After McEleny's firing, Alba's biggest remaining problem is spelt T-A-S - so is there *any* way Alba members can use the internal elections to depose the party's unelected Queen?

Among the large number of people, some of them quite senior, who have been bullied out of the Alba Party, there is a difference of view over whether the party's most baleful influence has been Chris McEleny or Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh - but if anything the majority view is that "Tas" is the worse of the two.  "She's poison, that one" said a former NEC member to me a few months ago.  Most of the harm Ahmed-Sheikh causes is largely unseen, but all of the indications are that she was the driving force behind the party leadership's sudden and inexplicable vendetta against the likes of Jacqui Bijster, Eva Comrie and Denise Findlay - which ultimately led to the rigging of the 2023 internal elections.  She also seems to have been a major roadblock, perhaps the biggest one of the lot, to constitutional and democratic reform of the party.

A few months ago, I made a passing criticism of Ahmed-Sheikh on this blog, and someone messaged me afterwards to say "that's it, James, now you've mentioned Tas by name, you're guaranteed to be expelled".  I've no idea whether that really was the trigger for my expulsion, but as I recently outlined, I do have direct experience of a separate incident in early 2024 when Tas maliciously launched a half-hearted "disciplinary investigation" into myself, Alan Harris and Morgwn Davies as a distraction technique to save McEleny's skin.  At a meeting of the Disciplinary Committee, the three of us had all raised points of order related to the discovery that McEleny had told us the direct lie that the person he was trying to get expelled from the party did not wish to attend the hearing.  Tas creatively reframed our legitimate and politely-expressed points of order as "possible misogynistic bullying of the committee chair" (Marjorie Ellis Thompson) and informed us that there would be a one-person investigation into the matter, with herself as the one person, naturally.

I'm going to reveal a lot more details about the lengthy email exchange between myself and Tas in a future installment of "THE ALBA FILES", but what I'll tell you for now is that I pointed out to her that the recording of the meeting would confirm I had shown no aggression towards Marjorie whatsoever, but that Marjorie had expressed some aggression towards me in trying to shout down my points of order and to protect McEleny and his deputy Corri Wilson.  I said that if Tas was hellbent on launching an investigation into something everyone on the committee knew hadn't happened, she wasn't really leaving me with much option but to protect myself by submitting a complaint about what really did happen.  So I told her I reluctantly wished to lodge a formal complaint against Marjorie for bullying directed against myself, Alan and Morgwn.

The reply from Tas was extraordinary.  She told me she wouldn't be considering my complaint in a formal way because it was impossible for women to bully men.  Not just that it was less likely to happen, but that it was literally impossible.  My guess is that her response would have been more than enough to get Alba into a great deal of legal difficulty about direct discrimination on the grounds of sex/gender if I or anyone else had decided to pursue the matter.

So if the antics of Tas are a major part of "the problem" for Alba, can members use the forthcoming internal elections - which were effectively launched today with a lengthy email - to find "the solution"?  It's certainly not going to be easy, because her position as Party Chair is appointed, not elected - a state of affairs that did not come about by chance.  However, counsels of despair are no use to anyone, so here are some ideas that might be worth trying.

1) Ideally there needs to be a third candidate for leader, ie. someone who isn't Kenny MacAskill or Ash Regan.  As things stand, MacAskill is the lesser of two evils because he would get rid of McEleny once and for all, but it looks almost certain he would retain Tas as Chair or in some other senior role.  The so-called "Corri Nostra" are all backing MacAskill, and it seems highly unlikely they would be doing that unless their ally Tas had received firm assurances.  It's going to be incredibly difficult to get a third candidate onto the ballot paper, but it might be a game-changer if it happened, because it could widen the debate to cover the question of whether there needs to be a change of Party Chair.

2) If Tas failed for the first time to top the female ballot for Ordinary Members of the NEC, that would at least make a psychological difference and weaken her position.  Again, it's going to be murderously hard to achieve that because Ordinary Members are elected on a pay-per-vote basis, and Tas has wealthy backers (one of whom is herself, of course).  But if you're an Alba member, all you can do is try your best - buy your own vote by purchasing a conference pass, and then rank Tas bottom of all the female candidates.  When I argued on the Constitution Review Group that the Party Chair should be directly elected in some form, Daniel Jack insisted (as he'd probably been told to insist) that it was unnecessary because Tas had topped the NEC ballot and it was therefore only natural that she was appointed as Chair.  I immediately jumped on that and suggested if he felt that way, we should write into the constitution that whoever receives the most votes in the NEC election should automatically be offered the position of Chair.  You should have seen the look on his face - he realised he'd just walked into a trap of his own making.  Tas clearly has no intention of risking her position being directly elected in any form, even if the voting system is relatively easy to manipulate or subvert.

3) Get some independent-minded people onto the NEC so at least Tas will face challenges and questioning if she remains in harness. Morgwn Davies leaps out as the sort of person desperately needed on the NEC - if he sees something wrong happening, he'll call it out.  He won't be cowed by Tas or by anyone else.