Over the last two weeks, I have sent three short and to-the-point emails to Chris McEleny, the General Secretary of the Alba Party, seeking the further information and clarification I am fully entitled to after his bizarre message out of the blue announcing that the NEC had removed me from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - something the NEC had literally no power to do under the existing constitution. (A person's party membership can be temporarily suspended pending a disciplinary hearing, but the NEC has no power to simply remove someone on an 'a la carte' basis from their elected position on an individual committee. It would be total chaos if they did have that power - if there was a troublesome minority on the NEC itself, for example, the majority could simply vote that minority out of existence.)
Because Mr McEleny ignored the first email, I made sure that the two subsequent emails were copied to the Deputy General Secretary (Corri Wilson), the party chair (Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh) and the party leader (Alex Salmond) - just so I would know there was no danger that they would be overlooked accidentally. All four individuals have quite plainly made an intentional decision to ignore my messages for fourteen days. In my opinion, for any party member to be treated in that way is disgraceful and an act of carefully calculated contempt. I would be lying if I said that this has not lessened my respect for these four people, which used to be considerable, and sky-high in the case of Mr Salmond. There was a time, actually, when I used to hear from Mr Salmond quite frequently by phone - but, of course, that was when he needed people like me to put his side of the story following his trial and to try to ensure enough support was there among committed Yessers to get Alba off the ground if and when the launch came. I was once warned by someone who has known Mr Salmond for far, far longer than I have that one of his greatest faults, ironically, is a lack of personal loyalty - if someone is no longer deemed useful, he'll drop them like a hot brick. My reaction was "not to worry, I'm big enough and ugly enough to look after myself, and I'm not naive either - I know how ruthless many senior politicians are". All of that still stands, but my goodness, what a prescient observation that person made. No longer am I needed to defend Mr Salmond's reputation after dodgy proceedings against him - now he is the instigator of dodgy proceedings against me, and conveniently the phone has fallen completely silent. My liberty is not at stake, of course, so my situation is infinitely less stressful than Mr Salmond's was five years ago. But suffice to say that this little irony has not gone unnoticed by me or by others.
I finally received an email today from Mr McEleny, but it continued to completely ignore all of the emails I had sent him over the last two weeks. It simply informed me that I have now been suspended from the party, pending a Disciplinary Committee hearing, due to new allegations that I have publicly "attacked the party" on this blog and on Twitter. I of course have done no such thing - I have made legitimate, measured and well-reasoned criticisms of the party leadership's actions in specific areas. I must say that there is a whiff of Stalinism about any party leadership that cannot differentiate between itself and the wider party, and thus regards any criticism of itself as an attack on the party. This is absolutely no surprise, though, because I have been an elected member of the Alba Disciplinary Committee since January, and I have seen exactly the threadbare, nonsensical reasons that have been put forward for expulsions and lengthy suspensions. Confidentiality rules have, frankly, been abused over that period to ensure that Alba members do not have a clue of the outrageous things that have been going on behind the scenes. I have known for months and I haven't been able to say anything.
It is the very problem of a party leadership that thinks it is the party that I have been trying to address in the Constitutional Review Group since January - in other words I have been battling against the odds to try to turn a sham internal party democracy, one where everything is carefully controlled and managed by a self-perpetuating leadership elite, into a real democracy in which the members can if they want change things for the better without the leadership's permission. I have not done that to "attack" the party, I have done it to try to rescue a party that will otherwise be in a death-spiral if it alienates and loses any more members. It now seems obvious to me that Alba was actually set up as a small, private version of the SNP for a few closely-connected families and friends to control in a way that suited themselves - although nobody bothered to mention that to the thousands of people from outside the in-group who joined and were promised a 'member-led' party. It's actually much more like a private living-room rather than a fully-fledged political party. We had an extraordinary demonstration last year that the leadership will even cancel internal election results if they dislike the outcome - I doubt if even the Sturgeon clique would ever have dared go quite that far in the SNP. Anecdotally, I've been left in no doubt that Alex Salmond had been monitoring the progress of those votes and only made the final decision to nullify them once he was sure the "wrong" people had won. If democracy had prevailed, Denise Findlay rather than Rob Thompson would currently be Organisation Convener, and Jacqueline Bijster rather than Daniel Jack would currently be Membership Support Convener. Instead, we have a de facto autocracy. I am nowhere near as big a threat to that autocracy as Ms Findlay, Ms Bijster and Eva Comrie were, but it seems that the leadership are being very thorough and meting out draconian treatment to even the lesser threats like myself.
Having served on the Disciplinary Committee for months, I know all too well that in its current composition it is a rubberstamp for the leadership. Things were a bit more evenly balanced at the start of the year, but following Marjorie Ellis Thompson's early resignation as convener and Alan Harris' automatic removal from the committee after he left the party, the leadership now have a 100% dependable majority, and of course I won't be allowed to sit in judgement on myself, which makes the majority even bigger. So whatever Mr McEleny wants the outcome of the hearing to be, that will be the outcome. This latest development is, therefore, fully consistent with Yvonne Ridley's boast to have inside information that a decision has already been taken to expel me from the Alba Party. The only thing that might theoretically stand in the way is the Appeals Committee, and to be honest I'm not sure if that's a more independent body - although the one appeal I am aware of this year was dismissed, so that doesn't bode well.
Nevertheless, I will be challenging both the Disciplinary Committee and the Appeals Committee to demonstrate that the Alba leadership are not presiding over a Mickey Mouse organisation in which the procedures are just for show, and to do that by actually applying due process. I haven't been given a date yet for the first hearing, but when it takes place I will have the right to bring with me another Alba member for support. That person will not be able to "represent" me as such, but having sat through several disciplinary hearings this year, with my jaw dropping to the floor on multiple occasions at what I was witnessing, I think it might well be useful to have an independent witness to events, if nothing else. So if you're a current Alba member and if you think you might be able to help at the meeting (particularly if you have legal expertise or some sort of equivalent), please drop me a line at: icehouse.250@gmail.com
A final point. Mr McEleny's allegations in the email suspending me are once again incredibly vague, and the closest thing he gets to specificity is by complaining that I publicly criticised Shannon Donoghue and Yvonne Ridley (he doesn't mention them by name but there's no-one else he can be referring to). I have made clear that I was subjected to attempted bullying during my period on the Constitution Review Group, by two people in particular. One of those was Shannon Donoghue, and to a small extent her bullying attempts spilled over into the public domain on Twitter, with one particular episode just after the general election in July. Yvonne Ridley, meanwhile, has I believe actually publicly posted the full exchange in which she attempted to bully me a couple of weeks ago. She blocked me immediately after posting it, so I wasn't able to doublecheck that she had quoted both of us fully and accurately, but if she has, I don't think there's much room for doubt about which direction the menace and poison was coming from. So the Alba leadership is now very publicly showing itself to have no interest in protecting party members from bullying, and there's one simple and over-riding reason for that - ie. the bullies themselves are actually in charge, or at the very least are in positions of enormous influence due to connections of family and friendship. The disciplinary process is in itself a useful tool by which an enhanced form of bullying can be administered.
I fully expect the forthcoming process to be a charade and that I will be expelled. I'm not sure even Keir Starmer would expel people just for criticising the Labour leadership in blogposts, but this is the grotesque place we find ourselves - Alba is now more authoritarian than Starmer's Labour party. I was advised by someone in this blog's comments section the other day to start looking ahead to life outside Alba just in case the worst comes to the worst, and of course I've been doing that: I have no intention of being left politically homeless if the Alba leadership expel me from a party that I have worked extremely hard for over the last three years. In the meantime, though, I've never backed down in the face of bullying in my life, and I don't intend to start now. I will be seeing what might risibly be described as this "disciplinary" process through to its conclusion.
