that I, Alan and Morgwn had raised about McEleny's lie and about other procedural irregularities as "possible misogynistic bullying of the committee chair".  I'm not making this up - yes, it's straight out of Orwell, but that is exactly what she did.  She announced she would be launching a one-person disciplinary investigation into the matter.  I don't think she ever had the slightest intention of finding myself, Morgwn or Alan guilty of "misogynistic bullying", because she knew perfectly well it wouldn't be that hard for us to produce a transcript of the meeting and to demonstrate that not a single misogynistic word had been uttered.  The whole thing was just a profoundly cynical stunt to deflect attention away from McEleny's lie, which should have resulted in his immediate resignation or dismissal.

In a future installment of "THE ALBA FILES", I'm going to go into much more detail about my lengthy email exchange with Tasmina.  But for now, here's an extract from my initial reply to Tasmina dated 25th March 2024 in which I did my best to very politely (perhaps too politely) take her to task about the wholly improper way she was protecting McEleny.  Because Colin Alexander's real name is not in the public domain, I have amended the text below to replace his real name with "Mr Alexander" - 

"Fourthly, I must take issue with your suggestion that it is 'not appropriate' to attribute motivations to the General Secretary in withholding information from us.  It's not just that it wasn't inappropriate to draw the inference that was made, it's that no other plausible explanation for his motivation is even available.  Even if the withheld email from Mr Alexander was somehow missed by error, there was enough information in the other emails to infer that there must have been a missing email, and also to infer the likely nature of that email.  Therefore, we shouldn't have been flatly informed that Mr Alexander did not wish to attend the meeting when the opposite was known to be true.  Let me remind you that this is not a trivial matter - the General Secretary made explicitly clear that he wanted us to use the meeting to expel Mr Alexander from the party.  For him to make that request on the basis of false information and partial information is something that must be deprecated in the strongest possible terms.  I'm sure you would agree, and I would urge you to speedily make representations to the General Secretary to ensure that it never happens again.

As party chair you command our fullest respect, but as you have chosen to involve yourself in this matter, I would respectfully suggest that the nature of your involvement should be to put an end to the grievous ongoing procedural unfairness against Mr Alexander and Ms Somerville by ensuring our next meeting goes ahead as scheduled on Wednesday evening, and by leaving the General Secretary in no doubt whatsoever that he should never, ever again ask the Disciplinary Committee to expel a party member while withholding key information from us."

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

BREAKING: Chris McEleny is fired as General Secretary of the Alba Party for "gross misconduct" after his hapless coup attempt ends in total catastrophe, both for himself and the party as a whole - which has now entered a state of outright civil war

As his idol across the water would have said in his Apprentice days: "Christopher, you're fired."

I hate to say "I told you so", but none of this would have happened if the Alba top brass had simply listened to the "wee gang of malcontents" - not just me, but so many others as well who have either been expelled or driven out of the party by bullying.  None of the chaos that Chris McEleny has unleashed within the party in recent weeks would even have been possible if our calls for internal democratisation and for reform of the Kafkaesque disciplinary procedure had been heeded.  McEleny has only been able to act with such impunity because of Alba's toxic authoritarian culture, which has allowed the constitution to be breached and party officials to exceed the limits of their powers again, and again, and again.

Technically the situation now is that McEleny is "suspended" from his position of General Secretary, so theoretically he could return if the disciplinary proceedings work out in his favour, but clearly that is not going to happen.  Make no mistake - he has been fired by Kenny MacAskill and that's an end to it.  There is no way back for him as General Secretary, and there is no way back for him in any form whatsoever within the Alba Party.  If you launch a coup against your own party leader (even an acting leader), you have to get it right within the first five seconds, otherwise you've blown it forever.  

McEleny's dreams of acting as the Ã©minence grise for an Ash Regan-led Alba, and of becoming an Alba list MSP next year, now lie in tatters.  He is extraordinarily ambitious and is highly unlikely to abandon his personal goals even at this stage, but to fulfil them he's going to have to join another party - which leads me to the inexorable conclusion that he will strongly consider renouncing independence in order to join Reform UK, because that is the only party he could plausibly join which would offer him a realistic chance of winning a seat at Holyrood.

This episode must finally put an end to the ludicrous pretence from the MacAskill faction of the party that Alba has been functioning as a normal political party over the last eighteen months.  McEleny was the driving force behind numerous malicious expulsions and lengthy suspensions - not just me, but also Geoff Bush, Sean Davis, Denise Somerville and Colin Alexander.  All of those spurious "upheld complaints" should now be overturned and apologies issued, and anyone who wishes to rejoin Alba should be allowed to do so.  That includes the larger list of people who McEleny falsely certified as having "publicly resigned from the party" in order to bypass the disciplinary machinery altogether.  I've rejoined the SNP since my expulsion and am extremely happy with that decision, but I believe the others are for the most part politically homeless at present.  That is totally unfair on them and a dreadful injustice should now be put right.

I can't help but raise a rather ironic smile at the revelation that a specific component of the "gross misconduct" charge against McEleny is that he gave the impression that Alba supported the Tories in their bid to deprive asylum seekers of free bus travel.  Er, didn't I raise concerns on this blog at the time that McEleny was flirting with far-right rhetoric and that Alba consequently risked mutating from its social democratic roots?  And wasn't I shouted down and ridiculed for that by Alba HQ's Robert Reid, known to be a strong MacAskill supporter?  If you're reading this, Robert - what total hypocrisy on your part.  Total hypocrisy, and you should hang your head in shame.

I was speaking last night to some former Alba members, and I said to them that there was a strange paradox about McEleny.  Most of us had sat in committee meetings with him at some point or another and seen how he remains completely calm and collected when he sticks the knife in.  He never raises his voice or shows any emotion.  You'd think such a man would have brilliant tactics to match his icy temperament, but that's where it all falls apart - his cunning plans are all Baldrick-like and invariably blow up in his face.  Did he really not foresee that absolutely everyone would work out within two seconds that he was the "disgruntled senior employee" quoted by the Sunday Mail briefing against Mr MacAskill?  Did he really believe that he would get away with taking bogus "disciplinary action" against the acting party leader - an action I struggle to think of any precedent for in any UK political party?

It was an attempted coup, that's for sure - the idea would have been that Mr MacAskill's leadership bid might prove untenable if he was suspended in some form or another.  But as I've mentioned quite a few times, 75% of the four members of the Disciplinary Committee who voted for my own expulsion in early December were Robert Reid's mum (Jackie Reid), or Robert Reid's girlfriend (Christina Hendry), or Alex Salmond's niece (Christina Hendry again), or directly appointed to the committee by Alex Salmond (both Christina Hendry and Josh Robertson).  The idea that those people were ever going to suspend Kenny MacAskill is just barking mad.  Maybe McEleny thought a temporary suspension pending the disciplinary hearing would be enough to do the trick?  Well, no, that makes no sense, because Mr MacAskill always had enough supporters on the NEC to overturn a temporary suspension.  It was just never going to work.  It was the sort of coup Mr Bean or Frank Spencer would have attempted, and the outcome is utterly predictable to everyone apart from the man himself.


I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

Take me 
To the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)
In the wind of CHANGE
Mmmmm

A slightly more detailed reply to Ballot Box Scotland on his denunciation of Find Out Now polls

The other day I posted a brief response to Allan Faulds' announcement that his website Ballot Box Scotland is basically going to treat Find Out Now polls as if they don't exist from this point on. I think it might be worth going into more depth about this, because the issues are important, and there really isn't much doubt that he's based his decision in part on a false premise.  I've checked his website and I've checked his Bluesky account (he's abandoned Twitter), and he doesn't seem to have noticed that false premise yet.

It's fair to say that Mr Faulds and I are not on each other's Christmas card lists, so it's unlikely he'll read this blogpost, and even if he hears about it he's likely to discount the contents simply because they were written by me.  But if there's any stats-minded person reading this who is on good terms with him, it might be worth gently attempting an 'intervention' without mentioning my name, because I genuinely do think he's going to damage his own credibility by "blacklisting" a substantial minority of published Scottish polls on the basis of a completely false assumption.

The simplified version of his argument for "blacklisting" Find Out Now goes like this - 

* Their poll at the weekend had the SNP at 25% of the list vote, which is implausibly low.  It's a joint record post-2021 low, when the evidence from other pollsters is that the SNP's popularity has rebounded markedly since last summer.

* Their poll had the Greens and Lib Dems on 13% apiece for the Holyrood list vote, and had the Greens on 10% of the Holyrood constituency vote, which is implausibly high.

* Their poll had Alba on 7% of the list vote, which is massively out of step with every other polling company apart from Norstat. It's an all-time high for Alba at a time when Mr Faulds thinks the party is in a very weak state (and there's a very long discussion about why he thinks they're so weak - some of which is perfectly fair comment and some isn't).

But the problem is that most of the above isn't true.  The SNP are not on 25% of the list vote in the Find Out Now poll, and nor are Alba on 7%.  The Herald (who commissioned the poll) reported the wrong numbers - it's as simple as that. If Mr Faulds looked at the correct turnout-adjusted numbers, which are available on the Find Out Now website, his mind would be set at rest to at least some extent.  The SNP are actually on around 27% of the list vote and Alba are on around 5% - probably only enough to win Alba one list seat, rather than the eight that was suggested at the weekend.  OK, that probably still understates the SNP and overstates Alba, but it's within a more realistic range.

The Greens are actually on around 9% of the constituency vote and the Lib Dems are on around 12% of the list vote - not a huge difference from the wrong numbers reported by the Herald, but again, slightly more realistic.

There is a legitimate criticism that can and should be made of Find Out Now, but it's totally different from the one Mr Faulds has made.  Where they're seemingly going wrong is by not giving their clients sufficient guidance on how to interpret the data tables.  There's not much doubt that Find Out Now regard the turnout-adjusted voting intention numbers as the definitive, headline numbers, because they've used the turnout-adjusted numbers for Westminster in their own write-up of the poll.  But they don't seem to have explained that to the Herald.  I know from my own experience of commissioning a Find Out Now poll that I was basically just handed the data tables without much in the way of explanatory notes.  I manually worked out the independence percentages with Don't Knows excluded, and I then emailed them to say something like "before publishing, can I just check I have these percentages correct?", and they said "yes".  But if I hadn't checked, I'd never have known for sure what the correct percentages were.  It's not at all hard to see how wires could be getting crossed with a newspaper client.

I also think Mr Faulds is wrong in another respect, although this is more a matter of opinion than of fact.  I don't think it's good enough for him to say "this polling company is producing numbers that don't 'feel' right to me, therefore I'm going to pretend their polls don't exist". Remember the 2017 general election campaign, when most polling firms were pointing to a Tory landslide, but Survation were suggesting a hung parliament?  Survation were relentlessly mocked, not least by Andrew Neil, who just 'knew' it was ridiculous to suggest that a radical leftie like Jeremy Corbyn could be polling strongly with the British electorate.  But it turned out that Survation were right and the others were wrong.

Demanding that polling companies must only produce results that "feel intuitively right" to commentators effectively encourages those companies to artificially "herd" their results - which in some cases will make polling averages much less accurate, not more so.

*  *  *

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