It's just coincidence, but while I've been dealing over the last few weeks with the action the Alba Party leadership took against me, I've also been gradually making my way through the 1970s BBC drama series
Shoulder to Shoulder, which covers the history of the suffragettes. When I saw it was on iPlayer, it caught my eye, because it was repeated on BBC2 when I was a teenager, and I remember seeing a couple of episodes and thinking it was quite good.
My knowledge of the suffragettes was previously quite patchy, and one thing I didn't realise was that although Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst initially set up the Women's Social and Political Union as a very democratic organisation, they later transformed it into an absolute dictatorship where no disagreement with their own policies or decisions was tolerated, and dissenters were instantly expelled. Absurdly, that culminated in the expulsion of Sylvia Pankhurst, Emmeline's own daughter and Christabel's own sister. Prior to that, the Pethick-Lawrences, who had built up the organisation almost from scratch, were unceremoniously expelled because they questioned the wisdom of militant tactics that incorporated severe law-breaking such as arson.
Emmeline and Christabel's justification was that they were at war with the government, and in a state of war you can't have democratic politics as usual - you need an unquestioned leader, an unquestioned chain of command, and iron discipline of members behind any decision taken.
Now, does that remind you of anything? A few weeks ago, the Alba leadership sent out an email revealing that internal democracy within the party was going to be completely suspended for several months, and that was necessary because the current executive team was supposedly uniquely familiar with Alex Salmond's private strategic thinking and thus uniquely well-placed to interpret and carry forward his wishes and plans. In other words, the party leadership now derives its legitimacy more from a kind of 'divine selection' (the words "Salmond blood" have even been used) than from democratic election. Alba's mission going forward will be to identify and do whatever "Alex Salmond would have wanted" - or rather whatever the self-selecting elite say he would have wanted, which will not always necessarily be the same thing. Presumably this is justified because Mr Salmond was, in a sense, "at war" just like the Pankhursts were, and had an unparalleled insight as leader into how London rule in Scotland could be ended.
Because iron discipline behind Mr Salmond's strategies and plans is required, rank-and-file members who are unhappy with the party's direction have not been encouraged to use the party's internal democratic processes to make the case for change, but have instead been told that "perhaps Alba is not the party for you". (Chris McEleny literally said that a few months ago in an email reply to an Alba member.) Those of us naive enough to assume that the internal democratic processes were there for a reason and that we could just get on with using them to press for change have found ourselves faced with trumped-up charges leading to either suspension or outright expulsion. Many people, of course, have simply jumped before they were pushed.
Alba in its own self-image now resembles a Leninist-style "vanguard party", which prefers to have a small number of people slavishly loyal to the leadership rather than a much larger number of people who might bring with them a plurality of views and friendly democratic disagreement over policy and strategy. That means the party has become the complete opposite of what it appeared to be when we all first joined in 2021. At that time it seemed to be an "all comers' party" - to join all you needed to be was an independence supporter, and from there you would have an equal stake and an equal opportunity to shape the party's direction. I remember, for example, the euphoria after an early Alba women's conference, when all of the women who had joined the party were able to get together and decide for themselves what the policy on women was going to be. That certainly wouldn't be happening now.
It seems to me there are two big problems with Alba's authoritarian and disciplinarian approach. The first is that I don't think any political party can function as a sort of 'memorial stone' to one man. It will become fossilised if it tries. However fully-formed Mr Salmond's private strategy was, and however thoroughly the current leadership think they have digested it, politics is a dynamic process and there will always be unexpected changes of circumstances that you need to react to spontaneously and creatively. Mr Salmond can no longer help with that. The Alba Party will always need to have a leader grounded in the here and now - which means that person cannot be the de facto "deputy" to someone who is sadly no longer with us.
The second problem is that, if I'm being honest, I'm not convinced that Mr Salmond's strategies during his time as Alba leader would actually have led to independence. When I was on the Alba NEC myself in 2021-22, there were a few things that concerned me. I was worried about the ever-increasing chatter that Alba might stand a large number of candidates against the SNP at the Westminster general election, but whenever those worries were raised, we were basically told to shut down all thought about the subject for the time being and unite in the interim behind the "Scotland United" holding position. The problem was that "Scotland United" struck me as part of a very obvious and transparent choreography preparing the ground for a large-scale Alba intervention at the general election, something which I assumed the leadership had already privately decided upon. I retrospect it looks like my guess was right. I thought we as the NEC should have been discussing, and perhaps challenging, the true underlying purpose of the Scotland United proposal. But there was never any opportunity to do that.
Towards the end of my time on the NEC, Nicola Sturgeon unexpectedly announced her plan for a de facto referendum, and I was also baffled and dismayed by the Alba leadership's reaction to that. I thought we should have embraced the news and dared Sturgeon to keep her word. Instead, the prospect of an exercise in national self-determination seemed to weirdly antagonise the Alba leadership, who redoubled their determination to bring Nicola Sturgeon down as First Minister. She eventually did resign, and what good did that do anyone? Her only two possible successors fell over themselves to ditch the de facto at breakneck speed. Now, I'm not naive enough to think that Sturgeon would have definitely kept her word if she'd stayed on. But even if there'd been only a 1 in 10 chance of her seeing the de facto plan through, a true gambler would have given her that chance, because anything that replaced her was only going to move the cause of independence backwards. No-one will ever dissuade me that the Alba leadership made a strategic blunder during that episode - always assuming, of course, that independence was actually the object of the exercise for them, rather than revenge against Nicola Sturgeon for its own sake.
The other startling thing about the Pankhursts is that, after moving to a dictatorship model, they also (with the honourable exception of Sylvia Pankhurst) moved away from their socialist roots in Keir Hardie's Independent Labour Party and swung dramatically rightwards. Adela Pankhurst emigrated to Australia and eventually became an out-and-out fascist. Emmeline and Christabel became born-again British nationalists during World War I, and endorsed the notorious 'white feather' movement on the grounds that young men owed it to women to lay down their lives for the Empire. After the war, Emmeline brought her political transition to its natural conclusion by standing for parliament as a Tory.
Alba's authoritarian, 'vanguard party' turn does not automatically mean it will also shift to the right. But there are some troubling signs. Neale Hanvey has repeatedly praised Elon Musk to the skies and even publicly asked him for funding. Numerous Alba spokespeople have demanded that Donald Trump should be treated with greater respect than (for example) the Greens are currently showing him, which strikes me as a very odd wedge issue to alight upon. And today it was reported that Chris McEleny has broken ranks with all other progressive parties in the Scottish Parliament by defending the Tories for seeking the withholding of funds from asylum seekers. All of these are examples of things Reform UK would be entirely comfortable saying.
Right from the start in 2021, some people tried to paint Alba as a right-wing party and I scorned that idea. But for the first time I'm starting to wonder. For some time now it's been pointed out in some quarters (including by me) that from a purely Machiavellian point of view, a right-wing pro-indy party with a degree of hostility to immigration might tap into a gap in the market and draw Yes voters away from Reform UK. But if Mr McEleny has decided that Alba is going to be the party to fill that gap, it's an obvious slap in the face for anyone who joined Alba in the 2021 on the firm promise that it would be a left-leaning, social democratic party in the mould of the Salmond-era SNP.
Is Mr McEleny's pronouncement an example of "doing whatever Alex Salmond would have wanted"? I can't deny the possibility that he's carrying out a pre-prepared, Salmond-endorsed plan, but ah hae ma doots. Mr Salmond always used to reliably come down on the progressive side of most issues, and I struggle to imagine him even risking the appearance of demonising asylum seekers. I suspect Mr McEleny has set in train what may be a lengthy process of doing things in Mr Salmond's name that Mr Salmond would not actually have done himself.
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