"Mad Dog" is Primus Suspect for yet another leak to the Sunday Mail about the chaos within the Alba Party

Those of you who have read my lengthy email exchange with Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh from last spring will already have a sense of perhaps the most grotesque feature of the sickness at the heart of the Alba Party.  Before his dismissal, the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny had dictatorial powers over Alba members.  He could suspend any party member at his own personal whim - making them instantly ineligible to stand in internal elections, for example, or to participate at conference.  He could also - and frequently did - arbitrarily veto any official complaints lodged by rank-and-file members about the behaviour of people in the party's elite.

And yet he was totally immune from accountability in a way that people with a tiny fraction of his powers were not.  As you can see from my exchange with Ms Ahmed-Sheikh, at the first hint of anyone trying to hold McEleny to account for blatantly abusing his powers, they were informed that they were not allowed to do so, because that would constitute beastly victimisation of someone who was no more than an 'umble, vulnerable employee, and the party simply couldn't afford to be taken to an employment tribunal by him.  It's not a bad set-up if you can wangle it, is it?  Having dictatorial powers over all members of a party, while being able to treat those members as your employers and use employment law against them if they try to fight back against your abuses.

Of course McEleny was only in this absurdly protected position because it suited the wider leadership for him to be there - it was of immense assistance in conducting the Stalinist purges of people who displeased them in whatever small way.  So there was a kind of poetic elegance to it when McEleny ended up using that cosy set-up as a weapon against the leadership themselves.  Although Alba look set to be nothing more than a footnote in Scottish political history, they will always, absolutely always, have the unique distinction of being the party in which the leader tried to sack the General Secretary, and the General Secretary responded by trying to suspend the leader on the grounds that sacking the untouchable General Secretary is a grievous disciplinary offence.  (Or to put it in McEleny's own terms, sacking him would expose the party to significant financial liabilities if he took legal action against them and won, and thus creating such exposure 'injured' the party and was a serious disciplinary matter.)

By that point McEleny had got so drunk on his own power and importance, and had got so used to the pseudo-legalistic justifications for his diktats going unchallenged, that he didn't anticipate what should have been blindingly obvious - ie. that the NEC were never going to allow an 'umble employee to suspend the *party leader* simply on the grounds that the party leader had tried to sack him.  Having received his long-overdue rude awakening, McEleny's faulty thinking has continued, and he's tried to take exactly the same hopeless case to the court of public opinion, or rather the court of the Alba membership.  Over the last few weeks, he's leaked a series of stories to the unionist press, the latest being the one in the Sunday Mail today, revealing the advice Alba received about the potential financial consequences of sacking him if he tried to appeal.

Apparently he genuinely anticipates that Alba members will react to this information by thinking to themselves: "WHAT?  MacAskill actually tried to sack the untouchable McEleny?  Has he taken leave of his senses?!  Our eyes were shut but now they are open!  We must rise up against the despot MacAskill and replace him with Ash Regan, who will restore the virtuous McEleny to his rightful place!"  Whereas anecdotally Alba members are in fact reacting in the opposite way - they think McEleny is a jumped-up little nobody and that MacAskill should be congratulated for belatedly cutting "Mr Unsackable" down to size.  They are appalled that McEleny is willing to drive Alba to financial ruin due to his own self-importance.

Whether McEleny realises it or not (and seemingly he doesn't), he's completely run out of road in the Alba Party and if he wants a political future it will have to be elsewhere.  But the person who does still have something to lose, and who is being tremendously damaged by McEleny's antics, is Ash Regan.  Somehow she's allowed herself to be convinced that embracing McEleny as some sort of martyr figure is the ticket to popularity in Alba, but it's actually going to cost her masses of votes in the leadership election, because party members are terrified (and with absolutely full justification) that she is intending to reappoint him to a senior position - perhaps Party Chair, perhaps 'Director of Operations'.  They're breathing a monumental sigh of relief for having got rid of him at last and the absolute last thing they want is a Mad Dog Restoration.

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Among those who have been bullied out of Alba over the last couple of years, there are mixed feelings about Craig Murray's recent blogpost. They are grateful to him for acknowledging that something has gone seriously wrong in the party, but they think he's falling into the trap of "both siding" the issue, by saying that the problem was caused both by an authoritarian leadership group and by an attempted insurrection against that group.  In reality there was no attempted insurrection - there was just Tasmina exploiting Alex Salmond's deep paranoia after his legal ordeal by cynically convincing him there was a faction within Alba trying to overthrow him.  That supposed rebel faction were actually the people who were most loyal to him - they practically idolised him and would have walked through fire for him, which was precisely why Tas regarded them as so much of a threat to herself.

There has also been deep disquiet about the revelation in the blogpost about how Mr Salmond reacted when Craig brought up the concerns that had been raised about the rigged NEC elections of December 2023.  Mr Salmond apparently said that one faction had been out-organised by another faction, and that they had nobody to blame for that but themselves.  Well, I can tell you that Mr Salmond claimed to me on the phone in September 2021 that the reason for the pay-per-vote system for NEC elections was to ensure that better-known people such as myself didn't have an unfair advantage, and that other candidates could level the playing field by mingling with conference delegates as the vote was taking place.  He certainly didn't mention anything about the real intention being to enable "factions" to jostle against each other with bulk vote-buying strategies.  That would have sounded like a somewhat less high-minded ideal.

Labour's uncertainty transformed into despair using empirical strategies: Reform UK take the lead for the first time ever in any "Freshwater poll" (nope, me neither)

I'm slightly baffled by this poll, because it's billed as the latest in a monthly series of polls by a firm called "Freshwater Strategies" on behalf of City AM, but I can't find much trace of the previous polls in the series.  Freshwater are not listed as a member of the British Polling Council (although amazingly there are members called "Walnut Unlimited" and "Yonder Consulting").  They appear to be an Australian firm, albeit with a secondary office in London, and their Twitter self-description is soul-destroying corporate gibberish: "we transform uncertainty into opportunity using empirical strategies".  Of course you do, guys.

GB-wide voting intentions (Freshwater Strategies / City AM, 28th February - 2nd March 2025):

Reform UK 27%

Labour 24%

Conservatives 23%

Liberal Democrats 15%

Greens 7%

SNP 3%

Whoever did the write-up for City AM was fairly clueless, because they described the SNP as being on "just" 3%, whereas in fact that's a healthy showing for the SNP in a GB-wide poll.  It's clearly stated that Reform UK have "surged" and are in the lead for the first time in the monthly series, which is surprising, because other firms are suggesting Reform may have dropped back just a touch recently.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 in January, and so far the running total stands at £1661, meaning that 24% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Reform UK lead in Find Out Now poll for EIGHTH time in a row

Reform UK went "Full Alba" today by removing the whip from one of their five MPs and referring him to the police.  In a small way that's good news for the SNP, because it now becomes slightly less likely that Reform will overtake them as the fourth largest party in the Commons during this parliament due to by-elections or defections.

It's obviously too soon for any impact of this incident to show up in the opinion polls, but I wouldn't automatically assume there'll be one.  Pretty much every parliamentary grouping Farage has ever been part of has fallen apart to some extent, and yet he always seems to come bouncing back as if nothing really changed.  In the meantime, a Find Out Now poll published today showed Reform with an outright lead yet again, albeit a sharply reduced one, which was perhaps inevitable due to the bounce for Labour caused by the Trump / Ukraine crisis.

GB-wide voting intentions (Find Out Now, 5th March 2025):

Reform UK 26% (-2)

Labour 25% (+2)

Conservatives 21% (-)

Liberal Democrats 12% (-1)

Greens 10% (-)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

By now, the pattern is pretty well established - three of the last four polling companies to report showed a two-point increase in Labour support, and the other showed a three-point increase.  So it does look like Trump's antics have benefited Labour a bit, but the effect has been far too modest to get Starmer out of the deep hole he was in.  The likelihood is, I would guess, that international affairs will eventually fade from view and even the small boost Labour have enjoyed will be reversed.

By my count, this is either the seventh or eighth Find Out Now poll in a row to show an outright Reform lead - it all depends on whether you count the MRP poll from late January or not (and I'd suggest there's no good reason not to).

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As Mhairi Black has come out and publicly said what we always suspected, ie. that she would have left the SNP if Kate Forbes had become SNP leader, it might be worth reminding ourselves that Ms Forbes is relatively well-regarded by the public and is probably the one person who could take over from John Swinney without it being a backward step as far as voters are concerned.  Here are the latest net ratings for leading politicians published by Ipsos only a few days ago - 

Kate Forbes (SNP): -8

John Swinney (SNP): -8

Anas Sarwar (Labour): -23

Russell Findlay (Conservatives): -31

Keir Starmer (Labour): -32

Nigel Farage (Reform UK): -43

Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives): -44

Donald Trump (US Republicans): -53

Elon Musk (US Republicans): -58

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Interestingly only watched one, Oppenheimer, and was very bored and bitterly disappointed that it didn’t really cover any of the engineering https://t.co/lk6mS0zQco

— Christopher McEleny (@ChrisMcEleny) March 8, 2025

As the film is actually largely about a kangaroo court with a predetermined outcome, I'd have thought it would be right up your street, Chris. Or are you less enthusiastic about such things now the shoe is on the other foot? https://t.co/fKnnlfOQDF

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) March 8, 2025

Some genuine good news for the independence cause: it seems that Alba will *not* be splitting the Yes vote in constituency seats next year, no matter who wins the leadership election

On Monday night, a commenter on this blog asked for my objective verdict on the STV mini-debate between Ash Regan and Kenny MacAskill for the Alba leadership.  I was planning to write a blogpost giving my thoughts, but that plan was overtaken by other events.  However, one of the things I had been intending to pick up on was that Ash Regan was surprisingly direct in saying she wanted Alba to be a "list-only party" in the Holyrood election next year.  Kenny MacAskill said something very similar, although his language wasn't quite as unambiguous, which arguably left him a get-out clause if he had a change of heart.

Nevertheless I was initially very encouraged by this.  Alba can only do harm if they stand in first-past-the-post constituency seats, because it would split the Yes vote and make it easier for unionist parties to win, and yet until recently there was every indication that was exactly what they planned to do.  In August, I directly heard Chris McEleny suggest that Alba would be standing in at least one constituency seat per electoral region, which would mean a minimum of eight across Scotland.  I know others heard him say exactly the same thing on other occasions.  And famously, Christina Hendry told the newspapers that her much-vaunted "Salmond Blood" gave her the right, Game of Thrones style, to stand in her uncle's former constituency seat in the north-east.  So Monday's debate implied there had been a very welcome change of heart on both sides of the Alba divide.

But I was much less encouraged after I then took a look at Chris McEleny's blog.  (That's the kind of crazy thing I force myself to do sometimes, just so no-one else has to.). There's a post from around a week ago in which he states that he wants Alba to be a "list-only party", but weirdly he then goes on to say - 

"Alba should at most only defend the new seat of the constituency incumbent Alba Party MSP Ash Regan currently holds and potentially at most a small handful of other seats"

Whatever else that might describe, it self-evidently does not describe a "list-only" party.  In fact it suggests that Mr McEleny has an extremely complex relationship with the word "only".  So my heart sank again - I assumed the plan was still to stand in several constituencies, but to dishonestly package that as a "list-only strategy" for window dressing purposes.

However, tonight I had a totally unexpected opportunity to clarify matters.  The National hosted a leadership hustings on YouTube, and viewers were able to submit questions via the live chat.  So I tried my luck and put forward a question asking whether "list-only" meant standing in no constituencies at all, because Mr McEleny's blog suggested otherwise.  I'm very grateful to Hamish Morrison, who was moderating on behalf of The National, for reading the question out, and the answers did actually take us forward.  Ms Regan was extremely specific that she didn't want Alba to stand in any constituencies, including her own.  Mr MacAskill essentially said the same thing, although once again he maybe left himself with just a touch more wiggle room than Ms Regan did.

So that's really good news for all independence supporters, no matter which party you support.  It'll make it easier for the SNP to hold off the Tory / Labour challenge in marginal constituencies and thus increases the chances of retaining the pro-independence majority at Holyrood.

I don't think there's much doubt Ash Regan "won" tonight's hustings.  She's a much more relaxed and fluent speaker than Mr MacAskill and as a result she came across as more sincere - even though on several points I knew perfectly well she was being disingenuous.  But sadly, sounding sincere when you're actually being insincere seems to be an indispensable skill for politicians these days.

I don't think her relatively strong performance will make any concrete difference, though.  All that matters in the Alex Salmond Memorial Party is who has the backing of Alex Salmond's widow and family, and that lucky designated winner is Mr MacAskill.  However, he had a bit of a shocker tonight and there was one point in particular where he totally lost the plot.  The question after mine was asking about the people who had been bullied out of the party and what could be done to bring them back, and Mr MacAskill responded by just flatly denying that anyone at all had been bullied out - which at this stage is a Comical Ali level of denialism given how well-documented the bullying and subsequent resignations have been.  He then went on and on about how awful it was that the question had been anonymously submitted, as if anonymity on the internet is a far more heinous affair than actual bullying and harassment.  

In fact, the question wording was perfectly polite, and I think most people would feel that anonymity is only a problem if somebody hides behind it while being abusive.  My guess is that the questioner simply happens to use a pseudonym for their YouTube account, and therefore wasn't being anonymous just for the purposes of the hustings.  Mr MacAskill making such a song and dance about the questioner's anonymity thus looked like a rather weak and desperate attempt at deflection.  I also got the distinct impression that he may have got the questioner mixed up with me, because he called him or her "an anonymous former party member", whereas in fact they hadn't identified themselves as a former party member.  (Hamish Morrison had introduced my question as being from "former member James Kelly".)

By contrast, Ash Regan did acknowledge that some former members, particularly women, had felt unhappy at the way they had been treated.  The problem is, of course, that her ally Chris McEleny was the guy responsible for a lot of that ill-treatment.

The bottom line is that there is no good outcome to this contest.  A MacAskill win would probably keep Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh and Corri Wilson in harness and would maintain the paranoid bunker mentality that the only problem Alba have got is that people keep having the temerity to speak out about their horrific experiences in the party.  But a Regan win would probably mean a senior role for Chris McEleny, who has been the single most baleful influence within Alba.  Ms Regan made clear she would accept Mr McEleny's resignation as General Secretary, but very noticeably didn't rule out appointing him to a different role.

Incidentally, YouTube lets you know how many people are watching at any given time, and it seemed to hover at around 40 or 45.  That's perfectly respectable for a small party's leadership hustings, but the snag was that you could see from the live chat that a lot of viewers were not current Alba members, but disenchanted former members such as Fiona & Neil Sinclair and Leanne Tervit.  Poor old Mr MacAskill and Ms Regan - they slog their guts out trying to win votes, and the only people listening (virtually) are what Zulfikar Sheikh calls "the Wee Gang of Malcontents".  There's some sort of poetic justice in that, I feel.

The SNP must ignore the siren voice of Ian Blackford and hold fast to the principle of unilateral nuclear disarmament

When I rejoined the SNP two months ago, I was well aware that I would find myself in a minority in taking a somewhat nuanced stance on the Ukraine war.  Perhaps because of the party's pro-Europeanism, perhaps because of an understandable fellow feeling with a country that has had its sovereignty trampled all over by a larger neighbour, the SNP has taken a stance of almost limitless support for the Ukrainian government in persisting with the war for however long it wishes.  But now that Ian Blackford has used the war as justification to come out in favour of the retention of nuclear weapons, perhaps I could just very gently observe that many SNP members may be waking up for the first time to the trap they have walked into by taking too 'conventional', too 'European mainstream' a position on Ukraine, because that effectively locks you into the logic of that mainstream European view, which ultimately leads back to the conviction that Russia is a very real threat to the continent's security and that nuclear weapons are an indispensable part of any protection against that threat.  If America is no longer willing to 'deter' Russia with nuclear weapons, British and French nuclear weapons will have to fill the gap - or so that mainstream view holds.

I suppose in theory the SNP leadership could follow Ian Blackford in surrendering to that logic, and try to frame support for nuclear weapons as merely a shift from 'unilateral' to 'multilateral' disarmament.  But if they did so, they would alienate an enormous chunk of their party membership and would probably end up losing many of their most committed and experienced activists.  Because we all know that "multilateral disarmament" translates into English as "no disarmament".  When Labour abandoned unilateral disarmament in the late 1980s, they packaged it in exactly the same way as "multilateralism" but in practice since then they have been fully wedded to the indefinite retention of a so-called "minimal nuclear deterrent" regardless of circumstance.

Mr Blackford's comments strongly suggest that he always privately believed in the principle of nuclear deterrence, but went along with the policy of disarmament because he thought it was a luxury Scotland could afford for as long as we were "protected" by the American nuclear umbrella.  But that categorically is not the place that true support for unilateral disarmament comes from.  Unilateralists understand that deterrence simply does not work, and that if you depend upon it to prevent either a conventional invasion or a nuclear attack, you are making as fundamental a mistake as France did with the Maginot Line in the interwar years.  The lengthy list of occasions in the Cold War when a nuclear exchange came within a whisker of occurring strongly suggests that if you tempt fate long enough with "deterrence", eventually your luck will run out, and 90% of the population of the world will be wiped out and human civilisation in any recognisable form will end.  That's not a mistake anyone can learn from.  

In the long run, the only way to save humanity is to opt out of deterrence and actually eliminate the weapons themselves.  The SNP have had this one right all along, and it would be an absolute tragedy if they suddenly lose their way simply because people have fallen in love with the fashionable cause du jour.

Is Donald Trump just a cosplay fascist, or does his threats to conquer Greenland and parts of Panama make him the real thing?

I was just watching a "highlights" video of Donald Trump's speech to Congress (if that's not a contradiction in terms) and I found it genuinely chilling when he said he was going to get his hands on Greenland "one way or another" and JD Vance started chuckling behind him.  It instantly called to mind Goebbels or Goering having a little snigger on the stage of a Nazi rally while Hitler taunted whichever country he had decided to invade next.

In Trump's first term it was always said that he couldn't really be considered a full-blown fascist because he didn't tick enough of the boxes, such as opposition to democracy and territorial expansionism.  The insurrection at the Capitol building obviously called into question the assumption that he wasn't an opponent of democracy, although that incident almost seemed like 'cosplay fascism' because he didn't have the steel to actually see through a proper coup attempt.  And the only vague talk of expansionism in the first term related to buying Greenland - I can't recall any suggestion of an invasion after Denmark said no to the proposal.

The Netanyahu regime in Israel actually fits in with the textbook definition of fascism much more comprehensively - it's militaristic, ethnonationalist, perpetually expansionist, genocidal (which only occurs in the most extreme forms of fascism), and its democratic status is questionable due to the apartheid nature of the state.  So arguably the main relationship of the US to fascism has been an indirect one via its enthusiastic enabling of Israeli fascism.

But that may be changing if the conquest of Greenland is a serious prospect.  Again, the only real question is whether this will prove to be cosplay fascism or the real deal.  The Panama Canal, Gaza and Canada are also apparently on Trump's shopping list for an expanded US empire.  The threats to Canada are generally taken less seriously than the ones against Greenland and Panama, but it strikes me that Greenland is not exactly contiguous with the US - there's a large expanse of Canada in between.  If the strategic location of Greenland makes it so irresistible to Trump, and if the fact that Denmark is a friendly country that already allows US military activity on its territory isn't sufficient for him, it's hard to see why the same logic wouldn't also apply to northern Canada.

Of course there isn't a cat in hell's chance of Canada becoming part of the US, whether Trump realises it or not.  But if that's his ambition, it means he's an expansionist on a Napoleonic scale, just as Hitler was.  The Empire he envisages would be more than double the geographical size of the present-day US (Canada is actually the larger of the two countries) and it would encompass the vast bulk of a whole continent.  That's a fascist prospectus, at the very least.

The Alba Party's relentless war against its own members continues despite McEleny's sacking - the NEC sticks two fingers up at the dozens of members who warmly welcomed the popular Leanne Tervit back to the party by crassly decreeing that, actually, she is FORBIDDEN TO REJOIN

I said the other day that Craig Murray was naive for sticking to the article of faith that Alex Salmond must have had very good reasons for stitching up Alba's 2023 internal elections and that those reasons were related to the pursuit of independence.  But in fact I think Craig's naivety went a bit further than that, and we're already starting to see the evidence.  Having revealed for the first time how Mr Salmond pressurised him to give up his slot on the NEC immediately after being elected, he said that he hoped the party would "come together again now and those who left will rejoin", as if he somehow lived in a world where people's reasons for leaving had been resolved or even a world in which people were free to rejoin if they wanted to.  

Despite the vote-rigging, Leanne Tervit was actually elected to the NEC in the notorious 2023 vote with a big mandate, but she stood down afterwards in protest and spoke out about the subversion of democracy the party had just witnessed.  Over the last few days she attempted to rejoin Alba, as apparently Craig assumes people like her are able to just choose to do, as if Alba was a normal political party in which it works like that.  When she announced what she was doing, she was enthusiastically welcomed back by dozens of Alba members - and a measure of her popularity within the party is that one or two people who seem to absolutely hate my guts were among the loudest and warmest in welcoming her.  You might think the strength of that reaction would have given the party leadership some pause for thought if they had any notion of playing silly buggers - but no.  This is the Alba Party, remember, where factional hatred, dictatorialism and petty points of "discipline" trump absolutely every other consideration, including common sense and basic political nous.

Leanne was one of a large number of former Alba members who the disgraced former General Secretary Chris McEleny (aka "that's Mad Dog PRIMUS to you") maliciously certified as having "publicly resigned", which is a form of insta-expulsion that bypasses the normal disciplinary process and effectively leaves the individuals concerned banned from rejoining for life.  The only theoretical way around that is to "apply to the NEC for permission to rejoin", but in practice McEleny tended to either refuse to even pass such applications on to the NEC, or just did his usual trick of pretending not to have received the email containing the application.  It's a minor miracle that Leanne's application even reached the NEC, but the miracle went no further than that - they rejected her application out of hand, and thus stuck two fingers up at the members who had been so happy about her return to the party.  It's a very clear signal that none of the other people who resigned in protest at the 2023 vote-rigging are welcome to rejoin either - so what does Craig have to say to those people now?

There really is no alibi here for the "Alba's leadership aren't as bad as portrayed" brigade or the "it was only one or two bad apples causing the problems" brigade.   McEleny is long gone now but the suffocating authoritarianism continues unabated.  The cultural problems in the Alba elite go a lot deeper and wider than just McEleny, or Tas, or even the Corri Nostra.  The people running the party actually want Alba to continue to be the narrow, inward-looking, paranoid sect that it's become - they are not remotely interested in having the type of broad church membership that Craig takes as read everyone is aspiring to.

Wee thread. 1/. Well it seems I was premature in thinking I'd rejoined Alba. After my welcome email I realised I couldn't log in as my account was suspended. I sent an email asking for it to be lifted so I could buy my conference ticket...

— Leanne Tervit (@LeanneTervit) March 4, 2025

2/ I got an email back stating that I had to submit a formal application to the NEC which was discussed on Saturday. My formal application is below. Im not sure why I had to submit this as Scott Fallon, who also publically resigned while giving members abuse didnt have to. pic.twitter.com/YLjBiU0DFV

— Leanne Tervit (@LeanneTervit) March 4, 2025

3/. Ive just recieved an email back with the decision of the NEC stating that my application to rejoin has been refused. Id like to know who was part of this NEC who made this decision, and chaired it, given that my resignation was due to the actions of certain NEC members. pic.twitter.com/LpXcA6CIyE

— Leanne Tervit (@LeanneTervit) March 4, 2025

4/ If theres any honest NEC folk with independent minds who'd like to privately message me, you have my word that your name will not be mentioned. HONESTY is what's needed in our Independence Parties. My reply is below.

Cheeky? A wee bit
Deserved? 100%

Up Yours. For Scotland pic.twitter.com/AJrFb2Ayc7

— Leanne Tervit (@LeanneTervit) March 4, 2025

The Alba NEC have refused Leanne Tervit’s membership!
Does Alba have a death wish?
If the NEC thinks this helps Alba they are deluded
And this is on Kenny’s watch
If members want less vicious infighting and more winning complete change is needed https://t.co/ZAwbO0scof

— Denise Findlay 💚🤍💜 (@gracebrod1e) March 4, 2025

@ChrisMcEleny can you assist?

— Brian Robertson (@brobertsonnews) March 4, 2025

You gotta love Brian's deadpan delivery there. 

Incidentally, reliable ol' Shannon Donoghue responded to Leanne's thread with yet another immature outburst on Twitter that once again drove a coach and horses through Alba's social media policy, which expressly forbids the "targeting of individuals". So will Shannon now face disciplinary action? Och, don't be daft. She's in the Corri Nostra, she's the daughter of the General Secretary. The rules are for the oiks. (And if those words are giving you déjà vu, there's a reason for that.)

New YouGov poll suggests Labour's hopes of a "Falklands moment" for Starmer are so far proving delusional - and the SNP have an 11-point lead in the Scottish subsample

I've been awaiting the first GB poll since the Trump v Zelensky showdown with a degree of trepidation, because that incident has at least temporarily caused the London media to fall back in love with Keir Starmer.  It's been a rare opportunity for a British Prime Minister to pose as a figure of genuine international significance (and of course the same is also true for President Macron in France and Chancellor-designate Merz in Germany).  Labour strategists have been briefing the media about how Starmer has just had a "Falklands moment" that will turn the domestic political situation upside down - that's a bit of a stretch given that any British military intervention is still hypothetical, but nevertheless I did wonder if Labour might get a moderate boost in the polls.  As it turns out, the new YouGov poll shows only a small margin-of-error increase for Labour, which I suspect Starmer's people will be very disappointed with.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 2nd-3rd March 2025):

Labour 26% (+2)

Reform UK 25% (-)

Conservatives 21% (-1)

Liberal Democrats 14% (-2)

Greens 9% (+1)

SNP 3% (-)

Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 32%, Labour 21%, Reform UK 16%, Conservatives 13%, Liberal Democrats 11%, Greens 6%

This breaks the remarkable sequence of four consecutive YouGov polls showing a Reform UK lead.  However, in all of those polls the lead was either one point or two points, so even if public opinion had remained absolutely static, it would have been statistically inevitable that the sequence would be broken before too long due to the margin of error.  My guess is that the increase for Labour may actually be real on this occasion, but it's tiny and the obvious question is "will this be as good as it ever gets for Starmer?"  He can't expect the kind of generous coverage he's received over the last few days to occur very often.

And just as an aside, it's a bit troubling that Starmer's strategists seem to have the mindset that cultivating military confrontation with Russia is a legitimate tactic to improve Labour's domestic popularity.  Russia and the UK are both nuclear powers, albeit with an enormous mismatch in Russia's favour in terms of the number of nukes each country has. It would, I'd suggest, be a bit of a shame if the population of this country was wiped out due to an ill-conceived attempt to bolster Keir Starmer's net ratings in Survation polls.

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The latest betrayal of Alba members is the most shameful - it's game, set and match to Tasmina as the party's unelected Tyrant-Queen gets her way on the retention of the discredited pay-per-vote system - her ruthless and callous tactics to crush all dissent appear to have SUCCEEDED as rumours strongly suggest members will *NOT* be given the option of introducing a democratic one member, one vote system for NEC elections

Although the Alba leadership never admitted that the 2023 internal elections were rigged (quite the reverse, in fact - they maliciously expelled Colin Alexander from the party simply for raising questions about what had happened, and suspended Denise Somerville for supplying evidence of the vote-rigging), Alex Salmond did make a nod to members' concerns by sending out an email immediately afterwards promising that the newly-launched review of the party constitution would be able to consider the possibility of introducing one member, one vote for NEC elections.  At the time, I interpreted that as meaning that the leadership accepted that the pay-per-vote system for electing the NEC had been so thoroughly discredited that it was no longer tenable to even attempt to keep it going.  I assumed that they would never have built up expectations of one member, one vote unless that was actually going to happen.

I was completely wrong about that.  The leadership were in fact totally wedded to the pay-per-vote system, and the reason why can be summed up in three little words - "Tasmina", "Ahmed" and "Sheikh".  Without pay-per-vote, there would be no way of guaranteeing that Tas would continue to top the annual female ballot for the NEC, and it was only by topping the ballot that she could justify her ongoing unelected role as Party Chair.  The constitution review was just a classic "kick it into the long grass by setting up a commission" wheeze, with the intention of dropping all talk of one member, one vote after emotions had cooled a bit.

Whenever I'm asked about Alba these days, the most common question is "so why exactly were you expelled?", to which all I can respond with is "that's a very good question" or "your guess is as good as mine".  But of course there's a big distinction between the 'official' reason, which is impossible to pin down due to the risible vagueness of McEleny's disciplinary referral document, and the 'real' reason, which was almost certainly much more specific.

One plausible interpretation of that 'real' reason is that it was bound up with Tasmina's determination to keep the pay-per-vote scam going at all costs.  The Constitution Review Group set up in early 2024 was 50% appointed, 50% elected, and three of the four elected members were in favour of reform.  Those three were myself, Alan Harris and Mike Baldry. I've outlined in a previous blogpost how Tas menaced Alan, myself and Morgwn Davies with talk of disciplinary action on trumped-up charges in the spring of 2024, before quietly dropping those threats a few weeks later and announcing that she'd destroyed all of the relevant evidence.  Part of the idea was probably to see if one or more of us voluntarily resigned to avoid the hassle and stress of a possible disciplinary process.  Alan Harris did indeed resign from Alba within a day or two of the threats being issued, although I must stress that his stated reasons for leaving had nothing to do with Tasmina's stunt.

Alan's departure reduced the number of reformers on the Constitution Review Group from three to two, exactly as Tas had presumably hoped.  But with the group's chair Hamish Vernal saying he wanted a consensus report, Mike Baldry and I still had some leverage between us. Although the meetings of the group were fractious and unpleasant affairs, we ultimately managed to convince Hamish that on important matters where there was no consensus on the group (such as one member, one vote), Alba members should be allowed to choose between the majority option and the minority option.  That would have allowed members to make a straight choice between one member, one vote, and the status quo of pay-per-vote, at the party conference later this month.

However, after the compromise with Hamish had been agreed, I was of course unceremoniously expelled from the party.  It's reasonable to wonder whether the reason for that, or part of the reason, was to reduce Mike Baldry to a minority of one and make it impossible for him to hold the line on what had already been agreed.

My worst fears on that front seem to have been confirmed.  I'm told there was a marathon five-hour meeting of the Constitution Review Group over the weekend to decide on a final proposed constitutional text to put to conference.  The sheer length of the meeting is a strong indication that what had already been agreed was not being adhered to and that everything was back up for grabs.  It must have been almost impossible for Mike Baldry to keep the minority options in play, not only because he had been whittled down to a minority of one, but also because the anti-reform members of the group include Chris Cullen and his immature fiancée Shannon Donoghue, who are part of the so-called "Corri Nostra" and are thus close allies of Tasmina.

What I'm hearing, and admittedly I'm getting this from a second-hand source but a very confident one, is that the meeting decided that Alba members will no longer be given the option of introducing one member, one vote, and will instead be presented with a fait accompli of the discredited pay-per-vote system being retained indefinitely.  To put it mildly, the optics of this are absolutely catastrophic, coming just 48 hours after Craig Murray provided dramatic new information about how the 2023 NEC elections had been stitched up.  As you'd expect in any tinpot dictatorship, the Alba leadership have not taken the opportunity to tackle the massive problems that have been identified, but have instead doubled down to ensure that the fun of vote-rigging can continue into infinity.

Serious questions have now got to be asked of Hamish Vernal, who promised me to my face that minority options like one member, one vote would be put to the Alba membership, but who then played a role in getting me expelled, and subsequently seems to have cynically used that expulsion as an excuse to block reform totally.  So much for Alba as a "member-led party".  Members don't even get to express a view on whether they want democracy.

As I said only yesterday, without democratisation Alba will wither and perish.  People may be willing to put up with authoritarian tendencies in a large party of power and consequence, but the tolerance levels for the Il Duce principle in a small party are very limited indeed.  Members who find they have no say in the party's direction or how it is run will just keep drifting away, and all you'll be left with is a small number of clapping seals.  A narrow sect of that sort is going to be of no interest or use to the Scottish voting public.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, Shannon Donoghue has yet again breached Alba's social media policy (specifically the part barring the targeting of individuals) with the tweet below.  So will she now face disciplinary action?  Och, don't be silly.  She's in the Corri Nostra, she's the daughter of the General Secretary.  The rules are for the oiks.

The issue you have when you surround yourself with snakes is there is always a bigger one willing to turn. 🐍

Some people will only love you as much as they can use you. In this case, Craig you help the narrative. Shame they didn’t think that about you last year.#Receipts 💥 https://t.co/zxkxsDI2bo pic.twitter.com/xlIR3gONpz

— Shannon Donoghue (@shannon_talks_) March 2, 2025

*  *  *

Denise Findlay has a new post on her blog about how Alex Salmond pressurised her to withdraw her candidacy for Organisation Convener in 2023 - you can read it HERE.

Craig Murray's shock revelations about Alex Salmond add to the mountain of evidence that Alba's internal democracy has been a sham from day one

I have owed an explanation and I now feel free to give it.
I was elected to Alba national exec last year and declined to take up the post - thus disrespecting my nominators and voters.
In truth, Alex phoned me and asked me to decline. He said there was somebody else he needed to…

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 1, 2025

Craig did you witness my public resignation? Did you witness me then being called a bitch a witch, a troublemaker and a racist? All for posting that the NEC had been engineered and asking for the results in full. Alba needs a massive reset.

— Leanne Tervit (@LeanneTervit) March 1, 2025

I did, and not only you Leanne. A number of people left the party, with more or less noise, at that time. I was very sorry for it.
Alex had asked me to stand down in a conversation he had specified was confidential. At that moment I knew nothing about the much wider problems…

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 1, 2025

Are you kidding?? Rejoin that? No way Craig. You missed the bullying out of many candidates? Maybe you didn’t care but some of us did care an awful lot, yet we were smeared for asking for our results and raising the alarm. I can’t believe you turned a blind eye to cheating

— 💚🤍💜 Can’t Wheesht, Won’t Wheesht (@m1lllavvies) March 1, 2025

I did care a lot. Alex asked me to stand down in a conversation he said was confidential. I did not know at that moment about what had happened to other candidates, I thought it was just me. But when I gound out I still felt bound by the confidentiality.
It was all strange but I…

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 1, 2025

Handy there’s nobody to corroborate.

— Middle class woman of a certain age, can be stern (@ipa1869) March 1, 2025

I believe Tasmina was with Alex at the time. And I told a couple of people at the time in confidence - I think Barrhead Boy and Wings.

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) March 1, 2025

Can confirm.

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) March 2, 2025

The same thing happened to me. I was standing for Organisation Convener two days before voting reopened Alex phoned me and asked me to withdraw.
Like Craig I did as Alex asked.
He didn’t tell me the reason but asked me to do it out of loyalty to him. https://t.co/5tGHmvPvvZ

— Denise Findlay 💚🤍💜 (@gracebrod1e) March 1, 2025

Although I believe this is the first time Denise Findlay has spoken publicly about the pressure Alex Salmond put on her to withdraw from the re-run of the Organisation Convener election, it won't be a surprise to readers of this blog, because I touched on it in my post about the rigging of the 2023 internal elections.  As you'll recall, when the elections were first held in October 2023, Ms Findlay was re-elected as Organisation Convener and Jacqui Bijster was re-elected as Membership Support Convener - but those results were 'unacceptable' to Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who had seemingly given Mr Salmond an ultimatum that the election of both women had to be stopped somehow.  So Mr Salmond stepped in to prevent the results being announced, and then simply nullified the results - which he had absolutely no power under the Alba constitution to do, but he somehow bluffed his way through with a ludicrous cock-and-bull story about a non-existent "black dossier".  He then announced the elections would be re-run in December, but the intention was always to ensure that Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster weren't even candidates second time around, because they undoubtedly would have won again.  So Ms Findlay received a phone call from Mr Salmond putting totally inappropriate pressure on her to stand aside, and exactly the same would have happened to Ms Bijster if she hadn't already long since withdrawn in disgust by then.

What's new to me, though, and I think new to most people, is the revelation that Craig Murray received a similar phone call from Mr Salmond putting pressure on him to step aside after he had already been elected an Ordinary Member of the NEC, and that like Ms Findlay he had reluctantly gone along with the demand.  This is entirely consistent with what I was told in early 2021 about Mr Salmond wanting to model his new party on the Brexit Party with himself in total control, and with no internal democracy.  I believe he had a rethink after reflecting on how bad a look that would be for any left-of-centre party, so he eventually accepted a system of internal elections, but he never intended that to be anything more than window-dressing.  The plan was always to get the people he wanted "elected" by any means necessary, no matter whether fair or foul.  

The 2023 elections were manipulated and distorted from top to bottom.  The sheer scale of the fiddling looks almost comical in retrospect.  The office bearer elections were rigged by the means set out above to overturn the legitimate victories of Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster.  The elections for Ordinary NEC Members were initially rigged by means of the notorious pay-per-vote system (and it was done in such a cack-handed manner that the exact results had to be hushed up to prevent people bursting out laughing at how implausible they were), but it seems even that wasn't enough for Mr Salmond and Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, who quickly got rid of several of the people who had been elected, with Craig being the most high-profile victim (albeit a semi-voluntary one).

I have to say I think Craig is being astoundingly naive in his repetitions of the article of faith that Mr Salmond must have done what he did for good reasons and in the best interests of the independence cause.  The reality is that we already know with a high degree of confidence that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh's jealousy was the reason for the ousting of Ms Findlay and Ms Bijster, and with all due respect to the Sheikh family (like others, I'm a huge fan of the Great Zulfikar Sheikh), who Tas feels jealousy towards has got absolutely nothing to do with whether or not Scotland becomes an independent country.  I don't know what the reason was in Craig's own case, but I'd be amazed if it turns out to be any more legitimate.  To be blunt, I very much doubt that Mr Salmond told him the truth at the time - I don't think the reason had anything to do with wanting a specific person on the NEC, because if you look at who replaced Craig, there's no real logic for Mr Salmond being so desperate for that to happen.  I think it had much more to do with negative reasons for not wanting Craig on the NEC - and those reasons are more likely to have been Tasmina's rather than Mr Salmond's.

As someone who was elected no fewer than six times to various internal roles within Alba, including once as an Ordinary Member of the NEC, I've thought at some length about how I would have reacted if after being elected I'd received the dread phone call from Mr Salmond telling me to withdraw out of personal loyalty to him, simply because he preferred to have someone else in the role.  I've written many times about how Mr Salmond was my political hero from the age of 16 until very recently, but frankly if he'd done that to me, no matter how much charm he'd deployed, I'm pretty certain I'd have told him to take a running jump.  I'd have said to him that what he was asking was absolutely bloody outrageous, and that he appeared to have no understanding of what democracy is meant to be all about - or no true belief in the concept, at any rate.  It's not supposed to be about one man making de facto appointments (under severe pressure from one woman) and everyone else dutifully rubberstamping them for him.

No wonder I was expelled - it was only ever the truly obedient and subservient who were welcome in the Alba Party.  It's just a pity that wasn't explained to us in 2021, rather than all the endless guff about a "member-led party".  It would have saved so many of us a great deal of stress and upset.  We didn't sign up to be used and dumped like that.  

I say in all seriousness to the decent Alba members who have not yet been expelled or bullied out of the party that they have literally one last chance to save their party from oblivion, and that will be later this month when the issue of constitutional reform comes up at the party conference.  Nothing less than full democratisation and one-member-one-vote will do - and even that won't be enough, you'll need to build in safeguards to ensure transparency and to prevent behind-the-scenes manipulation of elections.  Squander this last opportunity, as the leadership will be pressuring you to do, and I truly believe your party will be finished forever.  It might stumble on indefinitely as a sort of "zombie party" (like the SDP did after 1990, or as the SSP did after 2007) but in electoral terms it will be an irrelevance and the public will forget it even exists.

Starmer's cheerleaders need to make up their minds once and for all whether Trump is friend or foe

When Alba HQ wonderbairn Robert Reid's dad Bob Reid made his prolonged attack on me about my views on Ukraine (although there was little doubt his real agenda was Alba-related), he asked something along the lines of "James, do you not accept that there is such a thing as a just war?"  That was a straw man on stilts, because I hadn't said anything that even remotely implied that there was no such thing as a just war.  I do have pacifist leanings, it's true, but pacifists have always grappled with the logical problem of how they would have dealt with the Nazis, who would have thought it was Christmas if they had only been faced with a display of Gandhian passive resistance, and would have just carried on conquering, enslaving and exterminating people.

Not all aspects of the Allied campaign in the Second World War can be considered just, to put it mildly.  I can't justify the mass slaughter of civilians in Dresden, for example, and I certainly can't justify the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which constituted acts of genocide.

But to the partial extent that the war against the Nazis was a just war and an unavoidable war, it's instructive to consider how this country actually went about fighting it.  Because to the best of my knowledge, individual men of conscription age always had the option to avoid taking part in direct combat by registering as conscientious objectors and doing non-military work of assistance to the war effort.  It wasn't an easy option by any means due to the likelihood of social opprobrium, but it was there for those brave enough to take it.  I recently discovered that one of my favourite actors, Alfred Burke, who went on to become a household name in the 60s and 70s, was a conscientious objector during the war.  It's heartening that it seemingly didn't affect people's perceptions of him in later life.

Contrast that to the situation in present-day Ukraine, where the right to conscientious objection has been completely abolished.  In practice draft evasion is common, but if you're a male of conscription age and you want to remain within the law, you have no option but to fight and die - and in most cases it really does mean dying, because the casualty rate is insanely high.  That's one of the reasons, one of several, why western progressives are foolish to simplistically view Ukraine as the good guys who should be egged on to fight to the last man.  Even to the extent that Ukraine is a democracy, we ought to be troubled by any notion that democracy is about the majority dictacting to individuals that they have to fight and die, irrespective of their own wishes and beliefs.  That's certainly not liberal democracy, and it's not "freedom" either.

Yes, Russia was the aggressor, and yes, it's a good thing that Ukraine has defied the odds to maintain control over 90% of its sovereign territory.  But it would be nice if there were some people left alive to actually enjoy that hard-won sovereignty, and from that point of view an early negotiated peace settlement would be a highly desirable outcome.  Human life is more important than the sort of 'sovereignty absolutism' that insists every single square inch of Ukrainian territory has to be returned before the killings can cease, or that the perfectly honourable status of neutrality can't even be considered as an acceptable compromise.  Some prices for peace might be too high, but not every price is too high.

All of that said, though, and even though Trump and Vance were posing as peace-makers in their public spat with Zelensky yesterday, my sympathy was entirely with Zelensky.  There was an obvious double-standard in branding Zelensky "disrespectful" when all he was doing was exactly the same thing that Macron and Starmer had done in exactly the same location over the last few days - politely pushing back on a small number of carefully selected points.  It seems that Britain and France still have just about high enough status that Trump feels he has to tolerate some dissent from their leaders, but the same doesn't apply to lower-status countries like Ukraine.  Treating a country and its leader as being of lower value is in itself wildly disrespectful.  Trump would doubtless argue that he gets to do that because of all the money America has poured into Ukraine, but the flipside of the coin is that Ukrainians have been fighting and dying as American proxies in a war against Russia.  OK, that proxy war was being fought on behalf of the former US administration rather than the current one, and the US has every right to elect new leaders and dramatically change course whenever it wishes.  But there is no right to forget decisions taken in the past by the former duly-elected US president and the debts of honour, or at least of courtesy, that are owed as a result.  The human price Ukraine has paid over the last three years far exceeds the monetary price paid by the US.

Vance asked Zelensky a series of questions and Trump refused to let Zelensky answer.  That was disrespectful.  And it was particularly boorish of Vance to attack Zelensky for his alignment with Biden.  If all foreigners are required to show respect to the US because "it's an American world and we run it" as a delightful Fox News contributor put it last night, wasn't respect owed to Biden as US President until last month every bit as much as it's owed to Trump as US President now?  Maybe Vance thinks Zelensky should have played along with the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump remained the 'real' President afterwards.  But if that's the case, why should Zelensky pay respect to Trump now that he's in a constitutionally-illegitimate third term?  Shouldn't Zelensky be paying respect to the sacred US CONSTITUTION above all else, JD?

I was in Glasgow yesterday and my eyes rolled to the heavens when I saw the front page of the Mirror, praising Starmer for fawning all over Trump and supposedly building an alliance with the King of the World.  24 hours later the same cheerleaders are denouncing Trump and urging Starmer and other European leaders to fill the void left by American leadership.  At some point these people are going to have to get the story straight and work out whether Trump is friend or foe.  You can't insist on breaking the bank to build up the military capacity needed to take on Russia without American help, while still demanding that we all genuflect to Trump on the logic that nothing can be achieved without him. 

The state religion of Atlanticism is hard to give up, we know, but for the love of God make up your minds, chaps.

The US didn't so much elect a president as a personality disorder.

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) February 28, 2025

Spain had the "Caudillo". Italy had "Il Duce". Is Chris McEleny planning to set himself up as the "Primus" of a new Alba Party (Continuity Salmondite)?

A number of seasoned McEleny Watchers set up a quiet vigil yesterday to try to pinpoint the exact moment that the great man gave in to the inevitable and altered his Twitter profile to acknowledge that he is no longer General Secretary of the Alba Party.  That's now happened, but perhaps more significant than the timing is what he's replaced the old wording with - 

"Chris McEleny.  General Secretary Primus of Alex Salmond’s Alba Party."

"Primus" of course means "first", so this could just be a particularly ungracious way of acknowledging that there is now a second General Secretary and it's not him.  Alternatively, he could be drawing a distinction between what he sees as "Real Alba" or "Salmondite Alba" and the version of the party that he regards as having been overrun by interlopers (you know, interlopers such as Moira Salmond).  Perhaps in some strange, metaphysical, almost 'telepathic' way, he regards himself as *still* the General Secretary of the Alba Party, authentic Alba, Salmond Alba.

Maybe this novel distinction will even become formalised, and an "Alba Party (Continuity Salmondite)" will soon be registered with the Electoral Commission, and with one Christopher McEleny listed as the party's "Primus".  Such fascist-sounding titles are perhaps not quite as outlandish as they sound given the ongoing flirtaton between McEleny's faction and Reform UK.  I know some Alba members were determined to believe yesterday that Sky had stitched up Ash Regan, but actually if you watch the video of her comments in their proper context, it's obvious that they were permeditated, well-rehearsed, and carefully calculated to generate an "I will work with Farage" headline.  The intention seems to be to get Reform voters, or Reform-curious voters, to look at Alba afresh and realise that it's the one party that doesn't sneer at the far right or its values.  If this was Germany, Alba would look very much like the guilty party that has "broken the firewall".

Contrary to the perceptions of some, there are quite a number of old school socialists within Alba, and they are absolutely furious with Ash Regan for what she did yesterday.  But admittedly there are also other Alba members who have some growing sympathy with Donald Trump because of his stance on protecting women's spaces and women's sport, and who see Regan's comments as a welcome recognition that left/right distinctions are becoming less useful.  That cultural divide within the party is arguably unbridgeable - and it occurs to me that Ash Regan can count, that she must know Kenny MacAskill is going to defeat her for the leadership, and that her flirtation with Reform is therefore going to make it hard for her to play a prominent role in a MacAskill-led party.  So why is she doubling down and making the rift even worse?  

I still can't escape the conclusion that she's looking beyond her time in Alba and is preparing the ground for when she and McEleny strike out on their own in some form.

Alba civil war escalates into total carnage as McEleny's suspension is upgraded to an outright SACKING for gross misconduct, with strong hints he will also face EXPULSION from the party - this could mean his desperate attempts to stand for depute leader will count for nothing as his nominations are likely to be NULLIFIED

Scotland's most disgruntled employee is an employee no longer.  "Mad Dog" can now run free in the hills.  One chapter - but sadly only one chapter - in Alba's Reign of Terror is now over.  The statues are being toppled all across Scotland this afternoon.

I follow the Moskva

Down to Gorky Park

Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

An August summer night

Soldiers passing by

Listening to the wind of CHA-ANGE

Take me 

To the magic of the moment

On a glory night

Where the children of tomorrow dream away (dream away)

In the wind of CHANGE

Mmmmm

It sounds like the sacking actually occurred a while ago, but the reason the news has broken today is simply that today is the day Sky News ran a story about Alba.  They interviewed Kenny MacAskill, who revealed the sacking and also made clear that McEleny faces potential expulsion from the party.  And as we all know, Alba being Alba, potential expulsion means definite expulsion.  Unless he jumps before he's pushed, McEleny will soon find himself in exactly the same position he put me into on 5th December - sitting in front of the rubberstamp Disciplinary Committee with his fate already predetermined.  You know what they say, Chris - you live by the sword, you die by the sword.  

I will not be the only one of McEleny's many victims who burst out laughing upon reading his squeals of protest to Sky about his dismissal: "Alex Salmond used to always tell me that in a political party rational people need to bump along with each other.  Sadly we have not seen people bumping along with each other."  Anyone would be forgiven for thinking McEleny was not Alba's modern-day Robespierre and that he did not preside over countless malicious expulsions and de facto expulsions with considerable relish.

In case you're wondering whether MacAskill's announcement changes anything, given that McEleny was suspended as General Secretary anyway, it actually does.  If normal practice is followed, McEleny's expulsion will be preceded by a period of suspension from the party itself (he was previously only suspended from his paid employment, not from the party).  That will render him ineligible to stand for depute leader and his nominations will be nullified.  It was obvious something was in the air last night - senior leadership loyalists had seemingly been asked to pass on evidence of McEleny's desperate tactics to get the necessary number of last-gasp nominations (which were actually proving quite effective).  It seems a decision was taken that one or way or another, he simply wasn't going to be allowed to reach the ballot.

I'd suggest it's now almost inevitable that McEleny will lead a mini-exodus of his supporters from the Alba Party - but it will only be a mini-exodus, because as the nominations have proved, he doesn't actually have all that many keen supporters.  But what next?  Will he and his chums abandon independence and throw in their lot with Farage?  Will he set up his own party in the hope Ash Regan will join him in the (highly likely) event that her own leadership bid is unsuccessful?  One thing is for sure - he won't be leaving politics, because he's got his heart set on becoming an MSP.  Apparently he's convinced his family he'll be First Minister one day.  Ahem.

The horrors of the Alba dystopia continue as Christina Hendry seemingly bullies a former party member with threats of legal action if a perfectly legitimate tweet is not deleted

In addition to the people who were officially expelled from the Alba Party during the McEleny Purges last year (myself, Geoff Bush and Colin Alexander are the ones I know about, but there may have been others), there was a significantly larger number of others who McEleny bypassed the disciplinary machinery to effectively expel for life by personal diktat.  He was able to do this due to a loophole in the party constitution (albeit almost certainly an intentional loophole) which allows people to be permanently excluded from the party without any form of disciplinary process if the General Secretary simply certifies them as having "publicly resigned from the party", even if in some cases they haven't submitted any sort of resignation at all.  The only safeguard of any sort is that the NEC has to ratify the General Secretary's certification, but I know from personal experience as a former NEC member myself that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh always made sure that happened on the nod and without any discussion.  The whole process took no more than a minute or two.

One of the many victims of this Kafkaesque practice was Ashley Miller, the former Treasurer of Alba's Dundee LACU.  Regular readers of this blog will already know her story from former NEC member Heather McLean's guest post in mid-January about McEleny's maniacal vendetta against the entire Dundee LACU and anyone associated with its leadership.

"I found out that our Treasurer Ashley Miller who had ran the social media accounts since the inception of Alba had wrongly been reported to Twitter for impersonation.  There was a tweet Chris had taken exception to, but rather than contact Ashley and ask her to remove the tweet he heavy-handedly reported her to Twitter.  Ashley was embarrassed and had her reputation traduced and she felt she had no alternative other than to resign.  In an act of vicious nastiness McEleny deemed Ashley to be a public resignation, meaning she cannot rejoin Alba without a vote of the NEC."

It turns out that Alba's sinister persecution of Ashley Miller for her activity on Twitter is continuing to this day, even though she hasn't been a party member for a long time.  If you read between the lines of what she posted only a few hours ago, it seems pretty obvious that she's been threatened with legal action by Christina Hendry - ie. Alex Salmond's niece, Robert Reid's girlfriend, member of Alba's NEC and Disciplinary Committee, and indeed one of the four members of the Disciplinary Committee who voted for my own expulsion on McEleny's ridiculously vague trumped-up charges.

If you're naive enough to assume that Ms Hendry must have had a very good reason to threaten legal action, you'd be wrong.  Her aim is apparently to bully Ms Miller into deleting a single non-abusive tweet, the full text of which is as follows - 

"oh you mean the unprofessional inappropriate relationship.  When you take on the role of being responsible for the youth group there should be red lines that you don't cross.  No matter what organisation the youth group belongs to."

My reading of that is Christina Hendry must be in charge of Alba Youth (I wouldn't know due to my own age bracket!) and Ms Miller is saying she shouldn't have entered into a relationship with Robert Reid, a fellow member of Alba Youth, without resigning from that position first.  Now, I can certainly see why a comment like that would make extremely uncomfortable reading for Ms Hendry, but there's nothing illegitimate about it - the relationship between Mr Reid and Ms Hendry is in the public domain and has been deliberately put there by both of them, and therefore Ms Miller's opinion about the matter must be regarded as fair comment, regardless of whether you happen to agree with her or not.

Once again it speaks incredibly powerfully to the toxic authoritarian culture within Alba, and perhaps also to the political culture Ms Hendry has been immersed in for longer than Alba has even existed, that the first instinct when a member of the party elite sees a tweet they dislike is not to rely on their skills of persuasion to put the alternative point of view, but instead to make the tweet and the person who posted it vanish by instigating either expulsion proceedings or legal proceedings.

One of my most uncomfortable experiences as a member of Alba was listening to Christina Hendry's quietly menacing line of questioning when she was grilling Geoff Bush at a Disciplinary Committee hearing, just minutes before voting to expel him for the heinous crime of having given an inoffensive interview to The National in which he advocated for cooperation with other pro-indy parties and independent candidates.  The gist of her questions was "if you had your time again, would you give that interview again, or would you keep your trap shut?"  The threat was unspoken but obvious - she would only let Mr Bush stay in the party if he prostrated himself before her and promised to be a good boy in future and to not exercise his right to free speech in a way that she disapproved of.  To his immense credit, Mr Bush just gave her a relaxed smile and confirmed that he would say the same things again.

Ms Hendry had on several occasions in Disciplinary Committee meetings expounded her view that Alba is a sort of secret society in which rank-and-file members have absolutely no right to express personal opinions that differ from the leadership line unless they do so strictly behind closed doors.  Chris Cullen, also part of the Alba elite due to his place within the so-called "Corri Nostra", took a very similar attitude.

McEleny's recent "seek help" Twitter rant against me followed the bog-standard playbook of his hero Campbell by implying I was mentally ill (ironically his own nickname is "Mad Dog McEleny" and he has an alcohol problem that directly led to him being put on trial for threatening behaviour in 2023). He also falsely accused me of "harassing" three categories of people within the Alba Party - "family members, private citizens & young women".  But if you deconstruct which actual individuals he was referring to as being within those three categories, it comes to a grand total of two people.  "Family members" and "private citizens" seems to refer to Bob Reid, dad of Robert Reid, who I don't know from Adam but who decided to carry on his son's campaign of harassment against me by tracking me down and attacking my views on Ukraine at some length.  (My own so-called "harassment of Bob Reid" consisted of my rather robust public response to his unprovoked attack.)  And "young women" seems to refer solely to Christina Hendry herself - I literally can't think of a single other person McEleny could possibly be getting at.  Alba isn't exactly full of young women these days.

So who exactly is this vulnerable shrinking violet that seemingly must be protected from brutes like me? She's the person who thinks she has a God-given right to stand in the Banffshire and Buchan Coast constituency next year due to being "of Salmond blood".  (As an anonymous commenter on this blog memorably put it, "this isny Game of Thrones".)  She's the person who tells Alba members to essentially "shut up or else" - and has no compunction about expelling them if they don't shut up.  And she's now the person who apparently threatens former members of the party with legal action simply for expressing legitimate, non-abusive views on social media.

Sorry, Chris, but you're going to have to find a much more promising candidate to portray as a "victim".

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Meanwhile, the Alba internal elections are shaping up to be another wretched affair.  McEleny is really, really struggling to get enough nominations to reach the ballot for depute leader - he's miles short with only a few days to go, and in desperation has taken to direct messaging individual Alba members on Twitter and Whatsapp to beg them to nominate him.  He isn't even bothering to pretend he'd be a good candidate - he's arguing he should be on the ballot just for the sake of having a contest.  In reality, many Alba members would probably much prefer a coronation to the acute embarrassment of having a disgraced former General Secretary, who is still suspended for gross misconduct, run for the party's second highest office.

The Mad Dog tactics of Mad Dog may even prove effective if he's persistent enough, but at what cost?  I gather the leadership elite, which no longer regards McEleny as one of their own, is collecting evidence of what he's been doing, perhaps with a view to using it against him in future disciplinary action.

There had been some optimism that Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, regarded by many as an even bigger problem for the party than McEleny, might sit these elections out, but it seems she's dashed those hopes by belatedly entering the mix.  That probably means she'll stay on as the appointed Party Chair, and the Tas Tyranny will continue for yet another year.

There are apparently three times as many male candidates for the NEC as female candidates.  Because each gender gets four slots apiece, that means the immature Shannon Donoghue now has a 50/50 chance of getting on the party's ruling body simply by being on the ballot.

And Donoghue's partner Chris Cullen also looks like the favourite to become the new Local Government Convener.  That will be another terrible step backwards for the party, given the views he expressed on the Constitution Review Group about how Alba members should be treated with extreme distrust and should not be given the right to make decisions or even to be given substantive information about what goes on in the party.

Labour slump to new post-election low of 23%, and a dismal third place, in new More In Common poll

GB-wide voting intentions (More In Common, 21st-24th February 2025):

Conservatives 25% (+2)

Reform UK 24% (-2)

Labour 23% (-2)

Liberal Democrats 16% (+4)

Greens 8% (+1)

SNP 3% (-)

23% is the lowest figure for Labour in a More In Common poll since the general election, and is only 1% above the lowest post-election figure for Labour across all polling firms.  And Starmer ought to be far more concerned by that vote share than by being in third place.  Paradoxically, third place is almost a boon for him because it's a by-product of the right-wing vote being split down the middle, which is actually keeping Labour in contention.  But even though that split has persisted for months now, I still struggle to imagine it continuing for four more years until the next general election.  One way or another, the right-wing vote will consolidate, meaning that unless Labour's own vote recovers radically, they will suffer a record-breaking defeat that will make them nostalgic for 1983 and 2019.

Interestingly, More In Common agrees with the new YouGov poll in that it shows Reform UK dipping by a couple of percentage points and the Tories recovering a bit. That could be the start of a new trend, or it could just be margin of error noise replicated by two different pollsters by pure coincidence.

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I said yesterday that Labour's cynicism in cutting the overseas aid budget to spend more on the military was a reflection of the new Trumpian post-morality transactional world, but I'm slightly stunned at how little attempt they're making to hide that fact.  When criticised for the aid cuts, the Defence Secretary John Healey said that "hard power" was more important than "soft power" - as if he couldn't even imagine anyone thinking that humanitarian funding could possibly have any purpose or value other than as a projection of British power.  The idea that rich countries have a moral obligation to assist the world's poorest would, it seems, be entirely alien to him.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last month, and so far the running total stands at £1631, meaning that 24% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

The day that Labour and the Tories both moved to the right - and Scottish independence arguably became more likely as a result

What I found the most significant part of the Tory leadership election last year was Robert Jenrick's unequivocal promise to remove Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights.  That seemed to me to open up a real possibility that Britain would leave the ECHR before 2030, thus offering the SNP an unexpected second chance to use "Brexit Part Two" to win independence for Scotland, having squandered the golden opportunity of doing it with "Brexit Part One".

Of course Jenrick came up short, and events seem to have overtaken that episode anyway with most polls now showing Reform UK, who want to leave the ECHR, with a higher vote share than the Tories.  But as it happens Jenrick's vanquisher, Kemi Badenoch, who had never entirely ruled out pulling Britain out of the ECHR herself, has today radically changed her emphasis by saying she'd be likely to do it at some point.  So it may well be now that regardless of whether Labour's main opponent at the next election is Reform UK or the Conservative Party, defeat for Starmer will open up the "Brexit Part Two" opportunity and the SNP will need to be ready for it.

I know some will argue that voters don't give a monkey's about human rights treaties and human rights courts, but I do firmly believe there's a non-trivial segment of the electorate - liberal, relatively affluent voters who have stuck with No so far - who will be appalled.  For good measure, Badenoch has also raised the possibility of leaving the International Criminal Court, which will outrage the same voters, and if the SNP stress that an independent Scotland would immediately rejoin both the ICC and the ECHR, enough people may cross to the pro-indy side to give Yes a stable majority.

Meanwhile Labour themselves have also moved to the right in a way that would have been unimaginable even in the Blair years by boosting military spending specifically by cutting overseas aid.  I suspect they believe that in this Trumpian, post-morality, transactional world, this is some sort of ingenious step because it prevents voters themselves feeling the squeeze to pay for military adventurism in Ukraine and elsewhere.  And it's impossible to deny that Reform wouldn't be prospering unless there were a lot of voters out there who will thoroughly approve of passing the pain on to poor people in other countries.

But again, there is a subset of the electorate comprised of idealistic voters, some of them young but not all of them, which will see this as a crossing of the Rubicon that means Labour is no longer the party they thought it was.  In England, some of those voters may defect to the Greens and simply never come back.

I gather the three main London parties were all patting themselves on the back in the Commons today for their 'maturity' in creating a consensus for Starmer's choice to favour bombs over humanitarian aid.  I'd suggest that there's an opportunity for the SNP to flag up for voters what was lost when the Lib Dems overtook the SNP in July to reclaim third party status at Westminster.  Not only are questions going unasked on vital issues like Gaza, but there's no longer a leading voice in the chamber to puncture the toxic unity when the London boys gang together and get it all wrong yet again.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last month, and so far the running total stands at £1631, meaning that 24% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

FOURTH YouGov poll in a row shows a Reform lead - but SNP have massive 22-point lead in the Scottish subsample

Reform have the lead in a fourth successive YouGov poll, but they've achieved that despite their own vote share dropping back two points (which may or may not be margin of error noise).  That's been possible because Labour have also slipped back to their joint lowest level of support in a YouGov poll since the general election.

GB-wide voting intentions (YouGov, 23rd-24th February 2025):

Reform UK 25% (-2)
Labour 24% (-1)
Conservatives 22% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 16% (+2)
Greens 8% (-1)
SNP 3% (-)
Plaid Cymru 1% (-)

Scottish subsample: SNP 39%, Labour 17%, Conservatives 15%, Reform UK 14%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Greens 4%

I hate to disappoint our resident Reform-supporting troll, but in one key sense Reform are not AfD - they are not popular with the young.  The poll shows just 9% of 18-24 year olds would vote Reform, compared to 30% of over-50s.  

And in spite of the hype about Reform's breakthrough in Scotland, support for the party north of the border remains only half of what is being seen in both England and Wales.  One very simple explanation is the continuing massive correlation between support for Reform and support for Brexit.  Across Britain, 48% of Leave voters from 2016 are now in the Reform column, compared to just 6% of Remain voters - and of course in Scotland there are simply far fewer Leave voters than there are elsewhere in the UK.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last month, and so far the running total stands at £1631, meaning that 24% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Reform and MAGA are celebrating the AfD surge in Germany - but the fact remains that AfD are almost certainly frozen out of power for another four years

Our resident pro-Reform troll was gloating on the previous thread about the German election result, presenting it as part of an irresistible international tide towards Reform-type parties, which he claims in Scotland is seeing SNP voters and young voters flock to Farage in their droves.  Of course I've already written a blogpost debunking at least part of that narrative, and demonstrating that the percentage of SNP voters defecting to Reform is relatively modest.  There's certainly no room for complacency, but at the moment Reform look decidedly like a bigger threat to unionist parties.

As far as the youth vote is concerned, it's true that AfD seem - weirdly - to be regarded as the most skilled party in Germany at reaching young people via smart social media messaging.  However, as I understand it, the exit polling shows that the far-left Die Linke, the successor party to East Germany's ruling communists, actually won a narrow plurality among 18-24 year olds, which represents an astonishing comeback for a party that seemed to be dying until very recently.  Even a few days ago, the polls were still suggesting that they might fall short of the 5% threshold and fail to win any parliamentary represenation at all, but the youth vote and the anti-fascist vote has swung heavily behind them in the closing stages.

Nobody can say that AfD have failed - they've doubled their vote and reached second place for the first time in a federal election.  But the bottom line is that they have not won the election, and because all of the other parties have categorically refused to work with them, they have zero prospect of being part of the government for the foreseeable future.  I formed the impression from watching part of the post-election leaders' debate (one of Germany's most bizarre political traditions) that the AfD leader thought her best bet was for the parliamentary arithmetic to force the Christian Democrats to form a three-way, ideologically mixed coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens, which might prove to be just as unstable as the previous three-way, ideologically-mixed Social Democrat-Green-Free Democrat coalition, and could thus fall apart and bring about an opening for AfD at an early election.  However, if the live results I'm looking at right now are accurate, it appears that the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats will have a clear majority between them.  Previous 'grand coalitions' between those two parties have actually proved quite stable.

So all that's happened is that the AfD have become the largest opposition party, and that will only really matter if they can use it as a springboard to get into first place at the next scheduled election four years from now.  There's nothing inevitable about that - after all, people have been predicting for years that the far-right will get into power in France and it still hasn't happened.  But admittedly it can't be totally ruled out, and even a 10% chance of an AfD-led government is potentially game-changing in terms of perceptions of where Europe is headed.  AfD have been Eurosceptic since their earliest days as a much more moderate centre-right party, but they now seem to have firmed that up into a policy of full withdrawal from the EU.  The EU came through Brexit remarkably unscathed, but without one-half of the traditional Franco-German engine which has driven the bloc forward since the 1950s, it could be a very different story.  

The AfD stance on NATO appears more ambivalent, but at the very least they seem to want American nuclear weapons removed from German soil, which would be a monumental break with the past (and indeed the present).  I won't be a hypocrite about this - it's a welcome policy, although it's safe to assume that coming from a far-right party it's probably a case of 'correct policy, wrong reasons'.

And what about the most basic question of all - are the AfD anti-democracy, as their far-right predecessors the Nazis were?  I can't see any evidence that the AfD leadership are interested in dismantling the democratic system, but when I was growing up I remember it always being said that the only way to truly embed democracy into a society with such a strong authoritarian tradition as Germany's is to embed Germany itself into a united, democratic Europe.  If Germany was outside the European system, and particularly if the European system itself fell apart as a result of Germany's withdrawal, there would always be that little question mark.

But here's the thing - Germany has proportional representation.  When Farage says that he'll take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights within 100 days of taking power, that has to be taken very seriously, because under first-past-the-post Reform could win an absolute majority in parliament with less than 30% of the vote.  By contrast, to have any chance of withdrawing Germany from the EU, there would have to a doubling of the current AfD vote from 20% to 40%, and even then they would probably need an anti-European coalition partner.  It looks like the only possible candidate is the new "Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht" party, which is one of those peculiar 'economically left, socially right' parties that are becoming ever more common, although unlike most of those parties, they are in the final analysis regarded as far-left rather than far-right.  But at the moment they look like falling short of the threshold for parliamentary representation by a margin of just 0.1%, which could be a decisive setback that will prevent them even being a credible force by 2029.

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I launched the Scot Goes Pop fundraiser for 2025 last month, and so far the running total stands at £1601, meaning that 24% of the target of £6800 has been raised.  If you'd like to help Scot Goes Pop continue with poll analysis and truly independent political commentary for another year, donations are welcome HERE.  Direct Paypal donations can also be made - my Paypal email address is:   jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk