Here is the *minimum* that Alba members should be demanding from the constitution review process, in my view

The weekly Alba email to members, this time written by Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, has announced among other things that a National Assembly of the party will be held in Perth on 1st December to discuss the proposals of the Constitution Review Group.  This is the first news of any type I've heard about the constitution review process since I was suddenly informed by Chris McEleny around ten days ago that I had been removed from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - a decision which I am reliably informed by those with legal expertise that the leadership quite simply had no right under the existing constitution to take.  (The General Secretary can certainly temporarily suspend someone's party membership pending a disciplinary hearing, but there's no provision for someone to be removed or suspended on an 'a la carte' basis from their elected position on a specific committee or group.)  I've no idea whether today's announcement means that a meeting of the group has already been held in my absence.

I would urge all Alba members who believe in the type of thoroughgoing constitutional reform that would make the party fit for purpose to attend the National Assembly and to insist as best they can on real change.  I intend to be there and to make a pro-reform contribution, although obviously that will be contingent on the truth or otherwise of Yvonne Ridley's boast of having inside knowledge that a decision has been taken to expel me from the party on baseless, trumped-up charges about a breach of confidentiality rules.

December could well be the last chance for the rank-and-file membership to seize back control over the reform process.  It's a statement of the obvious that my own unconstitutional removal was part - perhaps a small part, but nevertheless a part - of a set of tactics intended to ensure that any reform package is as superficial and limited in scale as possible.  Unless members put up a real fight at National Assembly and then at conference, the opportunity to make the needed changes will be lost and may never come round again.

Regardless of what the Constitution Review Group proposes (and remember that group now has a majority of leadership-appointed members, with elected members firmly in a minority), I would suggest the minimum that the Alba membership should be insisting upon is the following:

1) All members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), with the exception of Ash Regan as leader of the parliamentary group, should be directly elected by the whole membership on a one member, one vote basis.  During the Blair/Brown government, I saw a Labour minister on TV making an atrocious defence of an unelected House of Lords.  He argued that in a democracy, it's not necessary for every position to be elected - for example, in some American jurisdictions, judges are elected.  We don't do that here but we're still a democracy, he said.  Well, OK, it may not be necessary in a parliamentary democracy for judges to be elected, but it surely is necessary for parliament to be elected.  The same principle applies to Alba.  The NEC is the governing body of the party, and if the membership doesn't elect it, the party doesn't have a fully-fledged internal democracy.  At present around 95% of the members are in practice deprived of the right to elect ordinary members of the NEC due to the discredited 'pay-per-vote' system.  

I suspect the main reason that the leadership prefer a restricted franchise is that it ensures that a far greater percentage of those able to vote in NEC elections are the equivalent of a 'pay-roll vote', ie. not actually paid employees but people firmly under the leadership's influence. Anecdotally, I've been left in no doubt that people were told who to vote for last year. The system maximises the chances of the leadership getting a pliant NEC that will mostly do as it's told and not challenge anything or ask awkward questions.

But the even bigger danger is that the pay-per-vote system turns Alba into "the best democracy money can buy", ie. it potentially allows wealthy individuals to purchase a place on the NEC by buying voting rights for lots of people and then telling them to vote as a bloc.  Whether this has already happened in past years is something that can only be speculated about.

2) Other key committees, such as the Conference Committee and the Disciplinary Committee, should also be elected by the whole membership on a one member, one vote basis.  The main pushback I've heard against this is that it would somehow be 'overkill'.  People have said things like "I support the NEC being fully elected, but can't you have too much of a good thing?"  Well, it might not be the end of the world if the Finance & Audit Committee is not directly elected, but in many ways the other committees are more powerful than the NEC itself (in practice), and if they're not elected, the democratisation process will be hopelessly incomplete.  The Conference Committee is the gatekeeper of what can and cannot be debated at conference, so if the members don't control the Conference Committee, they have no ability to determine party policy.  At present the leadership appear to maintain control of the Conference Committee by swamping its meetings with people whose right to be there is highly dubious even under the existing constitution.  And if an increasingly authoritarian leadership is taking more and more disciplinary action against rank-and-file members, those members need protection against arbitrary treatment, and the most effective protection of all is for members to choose for themselves the composition of the Disciplinary and Appeals Committees.

3) Committees should select their own conveners, rather than have conveners imposed on them by the leadership.  The Alba constitution is closely modelled on the SNP constitution, so in the places where the Alba constitution is actually less democratic than the SNP, it raises a red flag for me and makes me wonder why.  As I understand it, the SNP's Conduct and Appeals Committees are independent from the NEC in their composition, but that is not the case in Alba, where the NEC (in reality the leadership using the NEC as a rubberstamp) appoints two members to the Disciplinary Committee and designates one of them as convener.  And even though nobody on the NEC is allowed to be a member of the Appeals Committee, the NEC still appoints the convener of the Appeals Committee, which is a ludicrous contradiction.  And in case you're wondering, no, the NEC did not appoint a convener from within the Appeals Committee's own ranks, they appointed a convener from outside who was not elected by anyone. That hopelessly compromises the committee's independence.  All committees should be trusted to choose their own chairs.

4) The "Enabling Act" should be removed. Like the SNP constitution, the Alba constitution permits rules to be drawn up that have the same force as if they were in the constitution itself.  But the SNP constitution adds the caveat that this is only the case insofar as the rules do not conflict with the text of the constitution. That caveat appears to be missing from Alba's constitution.  Why?  In theory, this is a weakness which could be exploited as a sort of 'Enabling Act' allowing the constitution to be overridden.  That's got to be sorted.

5) The General Secretary's veto powers over the disciplinary process should be abolished.  As Alan Harris' guest post set out, under the current system, the General Secretary can simply veto all complaints he doesn't approve of, and the Disciplinary Committee is not even made aware that those complaints ever existed.  But for complaints that the General Secretary allows through or sets in train himself, he is free to go all in, and demand certain outcomes and penalties.  That is not a fair, just or independent system, and unsurprisingly it is not producing fair, just or independent results. The Disciplinary Committee must be an independent, fully elected body that investigates all complaints without interference from the General Secretary or the party chair.

6) Something has to be done about the unelected nature of the party chair and General Secretary positions.  We have the weird paradox that most national office bearer roles are directly elected, but by far the two most powerful office bearers are not elected by anyone.  Presumably the leadership must be worried about those positions falling into the "wrong" hands, but given the huge power these two people wield over party members, I believe it is unsustainable for party members to have no say at all.  My suggestion is a compromise by which the leader would propose their preferred party chair and General Secretary, and the party membership would then either accept or reject those nominations via affirmative ballots.  However in an ideal world I do believe both positions should be directly elected.

Additionally, although it's not something I've personally prioritised, I know the biggest concern for many members is Alba's unsatisfactory approach to policy formation, which could potentially be addressed by the creation of a Policy Development Committee, or an elected Policy Development Convener.