Alba committee election results - this time I've been elected!

At this point I can now say a heartfelt thank you for the patience of non-Alba readers of this blog over the last few months while I was writing a disproportionate number of self-promotion posts for the Alba internal elections, which proved to be a longer process than anyone anticipated due to the re-run of the office bearer elections and the consequent postponement of the NEC elections.  I'm delighted and somewhat relieved to be able to report that my persistence did actually pay off in the end - over the weekend I was successfully elected to the Finance & Audit Committee, the Disciplinary Committee, and the Constitution Review Group.  The full list of everyone elected has now been published on the Alba website and can be found HERE (although you'll almost certainly need to be logged in).

I'm also pleased to report that there has been much more transparency than there was after the NEC ballot last month, and this time the full results, including every single stage of the complicated Single Transferable Vote count process, have been sent to the candidates.  It looks like the intention is that the same full information will be made available to all party members too, although at time of writing that hasn't happened yet.

So I'm returning to the Finance & Audit Committee after a gap of just over a year (I was previously on it as an NEC nominee), and I'm joining the Disciplinary Committee for the first time.  On the other hand, I'm no longer a member of the Appeals Committee, which I've been an elected member of since last February, because of course once I was elected to the Disciplinary Committee, I was no longer eligible to be a candidate for the Appeals Committee.  So of the four committees/groups I was a candidate for, the only one I missed out on was the Conference Committee - and in the immortal words that Meatloaf very nearly sang, "three out of four ain't bad".

Looking back over the last few weeks, my result in the Membership Support Convener election was probably better than I expected and I came within a whisker of being elected, my result in the ordinary NEC ballot was probably worse than I expected, and my result in these latest committee elections was probably better than I expected.  So the lesson is perhaps to always set preconceptions to one side, because each election is a fresh event and there's never any way of knowing which way it will go.

Congratulations to all of the other successful candidates, and I look forward to working with them over the coming year.