I was this evening informed by Corri Wilson that I have been expelled from the Alba Party. This, of course, is fully consistent with the boast Yvonne Ridley made several months ago (well before any official action was taken against me) that she had inside knowledge that the Alba leadership had already made a secret decision to expel me. That would imply that the so-called "disciplinary" process I've just been through was a complete sham from start to finish. Of course there's still no proof that Ridley was telling the truth, and the way things have unfolded since her boast may have just been an eerie coincidence. But I must say the process has felt very much like a sham, and I'll explain why.
I've said all along that if I was expelled, nobody in the Alba leadership or in the Disciplinary Committee would actually have a clue why they were expelling me, at least in the sense that they wouldn't be able to coherently explain what the 'official' explanation is. And so it has proved. The original 'disciplinary referral' that Chris McEleny wrote and then sent to both me and to the Disciplinary Committee was risible. He was clearly struggling badly - he and others in the leadership were angry at the persistent and public stand I had taken in favour of radical reform of the party constitution and he wanted to expel me, but he couldn't come up with plausible-sounding reasons, so instead he resorted to extreme vagueness.
His case against me was effectively split into three little parcels. The first parcel contained the closest thing there was to a specific allegation, which was that I had breached the confidentiality of meetings of the Constitution Review Group (of which I was a directly elected member), with a blogpost I had published on 21st April, entitled 'The case against a small political party treating its own members as the enemy'. However, this was a very problematical allegation, because as you can see if you follow the link, I clearly stated at the outset of that blogpost that I was bound by confidentiality rules and that I therefore wouldn't be discussing the work of the group. Nowhere in the blogpost did I make any statements whatsoever about what had been discussed at meetings of the group, or what decisions had been taken by the group.
So by definition Mr McEleny must have been alleging that I had revealed confidential information in some very indirect form. Now, you might assume that in order to establish I had done something as nebulous as that, Mr McEleny would first have to specify what that secret information was, and then he'd have to set out what evidence he had that the information existed in the first place and that it was covered by confidentiality rules - for example he would have to identify the presence of that information in documents or equivalent material relating to the group (such as the minutes of meetings), and then marry it up to what I had written in the blogpost.
Extraordinarily, he didn't even get past first base. I know this sounds unbelievable, but it's literally the case that throughout this process Mr McEleny has doggedly stuck to accusing me of disclosing confidential information while refusing to say what that confidential information was. His message has effectively been "this guy has done this, I'm not going to tell you how he's done it, just take my word for it and expel him". Even more astonishingly, that has proved to be enough for the Disciplinary Committee - or perhaps it's not so astonishing when you remember that in its current composition the committee is leadership-controlled and throughout this year has been a 100% reliable rubberstamp for Mr McEleny's wishes. I can attest to that fact personally - until my expulsion I was myself an elected member of the committee and I have sat through hearings that were utterly excruciating experiences because so much of what was said (and everything that was decided) had so obviously been scripted in advance.
A further logical problem, of course, is that if Mr McEleny is alleging that the blogpost breached confidentiality, by definition that must mean that the allegedly confidential information related in some way to the content of that blogpost, which narrows down the possibilities considerably. It's murderously hard to interpret this in any other way than the following: Mr McEleny must be suggesting that members of the Constitution Review Group were saying in private that rank-and-file members of the Alba Party couldn't be trusted because they might be "infiltrators", and that therefore information should be withheld from party members and they shouldn't be allowed to vote on important matters affecting the party. That was the main subject-matter of the blogpost, so what else can Mr McEleny possibly be getting at? Surely it's unthinkable that senior Alba figures would be saying such disrespectful things in private about the members of a "member-led party", and trying to disempower those members as much as possible? I believe there's a saying along the lines of "every accusation is a confession", and Mr McEleny might want to reflect on that at some length. For the record, I certainly did not allege in the blogpost that any member of the Constitution Review Group had privately made any such statement about party members. I was bound by confidentiality rules and I obeyed those rules.
The second parcel of Mr McEleny's case against me was that I had discussed party business in five specific blogposts after the leadership had removed me from my elected position on the Constitution Review Group - a decision that the leadership quite simply had no power to take under the current constitution. However, there is nothing whatever in Alba's Code of Conduct or in its social media policy that actually forbids public discussion of matters of internal party controversy, so that part of the case was a complete red herring. (That's where things get murky, though, because I was told at the hearing last night that Mr McEleny had replaced the original document with a much wider range of accusations covering nineteen blogposts - but I wasn't allowed to know what the new accusations were or which blogposts were being referred to!)
The third parcel was four little quotes from either the Code of Conduct or social media policy, with the implication that I was in breach of those specific parts, but without any explanation whatsoever of what I had done to breach them. Most outrageously of all, one of the quotes related to behaviour on social media that was either "abusive" or that "targeted individuals", but Mr McEleny did not supply even a single example of any such behaviour on my part. He did not come up with a single tweet, or a single Facebook post. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Again, his message to the Disciplinary Committee was effectively "oooh, this guy has done awful things on social media, but I'm not going to tell you what I mean by that, just take my word for it and expel him". And the committee's reply was effectively "OK, chief!"
As you can probably imagine, this bizarre non-accusation posed considerable challenges for me in preparing my defence. How can you defend yourself against an accusation that only exists in Mr McEleny's head and that he refuses to tell anyone about? The approach I took was to look at tweets posted recently by leading members of the Alba Party, including by Mr McEleny himself, to try to gauge how the social media policy is actually being interpreted by the party in practice. These are some of the examples I came up with, the first of which I'm sure many people would argue is both misogynistic and lesbophobic:
Chris McEleny, 21st November 2024: "Define irony: Mhairi Black, who spent 10 years at Westminster with her snout in the Kit Kat trough"
Chris McEleny, 14th November 2024: "How creepy. Some wee social media weirdo at the Scottish Parliament actually zooms in on women's footwear to brief the press."
Shannon Donoghue, 19th May 2024: "No it's not wrong, and if I'm really honest, I'm sick of the wee victim act. I've seen Eva first hand at conferences with the wee gang. She was privy to info being on NEC that Grangemouth was a key seat for them. The only one lacking unity is her."
(Note: "Eva" is a reference to Eva Comrie, who was Alba's elected Equalities Convener just weeks before Ms Donoghue posted her tweet.)
Shannon Donoghue, 6th July 2024: "You, is the simple answer. You and the wee gangs attempt to tarnish the party. You do more damage to Indy than good. Disgraceful."
(Note: The above was a *direct reply* to Denise Findlay, Alba's former elected Organisation Convener.)
Shannon Donoghue, 6th July 2024: "James Kelly really tweeting about self-awareness. The gift that keeps on giving."
I defy anyone to look at my own track record on social media and conclude that it is not significantly better and more respectful than any of the examples above. That was exactly what I invited the Disciplinary Committee to do, and in the circumstances there wasn't much else I could do. But needless to say the committee have decided to ignore all of that and have instead upheld the allegations that only exist inside Mr McEleny's head and that he's too shy to tell anyone about. What a bashful lad he is, to be sure.
The case against me was effectively an optical illusion. It was presented like a proper disciplinary case in a proper Alba-branded document, but the more you looked at it, the more it crumbled away and you realised there was nothing of substance there. There were no specific allegations at all, just smoke and mirrors. I have literally been expelled from the Alba Party for nothing.
Or nothing if you believe the official version. There is of course a real reason, which is that I had strong views on the direction the party should take and I kept maddening the leadership by expressing those views in public. And that takes me back to some of the conversations I had with Alex Salmond on the phone in years gone past, because I can recall three specific occasions when he spontaneously raised the issue of freedom of speech. The first was when I mentioned concerns about Yvonne Ridley's notorious tweet suggesting that a vote for the SNP was a vote for Jimmy Savile. (Ridley at the time was Alba's Women's Convener.) He laughed it off and said something like "nobody can stop Yvonne saying whatever she wants to say" and added that she had a right to free speech anyway. My reaction was basically "OK, fine, as long as the same rule applies to everyone else too".
The second occasion was when he was reminiscing about Margo MacDonald (it was just a meandering conversation and he randomly ended up on the subject of Margo). He said he was absolutely appalled when John Swinney engineered her removal from the SNP and added that he would never have done that in a million years. He admitted he had angrily clashed with her but stressed that he held her in high personal regard and respected her right to hold alternative views.
The third occasion was in October 2022, when he phoned me up to offer commiserations after I was voted off Alba's National Executive Committee, which I had been an elected member of for the previous year. I had just written a blogpost saying that I suspected I had paid the price for expressing dissenting views about the party's direction. He said to me "James, it's fine to express minority opinions, I have no problem with that at all". He actually chuckled as he said that, as if the idea that anyone in Alba would ever be penalised for expressing their own views was the most ridiculous thing he could think of. The subtext seemed to be "that's the sort of thing that happens in the SNP, not here".
I believed those assurances when he gave them to me. I absolutely believed them. Let's be honest - I was completely wrong to believe those assurances. I have just been expelled from the Alba Party for expressing my own views, which is the absolute polar opposite of what Alex told me Alba was all about. I am not the first person this has happened to. All of those inspiring promises about Alba being a natural home for all independence supporters, where they could be themselves and express themselves freely, have proved to be utterly worthless.
Let me be clear that I do not believe that Alex Salmond himself was primarily responsible for Alba degrading into this weird, paranoid, sect-like, cult-like state in which free speech is ruthlessly cracked down upon and anyone who dissents is swiftly purged. However, the fact remains that it did happen on his watch, and that is something that puzzles many of us. It's been suggested to me that he was effectively a prisoner of certain other people in the leadership because they supply much of the party's funding, and that those people were insisting upon a much more authoritarian and disciplinarian approach than he ever took as SNP leader. (Remember that it's believed that only one person was expelled from the SNP in his whole twenty years as leader - and that was Bill Walker, who was convicted of decades of domestic violence. By contrast, I am at least the third person to have been expelled from Alba within the last few months, all for non-existent or downright daft reasons.)
In a way I consider myself fortunate that I know (or strongly suspect) that Alex Salmond must have signed off on my expulsion before he died, because at least that keeps me clear-sighted about the reality of the situation and prevents me from romanticising "Alba under Salmond" and kidding myself that the problems only kicked in after his death. In truth, the rot set in long ago.
I'm not going to lie - I feel personally let down and in some cases betrayed by people I was foolish enough to put my trust in. I won't name names but those people know who they are. There's one guy in particular who keeps taking bad and cruel decisions, and I can see in his eyes when he takes those decisions that he knows deep down that he's doing something wrong, but he just goes ahead and keeps doing it anyway. I suspect I know why he's chosen that path.
My first TV interview as a political blogger was on BBC Breakfast just two or three days before the independence referendum in 2014. I made a premeditated decision that my first words in that interview were going to be "Scotland is a country", because I hadn't heard anyone say that during the campaign and I wanted it to be said on TV at least once before people voted. It's just a total coincidence, of course, but Alex Salmond's final public words before his death were very similar: "Scotland is a country, not a county". Alba have since embraced those words as an unofficial motto. Well, let me propose another variation: "Alba members are people, not pawns". That is something the Alba leadership have yet to learn or accept. Effectively the party in its current state is a private club for a self-appointed elite consisting of a small number of closely-linked families and friends who decided to set up a miniature version of the SNP that they could run to suit themselves. Nobody has let the rest of the membership in on the secret that everyone outside that elite is utterly expendable, and will be treated as little more than vermin if they are not deemed useful enough. I have little doubt that a secondary reason for my expulsion is that I stood my ground on the Constitution Review Group against low-grade bullying attempts from two individuals in particular, who just happen to both be part of one of the families that form part of that elite group.
The Kafkaesque "disciplinary" process I have just been through has been so obviously tainted by galactic-level procedural unfairness that I would be letting myself and other people down badly if I didn't at least lodge an appeal and challenge the Appeals Committee to do the right thing and overturn not only my expulsion, but also the upholding of such a blatantly bogus complaint. I'm sure we can all guess what the outcome will be, but that appeal is damn well going to be lodged just the same.
In theory the appeals process is supposed to be very quick, so I also need to think about what I will do if the expulsion is left in place. There are three basic options -
1) Apply to rejoin the SNP, and try to make the case from within for the SNP to return to a genuine pro-independence path. (Note that I always use the word "apply" when I talk about this option - I'm not making any assumptions about whether my application would be accepted.)
2) Either stand myself as a "real independence but with actual integrity" candidate in the 2026 Scottish Parliament election (probably on the Central Scotland list, because that's where I live) or get behind other independent candidates standing on a similar platform.
3) Join an existing small pro-independence party (in all honesty I've searched and so far I can't find one that is really close enough to my own views, either in policy or strategic terms, but if there are any I might have missed please let me know).
I'm not going to do an Elon Musk and say I'll abide by whatever the majority tell me to do, but I'll certainly be interested in people's views, because in a rarity for me, I am genuinely unsure about what course of action to take if the expulsion stands.
